Democrats and liberals are still licking their wounds over the US election, and who could blame them?
Let’s not sugarcoat it. The election has taken fundamental values — the ones carved into the Statue of Liberty, say, and those written in the blood of the martyrs of Montgomery and Mississippi — and placed them on the table. They suddenly appear up for negotiation.
But enough with the denial, Democrats. You lost. I lost. And now all the world is going to endure the consequences. What you need now is a strategy. Here is one in five easy pieces.
1. Get your heads out of the sand. No, the Electoral College is not going to reverse the outcome of the election. No, you cannot impeach the president-elect.
And the protests? It’s not for me to tell anyone they don’t have the right — or even the obligation — to be in the streets singing their song of America.
There is power in protest; it gathers energy that can be channelled all the way up the system and into the corridors of power. Democrats in Congress are going to need all the power they can get.
But they can also be distractions, and a reluctance to get about the hard work of preserving the values they are marching for. Already, the message #NotMyPresident has grown stale, even offensive. Like it or not, this country’s next president is going to be Donald Trump. Deal with it.
2. Admit Mr Trump is right. On some issues, he is. Just like Bernie Sanders, he has targeted something real in the nation, a cancer that will eat its prosperity and its civic prospects.
A rich country can’t stay that way if too many of its citizens are poor. That’s a truism as old as the Bastille and long before that. Especially in democracies, disorder has ever sprung from the seeds of poverty and usually just as things are starting to get better.
Messrs Trump and Sanders both seized on that resentment to build a political movement. Mr Trump took his appeal to places Mr Sanders, to his everlasting honour, simply would not go.
To Mr Sanders, no votes were worth sowing seeds of racial animosity, religious bigotry or blunt nationalism. But they both saw something was broken in America.
But the system failed. And President Barack Obama’s efforts to rectify it fell short of expectations among the people whose livelihoods were slow to recover, many of them already pushed and pummelled by globalisation long before 2009.
Mr Trump got that. He used it. And it is one reason why he is headed to the White House, and Hillary Clinton has gone home.
Mr Trump has also made reasonable proposals, even promising ones, on a wide range of issues that Democrats ought to greet with relief. He is likely to back massive spending on infrastructure in the US. As he says, he knows construction. Let’s hope he does.
3. Refuse to fall into the trap of fighting for the ‘‘white working class’’. America does not have a white working class. It has a working class that includes black, brown, white and every hue and creed and race imaginable.
Democrats have always championed workers in America, and to the extent the party has in recent years overlooked that part of its identity, it is time to rectify it.
But it is worth emphasising Mrs Clinton won the popular vote, a fact that is important even if it is not legally relevant. Among her voters? Millions of workers, many of colour, who responded to her message over Mr Trump’s promises.
Sure, Mr Trump’s appeal was custom-made for whites, and that paid dividends for his campaign. But that is a sign of his party’s weakness, not strength.
Rust-belt whites facing declining financial prospects are no different in economic terms than blacks in Detroit wondering where their jobs went, or Latinos in Dallas wondering how a city so rich can offer so few jobs that can lift them out of poverty.
That is something Mr Sanders understood. And Mrs Clinton too. The working class knows no colour divide, neither does hunger, want or hope.
4. Find your allies. Face it, Democrats — you are a minority party. In places like Texas, that’s nothing new. But you’re a minority party just about everywhere in the United States.
It is a question whether Democrats have ever been so weak in Washington as they are right now.
So, a strategy of all-out obstructionism is not going to work, not with these numbers.
The good news is Mr Trump has cobbled together a coalition of factions so unlike one another they will not stand united.
There will be conservative Republicans who turn on him, maybe not completely, but on this piece of legislation and that piece. Democrats must seek these senators and congressmen out, and make them allies.
Strange bedfellows? Surely. But just as they cannot afford to ignore good ideas from Mr Trump, they must not refuse to work with Republicans whenever they can. That was the great shame of the GOP under Mr Obama. Republicans simply would not work with the president.
5. Fight like hell. How bad will Trump-era policies be? Pretty bad. And when the worst of the worst head to the Hill, Democrats will need to fight like badgers.
There will be times when peaceful but passionate protesters are needed in the streets. When Democratic attorneys-general will need to file suit. When senators and congressmen will need to stand in the hallway and stop what they can.
The horrors of which liberal nightmares are made should not come to pass without an epic struggle. Democrats will not win them all, but there is honour and purpose in fighting hard, no matter the odds.
Plus, it is the party’s only path back, away from political oblivion.
●Michael A. Lindenberger is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News.
