Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.

I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.

Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.

The ranks of educated professional swelled as more Americans went to college and more Americans sort of adopted a more cosmopolitan lifestyle and worldview. And as the Democrats were looking for an alternative to the unions who no longer seemed like a large enough base for the party, they found the educated who veered more toward a progressive cultural outlook, who may have had - may have been working in the financial sector, in entertainment, in media, in universities. That became really the rank and file of the Democratic Party over a long period of time.