Civic Friendship
This chapter provides a prescription for addressing the problem of overdoing democracy. As politics always involves loss, democratic citizens need to cultivate within themselves capacities required for sustaining democratic commitments even in the face of political loss; they need to be able to regard one another as political equals even when they also see each other as severely mistaken about justice. Civic friendship is the blanket term used to refer to these capacities. Belief polarization under political saturation creates civic enmity, so the solution to the problem of overdoing democracy is to figure out how to cultivate civic friendship. It is argued that more or even better democratic engagement is likely to be counterproductive, and that the relevant capacities can be nurtured only by means of nonpolitical cooperative endeavors. A plan is put forward for doing this.