On the day after our last national election, Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, I began to pin my shattered hopes on imagining courageous, unfettered and principled Republican leaders who might emerge from the looming shadows around us.

With Donald Trump as president, Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and Republicans in control of more than half our state governments, such a prospect was imaginable, especially if you grew up, as I did, in a Republican home out in Oregon with memories of politicians like Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall.

But that dream soon began to seem disconnected from reality — at least until Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

Republican opposition to Trump’s behavior and his administration’s destructive policies was increasingly muffled. It was limited mainly to Republican politicians who had decided not to seek re-election. But on April 11, when Vermont Gov. Phil Scott addressed a deeply divided crowd on the steps of the Statehouse in Montpelier, my feeble hope began to feel like an actual possibility. Maybe the bipartisan resistance to Trump I’d first imagined could still arise, even though the balance on Vermont’s Statehouse steps probably tipped toward those who opposed what the governor was about to do.

In a state where Bernie Sanders, despite his lifetime D+ rating with the National Rifle Association, has been fairly criticized for his lack of support for gun safety legislation, a Republican governor who seemed to have no plans for voluntary retirement was about to sign three gun control bills, and used the occasion to explain why Americans must bridge the yawning political chasm where “hate and bigotry and blame” grow.

Dana Loesch, the NRA’s combative spokeswoman, suggested the next day just how difficult it might be to bridge that chasm when she accused Vermont’s governor of giving a “one-finger salute to the Constitution and to gun owners.” Loesch added her hope that gun owners in Vermont would remember this “betrayal” when Scott comes up for re-election.

The kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., seem to have understood almost immediately after the Feb. 14 massacre at their school that gun owners weren’t likely to be the real problem as they set out to force our political system to address America’s gun violence. The kids began to talk instead about the importance of getting other young people to vote and about replacing politicians who are in the pocket of the NRA. If they’re right, we may remember Scott as a politician who set in motion a bipartisan approach to political change that addresses much more than gun violence.

But whether Scott signals the prospect of bipartisan cooperation will depend a lot on how Democrats respond.

On the day after the governor signed those gun control bills, 450 Democrats met in Washington, D.C., to consider the importance of embracing the party’s liberal wing in the 2018 elections. Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders was a featured speaker. Before Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Any old blue just won’t do,” seemingly cheering his rejection of Democratic centrists.

Another speaker advised Democratic candidates appearing on television: “Dress like a conservative and talk like a socialist.”

Advising Democratic candidates for office to embrace the party’s left flank — in all cases and regardless of constituency — seems to me roughly comparable in its lack of wisdom to NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s favorite slogan: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Roughly translated, the advice from the far left becomes: “The only way to beat right-wing zombies is with left-wing zombies.”

LaPierre’s belief that the world would be a safer place if we all packed heat is matched by “Resistance Warrior” confidence that if Democrats just promise universal Medicare and free preschool, debt-free college and a much higher minimum wage, while never explaining how we pay for those exciting possibilities, victory will be theirs.

Enthusiasm for deficit spending is not likely to grow as voters see our new Republican tax law, given its monstrous tax cuts for large corporations and wealthy individuals, lead to increases in the budget deficit and our national debt and then, inevitably, to sanctimonious Republican efforts to cut “safety net” programs.

Vermont Democrats, like the Democratic Party more broadly, will probably lose in 2018 and beyond if they turn their backs on centrists and refuse to work with those Republicans willing to seek compromise.

Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.