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.

American democracy faces a massive challenge. I don't think it is a certainty that we're headed toward Putin's Russia, as some commentariat does. But people need to mobilize and build up small-d democratic institutions to prepare against that eventuality.

At best, Trumpism will be a more right-wing version of the same old Republican Party.

In the long run, however much damage we come through, Obama's vision is the one that's going to be left standing. It's a question of how much pain and suffering America has to endure in the meantime.

One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.

It's pretty clear that Hillary Clinton was a deeply, deeply flawed alternative. She had the wrong combination of the internal political chops to muscle out all the mainstream nominations from the field, leaving only Bernie Sanders, who was unacceptable to the Democrats' party establishment. But she also had a real lack of political skill that would enable her to win the general election.

The story of the Republican Party is of a far-right that has moved from the fringes of the party to a complete domination of the party. The moderate, mainstream and pragmatic leaders of the party have been pushed out or died off.