“Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist once wrote in the midst of the Great Depression and fascism’s rise. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart.”

As I’ve grown older, and hopefully a little wiser on the edges anyway, I have gained a deeper appreciation of the essential place role of democracy in society. Neither as a core value or necessary practice is it expendable. And this is so in capitalist and socialist societies.