a common effort....................

      The socialist Robert Nisbet once lamented that no great state can really long endure without a common effort to create unity and a collective belief that it is exceptional or at least better than the alternative: "No government can hope to achieve anything of a political, social, and economic character that rises much above the level of a written statute unless there is present a sense of veneration for that government that is but another way of expressing patriotism."  In other words, a state that does not exalt common citizenship itself loses credibility.  Cynical citizens see no need to heed its rules.

-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen