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.

When I commented yesterday on Elizabeth Warren’s speech to the AFL-CIO executive board a few days after the election, I left something out, thinking maybe it wasn’t germane, even though it bothered me. But while driving home last night after visiting my daughter and her family, I decided that it is germane enough (to me anyway) to make an additional comment today. By this point, you’re probably thinking – alright, already. Get to the point!

Ok. I hear you.

What troubled me is that not even a mention of the name Hillary Clinton found a place in her speech – let alone a word of thanks to her after what was an incredibly grueling campaign. Even if Warren disagrees with her positions on one thing or another, or even she thinks Hillary’s words and actions alone sealed her fate on election day (much too simplistic in my view), Hillary, as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, deserved a few words of appreciation in her remarks to labor’s leadership.

She isn’t on the other side of the great political divide that fractures our country. In fact, she (and women and young girls generally) were the object of an unrelieved and vicious attack from the right during this campaign. And at its core was the language of undisguised sexism and misogyny. Indeed it was so pervasive that no documentation is needed to prove the point. Even veiled, and not so veiled, messages of violence came Hillary’s way, including from the president elect.

Nor did Warren convey, in this moment of great unease and a spike in reported attacks against immigrants, people of color, women, and gay people, even a word of thanks to Hillary (or the President) for unhesitatingly standing up to the brazen politics of hate and bigotry of Trump and his gang. No doubt, this principled defense of tens of millions of people by Hillary infuriated the right and it surely hurt her on election day, as a section of voters across the Midwest, and even more so in the South, concluded, with the help of right wing networks on the ground, right wing talk radio and TV, and Trump himself, that Hillary won’t be “their president,” notwithstanding what she said to the contrary.

Of the many qualities that progressive and left leaders and movements should possess, if they hope to become a major player in U.S. politics, and eventually govern, a crucial one is a generosity of spirit. Or, as Michelle Obama said in much more compelling language, “when they go low, we do high.” And if I looked for a New York minute I could easily find a similar remark spoken by Martin Luther King. He had, after all, this spirit by the bucketsful, which explains in no small part why he was able to inspire and lead millions.

To be fair, in her speech, Elizabeth Warren didn’t go low, but she didn’t go high either. And that’s a problem as I see it. Hillary deserved better. She isn’t by any accounting an enemy; nor is she even an unreconstructed neoliberal, unwilling to reconsider and change her views.

Moreover, she has resisted the politics of the Republican right far longer than Warren has, and that should count for something, even if she has shown no desire to challenge the whole system of neoliberal financialization, globalization, and governance. But that’s true about most politicians and people.

Nor is it an unimportant consideration that Hillary would have been the first woman to sit in the Oval office. That too should have been mentioned (and regretted) in her speech.

Finally, Hillary’s – as well as President Obama’s – voice will be needed if we hope to turn back the assault that will come from the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress. That too should have been in Warren’s speech. The Freedom Train now and for the foreseeable future needs everybody on board who upholds progress, democracy, equality, peace, and decency. And by that measure, Hillary Clinton and President Obama, who command the respect of tens of millions, should be wholeheartedly welcomed. Selective seating that only gives a seat to like minded people is, simply put, stupid and dangerous.

My hope: After a well deserved vacation, both of them will climb aboard as we move into the future.