I’m not sure if you would call it a retreat, but I like Elizabeth Warren’s tweaking of her health care plan. It makes good political sense.

If yesterday’s testimony by the two career foreign service officers strongly resonates with Democrats as well as favorably registers among a good section of independents and erodes Trump’s support on the margins of the Republican Party then it was a good day for Democrats and the larger movement for impeachment.

A left that can’t speak of the necessity of defeating Trump without invariably reminding you that it is also committed to going toe to toe with centrists and neoliberals in the Democratic Party makes me wonder if anything has been learned from the experience of 2016.

At this moment, there will surely be competition between the various trends in the Democratic Party, but the overarching necessity of broad unity in the Democratic Party and the diverse democratic coalition opposing Trump should be the sauce that everyone swims in and gives voice to, even in this phase of the elections process. And yet, this doesn’t come out of the mouths of many on the left. Not good.

The ruling circles here drew the wrong lessons when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. What struck me at the time was their self-congratulatory spirit, overweening hubris, and unrealistic ambitions to construct a unipolar world in the 21st century. Socialism was dead, they said, while the superiority of capitalism was undeniable and the status of the U.S. at the top of the global power heap without any serious challenge for the foreseeable future. An era of global peace and prosperity, these “winners” of the Cold War loudly proclaimed, lied ahead. How wrong they were, thanks in large measure to their own class shortsightedness, selfishness, and revenge. Nearly thirty years after the “Fall,” the world is more unstable, more unequal, more violent, and more undemocratic. A promised golden age never arrived; an authoritarian global resurgence of the right did.

Indeed, democracy and democratic governance are under siege and humanity faces multiple crises, some existential in nature and demanding immediate solution. While much has to be done, a first step turns on the defeat of Trump and his right wing Republican acolytes next year in the voting booth.

I should add, to avoid any ambiguity, that this class offensive actually began in the mid-1970s and continued thereafter. Thus, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of existing socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were not so much the beginning of this offensive as an unexpected opportunity to give it new tempo and scope as well as imbue it with greater ambition.

I anxiously await the day when we have a national holiday to honor those who resisted unjust wars, while insisting on peace.