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.