Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

I think that we have basically nothing in the field of human behavior. Maybe that is just a condition of temporary ignorance. But it may be that we are simply not intellectually equipped to develop such a theory.

Those of us lucky enough to have a share of privilege in the more free societies should not be asking this question, but doing something to answer it.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.