For many if not most of your liberal friends (that is if you have any left) the world has just come to an end.
Many are either in a state of deep depression, even deeper denial or worse.
This is especially true of your older friends who were so looking forward to seeing the sun set on their lives under a Democrat president – proof that there was indeed a God that they could meet as they took that last step towards eternity.
Your younger friends are suffering from a similar depression, but theirs will subside more quickly as they will trade it in for a place on the picket line and the barricades and become the new freedom fighters, mobilizing to stop Trump and his loyalists from changing their America into a carbon copy of their grandparents’ America.
This latter group will protest, sit-in, boycott, harangue, threaten, occupy and obstruct every Trump executive order and every attempt to alter the culture that their hero, Barack Obama, constructed and handed off to left-wing, progressive tenured college professors and blue state politicians during his eight years in the White House.
Aided and abetted by social media and rich liberal donors, Democrats will embark on a crusade to topple the orange man and strip power from or character assassinate any of his supporters. Their actions will make Occupy Wall Street, Seattle’s Chop (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) and Black Lives Matter look like a 1950s 4th of July parade on Main Street. They perceive the Trump threat to be an existential one to their very way of life which includes: legalized recreational drugs, multi-genderism in sports, the right to occupy government buildings or vacant private property, reparations to slave descendents, forced national acceptance of DEI, CRT, and Marxist ideology, abandonment of merit in favor of racial quotas, free and unfettered abortion on a national scale and other radical demands.
You will not be able to talk to these activists. If you try, they will shout you down, refuse you entry to their campuses, protest your home and cancel you in social media. They mean business. These are not peaceful people.
The next four years will see an even greater more substantial movement of Americans to their respective corners.
It will be a time of consolidation … of power. We can expect various segments of our population to come together and find agreement with one another on the periphery.
The women’s movement will be one of them. It will reach out to minority women and bring them into their fold, largely on the basis of the abortion (or women’s reproductive rights) issue, but they will add minority poverty to their battle cry, thereby winning more voting women over to the Democrats’ side.
Instead of changing their tune, university professors will become more aggressive and push back at their administrations while riling up their students to engage in mass protests against the evil capitalists, the one percenters, and all Republicans. They will not hide their anger nor will they attempt to contain it for they believe that the 2024 election is the “shot heard round the world” and it is up to them to save democracy even if they have to destroy our society in the process.
If all of that sounds terrifying to you, it should, because the Left’s anger has been simmering under the surface ever since Hillary lost the election of 2016. Like the Republicans in 2020, the Left feels it was robbed in 2016 and just a couple weeks ago they feel they were robbed again.
It won’t take much to fan the flames of this now roaring fire of discontent.
So which of your liberal friends can you talk to?
You know them better than I do, but there are some of them that are, in fact, a lost cause. They are the lifelong Democrats who won’t change their stripes. They are the elderly, white, college-educated women. They hate Trump and any man who has a ready reserve of testosterone. They are your grandchildren (if they have already been indoctrinated by your left-leaning children) and they may be your spouse who desperately wanted a woman to be president, no matter how unqualified or unsuited for the job she was.
One group you might want to consider talking to could be those of your friends who are religious church-going people who understand how every man is flawed and that forgiveness is one of the most important attributes in leading a healthy and wholesome life. They could also be those friends you have grown up with who will hear you out and won’t condemn you or your views because they know you, through and through.
Aside from these groups, there aren’t many that you should waste your time on, because the well of comity is already contaminated and drinking from it will not bring you closer together with those whose minds and ears are closed.
So, what do you do?
You do not keep silent, but you do choose your rhetorical battles, carefully. You don’t pick open fights with those in power who would crush you.
You take them on, beneath the surface, away from the spotlight. You avoid placing yourself in uncomfortable situations with highly volatile people. You accept no invitations to events where you won’t feel comfortable. You keep your yard signs in the garage and your MAGA hat on the hat rack. You resist posting unduly provocative messages on social media, knowing that everything on the internet presents ammunition for the other side to use against you.
If you must post something, make it thoughtful and general instead of personal. Name-calling will only produce threats and possible cancellation from platforms. In short, you must be careful to avoid conversations with people or organizations that could do you harm.
Admittedly, these suggestions sound like a call for self-censorship, but what they really are is a roadmap for survival in a country that is seething with unrest. Speak softly and carry a big stick is a Teddy Roosevelt admonition he made about foreign policy back in 1902, and it is reminescent of President Trump’s belief in “peace through strength,” an approach Trump borrowed from our first president, George Washington which the latter announced in his fifth annual message to Congress in 1793.
If it was good enough then, it is certainly worth pursuing now. And maybe that is a good starting point for a discussion with your liberal friends.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven of which are on American politics and has written over 1,400 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com.
Image:
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
