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  • 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.

My pronunciation, probably incorrectly, is Heraclitus.

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