President-elect [Donald] Trump has made a provocative choice for secretary of education. Betsy DeVos comes from a wealthy Michigan family. She is an advocate for school choice. That phrase means, in essence, directing public education money to charter schools, private schools or parochial schools.

Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.

Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.

Those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats.

[Mark] Lilla is a professor at Columbia University in New York, and he has waded into the debate about what Democrats and liberals should do now. Some Democrats answer nothing.

People don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.

The Republican critique here is that Russia is in a weak situation, but has been emboldened by a weak response from the United States, that in Ukraine, that in other places, the United States has not stepped forward.