I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.

Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive.

All the people that you see on television defending Donald Trump have not been drafted into it.

We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.

Something changed between the two men, namely [Donald ] Trump started slinging mud on Twitter about [Ted] Cruz`s wife, Heidi, including a mean comparing her looks unfavourably to his own.

Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers...We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric - arrests, prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment - the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy.

We were arguing about what was good to deal with making education fairer, diverse and more American. We were not arguing about where black scientists get a good education.