I'm just imagining some of [Mark Lilla] fellow liberals being rather angry at you saying such a thing [that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital ].

I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.

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.

Karachi captures all of those rifts between ancient and modern, communal and individual. You see them playing out in people's lives.

President-elect Trump has said he would like to improve relations with Russia. His choice for defense secretary views Russia as America's number one threat.

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.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.