The evident defeat of Donald Trump would not have been possible without the grassroots activism and hard work of countless progressives. Now, on vital issues-climate, healthcare, income inequality, militarism, the prison-industrial complex, corporate power and so much more-it's time to engage with the battle that must happen inside the Democratic Party.

The realpolitik rationales for the left to make nice with the incoming Democratic president are bogus. All too many progressives gave the benefit of doubts to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, making it easier for them to service corporate America while leaving working-class Americans in the lurch. Two years later, in 1994 and 2010, Republicans came roaring back and took control of Congress.

From the outset, progressive organizations and individuals (whether they consider themselves to be "activists" or not) should confront Biden and other elected Democrats about profound matters. Officeholders are supposed to work for the public interest. And if they're serving Wall Street instead of Main Street, we should show that we're ready, willing and able to "primary" them.

Progressives would be wise to quickly follow up on Biden's victory with a combative approach toward corporate Democrats. Powerful party leaders have already signaled their intentions to aggressively marginalize progressives.

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants," Politico reports, "had a stark warning for Democrats on Thursday: Swing too far left and they're all but certain to blow their chances in the Georgia runoff that will determine which party controls the Senate."

Also on the conference call with congressional Democrats was House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who reportedly declared that if "we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win."

If we're going to get real about ending systemic and massive income inequality, we're going to have to fight for-and achieve-massive long-term public investments, financed by genuinely progressive taxation and major cuts in the military budget.

Such admonitions were predictable and odd, coming from House Democratic leaders who just saw shrinkage of members of their party due to the loss of "moderate" incumbents as well as the losses of avowedly "moderate" and widely heralded Democratic senatorial candidates in Maine, Kentucky, Iowa and elsewhere.

At the core of such conflicts, whether simmering or exploding, is class war. When Pelosi & Co. try to stamp out the genuinely progressive upsurge in congressional ranks that is fueled from the grassroots, they're "dancing with those who brung them"-corporate elites. It's an extremely lucrative approach for those who feed out of the troughs of the Democratic National Committee, the Senate and House party campaign committees, the House Majority PAC and many other fat-cat political campaign entities. Consultant contracts and lobbying deals keep flowing, even after Democrats lose quite winnable elections.

Biden almost lost this election. And while the Biden campaign poured in vast financial resources and vague flowery messaging that pandered to white suburban voters, relatively little was focused on those who most made it possible to overcome Trump's election-night lead-people of color and the young. Constrained by his decades-long political mentality and record, Biden did not energize working-class voters as he lip-sunk populist tunes in unconvincing performances.

That's the kind of neoliberal approach that Bernie Sanders and so many of his supporters were warning about in 2016 and again this year. Both times there was a huge failure of the Democratic nominee to make a convincing case as an advocate for working people against the forces of wealthy avarice and corporate greed.

In fact, Clinton and Biden reeked of coziness with economic elites throughout their political careers. To many people, Clinton came off as a fake when she tried to sound populist, claiming to represent the little people against corporate giants. And to those who actually knew much about Biden's political record, his similar claims also were apt to seem phony.

It's clear from polling that Biden gained a large proportion of his votes due to animosity toward his opponent rather than enthusiasm for Biden. He hasn't inspired the Democratic base, and his appeal had much more to do with opposing the evils of Trumpism than embracing his own political approach.

More than ever, merely being anti-Trump or anti-Republican isn't going to move Democrats and the country in the vital directions we need. Without a strong progressive program as a rudder, the Biden presidency will be awash in much the same old rhetorical froth and status-quo positions that have so often caused Democratic incumbents to founder, bringing on GOP electoral triumphs.

In recent months, Biden showed that he knew how to hum the refrains of economic populism when that seemed tactically useful, but he scarcely knew the words and could hardly belt out the melody. His media image as "Lunch Bucket Joe" was a helpful mirage in corporate medialand, but that kind of puffery only went so far. Meanwhile, the Biden strategists decided to coast on the issue of the pandemic, spotlighting Trump's lethally narcissistic insanity.

But when it came to healthcare-obviously a central concern in people's lives, especially amid the coronavirus-Biden largely fell back on Obamacare rather than advocating for a genuine guarantee of healthcare as a human right. Likewise, Biden talked a bit about easing the economic burdens on small businesses and families, but it was pretty pallid stuff compared to what's desperately needed. To a large extent, he surrendered the economic playing field to Trump's pseudo-populist blather.

Looking ahead, we need vigorous successors to the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s that were asphyxiated, politically and budgetarily, by the Vietnam War. Set aside the phrase if you want to, but we need some type of "democratic socialism" (as Martin Luther King Jr. asserted in the last years of his life).

