Like millions of people here and around the world, we woke up this morning dismayed and frightened that Donald Trump has been elected President. Whatever we each thought of the Democratic Party and of Hillary Clinton, none of us wanted to believe that so many people could bring themselves to vote for Trump.

Exit poll data by race and gender.

Simply put: there is a vacuum on the left of US politics. No serious analysis could conclude that the presidential wing of the Democratic Party represents anything more than, at best, a calculated neoliberalism with a human face. It is precisely these politics which have generated the mass popular discontent we see among all demographics and all parts of the political spectrum. To promote “more of the same” and diminished expectations as a solution is to provide no solution at all, and the absence of any left alternative has ensured that discontent has instead been channeled to the right, at least in electoral terms.

We have to defeat the far right agenda of white supremacy and nationalism that Trump represents. Our lives literally depend on it. But the only way to defeat the right is by building the left. We can’t win this fight by building greater unity behind the ruling class’s chosen candidates and their neoliberal agenda; even if the fear of something worse had mobilized enough people to deliver a victory to Clinton in this election, or even if it does so for someone like her in 2020, that would merely kick the can down the road while the right continues to grow stronger. It would not build the power we need to win and to build a better world.

To do that, we need to organize...