By Chris Satullo

Someone has to go first. And it’s going to have to be us.

Before I explain, I’ll tempt fate and strike a note of optimism amid the rampaging anxiety: Joe Biden is going to win the popular vote and Electoral College by margins falling somewhere between comfortable and slam dunk. The Democrats will control both chambers in the new Congress. The win will be big enough that it will mostly, if not entirely, fend off nightmare scenarios of street violence and last-ditch vote-suppression by Trump supporters.

That will be a nice first step.

But it will barely begin the longer, harder work of restoring a sense of shared norms, trust in laws and institutions, and mutual respect among citizens – all things required to turn the United States of America back into a functioning democracy and an improving society.

The damage done has been deep and broad. We’re all trapped in delusional bubbles, nursing hurts, hunting grievances, dreaming of revenge, ever-ready to call out others as ignorant, evil and dangerous. If we’re to break these toxic cycles – if we’re going to help Joe Biden keep the promise of healing that is the primary reason for his coming landslide – someone has to go first.

And it’s going to have to be us.

By us, I mean the moderates, traditional liberals and disenchanted Republicans who will form Biden’s winning margins. It would be nice if the self-righteous inhabitants of woke Twitter joined in, but I’m just a dreamer, not a fool.

Look, I know we’ve endured a lot at the hands of Donald Trump and his appointed minions, much of it corrupt, unconstitutional or a desecration of the values that invite us to love this nation despite its flaws. Stipulated. We’ve also been subjected to no end of taunts, insults and malignant fantasies by his enamored fans and his toadies in the media. Stipulated.

Revenge is tempting. Get over it.

That’s our patriotic duty. Thanks to the win that’s coming our way on Tuesday, the arrow of responsibility for saving democracy points squarely at us.

Someone has to live up to the imperishable advice of an authentically great American president, speaking at what was, after all, a far graver, bloodier crisis of division than anything we face now:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

In this work, someone has got to go first.  It has to be us.

We’re the ones who claim to believe in tolerance, diversity and justice for all. If our embrace of those principles hides some fine print – if we exclude 40-plus percent of Americans because of how they’ll vote on Tuesday – then our words are hollow. Our righteousness in the face of Trump’s evil rings false.

No, instead, we must go first, as often as it takes. Here are some tips, some do’s and don’ts, on how we might want to think and behave in support of a healing America:

Don’t be a sore winner.

Learn from those Canadians you have been thinking about joining Up North. One of the best rituals in sport is the handshake line between teams at the end of hockey’s Stanley Cup. Before they celebrate, before they skate about the rink with the beloved Cup held aloft, the winning team lines up to shake hands with and compliment the team that just spent a week or more rattling their teeth with body checks and firing hard rubber pellets at their faces. Be like a Stanley Cup champion; show some class. Don’t spike the ball in the face of the defeated; offer them a handshake.

Don’t pretend that when they do it, it’s terrible, but when we do it, it’s OK.

Mind-boggling hypocrisy has of course been a hallmark of GOP congressional caucuses ever since the Contract with America days, re: deficits, court vacancies, rules of procedure, you name it.

I get it. Payback may seem to smell sweet. But it will turn sour – e.g., Harry Reid’s fiddling with Senate rules on judicial nominees just bought us three young, right-wing justices. (This is not to insist, though, that Dems should refrain from adjusting the Supreme Court’s ideological tilt by adding seats. Just be honest that it’s a change of position and explain why it might be justified.) 

Here’s one example of liberals’ ritual hypocrisy that almost nobody recognizes: When black churches invite candidates to speak from the altar or when they run “souls to the polls” turnout operations, it’s a triumph of social justice. When evangelical pastors do the same, it’s an outrageous violation of the First Amendment.

Don’t say: “Trust science, but when my feelings speak, the facts don’t matter.”

Cancel culture (and it’s real, not just a figment of Tucker Carlson’s dark imagination) often insists that subjective feelings (“I’m offended,” “I felt unsafe,” “I felt excluded,” “I’m enraged”) trump the facts of an incident, the dictionary meaning of words, or the actual intent of another person. What’s more, sometimes – even after it’s pointed out that an emotion-laden misreading of the facts is being advanced – people demand that others suffer professional or personal harm based on their misreading. 

I’m not saying that all claims of bias or microaggression are false. Far from it. But to people who say they revere science and facts, the nuanced distance between legitimate and flawed claims of offense ought to matter greatly.

Remember, every time we steamroll over fact and nuance to demand punishment for free speech, we provide tasty grist for the grievance factories of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, which then cement many white Americans into a stance we should be eager to coax them out of.

Grasp the degree to which we’re responsible for how much “they” despise us.

I say it often: Politics are Newtonian. For each political action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s at least arguable that coastal liberals launched this cycle of contempt with their snobbery. They have long treated a huge swath of the nation’s populace as so ignorant and tasteless as to be comical, contemptible and beneath notice. Those other people can hear you, you know.

Sometimes liberals overcomplicate their analysis of why some Americans love Trump. It’s as simple as this, as Rich Lowry just put it in the National Review: Trump is a hugely satisfying middle finger to fling at all of us in response to our years of snobbish disdain. Always remember: That you sip kombucha while the other guy swigs Mountain Dew does not make you morally superior.

Don’t project our sins – or ones we’re planning to commit – onto the other side.

This kind of projection is of course core to Trump’s behavior – and he’s infected an entire political party with it. It’s still stunning to watch Republicans justify their attempts to steal an election they’re doomed to lose by fervently insisting that Democrats – the party up by a lot in the polls – are the desperate ones playing dirty. So, remember how obnoxious and maddening it was when Trump and others indulged in such projection. Then, never do that!

Don’t imagine evil where there is only disagreement.

Violent white supremacy – whether clad in white hoods or Hawaiian shirts – is evil. But most of the people supporting Trump are not evil. They’ve just settled into a different bubble, reaching a different conclusion based on different information, experiences and values. The group More in Common has found that “reds” and “blues” both imagine that twice as many people on the other side hold “extreme” views as really do. One of our biggest problems in fixing America is my idea of you and your idea of me. We’ll never discover that we’re not actually so far apart if we never talk to one another. Not only might you find the other folks aren’t as bad as you thought; they’ll discover the same about you. But if you never reach out (and, remember, it’s on us to go first), they’ll remain locked in a dark, malignant fantasy of who you are and what you want. Why let that awfulness persist?

Know what the best objections to your ideas are.

Seek them out, listen fairly to them, then refine your thinking and positions in light of what you learn. That is how ideas gain power and adherents, not by freaking out and “calling out” any time anyone fails to adopt your viewpoint down to the last comma. That “narcissism of small differences” has been the downfall of social justice movements throughout our history. Don’t repeat error; learn from it.

Reclaim and redefine patriotism: Admit you love America.

Lord knows, we have a lot of unacknowledged, unrepaired sins on our ledger as a nation. Not sweeping any of that aside. But beauty and power live on in our ideals as well. It’s not for no reason that millions yearn to move here.

Hey, my wife never stops trying to cure me of my many bad habits, but I know she loves me and only does what she does out of love. Why can’t we fight for social justice as the true patriotism, a way of improving an historic experiment worth loving and fighting for?

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If you doubt Trump voters and Biden voters could ever have a frank but respectful dialogue about the election, please watch a bit of this.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.