As a result of the November elections, the special runoff in Georgia, and the storming of the Congress that shocked the county, political power has shifted in favor of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, not to mention the broader democratic coalition that supported Biden and Harris last fall. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is split. Trump leaves the White House considerably weakened. And his mass base which has acted like a cudgel enforcing discipline in Republican ranks and provided the troops for the assault on Congress is in some disarray.

The shift in power, however, wasn’t a quantum shift. It was far more modest. This isn’t 1965 when Johnson and Democrats won in a landslide capturing substantial majorities in both chambers. Or even 2008 when Obama initially could count on 60 plus votes in the Senate. Biden, in contrast, has a Senate that is split down the middle and only the vote of Vice President Harris gives Biden and Democrats an advantage of one.

Moreover, the opposition will regroup, even if intra-party tensions and divisions remain high. Trump will reemerge. His fascistic base will catch a second wind. Nothing like a major anti-crisis legislative initiative of the Biden administration to concentrate the collective mind and discipline a fractured Republican Party and its legions of racist authoritarianism.

Into this cauldron of struggle – and it will be fierce, notwithstanding the appeals for comity and bipartisanship – must step the same expansive coalition that elected Biden and Harris last fall. That didn’t happen during the Obama years. Let’s hope, let’s make sure, it doesn’t happen once again.

It’s more likely that white workers and other Trump supporters will be weened off Trumpism by the enactment of policy and legislation addressing the concrete needs of our diverse working class than on the level of discourse, especially when that discourse is disconnected from the legislative process over the next 100 days. That’s not an argument to go silent, but a modest suggestion as to what line of argumentation might register with Trump supporters.

Recently I’ve had two personal experiences – one with my step daughter and the other with my daughter – that challenged me to reconsider my own ways of understanding and speaking that don’t measure up to the new requirements for anti-racist behavior and building an anti-racist world. These experiences remind me that younger generations bring to the plate new eyes, new sensibilities, and new understandings of racism that is on me (and older people) to soberly and self critically consider. I find it easier to do that if I think of myself as a work in progress and not too old a dog to learn anew.

Somber and simple, but beautiful and moving ceremony on the capital grounds today with the President and Vice President elect honoring the 400,000 dead due to Covid. To think that it took this long for the country to collectively mourn our dead speaks to the utter depravity and immorality of Trump and the Republican Party.

On this holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, the great revolutionary democrat of the 20th century, I’m reminded that working class empowerment depends on people’s empowerment and people’s empowerment depends on working class empowerment. That strategic, dialectical relationship and lever of progressive and radical change goes unappreciated in too many instances.

Back in the day when I was much younger, I remember reading Lenin for the first time and being struck by the emphasis that he, like King, placed on alliance relationships and coalitions at the national and international level. In his view, such alliances were the gateway to freedom and social liberation for the Russian working class. Many decades later, that dialectical relationship and alliance advocated by King (and Lenin) has lost none of its resonance, as I see it.