From today's New York Times, Malcolm Gladwell on politics and national identity:

"I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other. And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical."