But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.

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

We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.

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 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.