After a few hours of listening to car horns and trawling the internet, I had to lie down. Saturday was the day for celebrating. “Champagne for everyone!” Bubbles DeVere used to cry on the British TV show Little Britain. Next week, we have to return to the question, “How did 70 million people vote for that man?”

I don’t think we are center right or center left or center center anymore. We aren’t really Republicans or Democrats. We are a country founded by straight white men for the benefit of straight white men using brutal oppression. We are on a long long march to undo that original sin.

We have tried to deal with slavery, voting rights, women and queers in the military, worker’s rights, women’s rights, queer rights, indigenous peoples’ rights—the list goes on. But the cancer is in the bones. It will take going deeper into our white cruelty to rid ourselves of it. And it will continue to be painful. This is what changing systemic racism is about. It’s not just about registering everyone to vote (although that’s still a challenge) or buying a house in a white neighborhood if you don’t happen to be white.

The challenge is for America to understand that its economic system is built on racism and genocide. All of us white middle-class kids were fed lies. We couldn’t even see that we were white and how much privilege we received because of that fact. What we now see with some members of the angry white working class who voted for Trump is not necessarily a right-wing push or even an overt racist rant (although that is a big problem). Some are actually voting against the damage that the economic system has done to them. They are broke without a future (or health insurance).

Our challenge is not going to be solved by moving the Democratic party toward a corporate center. How do we get ourselves to see that the corporate center is linked to the plantation populated by slaves, and to the very White House built by slaves? How do we get millions of people to understand that the economic system (often referred to as late capitalism) has screwed them as well as people of color? The government has a role to play in taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth to the people who actually created it. Instead, the corporate class has convinced some members of the working class that the problem is with the poor, people of color, women, queers, and anybody else who is not a straight white man.

This is why folks like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, and Kamala Harris are so important in keeping the Democrats from slipping back into corporate centrism. The neoliberal model didn’t work for middle-class and poor people across all races and political parties. Interestingly, when capitalism went off the rails in the 1930s, it was a rich straight white man who convinced working people that the government’s role was to help the poor. Now we need somebody like FDR to inspire all of us. Let us hope it is President Biden, with President Harris following him into office.