When I read yesterday that liberal resistance to far right policies is at an all time low for some reason I was not surprised. We are in a new era. Resistance has just swapped out all of its price tags. The current administration has raised the price of noncompliance. When you consider the new far right leaning combine of electronic media and political aggression fueled by the raw power of the executive order, the new political minority who once felt a slim consensus behind them are now on their heels. 

I am seeing articles from the more liberal spectrum calling for a more pugnacious approach to resistance. Unfortunately the pugnacious approach might work for the NFL and testosterone movies, but to pretend one has the raw power when one doesn’t plays right into the hands of the current strategy of the far right. If the left-leaning side of this national division has learned anything, it has learned its power base is up in smoke and needs to be overhauled from the ground up. This is more a Tai Chi moment in history than a Netflix moment. The first thing you do in Tai Chi is get off your heels and find your center and get ready to help the lumbering bully swing so hard he falls. The price is too high right now to pretend we are in one of those long tedious television series with a Deus ex Machina ending. Our opponents are not overly concerned about collateral damage. The greater danger for us all now is to shift to violence if for no other reason than violence is the specialty of the current power structure and not of the resistance.

The position of this project is the nation, or at least 51% to 55% of its voting citizens could find a new center on the negotiated shared consensus sense of good that still drives many if not most individual decisions. The message of fear that is currently on display by the current administration has one profound weakness; there is nothing at the center but fear. They have few to no discernible practiced values; only slogans. A new center of integrity built on an agreement of practiced values linked together with a genuine diverse coalition of religious traditions and well as compatible secular values could hold the center for the long run. History has shown us the bullies of this world when up against this sort of faithful integrity deflate and fade. Spreading the temptation to violence is their game but mutual violence only extends their reign of fear over a field of ashes and loss. Look to the middle east for your textbook illustrations.