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

When it comes to explaining the phenomenon of right-wing populism, liberals are likely to argue both that the populist era has exposed a darkness always present at the heart of conservative politics and that a toxic, post-truth new-media ecosystem has greased the skids for President Trump, Brexit and the rest.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

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

Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college's incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

I had just been sort of raised and formed in a general Christian context, and it seemed to my teenage self that I found the argument for Catholicism very compelling. To the extent that there was a personal driving force, it was more on the intellectual side of things than the mystical or deeply personal. When I converted, I thought it was true.

When I started reading George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, it was the late 1990s and obsessing over fantasy novels was (if painful memory serves) a super-nerdy thing to do.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that's formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind.

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.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism's problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

Every year at this time I join a growing number of journalistic flagellants in enumerating things that I got wrong in the previous annum's worth of columns.

I think it's totally possible and plausible that racial balkanization is a recurring aspect of the nature of human politics.

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

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

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.

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.

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.

Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full.

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.

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.

We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular populists and nationalists, and it ended up going pretty badly for everybody.

Cultural change is always incremental, so the most important thing for any right-leaning artist, writer, or media mogul is to focus less on making political statements and more on producing high-quality work.

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.

There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.

It's a long way from Martin Luther's 'On the Freedom of a Christian' to 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and a vigorous Protestantism should be able to prevent the former from degenerating into the latter.

I think that for social conservatism to make sense as a political world view, it has to have a more capacious understanding of what kind of society it wants than just saying, 'Leave us alone and let us pass laws against abortion.'

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

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy's vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.

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

In general, I think that not voting is a perfectly honorable and civic-minded course in an election with two options that you consider unacceptable. I think casting a protest vote is a totally acceptable course. I have done both in my life.

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.

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs.

Politics is partially about what you fear more than what you love, so there are plenty of things about liberalism all by itself that make me tempted to support Trump.

One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.

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

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.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

If you're too confident in assuming that America's and God's purposes are one, you tiptoe toward idolatry.

Whatever role the structure of the Internet plays in radicalization, the root causes are still primarily sociological and political, and they will perdure and manifest themselves somewhere, somehow, no matter what YouTube suggests for your next video when you watch a Milton Friedman lecture.

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.

Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so.

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 days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite's entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates with talents and deserts.

It's an oversimplication to say that more monks and nuns are the answer to the Joel Osteen-ification of Christianity... but it wouldn't hurt.

I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses toward community and solidarity and it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really bad.

For all its deranging effects, I am always grateful to Twitter for the interesting ideas it surfaces.

The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But it should be tempered by recognizing that America is not the church.