Trump's victory didn't expose the weakness of identity politics; it showed its frightening dominion. He ran on it with a vengeance, and won. Still, Democrats will need better equilibrium between a message of racial inclusion and a message of economic inclusion. For pointers, they need only listen to their party's most skillful and class-conscious communicator, Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is a champion of those left out of the economic boom that has powered the upper-middle-class and super-rich to new heights. At the same time, she is a stalwart for social justice. She makes the balancing act look easy. Maybe it is.

Warren is also a good guide on the second, emerging, Democratic question: Cooperate with Trump or resist?

Warren makes some moderate Democrats uneasy. But she's the right woman to lead the resistance. She has the luxury of a safe seat, and she has the will to contest a historically unpopular president-elect who won with 46 percent of the vote, and a Republican congressional majority that is about to propose a radical agenda for which it has no buy-in from the American public. In a typically aggressive floor speech last week she said:

The American people didn’t give Democrats majority support so we could come back to Washington and play dead. They didn’t send us here to whimper, whine, or grovel.