They did not think they had all the ideas. They did not think that they had the agenda and everyone else had to join them. They were literally there for dialogue. Tonight I think that possibility is in this room. What I took away from that conference was that we will not be able to survive the next period unless we build a movement that can challenge what is happening in this country.
Liberalism is no longer a movement, it's in disarray.
It can't sustain alternative dialogue, it's absent, it's gone, it's looking for us, ironically. What's left of any part of it that has morality is looking to the left in a way that liberals in my experience have not looked except at the very end of the antiwar movement. That means that the challenge for us is whether we're going to pick it up again and begin to build a new movement. And that's what I saw at Columbia. And that's what is exciting in the dialogue about liberalism and the left.