This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

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

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.

Globalization looked like it was going to answer all the economic questions of class. Turned out not to be the case.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .

The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the country a fairer place. And that's partly a matter of policies that achieve results in terms of reducing inequality and raising middle-class and working-class incomes, which have been flat for decades. But it's also symbolic and rhetorical, it's whether Hillary Clinton can - or whoever's president - can persuade Americans that it's happening and that they can begin to trust their elected officials a little bit more and their institutions of government a little bit more.