Anand Giridharadas

As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.

Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.

There is always a gap between what candidates say in the heat of the campaign, when they are not constrained by the realities of governance, and how they act after being sworn into office.

Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities.

The American television punditocracy - the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle - can be incestuous and herdlike.

I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you.

More and more, the superrich don't live in one place but many, flitting between multiple homes on different continents, flying to them on private jets, perhaps, concealing many of their real estate purchases through webs of shell companies and trusts.

Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?