I think if you read back in my blog a month or so, you will see I am not saying we have the coalition we need and no more. Quite the opposite. The point here is that building the coalition we need does not involve telling everyone who is already mobilized that they’re not wanted or needed, that only the people who are not in the coalition yet really matter. It does no good at all to build a coalition that by its nature drives off some of the people already mobilized, which is what I think Brooks is doing: preferring some unattainable perfect over the already-existing good. The question really is: who could be part of a coalition for a better politics (and against Trump’s awful politics) who isn’t now, and what does it take to make common cause with them? The answer can’t be: get rid of some of the people who marched or supported the marches first. That’s at best zero-sum, likely worse than that. Are there bridges that could be built (that perhaps Hillary Clinton and her closest supporters neglected to build)? Yes, I think so. But Brooks could write more concretely about what those look like, and I think others *have* written more concretely about them.

I think you are wrong when you say “anything which excludes pluralism, which rejects diversity, which ignores identity, which denies difference, is not going to serve as a unifying, coherent, rallying force”. I think that is the essence of a unifying and coherent rallying force; it needs to address problems that affect people of as many identities as possible and bring them together on that basis, rather than dividing us into subgroups. Otherwise you end up with something like the Occupy movement, marching to the four winds because no one group has convinced the others that its issue should be dealt with first. It may be tempting to say that there is no issue on which enough USians agree to justify putting it first – but Trump found one, in fact he appears to have found several. And most of them should have been democratic party priorities long before he burst on the scene.

Further – “anything which excludes pluralism, which rejects diversity, which ignores identity, which denies difference, is not going to serve as a unifying, coherent, rallying force” — is most excellent.

This. Every single time he’d describe what he wanted from national politics, I basically said: this is like listening to someone on a dating service describe the perfect partner, then meet the perfect partner and reject them because somehow they wanted something else–and then go back and repost the ad exactly as before. Even he seemed to know it before the election started–he came this close to admitting it, but in that freaky unreflective, unaware way that he has. Like he would burst into flames if he had to admit he’d been kissing the wrong asses for years.

Every month during the Obama presidency it seemed he wrote an article lamenting American politics not quite producing the right kind of governance, a failure of especially of Democratic partisanship, and then in his imagined perfect polity basically described the Obama administration.