Todd Gitlin

The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.