Ross Douthat

“Fox News is really two news networks. It's a center right news network that has good, solid, interesting coverage if you're watching Chris Wallace or the panel on 'Special Report' or anything like that. Then, it has what Hannity and others like him do, which is just a sort of tribal identity politics for older white people.”

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

“The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump's specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism.”

“Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.”

“A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy's ruthless solipsism.”

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

“For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn't just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.”

“It's always good to have fears for your eternal soul.”

“Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.”

“Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions.”

“Jewish Americans weren't just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.”

“The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, has always been with us and always will. But that reality is no less problematic for being inescapable.”

“In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.”

“To visit the West Coast, now and always, is to be overwhelmed by its beauty - the blue water and blue skies, the temperate air and the beaches and the looming mountains not so far away.”

“When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there's time for assimilation to do its work.”

“To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void.”

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

“I try not to feel too embattled. I don't think that's a healthy approach for someone who writes for a newspaper like the New York Times to take. That means, in part, that I try and avoid wallowing in things that might make me feel too embattled.”

“Most people want the convenience of the Internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected.”

“Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.”