I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don’t.