The idea that Russia felt emboldened and apparently fearless to go into our election and manipulate our own election process, whether successfully or not, is a sign that they are outside the norms of normal society.

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.

I just think, realistically, there's a lot of room outside the Trump populist right and the Bernie-Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren populist left. There are a lot of us who believe in open trade, open borders, a dynamic forward-looking economy, not a nostalgic economy, but do want to provide a significant level of social service or sort of economic Milton Friedman foreign policy, Ronald Reagan domestic policy, Franklin Roosevelt. And there's a lot of room in the center.

The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.

There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.