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Trump has picked the more extreme versions of all Republicans so far, the more aggressive. And I think the thing to watch out for is, I could totally paint a scenario where Trump runs an authoritarian regime. I can totally paint a scenario where he has no control over his own government.
It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.
Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we've sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.
Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.
Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word sinful is most commonly associated with chocolate.
How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character.
It's the rising tide of enmity in the country, Donald Trump attacking judges, Donald Trump attacking John McCain, Senator [Richard] Blumenthal, the town halls, the riots in Berkeley. You have got the incivility on the floor of the United States Senate. You have got just a rising tide, every single story.
Most poverty and suffering - whether in a country, a family or a person - flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it
I don't blame the Democrats for fighting. They have got a very energized base. And there is a lot to complain about a lot of these nominees. But I think, if you are actually going to turn someone down from a president's [Donald Trump] own Cabinet, it better be a lot more egregious than the cases we have seen.
I think as we interpret him and frankly as the world learns to interpret Donald Trump, are these just words that are enigmatic things floating on air or are they actually shifts in policy and will they change moment by moment, day by day without any underlying connection to the actual stuff of governance? I don't know.
We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?
If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into.
If you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race. I've seen the work on information overload, which makes people depressed, stressed and freezes their brains. I know that checking the polls constantly is a recipe for self-deception and anxiety.
With a normal president like President [Barack] Obama, he says a word, and that's because there has been some thought that he's done and there had been policy papers and there's been aides and there's been advisers and then there is a connection to an actual set of policies. And so, the words like have roots into actual stuff.
Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.
If you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake. And that seems to be essential for any organization. And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.
[Mitch Daniels] was not a bad governor. He could be playful, but - or communicator.I'm just saying it will - I think will be - every candidate comes into the White House, assuming if [Hillary Clinton] wins, or if she does win, with strengths and weaknesses. This will be a weakness, because this was such an easy moment to show some heart.
If Donald Trump is just tweeting about a union guy, then he's just being the bully we have seen. But if he uses the power of the presidency to back up some of those tweets and he's really, really coming down with a hammer on people he doesn't like using the power of the presidency, then we're seeing something very new and very different.
We have an international system. We all profit from it. Trade profits from it. Peace. We can travel around the world because of it. And part of that system is certain ideas, the certain ideas you can't invade other countries for no reason. You can't commit genocide. You can't - rogue regimes can't have nuclear weapons, and you can't gas your own people.
Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
If I were Donald Trump, I would definitely not pick Mitt Romney because it's very easy for Mitt Romney to have have a separate foreign policy operatus in the State Department that would run a dissenting foreign policy from the White House foreign policy. There, I think the populist America-first foreign policy of Donald Trump does run against a potential rival.
My SUV, assuming Hummer comes out with a model for those who find the current ones too cramped, will look something like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels. It'll guzzle so much gas as I walk out to my driveway there will be squads of Saudi princes gaping and applauding. It'll come, when I buy it, with little Hondas and Mazdas already embedded in the front grillwork.
What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.
There has never been evidence that people from these [banned] countries are disproportionately likely to commit terrorist acts. We have sent chaos to the airports. We have offended the world. We have derailed the administration. We have done it in such an incompetent way, the administration has, that people with perfectly legal residence have been widely inconvenienced.
This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making , a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.
Basically, global capitalism, basically to support it, or is it to be opposed? Is international order to be supported, or is it to be opposed? Republicans have taken a very clear line. Democrats can have a different version of the line, or they can just say, no, we are the party of international peace and activism, and we're the party that's going to have a civilized capitalism.
Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.
The party cannot be competitive nationally unless it's competitive in California, Oregon, Washington, New England, Pennsylvania, along the coasts. And the problem for the party is, you can't get there from here. You can't start out where the current Republicans are and win back those places. To me, what you have to do is create a different Republican Party that can win in those places.
Donald Trump understands sense of belonging. And a lot of people think globalization, any time you make any particularity, you're sort of offending some other group. And a lot of people in this country think they belong to America anymore, and he at least appeals to some sense of belonging. I like the idea that we belong to Western traditions, so I'm glad he appeals to that sort of thing.
I, personally, think Trump improved pretty dramatically and certainly changed pretty dramatically over the last hundred days. He's less of the populist. He's more of the corporatist. He's less incompetent. He's trying to at least turn toward people who can put a decision-making process. And he's trying to adjust to the job. And so whatever one thinks of him, he is certainly a learning creature.
Donald Trump is sort of an Orwellian figure, an authoritarian figure who is twisting words in an Orwellian manner, "1984," to exercise power and control people's minds, or is he a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the universe has to warp around his ego needs so he can feel good about himself, and everybody has to produce photos to make the monarch feel like he's made of gold.
