A common criticism from the left is that President Obama speaks only the language of universalism – the framing of social problems and articulation of political solutions that apply across the population to the neglect of a targeted focus on specific forms of injustice and discrimination that are embedded in the daily experience of particular peoples and communities.

But in thinking about the outcome of this election, it seems clear – to me anyway – that many white voters processed the words, actions, and images of the Obama presidency very differently than many on the left did. What jumped out at them wasn’t the language and practice of universalism. It was something very different. In their reading, they believed the country, with the president as maestro-in-chief, was squarely on a forced march to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, politically correct, egalitarian society. And for them, this was anathema – a direct challenge to “America,” as they knew it and their place in it.

When the president spoke – and he did on many occasions, the last time at the Democratic Party convention – of an “America” that is inclusive and generous of spirit, rights past and present wrongs, guarantees everyone an equal place at the table, acknowledges shameful episodes in our past, and celebrates a mosaic of people and cultures, it rattled the heads and hearts of many white people. Or when images of multi-racial and multi-cultural events at the White House filled their televisions screens, these same people flinched. Or, when President Obama challenged policing practices that wantonly stole away the lives of African Americans, or berated the National Rifle Association for its resistance to the most modest gun control measures, or defended Planned Parenthood in the face of scurrilous, right wing attacks, or lent support to marriage equality, fury at the president grew.

If he spoke – and he did often – of universalism and universal solutions to society wide problems, such as jobs, wages and income inequality, economic stagnation, and health care, either their ears didn’t hear his message. Or, worse still, they considered it a sleight of hand to conceal his main agenda.

Latecomers to this motley crew were a significant number of white workers across the Midwest who once supported and voted for the president, but sometime in the past four years they decided to hitch themselves to this nasty opposition. And though there was nothing they could do about their earlier votes, they were not without means to make up for their “screw up.” With a presidential election around the corner, they vowed not to vote for that “crook,” that “liar,” that “criminal, and “that nasty woman” who, if given the chance, would continue the transformation of the country that the president set into motion.

On election day they carried out their vow, enough so at the margins that Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin swung the election Trump’s way, albeit with the help of the archaic and anti-democratic Electoral College.

What made this switch easy, writes Slate political writer Jamelle Bouie, is that their vote for Obama [in 2008 and 2012] “didn’t signify a change of heart. At most, he wasn’t George W. Bush. At best, he was “one of the good ones,” someone they could respect, even if they viewed his group with fear and suspicion. And four years later, he wasn’t Mitt Romney, a man who embodied plutocracy in approach, affect, and attitude. These Americans voted for Obama and kept the white racial frame that shaped their understanding of their place in this country.”

But in this election the choice was different. In Trump, they found a candidate who took delight in his political incorrectness and crude anti-democratic sensibilities, who activated their “white racial frame.” When he spoke of “Making American Great Again,” what these and other Trump voters heard wasn’t simply a commitment to fix unfair trade agreements or rebuild crumbling infrastructure. To believe so is naive to say the least.

What also registered was a commitment to put the brakes on any further movement toward a robust, multi-racial, multi-cultural, and egalitarian society as well as an equal determination to restore “America” to its glorious past – a past in which everyone had a place in a society deeply riven by vast inequalities, unrelieved exploitation, and violence.

What they didn’t see in Trump is that his first loyalty isn’t to them, but to the moneybags on Wall Street and Main Street as well as a nasty collection of authoritarian ideologues in his circle and himself.

Is it there any mystery really why a section of white workers voted for Trump? Or why he overperformed in small towns and rural communities?

This isn’t to say that all white people in general or all white workers in particular shared this point of view; they didn’t. A substantial minority were of a different mind and cast their votes for Hillary, which when added to other votes gave Hillary a two and a half million advantage over Trump.

Nor is it an argument that economic discontent didn’t figure into their thinking; it obviously did for many. But even here, it seems fair to say that these discontents, real as they are, were cognitively and emotively filtered through and modified by the lens of whiteness, maleness and masculinity, nativism, an idealized past, and cultural resentments generally.

