The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres.

The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.

It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.

Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.