We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.

We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.

Through American history, we have had populist movements that often, often, often have this ugly racial element. But, often, there are warning signs of some deeper social and economic problem.

Everyone is dividing based on demographic categories.

Every time Kellyanne Conway goes on TV, there's another fight with whoever's interviewing her that particular day.