In this country tonight, PBS shows one of the most talked about tributes of the year.

The fact that - I mean, these are things to be talked about. You can't do anything without educating the public, right? And that's a slow work.

I'm just imagining some of [Mark Lilla] fellow liberals being rather angry at you saying such a thing [that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital ].

Many Democrats are in a reflective mood . They lost the White House this year [2016], which would not matter as much as it does, except they also failed to take back the Senate, remain out of power in the House and are out of power in most states.

Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.

Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.