One of my biggest complaints about contemporary conservatism is that it has lost sight of the importance of storytelling. Conservatives refuse to celebrate, or even notice, how much of the popular culture is on their side. Sure, Hollywood is generally very liberal, but America isn’t.

Lina is one of 2.8 million Syrian refugees who have fled the country since fighting broke out in 2011. Hers is one of 145,000 refugee households — a quarter of the total — headed by a lone woman. A United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report released this week details the miseries that have befallen these women.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama on the theory that his border policies are “the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.’”

Created in 1956 to pay for the Interstate Highway System, the trust fund is both popular and controversial.

The deeper problem is the Supreme Court’s obliviousness to the growing imbalance of economic power between corporations and real people. By giving companies the right to not offer employees contraceptive services otherwise mandated by law, the court ignored the rights of employees to receive those services.

That crowd with the cameras speaks to what we too often are: indifferent, desensitized, estranged from our own humanity.

Dynamic social and economic change, concern for the middle class, poisonous politics, bad policies, flawed leaders — they were all there two centuries ago, just as now. History’s lesson is that the political system remains a permanent work in progress. It can never be taken for granted. Failure is always an option.

Liberals tend to equate patriotism with the government. President Obama was supposed to usher in a glorious new era of European-style big government. He’s failed, though alas not entirely. But in the attempt he aroused a populist movement — the tea parties — full of people who wore their traditional patriotism on their sleeves and tricorner hats.

America could have been declared independent from Britain without all men being declared equal. The various “injuries and usurpations” relating to the traditional rights of Englishmen would have been enough. But something more ambitious and universal got planted.

The story behind the story is that America is in an era of rising inequality, with a few at the top doing fabulously well, but others are on a downward economic escalator.

Charles Krauthammer: It was a welcome constitutional lesson in restraint, noted The Wall Street Journal. One would think that an administration so chastened might reconsider its determination to shift regulation of the nation’s power generation to Washington through new CO2 rules under the Clean Air Act.

By their nature, many innovations are disruptive. The Internet is, of course, Exhibit One. It has remade the music industry, is threatening “brick and mortar” stores, is changing how we talk to each other (Facebook, Twitter) and is transforming the news business.

Elizabeth Warren would be able to defuse Hillary Clinton’s greatest asset (her gender) and exploit Clinton’s greatest liability (her wealth and how she came by it) while in the process generating huge excitement from the status-quo-weary grass roots.