This is a terrible danger. We have one party at the national level that is not committed to accepting the outcome of legitimate elections, that's not something that you can tolerate in the long run ; that is a recipe for edging towards authoritarianism. So I think that it is a stark choice.

Michael Gerson

The soft bigotry of low expectations by Michael Gerson

The soft bigotry of low expectations

inner-city-schools expectations lows

Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

atheist judging people

Parenthood offers many lessons in patience and sacrifice. But ultimately, it is a lesson in humility. The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else’s story.

sacrifice humility stories

The Republican Party has become more conservative. The Democratic Party has become marginally more liberal. There's almost no overlap in the middle, ideological overlap, in either house of Congress. That leaves moderates homeless. We have had a hollowing out of the middle in the U.S. Congress. There's less opportunity for compromise.

party house opportunity

The NSA is not looking through people's address books and Visa bills and violating the rights of average citizens. That's not what the NSA does.

rights average book

This has all the appearance of a foreign power trying to undermine structures of legitimacy of an American election. That is a serious matter. If I were the media, I would be wary of using anything that came out of these document dumps which serves the purpose of a foreign power. But, at the very least, Americans have to discount this. This is an attempt to hijack and change American democracy by a foreign power. It can't be accepted.

democracy purpose trying

The problem with these presidential debates like this is that you can't really prepare for them, because the questions are so individual and personal or even idiosyncratic. Secretary Hillary Clinton has a lot richer and deeper experience in doing these, obviously, than Donald Trump.

debate presidential problem

When you analyze it, Mike Pence could only defend Donald Trump in some circumstances by projecting an image of himself, as though he were - that Trump held his views on Russia or his views on Syria. And that's really not true. So, it was a weird way to defend the person at the top of your ticket.

syria circumstances

There is some of the paradox of foreign policy polling. So on Iraq and Syria, the President is pretty much doing what Americans want, he's not very engaged, but they don't like the results, his polling numbers are going down. Americans may be ambivalent and disengaged with the world, they don't want a President who is ambivalent and disengaged with the world.

paradox president world

It's hard when the worst people in the country are cheering, the people with the confederate flag, the people that do anti-Semitism on Twitter, that's difficult for a lot of people in this country. But, you know, I do think an inaugural, for example, is almost always an act of national healing.

cheer healing country

When your goal is to bring together the country in a substantive way to say that we're united by values and more - that are - you know, stronger than the things that divide us. That could be a moment.

goal together country