Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

Conservatives are much more comfortable supporting the leader who's in power than liberals.

Illiberal left ideology has its greatest strength on campuses because campuses are one of the few places in American life where a certain kind of far-left politics can actually impose hegemony on other ideas and really control the discourse in a way it can't in most places in American life where even moderate liberals are more of a minority.

Obama took 20 million people from the category of ignorables and put them into the category of unignorables. No one had to do anything for these 20 million people because they were outside the system. Now they're inside the system. Taking away their health care imposes all kind of political pain. We don't know the outcome, but every passing day it show how difficult it is for Trump to deprive them of what they now have.

Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.

I'm convinced in 100 years Obama will have an important place in the civic pantheon of American life.

We're not going to be living in a world of abundant coal power in a hundred years.