I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.

Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.

A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.

People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?"

In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.