Pocock’s point would be that democracy, while exceedingly worthy of esteem, is not a nation. It is a type of regime, not a political point of view. He would diagnose the breakdown of referential coherence within American political discourse—with democracy’s self-styled saviors per­ennially contesting electoral outcomes—not as a failure of civic educa­tion or basic political theory, but rather a cultural (or, per Bakhtin, chronotopic) collapse of the political “we”: of the desire to be collectively self-determining…

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