TODD GITLIN

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought - at least by Americans - in the name of a wise, honourable and democratic patriotism.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.

The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.