The ravages of market-based "solutions" are all around us; the public sector has been decimated, and it needs to be revitalized with massive federal spending that goes way beyond occasional "stimulus" packages. The potential exists to create millions of good jobs while seriously addressing the climate catastrophe. If we're going to get real about ending systemic and massive income inequality, we're going to have to fight for-and achieve-massive long-term public investments, financed by genuinely progressive taxation and major cuts in the military budget.

With enormous grassroots outreach that only they could credibly accomplish, progressive activists were a crucial part of the de facto united front to defeat Trump. Now it's time to get on with grassroots organizing to challenge corporate Democrats.

(c) 2020 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."

Apart from barely squeezing through the swing states to defeat corrupt, incompetent, lying, corporatist Donald Trump, the Democratic Party had a bad election.

Loaded with nearly twice as much money as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party showed that weak candidates with no robust agendas for people where they live, work, and raise their families, is a losing formula. And lose they did against the worst, cruelest, ignorant, lawbreaking, reality-denying GOP in its 166-year history.

The Democrats failed to win the Senate, despite nearly having twice the number of Senators up for re-election than the Republicans. In addition, the Democratic Party lost seats in the House of Representatives. The Democrats did not flip a single Republican state legislature, leaving the GOP to again gerrymander Congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade!

Will all this lead to serious introspection by the Democratic Party? Don't bet on it. The GOP tried to learn from their losses in 2012, which led to their big rebound. Already, the Democratic Party is looking for scapegoats, like third party candidates.

Will the leaders of these inexcusable defeats-Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi-explain how this happened? Will they take some responsibility and tell the American people why they let their profiteering media consultants spend so much money on tepid, low-impact TV ads at the expense of a massive ground game to give voters personal reasons to get themselves out to vote, beyond Trump? A third of all eligible voters stayed home. Could part of the problem be the 15% commission the consultants receive from TV ad revenues as compared to zero commissions from ground game expenditures?

Can the corporate Democratic leaders respond to inquiries by progressives and the sidelined primary voters of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Can they respond to why the living wage, the corporate crime wave, and the GOP blocked stimulus/relief package passed by the Democrats in May (including a $600 a week extension for tens of millions of desperate workers and critical aid to local agencies overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic) were not prominently front and center? Also, why did the Democrats refuse to campaign for full Medicare for All, supported by 70 percent of the American people? The Democrats, as pointed out by political media specialist, Bill Hillsman, did not speak directly to white, blue-collar workers who deserted Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump in 2016.

Moreover, the Democratic Party has a long-standing problem with authenticity. Rhetoric for a large infrastructure jobs program paid for by repealing corporate tax cuts and loopholes is seen as a throwaway line by many voters. Democrats should have explained, at the local level, how determination and integrity could shape the upgrading of our schools, clinics, roads, mass transit systems, waterworks, and other public services, with good-paying jobs.

Meanwhile, the Trumpsters showed their ferocious energy for wannabe, ego-obsessed, dictatorial Donald with more rallies, signs, and door-to-door contacts. The Democrats misread the faulty polls again thinking that the projected huge turnouts were primarily their voters and not also the Trump voters who turned out in greater numbers as well.

Too many Democratic operatives treat Trump with derision and mockery, instead of stressing how his daily lawlessness and serial violations of the Constitution have dismantled the protections for the people and turned the government over to big business to do and grab whatever they want.

Trump openly commits federal crimes (e.g. The Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act) using federal property, including the White House, for his campaign, spending money illegally, while brazenly defying over a hundred investigative subpoenas from the House of Representatives.

Yet, neither Biden and Obama nor the Democratic Party made these corrupt forms of obstruction of justice, front and center issues. They even ignored Trump's past criminal assaults of women, whom he has repeatedly degraded.

These many missed, obvious opportunities have consequences. Don't Trump voters and their families also suffer from frozen minimum wages, from the absence of adequate or any health insurance, from those sky-high drug prices that Trump failed to reduce? He put more toxins in the air and water and allowed more dangerous workplaces. Trump calls endangering people and the planet "deregulation" but what he was really doing is rewarding his corporate paymasters.

Trump just pushes many more buttons than do the Democrats. Why don't the Democrats promote more unions, more consumer cooperatives, more campaign finance reforms, and more known ways to empower the people directly?

Of course, the Democrats would never argue that the American people, not corporations, should CONTROL what they already OWN such as the public lands, the public airwaves, and the shareholding mutual and pension funds investing their money. The Democrats never even think to demand that U.S. taxpayers get a direct return for trillions of dollars of government research and development that have subsidized the growth of modern industries (from aerospace to computers to agribusiness, biotech, pharma, and more).

