work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific project, with outside help. The best idea for making America again as a single country might be to require a year of national service, in military or civilian form, repaid by scholarship, training stipend, or small-business grant.

Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to

The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less government at the local level means anything.

We need citizens who can listen to one another while thinking for themselves. And we need to affirm the value of free expression for any of this to matter.

Any writer who is afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong profession.

Everyone has a voice, but everyone uses it to conform, and the consensus becomes more extreme as it hardens like plaque.

“Now we’re in an age where you can simply reinforce your own viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re dealing with two separate sets of facts—two sets of talking points that came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”

Barack Obama recently described the kind of coverage he once received as a state politician in Illinois. “Even as late as 2008, typically when I went into a small town, there’s a small-town newspaper, and the owner or editor is a conservative guy with a crew cut, maybe, and a bow tie, and he’s been a Republican for years,” Obama recalled. “He doesn

“But democracy in any sphere is a serious undertaking. It substitutes self-restraint for external restraint.”