Herbert Muschamp's paraphrase of views of John Gray, LSE, re Freud and Marx:

"Our dismissal of them, in fact, supports the view...that the United States can no longer be regarded as a Western country. We've rejected the modern tradition of self-examination that holds Western societies together. It is as if freedom, equality, accountability and other strands of social tissue have frayed beyond repair. Or, as some have put it, the United States didn't win the cold war. We were just the second to lose it. Instead of mass famine, we've got reality TV." (NYT, 25 Feb 2001).