"Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity." — Anne Applebaum

I am not sure when it became de rigueur for presidential candidates to publish a work between hard covers, but nobody now runs for high office without having written, or having arranged for the ghostwriting of, a very large book.

The Brexit campaign was transformed from a fringe eccentricity into a mass movement by a handful of people who decided to make it into an argument about identity.

The Occupy movement flared and then seemed to fizzle out - until it re-emerged in the form of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and in the far-left surge that made Jeremy Corbyn leader of the British Labour Party.

For hundreds of millions of people, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great triumph: The moment marked the end of hated dictatorships and the beginning of a better era. But for the KGB officers stationed in Dresden, the political revolutions of 1989 marked the end of their empire and the beginning of an era of humiliation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade.

Clearly, the qualities Poles admire in a secretary of state - foreign languages, diplomatic experience, even sense of humor - are emphatically not those desired in a head of state: So be it.

At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.

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Nationalism has nothing to do with the rule of law, justice, or opportunity.