But since your Trump administration now boasts more generals than Pinochet’s junta, it’s likely that, isolationist noises aside, the White House will soon be up to its usual shenanigans around the globe. Who can say what these might be, in light of our new president’s one-man alliances with assorted global strongmen, autocrats, and wing nuts? Blue states and cities will do our best to publicly disassociate our America-within-America from whatever new international follies you people may be persuaded to embark upon. And we will continue to take to the streets to defend the rights of immigrants and refugees and anyone else threatened by your saber rattling and isolationism. To quote St. Augustine, “When there is no justice, what is the state but a robber band enlarged?” We respectfully decline to join the Trump-Putin robber band.

I realize that this all sounds like a terribly pessimistic view of the future. It will leave behind millions of our fellow Americans most in need of the kind of assistance that only the federal government can provide—Americans whose only crime was to have the misfortune of resid-ing in a Trump State. I actually love Mississippi, an incredible place that, along with so much else, gave us Medgar Evers, William Faulkner, and Robert Johnson. I would love nothing better than to see Detroit, one of our greatest cities, restored to its former glory. But such hopes and dreams mean little now. The moment requires us to put aside, for now, the liberal ideal, which at its core was always about nurturing new shoots of enlightenment—which are as likely to spring up in a lonely farmhouse, or on a ghetto block, as at some great center of power or finance. The promise of liberalism was that we would never stop reaching out toward one another, always building and connecting, until all of America and the world was covered with diverse, democratic, and yes, brilliant societies, “the broad, sunlit uplands” that Churchill envisioned, or Dr. King’s “nation that will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”

Many of my fellow blue staters, of course, would prefer to persuade you to come around to our way of thinking. That is, after all, what elections are supposed to be about—instead of, say, suborning the head of the FBI, or getting foreigners to commit felonies on your behalf. It’s true that even the most dominant powers can be dissolved by the right idea, carried forward by enough people who believe in it. The national majority that Democrats enjoyed before the Civil War collapsed in the face of the demand for “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Land, and Free Men.” The Republican landslides of the 1920s were reversed nearly overnight when they ran up against the liberal program of the New Deal.

Unfortunately, nothing like that is going to happen now. A political sea change takes place only when you can get people on the other side to come over. But you can only get them to switch if you can get them to listen to what you have to say, and you can only get them to listen if you share something resembling the same idea of objective reality. This is the bleakest new reality of all: That common ground is gone. You Trump Staters don’t read or listen to the same news sources we do. You don’t even care what a legitimate news source is, as the rise of all those fake news sites has demonstrated. Two-thirds of you believe that unemployment rose under Obama, even though he actually cut it by more than half; just 17 percent of you acknowledge that Obamacare has driven the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low. Exactly what is the messaging strategy to win over those of you willing to believe that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are running a secret child-sex-slave ring out of a Washington pizza parlor? Or that President Obama is a secret Kenyan? Or that a routine military training exercise is a UN attempt to conquer Texas? Or any of the other bizarre and inane conspiracy theories that are now promulgated daily as the gospel truth not just by a few, fringe elements but by leading members of our new government’s security apparatus?