My pronunciation, probably incorrectly, is Heraclitus.
But your...
...the line is absolutely, yeah, right.
You can't step in the same river twice,
and the world has changed an awful lot.
And that the most important thing,
for those who believe in government - for progressives -
is, government has to work.
So you have to show that you can get stuff done.
I think it's fair to say that if Biden gets the things I just
described done, this will be the most
progressive and expansionist view of government
since the Great Society, and really since, basically,
'64, '65, 66, because after that, Vietnam
overwhelmed Johnson and he didn't get much done.
And so you are looking at something
that is really quite historic.
This would be a transformational presidency
led by the most untransformational character
you could imagine, like an old poll.
Joe Biden has been around forever,
navigated the centre of the Democratic party,
no matter where it was.
But the lesson, I think, from the Obama years was,
go for it, not on foreign policy,
by the way, which is interesting.
On foreign policy he is still being very careful and cautious
and navigating between what I suspect his instincts are:
to rejoin the Iran deal, to try to find
some workable areas of co-operation
with China, even with Russia, to re-engage with some
of the international agencies and things like that,
and being well aware that there is
a nationalist, populist critique of all that,
articulated most powerfully by Donald Trump,
but also by a whole bunch of senators and lots of people
on Fox News and talk radio.
And so there they're being more cautious.
I think that there is room for a world in which the United
States and China can co-exist.
But there will have to be parameters,
and there will have to be accommodations on both sides.
And the fundamental one is probably this.
The United States has to find a way
to articulate a goal that is not the conversion of China
to westerndom or to the successor to Christendom,
if you will.
If the idea is that China is ultimately
going to be pressured, cajoled, harangued
into becoming a western liberal democracy,
I think we're in for a very tough struggle.
If there is more of a sense of 'live and let live,' I think
there is a path forward.