While the pundits are puzzling over what went wrong with their laughable polling data, and with what a sorry candidate Hillary Clinton was – though Donald Trump was much worse – and over how creepy/awful it’s going to be for poor President Obama to welcome DJT into the White House after DJT loosed all his abysmal nastiness on the country, what I’m finding worthwhile to think about is being wrong.

I’m giving some thought to being wrong this week, of all weeks, as a way better to engage my citizenship – inadequately exercised, as it was, by my merely voting in Tuesday’s election, though debrided to near extinction by the election’s miserable outcome.

What I was not wrong about was voting for Clinton. I won’t go into the pros and cons of that now. The election’s over. The damage is done – or more likely just beginning. I thought she was the far better candidate, who would make a far superior president. But the electoral college, bizarre yet authorative, went the other way. In truth, I can’t bear, just for the moment, to think about the particulars of what that choice is going to mean to a lot of people who have reason to expect better from their government than what Trump is likely to provide. For me, it’s better to think about citizenship and about being wrong. There may be more to gain.

A famous American jurist, the tartly named Judge Learned Hand, wrote once that the spirit of liberty – something we purport to prize in my country – is that “which is not too sure it’s right … the spirit which seeks to understand other men and women”.

One thing I was wrong about – one of several – was to violate Judge Hand’s injunction. By thinking I knew what was best for the other fellow – supposedly all those rural or rust-belt, under-educated, under-employed white guys, or Latinos or blacks who don’t feel sufficiently noticed by their elected officials – I was wrong by feeling so sure I was right. I’m actually fairly certain I did not try to understand them, just thought I generally knew what they needed, and probably as a result condescended to them. I most certainly publicly and unreservedly derided their candidate – calling him a moron, an incompetent, a liar, a boob, a puerile charlatan, a huckster and a sexual lout, along the way to promising as many readers as I could that this man would never, ever be president. Which, it appears, is the second thing I was wrong about, but never for one moment doubted until sometime late on Tuesday night.

The effect on me of these two wrongs is that I seem, momentarily, to have lost – let’s call it – my feel for the authentic. Another way to say this is that I now feel I may actually not know – as we say in Mississippi – my ass from a hole in the ground. And I may also be guilty (wrong #3) of a lack of empathy for those fellows out in the hinterland who feel so hard-pressed as to have to vote for a miscreant. Too little empathy is bad news if you’re a novelist. William Blake famously wrote that “He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars … General good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite and the flatterer”. Setting aside the fact that promising the general good is precisely what the scoundrel but soon to-be-president Donald J Trump did to get elected, his civic wrong does not cancel out my own.

The problem of course, especially in terms of one’s citizenship, is how to honor the other chap’s point of view, be empathetic and all, and allow that you might be wrong about what’s generally good for him, without rendering yourself toothless and civically flaccid. Here, I do not have a formula for overall ethical acuity, only a handy checklist for those who might be interested. It may be that all acts of responsible citizenship require a certain amount of willfully entered arrogation. Plato has thoughts about this.

Right now I’m sitting at home staring at Trump’s face on the TV trying to get used to thinking “President Trump”. It’s not that easy after all the bad things I’ve said and thought about him, and still believe to this minute. But doing this only brings to mind yet another wrong I committed. And that is the complex wrong of being a citizen in a society where (god bless her) Hillary Rodham Clinton was my best choice for president, a choice I willingly acceded to by blacking in her circle on my ballot. This was all wrong when you get round to it, every last bit of it.

But rather than keeping it all at arms’ length, and blaming … I don’t know … somebody else, I want to bring it to my bosom like an asp and let it sting me. American wiseacres used to sport a bumper sticker after the last Obama victory that said, “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Romney”. My bumper sticker, if I had one (and I don’t) would say today, “Blame Me. I Voted For Hillary”.

As much as our just-completed election seemed to be about averting the unthinkable (a dilemma both sides envisioned, but only one side had to endure), the problem was always really about what was going to happen afterwards. An election in which both candidates are acknowledged to be lamentable and defective is as good a measure as any of a polity that’s fast becoming ungovernable, and at the same time is a formula for worse things to come. I really want that not to happen to my country. I want there to be something we can do. What all political sides share in their dire diagnoses of America is a vision of a country not working very well, and a fear that it’s getting beyond the point of being helpable. In my view, this convergence of opinion ought to be a source of strength – even if we have little else that feels reconcilable. Moral leadership would be useful to us now. We’ve just had eight years of it. Goodness knows where we’re headed next. It’s time for us to resuscitate our deflated citizenship, time to pay more attention, own up, not just fade away, blame the other guy, and forget.