Todd Gitlin

My business is the analytical framework.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.