In Eddie Glaude’s great book on Baldwin, Begin Again, Glaude quotes Ralph Ellison: “The way home we seek, is man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy.” Ellison’s impressionistic sentence, delivered in a short speech upon receiving the National Book Award for Invisible Man in 1953, tells us a few things. Democracy is not, in the first place, a procedure. The procedures and structures of democracy—voting, say, or the separation of powers—depend on a democratic aspiration, a vision of the good. This moral vision underwrites the procedures and structures. It’s the blood to the bones. But the content of this moral vision, Ellison tells us, is a vision of love. And this love is itself a different way of seeing: You are not invisible. You are my brother. As brothers, we stand as equals in need of the grace of our Father. No one is innocent. We all come at a cost.