In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln told Americans they must  have malice toward none and charity toward all. At least 620,000 died in the Civil War. It was unimaginably personal. Without that generosity of spirit the republic would not have long endured.

With the re-election of Donald Trump, many Normal Americans of good will are not quite that generous, but are coming close. We have to be kind toward and accepting of the people who not only called us Nazis, fascists, haters, garbage, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, racist, sexist, every sort of “ist” or “phobe,” people who canceled us, tried to bankrupt us, jail us even kill us. People who threw open the borders knowing the economic havoc it would cause, knowing they were unleashing vicious criminals, and welcoming and funding terrorists. People who flooded America with drugs and who condemned children and women to sex trafficking. People who want to abolish the Constitution the better to abolish us. People who wouid do worse if they could.

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Now, various talking heads are trying to emulate Lincoln. We must not do to them what they gleefully and maliciously did to us. We must strive to unite, to become one, with the people who refuse to admit the wrongs they forced on us and our republic in the name of “our democracy,” a tyranny of the majority, a one-party state for which they yet long. A few are beginning to sort of admit error, fewer still recognize our common humanity and the need to become, once again, Americans. Can’t we all just get along?

The hell with that—mostly. There’s no question if the republic is to survive Americans must once again come together as Americans, but that means willingly embracing the Constitution, the rule of law, and acknowledging our individual liberties do not impose a duty on others to accommodate our every whim, neurosis or psychosis. The social pathologies of leftists do not require Americans to hamstring their police and to accept rampant crime, nor do they require us to accept  and praise the whims of the sexually deranged. They certainly don’t require us to embrace open borders and the horrors that insanity brings.

America must be united, but we’d be smart to take the advice of wise Americans of the past, like John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who said: 

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

And Ronald Reagan who said: 

Trust but verify.

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More politically canny leftists are beginning to argue for a return of their Party to the political center. Is this a frank and humble admission they have gone too far? Do they truly recognize the damage they’ve so willingly done to so many, to America? Or is this merely cynical, political calculation, an attempt to trick Americans into thinking they’ve changed and are suddenly willing to put America and Americans first? Will they, should they again gain power, immediately revert to their true nature? Do they, after decades of hating the Constitution, the rule of law, embracing America’s enemies and damaging her allies, of despising every American not slavishly in their camp, really intend to repudiate that hatred, all that evil?

As Ricardo Montalban said in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn:

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

It would be satisfying, and perhaps the very definition of justice, to do to them what they’ve done to Americans and America, but that’s a suboptimal solution for a moral people. We’d be foolish to blindly accept rhetorical promises of sudden Americanism.

If we truly want to preserve the republic, we can’t engage in lawfare. We must restore the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution. But we must also prosecute those who have, and who will, commit legitimate crimes. There can be no made up crimes, no political prosecutions, and everyone, no matter how undeserving, gets full due process. We must identify every attempt to damage our sovereignty and national security, expose every plot, every American working for foreign enemies, and prosecute them

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We must identify and prosecute/expel every spy, every terrorist. We must deport illegal aliens, beginning with criminals and the insane, and we must prosecute every American who willingly helped them break our immigration laws. Defund anti-American NGOs. Fire every bureaucrat who betrayed the trust we put in them to serve the American public. Make clear the elected and appointed are our hired hands, not our rulers.

If they truly want to unite, to be American again in more than name only, they ought to be willing to take as long as it takes to prove their intentions and sincerity with deeds, not words. That alone will restore the republic. That alone will avoid a second civil war.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.