Reflecting on the still-urgent messages anti-war activist Tom Hayden distilled during his lifetime.

Tom Hayden and I spoke and corresponded a good deal during the last year of his life about the 2016 presidential race. The great radical thinker and doer, who died too young at age 76 on Oct. 23, understood the dynamics of a race that has seen wounds he sought to heal reopened and rubbed raw.

Hayden took seriously the threat posed by Donald Trump and Trumpism. He was old enough to have confronted McCarthyism, racism, sexism and anti-immigrant hysteria in all their awful incarnations during the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s and ’10s. He had succeeded to maintain a faith in what he described as “rare moments when hope and history rhyme.”

Yet his experience as a civil-rights activist, voting-rights activist, anti-war activist, anti-corporate activist, environmental activist, and political leader (California state assemblyman, state senator, gubernatorial candidate, U.S. Senate candidate) told him that those moments do not come by chance. They are forged in the crucibles of campaigns and movements. They demand an honest assessment of dishonest politicians and disconcerting times.

Hayden knew enough to be unsettled by what the 2016 campaign was exposing about America’s ongoing capacity for political cruelty. Yet, he was not simplistic or resigned in his response to that cruelty. Raised in a Detroit-area Catholic church that was led by Father Charles Coughlin, a nationally-known “radio priest” whose preaching anticipated the crudest populism of the current moment, his first rebellions were against those who would use economic instability to divide workers along lines of religion and ethnicity.

“We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things – if anything, the brutalities of the 20th century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to ‘posterity’ cannot justify the mutilations of the present,” Hayden and his comrades declared in 1962. “We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been ‘competently’ manipulated into incompetence – we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.”

What I loved most about Hayden – and I loved a lot about him – was his faith that the politics of division could be overcome, that coalitions could be bigger and bolder, more inclusive and more powerful. When we went together into the streets of Seattle in 1999 for those great protests against corporate-defined globalization, Tom was joyous at the sight of “Teamsters and Turtles” – blue-collar trade unionists and environmentalists – marching together.

Hayden never lost faith. He believed, to the end, in great awakenings.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national affairs correspondent. He is the co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.