Authoritarianism is dangerous not just because it's hostile to individual liberty, but also because it poisons every step of the process of social change. And societies that succumb to it are, in a very real sense, setting themselves up for failure. Roughly a quarter of Americans organize their lives around authoritarian thought patterns. That's a lot of potential resistance to change.

Beyond today's political squabbles over such topics as offshore drilling or oil speculation is this hard fact: the Age of Oil — and an American empire built on oil — is coming to an end, and there is no turning back. Americans can either get out in front of this change and come out of it at the century's end with much of their greatness intact — or continue to fight it and end up as another of history's has-beens.

Beyond today's political squabbles over such topics as offshore drilling or oil speculation is this hard fact: the Age of Oil — and an American empire built on oil — is coming to an end, and there is no turning back. Americans can either get out in front of this change and come out of it at the century's end with much of their greatness intact — or continue to fight it and end up as another of history's has-beens.

Computer-illiterate dinosaurs died early in the tech industry. But they continued to find refuge far longer in sectors like military contracting, heavy industry — and, apparently, the Senate, as we saw this week when Arizona Sen. John McCain marveled to reporters about all the information his staff could summon about possible vice presidential candidates using "a Google."

As of this election year, the vast and rising tide of Millennials is arriving in numbers big enough to swamp the Boomers and set the whole American conversation on a whole new heading. And it is this, it can be argued, is what the Barack-versus-Hillary showdown was really all about.

One of the grandest -- and most frustrating -- things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are.

Progressives have always loved holidays, which may be why we've created so many of them. There are Saturdays, of course, brought to us with no small help from the early 20th century unions. And May Day. And Labor Day.

And Mother's Day, which started out as the first and perhaps greatest progressive holiday of all.

Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. The right has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms. Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other.

Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week -- and the media doesn't quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they're stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him?

One of the trickiest parts of dealing with the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy -- or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror.