After The Anger Must Come Sanity

The family separation practices of the Trump Administration's zero-tolerance immigration child-separation policies still burns my mind. That the Trump Administration could separate families for the political reason of attempting to discredit the Democrats is too infuriating to comprehend. This is especially true since discrediting the Democrats is not really needed because they do a good enough job at doing that to themselves. And that too many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians fell for the Trump Administration's lines only shows that they are more concerned about the status of their conservative identity than their Christian beliefs. And that is equally infuriating.

The good news from the whole situation is that showed that even the Trump Administration is subject to public pressure. Yes, Trump tried to put his own narcissistic spin on his executive order  ending the family separation practices; but such is a fixed cost that is to be expected. But, again, it was public pressure that caused Trump to reverse a policy that came from his own administration.

However, where does that leave us now? We know that the public can even change the policies of a President like Trump. But what will we do with that knowledge?

Before getting to excited about the prospects of successfully challenging Trump, we should note the public opinion conditions that caused Trump to reverse course. For the public pressure to which Trump bowed down to just didn't come from the Democrats and Leftists. it came from his own party. And that is what's depressing here. On how many other issues can we gain the same kind of consensus we had against child separation? And yet, we need that consensus to change many of the courses that the Trump Administration is pursuing.

This leads political nonconservatives to one, and only one, possible conclusion: We must learn to work more with political conservatives in order to gain some degree of control over the White House. We cannot affect change without such collaboration. And yet the ever ominous question arises that arises is, on what issues can we collaborate with conservatives to affect change?

The answer to the above question will be none if we do not learn how to talk about conservatives, and even Trump, in non-alienating ways. For the more we offend conservatives, the less we can reason with some of them. And the greater divide we have with conservatives, the less chance we have of winning some of them over on individual issues and the less chance we have of finding issues on which we can collaborate. And what is true for us regarding conservatives is true for anti-Trump conservatives regarding us.

In other words, if we as a people are going to put controls on the behavior of our current President, and future ones too, we have to exercise a significant amount of self-restraint when talking about, and with, those we disagree. We have to be able to talk about our disagreements without labeling each other as lost causes. We know that if we have enough people on our side, we can change the pursuits of the Trump White House. The question becomes: What will we do with this knowledge?