How lucky are we to be to be alive? At this point where like hundreds of years in the future people will say what choices did they make

they made the right ones things turned out better because they did so I think of it is just an incredible gift

to be alive at a time when we have such a chance to make a difference and we know it's due.

Hello and welcome to Wises happening happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

Well, it's an election year, obviously you you know, 2024. That will be the focus of a lot of what I'm doing on our television show,

along with Chris Hayes Hayes Tuesday through Friday,

8 PMSMDC, we'll talk about on the podcast,

but I wanted to talk, I've been thinking

even more broader terms than just sort of specific electoral terms

because obviously there's a lot that has to do with the selection.

But thinking more about the sort of general arc of progress in America,

and broadly, like, there's a weird paradox to my mind

at the heart of it.

It basically goes like this. I think that in many ways since I first

started covering politics when I was 23 or 24 in the Bush administration post 9-11.

I think I would say that public opinion has moved in a progressive direction pretty strongly.

This is particularly true if you compare it to the just immediate aftermath of 9-11, which I it's very, for people that weren't there very hard to express just how reactionary it was, it was just colossally, dangerously and stultifyingly reactionary.

So in the 24 years or 22 years, say, since I've been writing about politics and covering

politics as an adult, public opinion has gotten more progressive.

The ideological argument on a whole bunch of fundamental questions has been one fairly definitively by the left.

There's certain examples people give all the time about this,

like marriage equality for gay folks, right?

...