One of the things we're all going to have to discover, establishment is just an abusive term for institutions. It's institutions that keep us free.

Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state.

You can have these fake engagements, these virtual engagements that substitute for actual engagements. You don't have to participate, you can hit a button, send you 200 dollars to the Barack Obama for President campaign and think it's like you knocked on a door. But you didn't knock on a door.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.

Modern authoritarianism, as it's growing inside Europe and now coming to the United States, rests much more on the use of power to protect the guilty than to persecute the innocent. And its motive is not crazy totalitarian utopianism, it's motive is repressive kleptocracy. To steal and to use the powers of the state to protect theft.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.