They are our great strength, I believe. They are not nongovernmental, they are procivic. Let's call them 'civic organizations' or 'civil associations', that stand somewhere between overbloated governments and overbloated private corporations, defining a vital domain where liberty can breed. This domain belongs to us. It's our domain.
Civic space is our space.
But for the most part it exists exclusively in our imagination nowadays. In reality there are malls, shopping arcades, movie houses and bureaucracies, but little real civic space like the one we created here in the last couple of days. I am pessimistic in ways you've seen, partly because the myths I've talked about are so widely shared, so powerful, so insidious. I do know that without a robust civil society there will be no citizens, only consumers of goods or subjects of oppressive states. And without citizens there can be no democracy.