In the House Judiciary hearing last night the politics of resentment and grievance were on full display as GOP House members turned the impeachment of Trump into a concocted attack on Trump’s supporters. More than one said that it was an attempt to nullify their 2016 vote. They did it with a full mix of lies, demagogy, sheer invention, and plenty of outrage.

But I wonder if it resonates much beyond Trump’s loyal supporters. My guess is that it doesn’t. But maybe that isn’t its purpose anyway. Maybe it’s to confuse and wear out the rest of us. Maybe it’s to make us throw up our hands in despair and retreat into our private lives where we can find some happiness and solace from the storms and recriminations in the public world. My only advice to this abusive and sustained onslaught is to repeat what a much older friend would invariably tell me (in Latin no less) upon finishing our occasional lunches together: Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down!

These days the problem isn’t the “deep state,” but the takeover of the state by Trump and his gang of lunatics. It proceeds apace, despite the stubborn resistance inside and outside the state.

We have an immediate chance to derail this growing danger as Democrats press ahead with the impeachment of Trump. But it is an uphill climb given the makeup of the Senate.

Next year’s elections, however, offer a far more favorable terrain on which to confront and challenge this existential danger, provided we accent unity at every phase of the election process. One can express differences in the primaries with one or another candidate without taking them to the woodshed or intimating that you might sit out the fall election if you’re candidate of choice doesn’t win the nomination.

I will, without complaint, canvass for Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, or anybody else that might secure the nomination. Hopefully, I will do so somewhere in the Midwest.

The center of gravity in the Democratic Party is shifting in a progressive direction, but it is far too early to conclude that the space for moderates — some say the center — has nearly evaporated as a broad current in the Democratic Party or the country. Thus, it is a mistake, even as a first cut, to reduce the Democratic Party or the democratic coalition to two wings, one corporate and the other progressive. That characterization not only misses the complexity, multiple tendencies, and heterogeneity in Democratic Party and the larger democratic coalition, but also blurs, even misconstrues, the tactical challenges facing progressive and left people in the near and longer term.

I was in Detroit, when Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed weaponized its monetary instruments to throw the economy into a deep recession/depression. The auto industry and the traditional centers of auto production like Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, etc., felt its devastating impact as much as anybody. To make matters worse, it coincided with other changes taking place in the global auto industry that weakened the Big 3 and set into motion a massive restructuring process.

The experience of Detroit and other auto center in Michigan was of a different order of magnitude than many other places (and its racist dimension shouldn’t be lost sight of), but, at the same time, it wasn’t an outlier. Across the national and global economy the devastation of Volcker’s actions were, and are still, felt.

With the advantage of hindsight, his actions signaled not only a new round of class warfare, but in a fuller sense the beginning of the political ascendancy of finance and financial elites on a global level and the onset of an era of harsh austerity with all its attendant long term hurt and restructuring. The era of neoliberal governance and accumulation, it can be said, began, not with a bang, but with Volcker’s matter of fact announcement to ratchet up interest (borrowing) rates to record levels. A bang then followed. Few of us knew how big and how enduring that bang would be!

Good analysis. But I would add that the decision to move forward on impeachment not only fires up the base, but also in the course of this fight the Democrats have captured the moral high ground — no one more so than Nancy Pelosi — while revealing in a new way the corruption and mendacity of Trump.