Top Highlights

• The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.
• It would not be too much to say that American politics is characterized not by two dominant political parties or philosophies but by two competing enemies lists.
• A master villain supports a master narrative. But a theory of everything is a theory of nothing, and theories that rely upon the dark operations of secret malice (by left-wing radicals, the Christian Right, corporations, the elites, the 1 percent, the 99 percent, the 47 percent, etc.) are inconsistent with a great many facts that are well documente...
• But life as it is actually lived is rich with incident and detail, which together form an acid in which easy generalities are dissolved.
• If there were self-evident solutions to such sticky problems, they probably would be implemented. Nobody wants untreated schizophrenics on the streets, and nobody profits from it. Nobody wants underperforming schools, even hard-hearted people who do not care about the students themselves—businesses profit from having highly skilled workers and cons...