On August 25, Progressive Book Club hosted a lunch for a dozen or so progressive authors gathered in Denver for the Democratic National Convention. Their brief was to discuss the present political moment. Is there more promise than peril in it for Democrats and progressives? Is the Conservative Era that began with Reagan finally over? Do progressives, having come far along since 2004 in building a durable political "infrastructure," have the political momentum? Do we have ideas and policies equal to the challenges of the 21st Century? The discussion was moderated by PBC editorial board member Todd Gitlin, author of many books, most recently The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals. What follows is the edited transcript of the lunch, in the second of two parts. Part I is here. (Click here for a list of participants.)

Cass Sunstein: This election has real promise for breaking through old, tired, exhausted, debates that are destructive to Americans who need help.  I think there’s something really exciting that’s happened in the last few years that’s somehow been missed in the conversation, which really does have, on the domestic side at least, a ten-years-ago feel to it. It's that with Obama we have a freshness and originality of the sort we haven’t seen from the Democratic Party since the days of Roosevelt. There's a great enthusiasm about helping the working poor.  There’s been a lot of social science work, empirical work, that shows what actually works, gets millions of people above the poverty line. On climate change, where the nation has been stuck, he has an extremely innovative program with an auction system for getting the emissions-rights- ... continue reading >