Writing a book is never easy. In the case of this particular book, the usual challenges were magnified by two special circumstances: the 2020 US presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic. As for the latter, this book was written under lockdown from a small desk in a corner of my home between April and November 2020. Hence the process was stranger than usual. I typically work in my campus office, where I can count on there being long stretches of solitude that every so often are broken by colleagues who see fit to check in on me. A lot of good can result from unexpected chitchat with a phi- losopher. Even small talk can refresh one’s philosophical perspec- tive. Anyway, this book was written outside of the normal course of such exchanges with my regular cast of academic interlocutors. I don’t believe the book is worse for that, but it was harder to write. That my final chapter makes the argument that democratic citizens need to establish a kind of political distance that can occasionally disconnect them from the din of partisanship is an irony that’s not lost on me.