There's something deeply rooted in American culture. You can pretty much identify what it was. You take a look at the history. It was internal conquest. You had to defend yourself against what the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened figure, called the attacks of the "merciless Indian savages," whose known way of warfare was torture and destruction. Also you had a slave population, you had to protect yourself against them. You needed guns.

Many of the people who voted for Trump were people who voted for Obama eight years ago. You remember, of course, his message was "hope and change." People wanted change, for good reasons, and they wanted hope. Disillusioned with what took place, they turned to someone else who was offering hope and change. When they're disillusioned with that, it depends on what activists and others do.

What has to be done today is (1) large-scale conversion (weatherizing , etc.), (2) sharp change in transportation to greater efficiency, like high-speed rail, (3) serious efforts to move to sustainable energy, probably solar in the somewhat longer term, (4) other adjustments that are feasible. If done effectively, that might be enough to stave off disaster. If not, then we can give up the ghost, because there are no alternatives in this world, at least none that I've seen suggested.

There's just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

The racism in Europe takes the form of anti-immigrant extremism - which is bad enough here - I think it's hard to measure, but my guess is that it's probably worse there.

What the polls don't tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they're liberal.