The original version of this essay was written in June 2015, almost at the moment Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign. No one took him seriously, and everyone — including me, the author of a very critical book about her — thought Hillary Clinton had a lock on the presidency. Democrats have yet to process this loss, blaming Vladimir Putin and the incurable bigotry of the white heartland rather than their own ideological and organizational deficiencies and the fatal weakness of their candidate and her already-forgotten running mate.

It’s striking, re-reading this after Trump’s election, to reflect on his formation of a very right-wing government despite the lack of any elite or popular mandate for one. He was endorsed by almost no capitalist of significance, and he lost the popular vote by nearly three million. Though there’s little doubt that while quite a few of his voters — we have no good idea of just how many yet — were hardcore xenophobes and misogynists, he won mainly because of the exhaustion of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, an exhaustion perfectly embodied by Hillary Clinton. It’s a party vulnerable to the sort of takeover from the left that the GOP experienced from the right from the 1960s into the 1980s. While there are certainly obstacles to that sort of renovation — for one, our ossified labor movement could never provide the kind of institutional support to the Left that the corporate lobby provided for the Right, and for two, the Dems’ moneybags would fund a formidable resistance to any insurgency — there’s a lot to learn from the discipline and far-sightedness of the revolutionists of the Right.