Obviously I think politics is interesting and important and educational.

There are a few things [Donald Trump] has been pretty clear he'll do. A big infrastructure program that he'll get bipartisan support for.

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

[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.

There will be trying times during Obama's presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

Of course there are different forms of conservatism. I would say just analytically that the Republican Party is more thoroughly conservative and the Democratic Party is more thoroughly liberal today than has been the case for most of modern history.

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.