- [on dealing with the fallout of the financial crash of 2008] When you have this degree of shock, you have to think very hard about maybe the people in the 1930s who built the welfare state knew something that was not just true for their time but had some continuing truth.
- If you live through the plague and you don't get the plague, what are your duties to the people who did get the plague. You'd better be a nurse, right?
- [on Glenn Beck] He represents the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.
- The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.
- [observation, 2018] I think it's positive that many people on the left who used to make heroes of people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange now see governments needs secrets. And that these so-called whistleblowers who end up in refuge in Moscow or under protection of the government of Ecuador are agents. They're not working for you. For somebody else.
- One good thing I would say about Donald Trump as a human being is that he is not a hypocrite. He does not pretend to be a good man, a good husband, a good father. He doesn't pretend to be kind or considerate. That's one of the things that is so amazing about his evangelical support. He doesn't try to fool them.
- Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on non-regulation; not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.
- [assertion, 2018] The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet's thugs, crooks and dictators against it's own ideals - and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness and dictatorship into the very core of the American state, into the most symbolic oval center of its law and liberty. The man inside that office did not act alone. He held his power with the connivance of others. They executed his orders and empowered his whims for crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity or - in the worst cases - malicious glee in the wreck of things they could never have built themselves. They claim the symbols of the republic as they submerge its institutions. They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the day's work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting. They speak for America to a world that remembers a different and better America. But that memory is already fading into a question of whether it was not perhaps always an illusion, whether this new regime of deceit and brutishness will not only form the future - but whether it will also retrospectively discredit the American past.
- Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics, a new politics in which the Trump experience is the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse.
- Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with a wearying insistence on the honesty, integrity and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you. Don't be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.
- Words and arguments can overbear ignorance and prejudice. Over the long term, words and arguments can even overcome oppression and violence. That's why liberals in the broad sense are so uniquely horrified by official lying. How can reason prevail unless words connect to reality? How can we argue against people who will spread fictions, if serviceable to them, without a qualm?
- I've spent my life as a conservative, but what I've sought to conserve is not the Spanish Inquisition or the powers of kings and barons. I've sought to conserve the free societies that began to be built in the 18th century and that have gradually developed and strengthened - with many imperfections and hypocrisies and backsliding - in the 250 years since. When I was young, the most important challenges to these free societies seemed to come from Communists and Marxists. When I was not so young, the most important challenges to those free societies seemed to come from Islamists. Today they seem to come from - speaking politely - populists.
- [on the lame official U.S reaction to the corona virus, 2020] There is always something malign in Trump's incompetence. He has no care or concern for others; he cannot absorb the trouble and suffering of others as real. He monotones his way through words of love and compassion, but those words plainly have no content or meaning for him. The only thing that is real is his squalid vanity. This virus threatens to pierce that vanity, so he denied it as long as he could. What he refuses to acknowledge cannot be real, can it? And now that he has acknowledged the crisis, he still cannot act because he does not know what to do. His only goal now is to shove blame onto others.
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