Psychologists find that people will ignore or even deny the existence of a problem if they’re not fond of the solution. Liberals were more dismissive of the issue of intruder violence when they read an argument that strict gun control laws could make it difficult for homeowners to protect themselves. Conservatives were more receptive to climate science when they read about a green technology proposal than about emissions restriction proposal.

Several Democratic strategists have told me they believe that free college, on a policy level, might not be a winning issue. Instead, they say, the messaging should focus on affordability. The argument tends to be that if students have a vested interest in their education—evinced by spending their own money—they will value it more. And as Republicans, both voters and politicians, increasingly object to the culture of higher education, which they believe is biased toward liberals, promoting the idea of sending people to college for free seems to run counter to an argument that would sway swing voters.

I see this as the winter of liberalism. We need to first accept that the liberal project is dead. We need to achieve that so we leave space for something else to grow. Progressivism is almost just a placeholder for what hasn’t been created yet.

When I talk about fulfillment, I’m really talking about something I want to believe in and fight for. It should be a powerful antidote to fundamentalism, be as powerful as fundamentalism is to people. It should be unchallengeable in the way liberalism was in the post-Depression era.

Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m proud of it. It’s a term we need to reclaim. Because I believe most Americans are liberals just like me. Most Americans believe in helping people. And most Americans believe that government has a role to play — to create opportunity, to protect our environment, to provide for the common good.

The right-wing media tells us constantly that the problem with the mainstream media is that it has a liberal bias. I don’t think it does. But there are other, far more important biases in the mainstream media than liberal or conservative ones. Most of these biases stem from something called “the profit motive.”

We seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician. In fact, the ‘Trump Effect’ yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them.

If we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching reasonable political discourse.

Paul Wellstone’s greatest contribution to the progressive cause wasn’t what he accomplished in the Senate, although he accomplished a lot. It’s the way he inspired others to take action, and taught them to be effective, and gave them the confidence to stand up and shout about what they believed in.

We liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good. When liberals look back on history, we see things we’re very proud of. And we also see some things which might have seemed like good ideas at the time, but which turned out to be mistakes.

Liberals don’t hate America. We love America more than Ann Coulter does. I love it enough to engage my readers honestly.

Eventually, Liberalism underwent a schism and divided along the two defining ideas, liberty and equality. Modern (or Social) liberals focus on equality, under the law, equality of access to education, healthcare and opportunity. Classical liberals instead focus on liberty especially in matters financial, where they seek unfettered freedom to trade, market, own and employ as they see fit. In the US, our liberal Democratic-Republican party also split, along the same lines in 1825, forming the Democratic party and the Republican party, which have come to represent social equality and economic liberty, respectively.

We believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

The achievements of liberalism were everywhere visible: the robust growth of the American economy, stabilized (at times at least) by the active use of Keynesian policies; the gradual expansion of the New Deal welfare and social insurance system, which had lifted millions of elderly people (and many others) out of poverty; and beginning in the early 1960s, the alliance between the federal government and the civil rights movement, an alliance that most white liberals believed gave liberalism a powerful moral claim to accompany its many practical achievements.

The first blame for September 11 was put squarely on liberals. When some liberals questioned the confluence of events that resulted in our vulnerability to terrorism, certain Americans who should know better have branded us as some kind of anti-American treason lobby.

When I attended a Christmas party at the White House in 2001, I thanked President Bush for inviting me, especially in light of my ardent criticisms of his policies. My exact words were, ‘Thank you for inviting a liberal to the White House.’ Without missing a beat, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘We’re all Americans.’ He couldn’t have said it more succinctly or profoundly.