ROSS DOUTHAT

Absent a national church, Christianity has frequently provided an invisible mortar for our culture and a common vocabulary for our great debates.

There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet… Neither prophets nor madmen should be elected to the presidency. But neither can they safely be ignored.

The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.

The thing that the government does very well is to write checks. Get rid of all the bureaucracy and programs and just write check [to the poor].

The Tea Party has won. There simply isn’t that much difference between the establishment Republicans anymore, and if grassroots chalengers are loosing more races, it’s because they’ve succeeded in yanking the party far enough to the right that there isn’t any more space for them to fill.

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

I think with artists and celebrities, you want to be simultaneously supportive of their conversions without putting too much hope and weight into it.

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.

Great preschools are no easier to build than great high schools, and if you think your kids might be better off in the care of a parent or with some extended family member, then a system designed around a dual-income plus day care norm will likewise feel like a burden, or a trap.

I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think that Trump is benefiting from the weakening of religious participation. He's winning evangelicals who aren't in church.

There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time.

Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism - crude and polished, K.K.K. and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.

If we had a populist president who didn't alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.

Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government's ineffectiveness and gridlock.

That clerical celibacy doesn't guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted.

Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.

Modern conservatism was forged in the crucible of the 1970s inflation crisis, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash many conservatives were convinced that there was nothing the Federal Reserve could do about the vast army of the unemployed without touching off a similar inflationary spiral.

For presidential power to meaningfully expand, it is not enough for a president to simply make a power grab.

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality.

For a divided, balkanized America, it might take the looming-up of a rival power, the rise of a dark but all-too-plausible alternative, to remind us of who we are, and what we do not want to be.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

It is not white nationalism to believe that growing ideological uniformity in the commanding heights of culture makes American politics more polarized.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one's own.