A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.