Reading Jason Stanley’s “How Fascism Works.” Well worth the time. Actually, it’s a quick read. Stanley writes with clarity and simplicity of expression, staying away from the obtuse and unfamiliar that is the stock and trade with too many academics. Back in the day when socialism was a new interest for me, I always appreciated the writing of Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff for precisely the same reason.

Springsteen covers Commodores’ Night Shift. The song was written in 1985 by lead singer Walter Orange in collaboration with Dennis Lambert and Franne Golde, as a tribute to soul/R&B singers Jackie Wilson and Marvin Gaye, both of whom died in 1984. A full album, honoring and covering R&B singers of that era, will be released by Springsteen in early November.

I hope to hear some of those songs and more at one of the tour stops of Springsteen and the E-Street next year. I’m still fishing around for a ticket. A tad expensive, but at my age and as a rock and roll lifer, I’m more than willing to pay the price.

Listened to this interesting exchange between President Obama and his former aides, while driving yesterday. Obama is many things, including brillient and sober minded about politics and what it will take to win.

I am surprised when I see people on the left insist (repeatedly in some cases) that white workers are neither the money bags nor found at the apex of the MAGA movement. Who thinks they are? Who makes such a claim?

Years, even decades ago, it was apparent for anybody who paid any attention that the financial moneybags and decision makers of this movement aren’t found in the lunch rooms of an Amazon distribution center or a steel mill in Gary or auto plant in Detroit or a Starbucks coffee house in Seattle or a Walmart supercenter in the Bronx, Des Moines or Lubbock. They hang out elsewhere – not only Wall Street – and make their unearned billions from a range of businesses.

But that fact shouldn’t conceal another well documented fact that a considerable section of white workers, largely high school educated, voted for Trump and constitute a section of the MAGA mass base. To ignore, minimize, or conceal this shift toward authoritarian and neofascist politics by white workers under the subterfuge that white workers aren’t found in the command centers of this movement reveals a radicalism that is long on wishful thinking and short on what is absolutely necessary at this perilous moment – sober analysis. And that helps no one.

Such negative trends should be addressed, straightforwardly. And with a confidence that white working class voters can be won to voting and seeing the world differently. There is already some evidence for that. Otherwise, the struggle to decisively defeat the MAGA movement and the likelihood of a political realignment within the working class and people’s movements toward democracy, equality, and social advancement becomes a much steeper climb.

A strategy that pins much of the election hopes of Democrats on the voting disposition of suburban white women may be a near term necessity, but, looking ahead, it shouldn’t be a substitute for mobilizing low propensity Democratic voters and sections of the diverse working class. Instead, the two should complement each other.