Many of those lodging the Nostalgia Complaint are themselves hankering for a return to big movement politics, it seems. But you don't have to be Max Weber, with his famous definition of politics as the patient boring of hard boards, to have arrived at the recognition that building and sustaining decent institutions is at the heart of the democratic matter. No, but institutions, sturdy but resilient institutions of democratic civil society, do. We Can't Give to the Government Civil society creates spaces for the enactment of human projects, yes, but it also reminds us that this is a world of ties that bind. You cannot have all the good things of democratic life and culture without accountability and duty.
Government can help or hinder.