Ross Douthat

It is not white nationalism to recognize limiting principles on liberal universalism, and a justifiable role for particularity - ethnic, cultural, religious - in many political arrangements.

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

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.

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

The best time to make deficit reduction a priority is when the inflation rate and the bond market give you some indication that you are headed for a dangerous inflationary spiral.

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people's flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities.

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.