Photo: Adrian Simmons Walking amid a group of families gathered on the morning of July 4th to celebrate in patriotic song, a reading aloud of our country’s founding documents, and an impromptu mini-parade, I was reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation: Local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations. Tocqueville was touring America in the early 1830s, around 50 years after the end of the Revolutionary War, seeking to understand how and why this ne