"A lot of liberal public policy is, look at the great outcomes in these elite places. Let's spend enough money to make everybody elites. That doesn't work...

...

if you take that power away from people put it in the central government as Bernie Sanders would you then liberate everybody from the duty to serve their neighbors right because the central state is providing this. Once that's happening then we're not actually living out our lives as political animals."

"Virtue is I think what's going to be missing from a secular attempt to replicate [community] that instead it gets replaced with best practices... that doesn't succeed in passing on a dedication to community... I call it infertile virtue... The only thing that makes that shared higher purpose hold up is it actually being a higher cause."