Democracy

From Stephanie Zacharek's review of Lions for Lambs:

"Lions for Lambs" doesn't for a minute treat good citizenship as an easy or certain enterprise. It's easy to live up to diminished ideals; the hard part is rising to the lofty ones. Thanks to the imperfections of democracy, we'll never be able to live in the perfect country of our dreams. That's all the more reason to act like citizens of it.

("The imperfections of democracy" refers to an earlier-cited Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.")

What do y'all think? Where are our lofty ideals? How do we decide what it means to be a good citizen (and hey, what does that mean)?