Finally, major sections of the working class – a fact that is either ignored or goes unanalyzed by most left populists – despised Trump and everything he stood for.

All of which leads me to these conclusions:

First, this election in the minds of tens of millions was a contest of competing visions of our country.

Second, the two candidates embodied in imperfect ways these competing visions as well as the larger political clash between contending and powerful class and social forces and coalitions. But one would never know this from the near singular focus of too many progressive and left people on the “flaws” of Hillary that left them sitting on their hands this fall and holding their nose when they voted for her.

Third, the broad democratic movement is on the defensive, up against what looks like an authoritarian and reckless President and a right wing dominated Congress, for the foreseeable future. In these circumstances, only the elaboration of a strategy that soberly assesses the current alignment of class and political forces, systematically enhances the organizational wherewithal, political capacity and geographical reach of the Democratic Party, labor movement, and other major social organizations, accents unity and mutuality in its mulitiple forms, lifts up the importance of Congress and the 2018 elections as critical sites of struggle, extends solidarity to the new social movements, attends to the struggle for peace and against militarist aggression and, defends every inch of democratic space will begin to move us to a new political landscape.

Fourth, an overarching task is join the defense of peoples who have been and remain the target of the  of the aggressive words and actions of Trump, the alt-right, and the mini-Trumps that pox too many communities.

Finally, it is hard to overstate the imperative of complicating the notions of class and class struggle. What the new economic populists haven’t absorbed is that – call it what you want – other forms of oppression or issues of identity or democratic rights broadly understood are organic to class formation, consciousness, and unity, not to mention broad democratic and popular alliances and coalitions. These categories of analysis and struggle are interactive and interconnected. Giving primacy to class and turning everything else into secondary, lower order phenomena is a recipe for defeat. It will never withstand the Trump offensive. We can and must do better.

Below is an excerpt from a longer post that will appear on my blog tomorrow.

In thinking about the outcome of this election, it seems clear – to me anyway – that the way many white voters processed the words, actions, and optics of the Obama presidency over two terms figured prominently in their political calculus this year. In contrast to many on the left, it wasn’t the administration’s language and practice of universalism – the framing of social problems and articulation of political solutions that have general application across the population to the neglect of a focus on specific forms of injustice and discrimination that are embedded in the daily experience of many peoples and communities – that commanded their attention.

What did was something very different. In their reading, they believed the country, with the president as maestro-in-chief, was squarely on a forced march to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, politically correct egalitarian society. And for them, this was a direct challenge to America as they knew it and their place in it.

Moreover, in Hillary Clinton, that “nasty woman,” that “crook,” that “liar,” and that “criminal,” they saw someone who would continue the transformation that the president had set into motion.

This isn’t to say that all white people in general or all white workers in particular shared this point of view; they didn’t. A substantial minority were of a different mind and cast their vote for Hillary.

Nor is it to suggest that economic discontent didn’t figure into the thinking of Trump supporters; it obviously did for many. But even here, it seems fair to say that these discontents, real as they are, were cognitively and emotively filtered through and modified by the lens of whiteness, maleness and masculinity, nativism, an idealized past, and cultural resentments generally.

If the above captures the election’s dynamics, then the main turf on which this election was contested was one of clashing visions of tens of millions.

What Bernie, some of Bernie’s supporters, and the new economic populists haven’t absorbed is that – call it what you want – other forms of oppression or issues of identity or democratic rights broadly understood are organic to class formation, consciousness, and unity, not to mention broad democratic and popular alliances and coalitions. These categories of analysis and struggle are interactive and interconnected. Giving primacy to class and turning everything else into secondary, lower order phenomena is a big mistake from many angles.

Over the past two weeks, many have challenged the notion that the election signified a “working class revolt against the elites.” This discussion is no academic matter and its resolution will will have a major bearing on the conduct of coming political struggles. Below is an excerpt of a longer analysis that I will post on Monday.

The “working class revolt against the elites” across the Midwest was boycotted by a substantial section of the working class, namely workers of color, immigrants, millennials, and substantial numbers of women.

