Batting Order: First Defeat Trump, Then Begin Our National Reconciliation

"When you come to a fork in the road," legendary political scientist Yogi Berra famously observed, "take it." There is no mistaking that this November's presidential election will mark as consequential a fork in the road as America has confronted since the election of 1860, and we will have no choice but to take it.

Practically speaking, the choice will be between endorsing cruelty, the gutting of democratic institutions and the jettisoning of the rule of law, on one hand, and restoring the hope for America that we've held in our hearts, on the other. Put another way: returning Donald Trump to the White House or putting him in our rearview mirror, doing some soul-searching and moving on.

Banishing Trump from our political scene and cleansing the nation of the toxicity that he represents is necessary -- but not sufficient. At the moment, Vice President Kamala Harris is weighing whether to reach out toward centrist, independent and moderate Republican voters, or bow to the dictates of the Democratic Party's hard left. Whether America will recover from the disease of the Trump era or wobble uncertainly into the future will depend on whether she has the wisdom -- and the guts -- to tell the far left to stuff it. And once in office, the Harris administration will need to make clear that it hears the concerns among many Americans that Democrats are afflicted by supercilious elites who believe they are better and smarter than the great American middle.

But it is going to depend even more on the choice that individual Americans make to cure our society of the poison within it and heal the profound divisions that have deepened and spread. Somehow or other, in PTA meetings and town halls and election campaigns, ordinary people are going to have to bury the assorted hatreds that have seemed so fulfilling to them and replace them with a renewed commitment to the common good.

When America was at its most badly fractured, Abraham Lincoln required only a few words to convey his prescription for national survival. "With malice toward none, with charity for all," Lincoln exhorted citizens during his second inaugural address, Americans needed "to bind up the nation's wounds."

There are more dramatic examples of national reconciliation than the task before us, ones where actual violent discord has been replaced, however haltingly, with a spirit of national repair. Northern Ireland is one such example. The historic conflict between Catholics and Protestants involved the real and regular spilling of actual blood by the time the Good Friday Agreement was brokered in 1998, and plenty of blood was spilled thereafter. The case of national road rage that presently afflicts America hasn't reached that level. We aren't yet in a war zone, though the unfettered access to weaponry here makes the fear that the rage could descend into political violence all too reasonable.

Still, the reconciliation and healing that Northern Ireland has experienced once Catholic and Protestant leaders publicly embraced a new day there has much to make us hopeful. "It took very strong leaders to begin to talk to one another," recalls Kevin Cronin, a retired school teacher from County Wexford, Ireland, who has shown Ireland's magic to hundreds of visitors of disparate backgrounds over the past 40 years. He chalks the spirit of healing to leaders who have pushed and pressed their constituents to look at their country in a new way. But he also lays the progress to the willingness of ordinary people to follow their lead, albeit sometimes reluctantly. "I think that people had to reach a certain fatigue level before they realized that something had to be done," Cronin told a visitor to Ireland last week.

Americans are badly fatigued by our divisions, and we know we have reached a danger point. Something has to be done, but at the end of the day, it will be up to individual Americans to do it.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.