It is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country - and indeed the world - has yet seen.

Republicans define freedom as an absence of restraints imposed by government. Democrats define freedom as an absence of necessity, which government exists to reduce. America has not moved as far as it thinks it has beyond the argument about the New Deal, when FDR insisted, "Necessitous men are not free men."

Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.

Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.

Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.

Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.