[Mark] Lilla is a professor at Columbia University in New York, and he has waded into the debate about what Democrats and liberals should do now. Some Democrats answer nothing.

Researchers have been asking a basic question of young people. Should men be allowed to beat their wives? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. U.N. researchers put that question to adolescent girls in India and Pakistan and 53 percent - a majority of girls - said yes, wife beating is justifiable even if it's for refusing sex.

I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.

Karachi has had an overdose of history, too much has happened.

[Democrats] have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly educated.

To take one example, I mean, the whole issue of bathrooms and gender - in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers.

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.