[I]t's up to Republicans to expose the bureaucracies and criticize the orthodoxies - to ask why visas for travel to the United States are still being issued in West Africa and why American military forces are being deployed there without a workable plan or intelligible purpose, why CDC spending priorities are so skewed and CDC management so weak, and why here at home routine police powers aren't being used and routine public health measures aren't being implemented.

For all the talk about the bitterness and the partisanship in American politics, is it really that bitter and partisan? Think of American history. Think of Joseph McCarthy. Think of the New Left. Think of [George] McGovern. Think of [Ronald] Reagan. Think of George Wallace. We've had an awful lot of real extremism on both wings.

[Donald ] Trump is more important than all of us. He's more important than the media.

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.

[Among conservatives] there's been too much pseudo-populism, almost too much concern and attention for, quote, 'the people'.... After all, we conservatives are on the side of the lords and barons.... We...are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants.

Maybe one thing that has happened is that the claims of non-partisanship of the mainstream media have been a little bit exploded. Mostly I'd say what, if anything has caused the change, are just the obvious technological changes - proliferation of easier access to getting your opinions out and the proliferation of media.

My sense from talking to college students is that you have a healthier sense of the diversity of opinions or arguments or analysis about issues. In our day it was just sort of, "Well gee, this is what the news says so that's the way it is." It didn't really get challenged that much.