Among this audience, there is little reason to recite the litany of Trump’s crimes, what his administration means, and how dire the situation is. It’s very, very bad. It’s our duty and mission to defeat the Right and build a majority around a different set of politics.

In order to figure out how best to do that, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind. First, Trump doesn’t have a mandate. That’s not to say that he isn’t dangerous — he has power. But that does mean that the political situation is very much up in the air.

There are huge opportunities for left advance, and we should be wary of thinking that we need to save the liberal center before we create the conditions for us to build a socialist left alternative. That doesn’t mean that we should throw out the best aspects of liberalism, or vulgarize our politics into a crude populism. But it’s key that even though the people in charge of the bourgeois state at any moment (then Obama, now Trump) are our main enemies, much of our political activity should be challenging (broadly conceived) the political center. By this, I don’t mean individual liberals, but the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party at every layer, and the caste leading liberal reform groups in this country.