No need to lash one’s self unduly. There is nothing inherently wrong, and often a lot right, with the muddle-through instinct. While we properly laud Zelenskyy’s physical and moral courage, it’s worth remembering that a willingness to trade one’s life for a cause is not by definition admirable. Many of history’s great crimes, including the 9/11 attacks, are committed by people who had precisely such willingness to surrender everything to a higher purpose.

That kind of devotion always comes more easily to the absolutist mind — people in the grip of authoritarian belief systems — than it does to people oriented to the pluralistic, materialistic, relativistic cultures that characterize most liberal democracies. To put it bluntly, autocrats often believe that people animated by liberal values are too soft to withstand the steady, ruthless application of force. The past generation offers many examples of why autocrats believed this. Tiananmen Square signaled hope that freedom was on the rise in China; the three decades that followed showed that it is mostly in retreat there. The joyful optimism of the Arab Spring protests of 2011 has long since curdled. Along the borders of Europe, leaders in Hungary, Turkey and many other places have far more in common with Vladimir Putin than Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Even in the United States, the notion of people risking personal fortunes in defense of ideals can seem rather remote. The person currently most hailed as courageous in American politics right now is Rep. Liz Cheney. The Zelenskyy example reminds us that what Cheney is risking with her criticism of Donald Trump is the loss of her Wyoming congressional seat, in favor of a new career of board seats and speaking engagements and TV network contributor contracts. That is far more nerve than nearly all of her colleagues in the Republican caucus, which includes many people who share her views privately but are afraid to share them publicly.