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 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.

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.

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