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If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood.

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

In the end, a new Americanization movement can't just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits.

I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America.

You could say that we are living in an internally globalized country.

I self-deprecate. When I first got here two years ago, I didn't realise that in America you can't go into the room and put yourself down.