1. The election of Doug Jones in Alabama last night was, with no hyperbole, historic.

2. African American voters were once again front rankers in the struggle for decency, democracy, and freedom.

3. A multi-racial, socially and politically diverse, democratic minded coalition brought Jones across finish line.

4. The enthusiasm factor can’t be underestimated. One side was energized; the other limped along.

5. No joy in White House today, Trump rebuked, and Republicans across the country got to be re-calibrating the way forward.

6. If we are going to upbraid the Democrats in defeat then we should — to be fair and consistent — extend praise to them in victory. I don’t know the full story, but it strikes me that they did a bunch of things right in the victorious campaign of Jones.

7. Jones’ acceptance speech notably ended with a quote from MLK.

8. His election will continue the continuing erosion of Trump’s coalition.

9. Trump’s coalition is an aging one, while the anti-Trump coalition is much younger, as demonstrated again last night. College voters, including at the Auburn and Alabama campuses, voted for Jones by a large margin.

10. It will be interesting to see how the political dynamics within the GOP and between the GOP and Trump will change in the wake of last night’s election loss.

11. Trump’s favorables to unfavorables in Alabama, as reported by MSNBC, were dead even — 48 to 48. That surprised me when I heard it on early on election gay, but it also made me much more hopeful, if not confident, that Jones could emerge the winner later in the evening.

12. Yesterday’s victory is reminder of the importance of a broad and flexible approach to next year’s elections. Only a coalition of the many, the varied, the decent, and the multi-racial has the wherewithal to elect a Democratic Congressional majority next fall.

13. Jones’ victory is also a reminder that creeping authoritarian rule isn’t unstoppable. I say that in reaction to a number of recent articles that pessimistically wonder if anything can halt Trump’s march to full blown authoritarian rule.

14. It is hard to argue that white working class men who voted for Roy Moore and still support Trump are motivated by economic discontent. Moore’s political identity in the public mind isn’t wrapped around economic fairness to say the least, while Trump economic agenda has been overwhelmingly to the advantage of corporations and the wealthy.

15. It is an egregious mistake not to acknowledge that racism, along with sexism and nativism, are the main mobilizing instruments of Trump and the right — Moore’s campaign no exception — in their appeal to white voters. Lift up economic issues heading into next year’s elections for sure, but it can’t be at the expense of the struggle against these reactionary, oppressive, and divisive ideologies and practices.

The Democratic Party leaders are taking it on the chin for insisting that Minnesota Senator Al Franken step down. And it comes from the left as well as the right. Their motives, it is said, are anything but noble and pure. Political expediency guided them, not opposition to boorish behavior on Franken’s part. Some compare what they did to the political repression of the McCarthy period; others to the Salem Witch Hunt. New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand, some say, had nothing more than the 2020 primaries on her mind.

I don’t agree. I think they did the right thing, and not on flimsy evidence. Leaders on our side of the political ledger — elected and otherwise — should be held to a higher standard of personal and political conduct; nothing puritanical or holier than thou about that. It’s not a witch hunt to expect that leaders representing us measure up to certain norms of behavior.

And those norms are not the same today as they were only a year ago. Bill wouldn’t have survived in this new environment and rightfully so. We are in the midst of a social shift. The bar is being raised. Not only is male violence against women and the exaction of sexual favors by men in positions of power no longer acceptable, but also male groping, squeezing, sex talk, and the like are behaviors that have no place in the relations between women and men in this new shifting social climate.

The wind behind this change comes from scores of women who courageously came forward recently to tell their stories of sexual predation and violence at the hands of powerful men as well as millions of women who are saying enough is enough.

In contrast to our opponents on the other side of the political divide that are comfortable with the sexual predation of Trump and Roy Moore, we should embrace this new moment and its new standards fully and without any equivocation. How else can a movement that hopes to expand the frontiers of freedom and equality do anything less.

Narrowly framed political expediency can’t be our main guide; the creation of a society in which women not simply feel safe, but fully live and thrive in conditions of full equality is.

I come out of the communist movement where on the grounds of political expediency and unity a lot of awful shit happened. Humane values and norms were back benched in the interests of some pressing immediate goal. I can tell you it came back to bite us.

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.