On the left, too many remain wedded to paradigms first formed during the decades between the Progressive Era and the New Deal. They are top-down, prescriptive, bureaucratic notions bout how to address social challenges. These state-centric approaches made sense in a a centralizing, industrializing America. They make much less sense in the networked economy and polity of today.

On the right, we hear ideas even more historically irrelevant: laissez-faire economics and a "don't tread on me" idea of citizenship that might have been tolerable in 1775 when the country had 3 million largely agrarian inhabitants, only only some of whom could vote, but is at best naive and at worst destructive in a diverse, interdependent, largely urban nation of over 300 million.