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If you’re reading this, you’re angry. Or so I would guess. Maybe what I’m about to say will worsen the anger — enough, even, to hit that “unsubscribe” button. I hope you’ll stay.

For months, ever since the 2024 election, the posts I’ve written here have evoked anger, or fear. According to my most recent essay, a circle of presidential advisers, I’ve want to punish enemies by breaking what they see as subversive organizations. The party opposing the president, I’ve pontificated, has wedded itself mindlessly to a shallow, unworkable view of human nature and social reality. And so the new administration has unleashed fury, intent on dominating American politics, heedless of law or limit, seemingly at will. The day of wrath has come.

For today, I want to set wrath aside. Maybe in doing so, I’ll seem to contradict everything I’ve written up until now. I don’t care.

The question is: what are any of us supposed to do? I mean us, personally. In my case, that means the middle aged, Midwestern guy full of coffee typing this at a kitchen table full of books. In your case, it means you, personally, reading these words on a phone at work or a laptop while the kids raise hell. What are you or I supposed to do, as the former order of things in the United States passes away?

Because it is. No matter how the courts eventually rule, there’s no coming back from what the new administration has done, and continues to do, whether you support it or not. The White House has deliberately crossed lines once thought uncrossable. Only a few years ago, those who aspired to political leadership would have regarded firing federal workers by the thousands and unilaterally closing whole agencies as not only illegal but wildly impractical. Not anymore. Even if the Supreme Court eventually rules against such action, the consequences will still exist, for good or ill. Radical action has radical consequences. I think we can all agree that the actions of this White House are openly radical in their intent, scale, and impact.

Whatever we think of those actions, all of us now face the consequences, in the organizations that give rhythm and shape to our daily life. Once upon a time, national politics often seemed to have little direct, obvious impact on our personal, organizational lives. That’s no longer true. Today in the federal government or its constellation of contractors, loan recipients, and grantees, employees are losing their jobs. Other employees fear the loss of federal benefits they’ve used in private life, like Medicaid, or of services they’ve relied on in a community, like weather data. Still others face investigation or litigation by the federal government, which harbors a view of organizational wrongdoing much different than its predecessor. Lawfare begets lawfare. As all of this happens, some employees and leaders will welcome administration action. Or they won’t resist.

Other organizations will make resistance their reason for being. For them defiance of the national administration will become a core purpose, as it did in President Trump’s first term. From 2017 to 2021, that choice for existential resistance drove the response to MAGA of many institutional leaders in the United States, overtly or behind the scenes, not just in politics but among media, nonprofits, industry, education, and the professions, such as medicine and law.

Here’s one example of what I’m talking about. Many institutional leaders saw the 2016 election as an expression of racism or other forms of social oppression, such as xenophobia against immigrants or abuse against women. In response, organizational leaders rushed toward social justice-centered policies and programs, from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in human resources to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies in investments. These paradigms drove the Biden administration’s epic restructuring of federal regulation and spending on social and environmental justice. The fruits of that project included a radical overhaul of civil rights policies and trillions of dollars in spending on health, infrastructure, and climate. This strategy tried to strike back at what proponents saw as the predatory social oppression of the previous administration and the forces that gave rise to it.

The same response is taking shape today. Oppression has seized power once again, according to many anti-Trump institutional leaders. The only ethical, practical response, they say, is #Resistance. Anything that smacks of validating the new administration must be rejected. Money and human bodies must be mobilized for emergency action, starting with displays of defiance, like that of Congressional Democrats during and after the President’s speech this week. Eventually, the forces of oppression must be driven from power, again. The instruments of power must be deployed for social justice, again. The inevitable opposition from the right must be driven from power and excluded forever, again. The same war plan against the rise of oppression from 2016 to 2024 must prevail in 2026 and 2028. Again.

The cycle must end. American organizations can’t function effectively in a forever war.

Companies and nonprofits and public agencies can’t deliver services or products when their funding and legitimacy are in doubt, around the clock, from one political faction or the other. Human disagreement will never go away, but the destructive American culture war unleashed in 2016 has to end. The reasons are not idealistic. They’re purely, coldly, harshly practical. A country divided against itself cannot stand, because such an epic division will infect the organizations that make the country work.

At a personal, local, and state level, the best response to national dysfunction is reunion, not #Resistance. American organizations have to be made whole again. That means they can’t countenance organizational philosophies that look for scapegoats, whether conceived as instruments of oppression or traitors to America. The former is what DEI and ESG (by whatever name) too often sought, without nuance or mercy. The latter is what the federal crackdown on DEI, ESG, and other signs of leftism is becoming. One witch hunt is being replaced with another.

The cycle must end. American organizations must adopt philosophies that welcome all human beings willing to do good, productive work, delivering the services and goods that our communities need. There will be disagreements over the details, or the fundamentals, of how to make that happen. Humans are still human. But the disagreements need to be worked out, case by case, organization by organization, town or county or state by town or county or state, formally or informally, in writing or not, by law or otherwise, over and against any conflict, or suffering, or loss, or fear. Whatever our politics, none of us can live at our best in permanent fear. The great American Culture War must end. The work of building a new country must begin.

Any opposition to the new presidential administration should be conducted on that basis. The goal is not victory in a culture war to impose one political agenda over another. The goal is not protest or outrage. The goal is peace and getting back to work. Opponents should say to the administration: here’s what has to happen for us to come to the bargaining table and hammer out a permanent settlement, on whatever the issue may be. That’s what opposition should fight for, if the need exists, but only to get to the table.

That approach will require, in both of the major American political coalitions, that radically different notions of humanity and its place in the universe must learn to coexist and even work together. No creed can do that in the midst of a witch hunt against the other. American political worldviews at their best, right, left, or otherwise, cherish ideals of common humanity, whether rooted in rational inquiry or ancient belief about the image of God. That’s where to start, no matter how much our primal instincts for survival say otherwise.

“In politics,” I wrote recently, “human beings respond best, over the long term, to profoundly conservative notions of what reality is: a bloody, chaotic mess, torn by rivalry, dominated by power.” The sanest response to a universe like that isn’t a war that lasts forever. It’s making peace: one case at a time, again and again and again, for as long as it takes, whatever heart-rending admissions and concessions and forgiveness become necessary, whatever the anguish of breaking bread with the enemy, whatever the demons of rage and terror may say.

Enough.

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