While Trump incites street violence and then cries loudly for "law and order," the Democrats don't throwback "law and order" for violent, polluting corporate crooks who cheat and harm children, consumers, workers, and communities, as well as rip off government programs like Medicare. Trump has gotten away with defunding the federal corporate crime police big time. Never will the Democrats go after Trump for the bloated, runaway, unaudited military budget and its Empire that are devouring necessities here at home.

The House Democrats refused to keep multiple impeachment pressure (apart from the Ukraine matter) on the Republicans. A national TV audience of the Senate dealing with a dozen of Trump's impeachable offenses would give even the most ardent Trump supporters pause. (See December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197).

The Democrats let Trump and his lawless Attorney General William Barr get away with all his corrupt, criminal, and unconstitutional actions, which have turned the White House into an ongoing crime scene. And, despite this "rap sheet" Trump came close to winning the Electoral College for a second term!

Next time, the rulers of the Democratic Party should listen to civic groups and advocates and not be so smug and incommunicado. As an example, I'll refer you to my Eleven Suggestions for turning out the vote, with popular mandates, available to everyone in whole and in part for weeks (See also my latest op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 27, 2020).

Now let's see how many rollbacks and repeals Biden will quickly institute to stop Trump's devastations and usher in a truly progressive, majoritarian set of long-overdue policies.

A significant portion of Black males are "contrarians" that take positions at odds with the general Black political consensus - while Black women tend to take the communal approach. Corporate media are all abuzz about the relatively high numbers of Black men that voted for Donald Trump this election cycle. An NBC News poll of early and election day voters found that "eighty percent of Black men supported Joe Biden, down slightly from Hilary Clinton's 82 percent of the Black male vote in 2016, but significantly lower than Barack Obama's level of support among Black men in 2012 [87 percent] and 2008 [95 percent, just one point below Black women]." This year, ninety-one percent of Black women supported Joe Biden, down only slightly from the 94 percent that cast votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the 96 percent of Black females that supported Obama in both of his presidential bids.

However, when it came to slicing and dicing this year's Black male voter demographics, NBC's numbers were downright strange - or, as the network put it: "There was an unusual relationship between education and how Black men voted this year." According to the poll, Black men with some college but no degree voted for Biden at levels much like Black women, while Black males with both less and more formal education gave from 20 to 26 percent of their vote to Trump: high school only: 26 percent; bachelor's degree: 22 percent; advanced degree: 20 percent. This makes no sense; why would Black men with an incomplete college education behave so differently at the polls than those that received degrees and advance degrees, and those with no college at all?

The weird breakdown casts some doubt on the poll's reliability, but it is beyond question that Black men are more likely than Black women to break with the Democrats. Black women are significantly more "communal" (my term) than Black men in their political behavior - especially when "politics" is broadly defined to describe relations among humans. High levels of Black female participation in church and in social movements, is an aspect of communalism. The lived Black experience confirms that Black women are significantly more likely to join in behaviors that they believe are in the larger group interest, most especially regarding children. That same lived experience cannot fail to note that a significant portion of Black males are what I call "contrarians": men that take positions at odds with the general Black political consensus - often quite loudly and ostentatiously. If voting for Obama had not been so universally seen as a "once in a lifetime" Black experience that could not be missed, the First Black President would not have gotten 95 percent of Black male support in 2008. The Black male "contrarian" vote kicked in later, when good reasons could be found to be angry with Obama and the Black Democratic echo-chamber - but only Black males actually voted Republican in significant numbers.

Many Black contrarians justify their support for Republicans by referencing Malcolm X, who castigated white liberals as "foxes" and white conservatives as "wolves," and declared that: "The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the 'smiling' fox." However, Malcolm was essentially saying, "a plague on both their houses" - a point the Black contrarians that vote Republican often forget.

Trump did provide a substantive excuse for some Black men to vote for him. A number of Black males have cited Trump's "First Step Act" which, as Vox.com reported, resulted in "more than 3,000 people" being released from prison while "more than 2,000 people - 91 percent of whom are Black - received sentencing reductions" because Trump's measure "retroactively applied the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 (a law Obama passed), reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine charges." Obama refused to make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive.

For some Black men, that was reason enough to pull the Republican lever - but their mothers, sisters and wives did not; they stuck with what they saw as the communal interest: to beat the White Man's Party. Black women, and most Black men, will continue to seek communal safety from the racist hordes as long as they are presented with a duopoly choice between an overtly racist party and a party that claims to want "inclusion," and to which the vast bulk of Black elected officials belong.

