But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.

The system has evolved to protect parties from people like Donald Trump. It really is true that people without well-established public records, without proven capability in public service, without tested beliefs and at least apparently under the influence of a foreign power, such people are screened out by major parties.

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

While there is an attempt by the Trump people to say that California isn't really America. California certainly seems like America to me.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.