I hear it said that Ron DeSantis is Trump without all the drama and personal excesses. He is more calculating, more focused, and smarter on the one hand and less ego driven and unpredictable on the other.

But what this comparison misses is Trump’s innate ability to energize, direct, sustain, and manipulate a mass base. When it comes to giving voice to people’s basest passions and assembling a cross class constituency on a national level, Trump so far is in a class by himself. Nor does DeSantis or any other Republican have the daring to recklessly act, to roll the dice like Trump demonstrated on January 6.

And it is naive to think that Trump won’t clean up some of his mistakes, including acting in a more measured way in some situations, if there is a ‘next time.’

Right wing extremist authoritarianism, fascist or some other variety, is in many ways an irrational system and its politics therefore rest to no small degree on demagoguery, lies, and perfomative politics as well as force. On this count, Trump stands above DeSantis, admittedly no novice, by a considerable margin. That could change, but I doubt the odds makers in Vegas would give you great odds on that bet.

The anti-working class dimension of the maga movement is either obscured or doesn’t figure prominently enough in the conversation and practice of the anti-MAGA coalition. Nor does the dominant role of sections of industrial, commercial, and finance capital that sit at the top of the movement see the light of day enough. This is a mistake. After all, the obscuring of the class dimensions of the MAGA movement narrows the reach of the anti-MAGA movement, masks its nature, demagoguery, and aims, and makes a decisive victory over this revanchist and retrograde movement a very steep climb.

Once again in the aftermath of the police assassination of Tyre Nichols, we hear from many good people, “This has got to stop.” But we said much the same at the time of the last execution and the execution before that and the execution …

This almost predictable response should tell us that whatever has been done to address this national shame and crisis isn’t enough.

Which begs the question: What would be enough?

I’m not sure, but it seems to me that one beginning would include not simply a disbanding of this or that police unit, but instead a full blown reimagining of policing, along the lines of what activists and academics in this field have been advocating for a while now.

To this end, I would think that President Biden should name, after broad consultation, a representative commission to study and come up with proposals that would do exactly that and then put the full power of the White House and federal government behind its recommendations.

Others, with far more expertise and a far bigger voice than I have, may well have better suggestions as to how to proceed. The main thing here is that the approach be holistic and cut from a new cloth.

The elimination of policies and practices that result in the horrific deaths of young people of color is imperative, but that will only happen with a total reshaping, among other things, of the “culture” of policing – a culture that is racist, misogynist, homo, trans, and xenophobic, anti-working class, and lawless. Bad apples there are, but weeding them out of a culture that routinely breeds bad apples is no solution.

Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition were ostensibly and outspokenly pro-labor and pro-farmer. Rev Jackson’s working class politics, it seems to me were more consistently expressed and more creatively interwoven with the struggles for equality and social justice than the politics of contemporary social movements. Not many have done it – mastered this dialectic – better in my opinion than Jesse in my lifetime.

Moreover, given the movement of a considerable section of high school educated white workers to Trumpian politics and the outsized MAGA constituency in rural America, a serious examination and adaptation of Jesse’s politics and practice to current circumstances would seem to be in order.