I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.

I keep telling my American friends, "If you think of Donald Trump as only something that is happening inside the United States, you're missing it." Because there are Trump-like events happening across the Western world, in Warsaw Pact countries, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands. As we speak, the second-largest party in the Dutch legislature - who's more level-headed than the Dutch? - is Geert Wilders's party, which is a very Trump-like party, and they've got 33 out of 150 seats.

Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

One of the reasons I've been interested in the US health care is that here is something you can do, that could lift one of the largest burdens of worry from the shoulders of tens of millions of people for whom the rest of the economy isn't working. A lot of the things that are in Obamacare that Republicans don't like were deliberately put there to force Republicans to negotiate. Republicans wouldn't negotiate, so we got Obamacare with all of the fur on it. Once it's there, of course, it's very hard to take health care benefits away from people, as the Republicans discovered.

That is the way successful countries, and Canada has been one of the most successful countries over the past quarter century, they operate. That when you win, you win within limits, when you lose, you accept the outcome.

I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment.

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order.