The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

The primary goal of collectivism - of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America - is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government.

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."

Some parents say it is toy guns that make boys warlike. But give a boy a rubber duck and he will seize its neck like the butt of a pistol and shout 'Bang!'

[President George W.] Bush - never mind his well-crafted set speeches; listen to him as he leans on a lectern, chatting to an audience of carpenters - is completely comfortable being himself, a skill still eluding Gore in his 55th year.

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.