By this measure alone (the responses from obvious "conservatives," not the interview transcript), America as a political experiment is lost. Dead. It really started out going that way not too long after the ink had dried on the Declaration of Independence. We've come full circle. We're Europe, again, and there's essentially nothing much that differentiates us anymore. The only thing left for unequivocally enlightened individualists to hang their hats on is the ideals of the Enlightenment. America was the political culmination of those ideals, now gone, leaving only the ideas to be preserved by the very best of humanity. The ideas will never die. The Enlightenment shall live on--the ideas just as true and powerful as always. But far from the luxury of there being only the few who non-contradictorily understand and hold such ideas, there are fewer and fewer who are even made aware of them during their entire spans of life. And even those so informed reject them because they've been instructed from birth that they're no more important than any other ant on the hill or bee in the hive. They learn humility before "authority" above all--at the expense of their happiness; at the expense of their...