A significant and growing segment of young Blacks, however, refuse to accept that voting is the only politics that counts. They have seen how Democrats change their political tunes when confronted with masses of people on the move. Although the Democrats have no intention of keeping promises made under the duress of massed people's power, the social movement's articulation of demands broadens public perceptions of possibilities. The new order will not come from the voting booth, but when the duopoly corporate system is viewed as illegitimate by a critical mass of people.

Corporate media analysis of Black political behavior is almost uniformly bogus. At the turn of the 21st century Black and white operatives of corporate media were agreed that Blacks were becoming more conservative as they became more affluent. According to the corporate press, these relatively better-off Blacks folk were rejecting "old style, civil-rights-type" Black politicians in favor of a "new Black politics" that was less confrontational and more amenable to business-oriented solutions to social problems. There was absolutely no evidence of such a shift in political behavior among not-poor Black people, but facts were not allowed to intrude upon the corporate narrative. However, the weight of money does count in electoral politics. In 2002, when incumbent Black Congresspersons Earl Hilliard (AL) and Cynthia McKinney (GA) were massively outspent and defeated in primaries by little known corporate-backed challengers, and the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was almost unseated by a first term councilman (Cory Booker) who somehow outspent him by two to one, the corporate media declared that their theory of growing Black conservatism had been proven.

Cynthia McKinney was the last of the "old-style" Black politicians to go down, that year. The corporate media made her primary race a national cause celebre: she was too loud, too radical, too "Sixties." When former Black Republican Denise Majette beat McKinney in a nearly half-white district, the national corporate media cheered. But Bruce Dixon and I, working at The Black Commentator, showed that McKInney had won more than 70 percent of the Black vote and handily defeated Majette in Black precincts of Stone Mountain, Georgia, one of the most affluent sections of the Dekalb County, the second most affluent majority Black county in the nation, behind Prince Georges County, Maryland, outside Washington DC. A white political scientist - a favorite of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution - later concluded that McKinney won a whopping 85 percent of the Black vote, and urged Majette to get to know Black people better or get out of politics.

The corporate media's theory was disproven, but they keep presenting variations on the theme, hoping that the power of money will make the numbers conform to their narrative. These days, the corporate press insists that there is something called "people of color" (POCs) -- and then speculates as to which way this invented grouping is leaning, politically. The capitalist press now routinely release polling data that conflates all "minorities" (another term for the amorphous POC), with the result that none of the constituent groups' actual political proclivities are revealed, understood or respected - an outrageous example of white corporate hegemony in the raw.

The various POCs resident in the United States all have different histories and heritages of struggle. Their politics are energized by a universe of dynamics and -- most importantly for U.S. politics -- these ethnic/national constituencies are made up of people with very different, self-perceived relations to whiteness. A Cuban American whose family was self-consciously white before they left Cuba, is a very different political animal from a Mexican American mestizo, an Afro-Dominican American, a South Asian American of Hindu heritage, or a Chinese or Vietnamese American. And no group in the African diaspora shares the African American prism on race.

We will all find each - and Anglo-white people -- in struggle.

A jittery week at the polls, huh? One measure of our political anxiety is that liquor sales spiked this week. Also, it's probably not a coincidence that a new breakthrough in drug legalization was made on Tuesday, when 56 percent of Oregon voters said YES! to sanctioning the use of "magic mushrooms," which are said to relieve anxiety and depression.

Political pundits have rushed out to say (even gloat) that Tuesday was a debacle for Democrats, especially for the progressive movement - and we certainly did not match our extraordinarily high expectations. But hold the mushrooms. Despite a queasy roller-coaster ride in the Dump Trump race and disappointing shortfalls in some other contests, 2020 is hardly a debacle. Take heart from the phenomenal victories scored this year by our grassroots progressive movement, from picking up a dozen congressional seats to winning hundreds of local offices. Especially significant are the increasing number of overtly progressive sheriffs, district attorneys, and other criminal justice reformers we're electing, including in counties across the South.

This is movement-building at its best and purest. Not only are we electing a broad and expanding network of officials, but also these runs (even those that fall short) do three essential things that advance the overall democratic cause: (1) They increase the number, skills, and collective experience of our grassroots volunteers; (2) they spread and refine our progressive/populist message; and (3) they teach us how to run better next time - if we're willing to learn.

My message is an old and proven one: Persevere, keep pushing, build on what you learn, reach out. A movement is not a weekend project - ask those who launched the women's suffrage movement, none of whom lived to vote, but they kept advancing. Or ask any of the various communities of outsiders who've fought (literally) and are still fighting for civil rights and human dignity. Also, wallow in the true glory of it all - the reality that these are the fights worth being part of, joining in the joy of steady democratic progress. "Winning" doesn't come on one election day, but over a lifetime of participation.

And remember this bit of wisdom imparted to me years ago by a West Texas farmer: "Battling the bastards is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on."