America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.

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.

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

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.

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

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.

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.