Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.

I think, over the last couple of years, the written word has made a comeback on the Internet. For example, I'm seeing more long-form narrative experiments there. The overall noise level, however, continues to increase. Do we really need TV screens to watch when we pump gas? Really?

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

The man is the Piltdown Man of modern politics.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.