It seems like just yesterday I wrote about Ellen DeGeneres defending her friendly exchange with former president George W. Bush at a football game. In that piece I used a quote credited to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci that says, “The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state.”

DeGeneres isn’t really an agent of the state in the sense that Gramsci meant, but as if to prove the point, former first lady Michelle Obama has adopted the same civility-minded approach toward Bush, considered by some to be a war criminal.

In an interview with Jenna Bush Hager (Bush’s daughter) on the Today show on Tuesday, Obama was asked about the controversy involving DeGeneres and the former president. After mentioning that the former first lady was friends with both “Ellen and my dad,” Hager invoked Barack Obama’s recent comments about the dangers of “cancel culture” to ask about people “that want to be closer with each other.”

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“I had an opportunity to sit by your father at funerals, the highs and the lows. And we shared stories about our kids and about our parents,” Michelle Obama said. “Our values are the same.”

“We disagree on policy, but we don’t disagree on humanity. We don’t disagree about love and compassion,” she continued. “I think that’s true for all of us. It’s just that we get lost in our fear of what’s different.”

In her remarks — particularly about how her “values” are the same as Bush’s — Obama gives us an even clearer picture than DeGeneres did of how people near the top of our power structures view themselves as fundamentally aligned. An interview between a former president’s daughter and a former first lady defending shared bipartisan values among the national political elite offers a master class in the concept of class solidarity.

What is class solidarity? It’s a term used on the left to describe an attempt to build solidarity — collective agreement and support — among members of economic classes. In particular, leftist economics focuses on building working-class solidarity as a means to advance people-powered leadership on issues.

But the term has also long-been applied to the powerful, following the Marxist construction of conflict between the ruling and working classes. The idea that Michelle Obama shares values with George W. Bush is evidence of how power unites the powerful, even if, as she said, they have disagreements on policy issues. (Though her husband’s record on deportations and drone strikes has plenty of overlap with Bush’s.)

Obama suggested that peoples’ resistance to rehabilitating Bush’s image as a rich-kid-turned-war-criminal is derived from a “fear of what’s different.” She seemed to grant no legitimacy to critiques of the wars Bush started, his record on LGBTQ rights, or his ties to the oil industry.

But there is a nugget of truth in Obama’s response to Hager’s question: We should remember that George W. Bush is human, and that should make us all the more appalled at the inhumane regime he presided over at home and abroad.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Ellen DeGeneres’s George W. Bush Debacle Is a Lesson in the Drawbacks of Assimilation Politics