1. The metaphors that might capture the recent revelations of sexual predation, violence, and misbehavior by men are many. But one is “tip of the iceberg.” For this crisis goes far beyond men who occupy “high stations” and “command authority” in the workplace and society. It is much broader and deeper.

The fact is that unequal power inheres in and gives definition to gender relations between women and men in every sphere of life. No exceptions.

I would add one other thought: we should know by now that unequal social power no matter what form it takes is inherently oppressive and punctuated — sometimes permeated — by gross and systematic abuse and violence. Moreover, with the exception of class power, it should command but one solution — robust, substantive, and consistent equality.

2. Al Franken should step down today. He hasn’t, as some say, had his day in court or due process, but I have to think that his women colleagues in the Senate know much more than we do with respect to the allegations of several women against their male colleague.  Moreover, we are in the midst of a social crisis and cultural shift and thus the Democrats and the larger movement in their approach to this crisis and shift should set aside a narrow political calculus and be guided by larger moral and political considerations. And Al Franken should do the same today.

3. In publicly supporting Roy Moore, Trump reveals once again how that his moral center and politics are stepped in the toxic brew of racism and misogyny. It is easy to think that he is “cut from a separate cloth” and, actually, he is in some ways. But we can’t leave it there. He’s also the creature of right wing extremism that began its rise roughly forty years ago and climbed to an ascendant position in national politics in large measure because it heavily trafficed in racist and patriarchal ideas and practices. Yesterday, to no one’s surprise, Republicans in a reversal of their earlier position jumped on the Moore campaign bandwagon.

4. The Trump ship of state is taking on water as new information reveals collusion (and a coverup of collusion) between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the elections and immediately after. Whether this piling up of damning information sinks the Trump presidency isn’t foreordained, but it could well happen.

This turn of events isn’t, as some progressive and left people suggest, a distraction from the real business of working class and people’s politics. It is anything, but that.

6. Voter suppression, which takes many different forms, is a necessary staple of right wing extremist rule. Absent such efforts, it is hard to imagine how the Republican Party could retain its dominant presence in U.S. politics. It is, after all, on the losing end of trends that are reshaping the political and demographic profile of the country.

And yet it seems to me that the defense of the right to vote and its necessary corollaries — voter expansion and turnout — don’t receive half the attention that they deserve from our side of the political ledger. That isn’t to say that nothing is being done, but one has to ask if it is enough, especially given the opportunity that the midterm elections offer to register a body blow to right wing authoritarian rule.

The fielding of candidates with a forward looking program is necessary part of a winning formula in next year’s elections. But it will take more than a compelling program to shift control of Congress into Democratic hands — and nothing is more important than that.

If government failed to deliver for the vast majority over the past three decades, it is a mistake to simply attribute it to the rise of neoliberaliam and globalism. It is also the result of a conscious and systematic policy of the Republican right to make the federal government dysfunctional for the many, while bending over backwards to lend a helping hand to the corporate few. It was. in effect, a political as well as an economic strategy to secure their dominance.

As my as my swimming partner insisted early this morning, Trump’s racially charged comment at yesterday ceremony honoring Navajo WW II veterans, along with his paternalistic disrespect for the honorees and the conspicuous portrait of the genocidal Jackson just behind him, had to be by design. Things like this don’t just happen. I guess Trump and his team figure that such outrageous and unapologetic displays of racism on his part can only help him with his base, whose support he needs in the face of growing challenges from all sides to his presidency.

Haven’t read Adam Hochschild’s review of two new books on Ku Klux Klan yet, but will. Hochschild, author of some outstanding histories — WW!, King Leopold’s Congo, Stalin and his legacy, recently Spanish Civil War — is always interesting to read.

A New York Times’ article reveals once again that voter suppression is a necessary staple of right wing extremist rule in this era when politics and demographic trends are moving against the right’s political project. On its face, its patently anti-democratic aims should earn it no broad backing, but because of its billionaire supporters, clever packaging billing it as protecting the “integrity” of the election process, Republican control of a majority of state capitals, federal courts that are increasingly filled by conservative judges, and support from a substantial layer of the white electorate, that isn’t the case. In fact. it’s a clear and present danger, and thus should figure high on the agenda of the progressive movement. If I stopped here, however, I would leave out what is foundational to this anti-American assault.

It’s, of course, no mystery. It’s racism that animates its sponsors and gives it legitimacy in the minds of many people. Just as racism forcibly denied rights, opportunities, and equality to millions of people of color, scarred the political and social consciousness of white people, and severely limited the country’s progressive trajectory in the past, it does much the same today — in this instance and generally.

Indeed, unless vigorously resisted by a majoritarian, multi-racial coalition that locates the struggle against racism at the core of the “Battle for Democracy” in its many manifestations, a future that many of us would have thought unimaginable not too long ago could be starring us in the face.