Equality means the right to a life without poverty and its many ills, without discrimination—the opportunity for all people “to realize their full potential and dignity as human beings.”

antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific project, with outside help.

“Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free,” Tocqueville wrote, “but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.” To acquire the art of self-government, he believed, citizens have to be together. They have to come out of the isolation of their individualism and experience government at a level local enough that it brings them

Large regions of the country have gone dark, enclosing citizens in private worlds of simplifications and lies.

In an atmosphere of stifling conformism—a desire for the crowd’s affirmation or a fear of the sound of your own voice—honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. Fear breeds self-censorship, and self-censorship is more insidious than the

on.” But most stories don’t submit to our desire for certainty. When they appear to, it might just mean that we’ve crushed them flat. The problem with moral clarity is how much of life and news gets lost in its glare. It overpowers subjects more than it illuminates them. Writers stop seeing the little flaws and contradictions of actual life, and

The push to change didn’t come from the top of the media. It emerged from below, among younger reporters and readers. Some of the most decorated journalism of the past few years has rejected “objectivity” in pursuit of a different ideal: “moral clarity.”

Today the greatest obstacle to economic freedom is monopoly power. By allowing corporations to dominate both government and workers, Free America has weakened the countervailing powers that are as necessary to genuinely free markets as checks and balances are to free governments.