Gide, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

Here's a dangerous idea for you.

You can have all the great policies in the world.

You can have a brilliant set of ideas about what you want to do if you get into government.

But if you lack a paradigm, a framework,

a narrative, a grand story which your policies inhabit, you'll never win over the voters,

you'll never win hearts and minds. And that that fundamentally is the pickle that the Democratic

Party finds itself in. It has been inside a paradigm of social justice. Before that,

it was inside a paradigm of economic justice and class warfare. And now it finds itself somewhat

listless, disrupted and disoriented by the Trump phenomenon. A lot of people on the American

left have taken heart from recent elections in Australia and Canada and the UK, noticing

that there's a sort of anti-Trump liberalism, a centre-leftism that is resurgent and wondering

if Democrats in the US can capture some of that energy. But can they do so without a real reckoning

about what Democrats have gotten wrong and what the paradigm of the future

ought to be. Any time I want to mull on questions like this, I turn to one of my favorite thinkers

about political liberalism and democracy in multi-ethnic modern societies, Yasha Meng. He has a

fabulous substack. I wanted to get his thoughts about the broader culture, the fate of wokeness,

what's the next paradigm for the left,

how we should think about immigration and multiculturalism and infrastructure and an abundance agenda,

and Nimbism versus Yimbism, and Obama's legacy,

and big versus small government in the next chapter of American political life. He's also

...