When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

'A Spy in the House', the first of Y. S. Lee's 'The Agency' novels, is pure confection, an historical romp through England at the height of The Great Stink that imagines a secret spy ring for women tucked away where few notice but powerful factions clamor for their services.

If you rely on political factions to promote men to office, the people will work to develop instrumental relationships and will not seek to be useful with regard to the law. Thus, a ruler who mistakes reputation for ability when assigning offices will see his state fall into disorder.

We in the West think of peace as society's default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.

I've been in a lot of different factions my whole career, and all the guys who made up those factions are different performers. For example, if you look at the Undisputed Era as a whole, I'm very different than Roderick Strong, who's very different from Kyle O'Reilly, who's very different from Bobby Fish.

Rap has so many possibilities that need to be explored. There are different factions of rap, but some are in a rut. Rap doesn't have to be about boosting egos and grabbing your crotch and dissing women. There's a way to make political and social issues interesting and entertaining to the young rap audience.

We can't disrespect, by way discounting or misunderstanding our different sticking points, the beliefs of the various groups comprising the tea party movement, but we all have more in common with each other than we do with factions on the Left: the communists, the socialists, the say-they're-anarchists-but-are-actually-socialists.

I was in Iraq in the worst period, 2006, but from 2006 to 2008, and especially through 2011, the American military and the government of Iraq made huge strides in making that country a source of stability with a relatively representative government that was seeking pluralistic engagement from all the factions within the government.

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions.

I've had this theory for a while, but I think there needs to be a message with the end of 'Game of Thrones.' You know? I think what needs to happen is ice and fire are going to go to war, a huge war between those two factions, and I think, in that war, they will destroy themselves. There will be complete chaos, complete destruction.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama represented somewhat different party factions, but they both embodied wonkery, a vision of competence and expertise governing to some extent above ideology, in which there are assumed to be 'correct answers' to policy dilemmas that a disinterested observer could acknowledge and the right technocrat achieve.

It turned out that all socio-political forces - namely the United Development Party, Indonesian Democratic Party, Functional Group, and ABRI factions - said the majority of people still wanted me to accept the renomination for the 1998-2003 term. Well, that being the case, I was ready to accept their renomination with a sense of responsibility.

Share This Page