Biography

[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.