History shows that democracy is not protected by military strength. States? Sure. But not democracy itself.

Democracy depends on ideals, and on a mutually shared commitment to live according to them.

For a democracy to thrive it needs good teachers, free journalists, and attorneys committed to defending rights.

A merely militant state is one that is willing to declare exceptions to those ideals—often while paying lip service to the democracy that it ignores and often despises.

Ideals are not established or maintained by external force; they are learned by example and by long, costly practice and inner discipline. They are freely chosen, freely defended at personal expense.

Ideals that are imposed on others don’t take root. What a community can do to foster those ideals, exposing people to examples of the best we know, rather than imposing a rigid mandate.

What a community needs is people who will teach those ideals. Not rote memorization, but conversation, contemplation, and commentary—the slow, costly practice of considering the best stories we can gather. What do they tell us? How do we weigh their lessons? How shall we live, knowing the stories others have told? These are not light matters, and they’re not something that can be done quickly. This is a lifelong discipline, just as democracy is. There are no shortcuts.

Journalists also are storytellers. Those who attack journalists and the media they work for indirectly acknowledge the power of journalism, and of stories. Free press means we don’t just look backwards at the stories that have been told. The press tells the story of right now. No journalism is perfect, but we are better with many people exercising the right to free press than we are with a constrained press. A government that attacks the press—in words or, as we have seen too often recently, with physical violence—is a government that winces at the freedom of the people, that frets over the inconvenience of having to act in the light of day. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and those who fear it most are the parasites.

The defense attorneys and litigators draw on our best stories and on the stories of right now to ensure that the story we tell tomorrow is at least as just as the one we tell today. They use the courts to hold the powerful to account.

Don’t get me wrong: you and I both know that there are bad teachers, bad journalists, bad lawyers. But we are better off with all of them than with none of them.

So if you see a government attacking teachers, journalists, and lawyers, what you are seeing is a government that fears the stories of freedom that invite us to our best ideals. What you are seeing is a government that fears being compared to the good, the true, the beautiful. What you are seeing is a government that knows that the sunlight that makes good things grow is the same sunlight that destroys the parasites that erode the foundations of democracy.