There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.
Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.
We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.
Of course I don't know what's going on in that meeting on in the mind of Donald Trump. But I do know one of the things President Barack Obama was struck by was how much time he spent on cyber-security as president. And one of the things he said was that, in the years ahead, the next president will be spending even more time. And cyber-security isn't a thing that goes away after this election. It's a constant flow.
The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.
You have a country that is 20 percent liberal, 40 percent conservative. You have a country where maybe 22 percent have faith in government. If you're a liberal, it's just going to be tough. And you should just expect that. And it's tough for people on the right, too, because they don't get what they want either if you're, say, a libertarian. So, you have got the country sort of against you. And, nevertheless, you have a president.
For the Democrats, they're trying to avoid having the Sanders-Clinton debate over and over again. But, to some degree, they're sentenced to that debate. Clinton is much more embracing of the global economy and the international world order. Sanders and Warren are much less so. And they have got to figure out which side the party is on, if they're going to have a clear message. I think this is probably one you probably can't straddle.
The things that make them similar - their machismo, their expansionary braggadocio - is going to turn them I think into bitter and dangerous enemies. We will look back on this moment where we thought Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were sort of close as a moment of bitter irony, when they get into a schoolyard display against each other, amping up each other's worst tendencies and putting the two countries in some sort of scary position.
Russian hackers interfered in our elections, and we like penalized a few of them. Whatever they're doing underground, we don't know. No, this is going to be a big issue. And I have to say the Barack Obama - the Donald Trump position is, A, mystifying, but, B, doomed. He has a nice little Vladimir Putin romance going on right now. I think we're going to get out the hankies, because this is going to turn into an ugly relationship within a year or two.
What's sort of remarkable is that, especially in the Israel and the Russia cases, you have got a U.S. citizen, Donald Trump, siding with a foreign leader against the U.S. president. There is a reason why president-elects have tried to remain mute during their transitional periods, relatively, because you just don't want to be for somebody - some other country against your own government, and especially when you're about to take the helm of that government.
Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks.
I just think, realistically, there's a lot of room outside the Trump populist right and the Bernie-Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren populist left. There are a lot of us who believe in open trade, open borders, a dynamic forward-looking economy, not a nostalgic economy, but do want to provide a significant level of social service or sort of economic Milton Friedman foreign policy, Ronald Reagan domestic policy, Franklin Roosevelt. And there's a lot of room in the center.
Bibi Netanyahu, froze the settlements and offered to go toward a two-state solution. The Palestinians didn't take him up on it. Historically, we have had a series of these offers. And the settlements themselves are not the keystone here. It seems to me myopic and bizarre that at the last moment, the Barack Obama administration would surrender the whole balanced array of policies that are obstacles to peace and focus on the one that is most detrimental to Israel.
I'm not sure [Donald] Trump has had that distinction between private and public life in his head. And so, I think there's likely to be an erosion of just that standard, that different standard, consciousness, and I think it's likely we'll see what we haven't seen in the last eight years and even the last 12 or 16 of private enrichment in office and scandals where people have to resign and things like that, because just once the standards go, behavior tends to go.
I think, from a progressive point of view, to have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House, and to have spent the time on Obamacare, which had real benefits, 20 million insured, but not on inequality, was a major cost to the Democratic Party, costing them their majorities, but also a bit of a cost to the country, because it didn't address the fundamental issues that led to Donald Trump and that led to a lot of unhappiness, just the continued widening inequality.
I think the twenty-first century happened, basically. That this century started on 9/11. And basically, it's been a century of counter reaction to globalization and the meritocracy. And a good century for 72 nations have gotten more authoritarian. We've had Brexit. We have Le Pen rising in France. We've just got a lot of these types all around the world. And the people who are suffering from globalization and the meritocracy are saying, "No more. You know, we get a voice too."
The thing that should most concern us is a shift in American foreign policy. We have had a bipartisan belief in American foreign policy based on the post-World War II institutions that believed in democratic global world, which Russia and the Soviet Union was often seen as hostile to. And most Republicans and Democrats have always basically believed in this world order. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and maybe Marine Le Pen do not agree with this basic structure of the world.
We know the 65-point policy points, to the extent that they exist, but is Hillary Clinton willing to be vulnerable, is she willing to be funny, is she willing to be both authoritative, but also real? And so less what she says than the emotional tone she sets. It takes a lot of confidence to be a vulnerable speaker on this stage. And sometimes she hasn't always projected the confidence it takes to be in some ways weak. But that's what I think people were looking for, that moment of human connection.
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.