The heart of Mr Clegg's message to his party was well expressed when he described the moment when he walked into No 10 last year as a moment when the party also walked through a kind of door, too, to confront the responsibilities and the opportunities of government.
It's a sacramental experience for a young man to give up on peak experiences and confront the responsibility of being a sober adult.
In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk.
The USA and other countries are confronted with the responsibility of not only taking care of the growing population of older adults who become sick or frail but also helping those who are not yet in need of care to maintain their independence and well-being.
Nor will the Republican leadership confront the party's responsibility for the nation's economic collapse, the subsequent loss in tax revenues, and the Fed and Treasury policies that bailed out the Wall Street charlatans who invented this meltdown.
(To recap: it tells the story, beginning in 1944 and leaping decades ahead, of a young and beloved gym teacher in a Jewish neighborhood in Newark who confronts the social and personal responsibilities imposed by a polio epidemic).
But for me it is the only way I know to confront the past and take responsibility.
He called for the church to set up another, independent commission "to retrieve all the stories," saying: "The church must take responsibility, confront the victims and cooperate with them".
Set in a nameless Latin American country, this is an allegory about war and responsibility, confronting the burden of history as hauntingly as this director's films so often have.
Here we confront the nexus between moral responsibility for self-deception and the morality of self-deception.
