Are there particular ones that you think are reasonable and or effective?

Well, I'd need to be more of a technical expert than I am to answer those questions with the specificity and the certainty that you know, the times demand.

So let me lay out a few parameters.

And one of those parameters is wherever we end up, we need to get started.

And what that tells me is that we should get started in a way that doesn't provide any of the actors in this particular arena incentives to block action altogether.

So I'll give you a few examples.

The Department of Defense and the Department's defenders in the Congress are worried about the effect of regulation on our competition with China.

Bill, I'd like to get your thoughts on the China race and how that affects possible remedies that the United States might consider.

So, Bill, do you think the American people are too decadent to care about this massive corruption?

No, I don't.

And and I'm glad you asked, because I just want to make a couple of points in this connection.

Number one, to give up on the people is to give up on democracy.

And so if we believe in a possible future for American democracy, we have to believe that, you know, the people we go to politics with, you know, to, you know, to advert to Donald Rumsfeld's famous aphorism, not necessarily the people that you would ideally want to go to politics with, but unless we want to be Bertolt Brecht and, you know, against the East German government to go right back to the beginning, You know, we have to build on the people we have.

So that's proposition number one.

Proposition number two, the argument that the American people are so decadent or so jaded, you know, inured to all of this that they won't respond to it, I think is demonstrably wrong.

Is there as you look around and look at the state of the party, are there other people that you are keeping an eye on? Are there other people that you think are are sort of counterweight to the DSA or that might might be the future of the party?

(laughs)

1989, you know, and then after the 2008 election, where we very unpopularly suggested that Barack Obama could not be the second coming of FDR, however much, you know, pundits thought he could, could be.

But the third time we wrote this paper was in February of 2022, and in that paper, we not only argued that President Biden's immigration policy was on the road to ruin, you know, for his administration and for the party.

We also said this.

"What's looming in the wings is not the second coming of George H.W. Bush.

It's the second coming of Donald Trump," and we said, "The second time will be worse than the first, and therefore, it is the principal political duty of the Biden administration to conduct itself in such a way as to minimize the chances that Donald Trump would ever darken the halls of the Oval Office again." And that's what we said then.

That's what we meant, and it was the truth, damn it, right? That was their prime duty, not pursuing various avenues that seemed, seemed sensible to people who had spent their lives in progressive think tanks, you know, who were not scarce on the ground in the Biden ad- in, in the Biden administration.

Um, but we need something that is in that basket.

And that, I think, it was true back then and I think it's true now.

The issues have changed, but I don't think the disconnect has.

Because in the intervening nearly four decades, uh, we witnessed the rise of identity politics as one of the central organizing principles, not only of politics, but of how people in groups think of themselves.

And Democrats have had a very hard time, I think, distinguishing between the kernel of truth and importance and morality in identity politics on the one hand, and its excesses on the other.

So, I think a lot of ordinary Americans are asking themselves, "Do the Democrats know how to draw lines anymore? Or are they just pushed into extremes?" Uh, which-

What are some of the concrete lessons from your experience from '88 to '92 that apply to today?

today?FDR sparked a revolution inside the Democratic Party that lasted for three generations.

Ronald Reagan sparked a revolution inside the Republican Party that lasted for two generations.