One Might Almost Say, To Adapt Von

A Generation Ago, Or Two, When There Were Three Channels, Plus Pbs, And When You Needed - When You Needed 15 Million People To Make A Living, The Media Could Focus On The Broad Country. And Most People Had No Choice About Getting Political Information. It Was There At 6:30 Whether You Wanted It Or Not.

But The Thought Leaders On Talk Radio And Fox Do More Than Shape Opinion. Backed By Their Own Wing Of The Book-publishing Industry And Supported By Think Tanks That Increasingly Function As Public-relations Agencies, Conservatives Have Built A Whole Alternative Knowledge System, With Its Own Facts, Its Own History, Its Own Laws Of Economics.

Democracy Is Not About Protests. Democracy Is About Meetings.

One Of The Great Drivers Of The Alienation That Has Made Donald Trump Possible Is That The Growth In The American Economy Has Been Weak. In The Decade From 2005 To 2015, There Was Not One Year When The Us Hit Three Per Cent Growth. And To The Extent There's Been Growth, Virtually All Of It Has Been Collected By The Top 10 Per Cent Of The Population. Obviously, If We Knew How To Make Growth Faster, We Would. We Don't. And It's Very Difficult To Make Growth More Broadly Shared. Because It's Not Just The Us That Has This Problem.

One Of The Reasons I've Been Interested In The Us Health Care Is That Here Is Something You Can Do, That Could Lift One Of The Largest Burdens Of Worry From The Shoulders Of Tens Of Millions Of People For Whom The Rest Of The Economy Isn't Working. A Lot Of The Things That Are In Obamacare That Republicans Don't Like Were Deliberately Put There To Force Republicans To Negotiate. Republicans Wouldn't Negotiate, So We Got Obamacare With All Of The Fur On It. Once It's There, Of Course, It's Very Hard To Take Health Care Benefits Away From People, As The Republicans Discovered.