If I had a lock of hair out of place then I would not feel OK.

Glenn Slater is my lyricist who, of the new young lyricists coming along, is the most exciting, I think.

What is male and what is female? I don't always feel female.

American socialists have introduced a unique element—identity politics—that Marx would have repudiated and other socialists assiduously avoided. Consequently, American socialism deserves its own name, and the name I propose is "identity socialism".

No Scandinavian has ever identified American socialism as resembling Scandinavian socialism, even in embryo. The defining features of American socialism and the American Left (identity politics, class and ethnic division, and social intimidation to enforce these categories) are simply absent in the Nordic countries.

During all this time, the main opposition to these horrors on the part of the Democratic Party came from Republicans. This book makes an astonishing claim: of all Americans, Republicans are the ones who have the least reason to feel guilty about slavery or racism. This claim comes as a surprise because Republicans are the ones who are regularly chastised by progressives for their alleged bigotry. Let's see who the real bigots are.

Racism, of course, preceded the Democratic Party but the Democrats, in a sense, invented political racism in the early nineteenth century in order to defend slavery against Republican and abolitionist attack.

Notice that the GOP program—articulated by Douglass and affirmed by black leaders—is none other than the color-blind ideal outlined in Martin Luther King's famous "dream." King envisioned a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. This is substantially what Douglass and other black Republicans called for, more than a century earlier.

Today's socialist Left, however, wants an America that integrates the groups seen as previously excluded while excluding the group that was previously included. "If you are white, male, heterosexual, and religiously or socially conservative," writes author and editor Rod Dreher, "there's no place for you" on the progressive left.

Today when Republicans who are black, Hispanic, or Native American expose Democratic chicanery, they are routinely denounced—not just by Democrats but also by their allies in the press—as sellouts and, in the case of African Americans, "Uncle Toms.

In a remarkable book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston make the case that white southerners switched to the Republican Party not because of racism but because they identified the GOP with economic opportunity and upward mobility.

How can we be loved if we are always in hiding?