Share. Wash your hands. Don’t push. Be kind.

These are the lessons I’ve tried to impart to my 3-year-old daughter (with mixed success). They’re simple rules of the road, meant to help her navigate the world and become a contributing member of any community she joins later in life. They’re also universal. No matter our creed or nationality, we expect people to treat one another with a basic level of care and responsibility.

But there is another set of more specific expectations that applies to us as Americans.

Benjamin Franklin famously described our nation as “a republic, if you can keep it.” His point was not that the Founding Fathers had secured our future for us, but that they had entrusted it to us. The survival of the American experiment would depend on whether citizens could sustain the values, norms and behaviors that make self-government possible ‒ what Alexis de Tocqueville called “habits of the heart.”

Those civic habits feel especially urgent as the country

© USA TODAY