This text portrays America as dying from a refusal to engage a dialogue, a polity where everybody speaks, but nobody listens. Yet from this ailment the author provides a diagnosis which defends dialogue, negotiating conflict and keeping democracy alive.

This text defends dialogue that negotiates conflict and keeps democracy alive, and at the same time it protrays America as dying from a refusal to engage in such a dialogue, a polity where everybody speaks, but nobody listens. It diagnoses the ailment of the body politic as the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to, and precribes a new process of response. At the heart of this work is a re-reading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the centre of the question of legitimacy of democratic government. The author argues that liberal constitutional ethos - the tendency to assume that the nation must everywhere be morally the same - pressures citizens to be other than themselves when being themselves would lead to disobedience. This he argues is particularly hard on the religious citizen whose sense of community may be quite different from that of the sovereign majority of citizens. This leads to a view for the autonomy of communities into which democratic citizens organize themselves as a condition for dissent, dialogue, and independence.