Listening — Really LISTENING — To The Opposition

But first you have to look at this cartoon.

And read Aaron Sorkin’s letter to his daughter.

My friend Paul Abrams writes:

You may recall my article during the campaign about Trump seeking to become America’s Putin and how easy it will be.

Here it begins. [“Donald Trump is leveraging his new position as president-elect to empower his business empire — and he’s doing it publicly.”]

Gentlemen, our democracy is lost. We need to understand how to form an effective political opposition in a dictatorship.

Mark my words: Trump will have his picture and name on every infrastructure project the Congress funds. Obama was forbidden to do that. No photo. No name. Trump may also be forbidden. He won’t care. He will just do it. Who is going to stop him?

Here’s the near term picture: family brought into WH, informally if necessary. Pictures of Trump all over the place associated w work and improvements in your community. Continuous rallies. Constant attacks on whatever is left of the legitimate press. An AG hostile to civil rights. All US attorneys replaced by sycophants.

Within a year, fascism will become our new way of life.

If that leaves you even more eager to take to the streets, read this first — “The Right Way To Resist Trump” — in case you missed it in the Times.

The protests, argues the author, are counterproductive.

. . . There will be plenty of reasons to complain during the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are made. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition. . . .

Meanwhile, my friend Nathaniel Frank posted this very thoughtful piece: “Bridging the Divide: Thoughts from a Conversation with a Trump Voter.”

. . . I took the opportunity to listen—really listen—to what Conservative Stranger had to say. . . .

“All we’d ask,” he pleaded, “is that you don’t thumb your nose at us, don’t make snide remarks about how we like our guns and our bibles, don’t congregate with your college-educated peers about how out of touch and insignificant we are just because we don’t possess those same higher degrees.” . . .

In this context, Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” was potentially disastrous to her campaign. Liberals will do no better in bringing about the world they want to see if they continue to convey the kind of contempt that helped derail her win.

. . . Too many progressives fail to engage with the people they most need to persuade, opting instead for the comforting but counterproductive narrative that conservative voters are irredeemable. . . .

It Could Be Worse, argues Ron Elving, at NPR.com.

Yet the one bright spot a lot of us see — a chance finally to begin a major infrastructure revitalization — is a trap. It sounds like what we’ve all been wanting for so long, that President Obama called on a joint session of Congress to pass “right away” in 2011. But in Trump’s version, it’s “a tax-cut plan for [wealthy] investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors.” Read it here in the Washington Post.

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