And it wasn’t because they were winners in the economic and political restructuring over the past four decades. Or, in the years since the 2008 Great Recession. In fact, they experienced every bit as much and MORE economic hardship and dislocation than their white brothers and sisters who supported Trump. That’s the price they unwillingly pay for the other forms of oppression and discrimination that they experience.

Check out Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Cleveland, or Flint, where large numbers of African American workers reside, if you need evidence. Or the economic circumstances of the millennials in today’s workforce, some with mountains of college debt, and jobs that pay little and provide few benefits or stability. Or of the immigrants who labor in the fields in rural America and in low paid jobs in urban America, as they live in fear of deportation and the breakup of their families. Or women who still earn less than men as well as fill, despite some advances, the lower tiers of the occupational structures and do the unpaid and unappreciated labor of caring for the young and elderly.

If anyone has felt the pernicious and painful effects of the turn from broadly shared prosperity, the easing of inequality, regulations in the public interest, collective bargaining, an expansion of the social safety net, productive investment over finance, and more to its mirror opposite over the past three decades, it is these sections of the multi-racial, male-female, native born and immigrant, young and old, and gay and straight working class.

But the effects of this political and economic u-turn didn’t cause these workers to vote for Trump. Their votes went to Hillary who offered them a coherent economic program as well as respect for their humanity and democratic rights. Few of them thought a Clinton presidency would result in a radical rollback of corporate economic and political power. But most believed that the first woman president would give them space and opportunity to press their agenda in the years ahead.

Unlike too many of their white counterparts, they were not swayed by the words of Wayne LaPierre, “eight years of one demographically-symbolic president is enough.” Nor did they join the chant “Lock her up.” Most felt that someone who is a sexual predator should be automatically disqualified from the presidency or any other office. Finally, they knew from experience the subtext of Trump’s appeal to “Make America Great Again” or “build the wall” or “law and order.”

If this large (and growing) section of the working class had economic grievances or were troubled by the dysfunction of the federal government to address the many problems in their everyday lives, they didn’t buy into the notion that it was the simply the fault of our first Black president or liberal elites in Washington, or the “Establishment.” In contrast to their mainly white, male counterparts who jumped on the Trump bandwagon, their understanding of politics and the world had more complexity, sophistication, and depth. They were aware that the two parties were different in consequential ways and that each candidate represented in imperfect ways the clash of larger and competing social forces and coalitions.

While they – and many white workers as well – weren’t completely happy with the Democratic Party, or even the president, they knew that Trump and the Republicans would be a disaster. Indeed, they believed that this faction of the Establishment – a term that caused a lot of confusion in the primaries as well as the general election – had nothing but disdain for their democratic and human rights, and if victorious on election day, would usher in a frontal assault on their communities and the entire working class.

In short, they had too much class, democratic, and strategic sense to join this so called “working class revolt.”

This may go against the grain of what I have read of late, but my suspicion is if we want to find a form of governance and rule that might give us a clue as to what we might expect from Trump and his administration, we would probably gain more insight if we look to Putin’s Russia than Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy.

Putin’s regime is authoritarian, assertive, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, racist, contemptuous of democracy, corrupt, and culturally retrograde, and aggressive on the world stage, but governs in a country that retains, albeit compromised, democratic structures and forms, political parties and regular elections, space for citizen actions and people’s organizations, and a mass media. None of the latter existed in any meaningful sense in either Germany or Italy. Where structures of democratic governance existed, they were empty of any democratic content.

While such comparisons (Putin and Trump) have limitations, I could easily see the Trump administration gravitating, if allowed, in this direction, adapting, of course, to the particulars of our country and its traditions. It would be wrapped and rationalized in the rhetoric of personal responsibility, family and family values, fighting Islamic terrorism, safe and secure borders, protection of the unborn, color blindness, rewarding work not dependence, Christian virtues, America for Americans, and, above all, Making America Great Again.

Among other things, the problem with saying that fascism is around the corner is that it can cause people who are concerned about the president-elect, but aren’t disposed to any form of political action other than voting to retreat into the privacy of their own lives out of fear rather than engage in public and mass forms of opposition to the Trump administration and the Republican controlled Congress.