President Trump has been a profoundly antisocial force in our political life. He views the presidency not as a means by which to elevate and ennoble his fellow Americans, but as a way to humiliate his critics and reward cronies. This has been clear for a long time, and I do not expect him to change. It is Democrats who must change. Founded in the early republic as the party of workers and farmers, Democrats must decide who they will be, and what they will be for, beyond opposing Trump.
What America needs today is a Democratic Party with a prosocial vision advanced through prosocial means: to defend human beings as fundamentally social, cooperative, and mutually dependent, both in the way they campaign and in the policies they promote.
Unfortunately, too many Democrats look at Trump and conclude they can use his tools to advance their ends. Envious of Trump’s success, they have also become envious of his political style. Unable, or maybe unwilling, to reckon with their electoral failing, Democrats are frantically searching for someone to match Trump’s crassness and cruelty in a feckless bid to mirror his political success. But what they fail to recognize is that Trump’s style is consistent with his political outlook. The cultivation of anger, vulgarity, antagonism, derision — these tools are antithetical to any legitimate effort to build up the common good and unite Americans.
Democrats began the Trump era running ads about how our children were watching, and warning that Trump’s language and character were unfit for the highest office in the land. They had a point, and it’s a big reason why they won in 2020. In 2024, however, Democrats sought to maintain their claim of moral superiority all while increasingly employing their own brand of frivolous, crude, and ultimately ineffective politics (you cannot beat Trump at his own game). During the last presidential campaign, if my kids were within earshot, I would preemptively change the station whenever a Harris-Walz ad came on the air, as they so often resorted to using vulgarity as a shortcut to conveying conviction. We have never had such an openly vulgar, profane presidential campaign in the modern era — and Trump wasn’t the only vulgar nominee.
Trump has pitted family members and communities against one another, and it’s been heartbreaking and destructive. Rather than strike a contrast with Trump, Democrats routinely suggest that voting against them equates to a personal betrayal of one’s family, gender, and race. Kamala Harris supporters closed the campaign encouraging spouses to lie to one another, in effect promoting familial conflict.
It is ludicrous and self-defeating that a leading slogan for the 2024 Democratic ticket was “mind your own damn business.” For some reason, Tim Walz referred to it as “the Golden Rule,” though, of course, that is emphatically not the Golden Rule in Minnesota or anywhere else. Did he get a thrill out of gesturing to the sacred before turning to the profane? The distance between the winning Obama coalition and the campaign-by-meme Democrats we have now might well be the distance between Obama’s “I am my brother’s keeper” and Walz’s “mind your own damn business” (full disclosure: I served the 44th president as his director of faith outreach).
Progressives who dismiss critiques of Democrats as “false equivalencies” miss the point. It is no coincidence that Trump employs vulgarity, derision, anger, and fear; these are the social and emotional conditions that justify his antisocial politics. The nature of these tools does not change just because Democrats use them. Democrats help Trump when they appropriate his style — even when they ostensibly aim to oppose him.
Democrats should understand that just because a particular style or set of references have caché in pop culture and on social media, it doesn’t mean Americans want it in their politics. Obscure references, sarcastic putdowns, memes, and celebrity culture can undermine Democrats’ message, and make voters feel like politics and politicians are distant from their lives. Similarly, many Americans may accept and be drawn to entertainment that is full of anger and vulgarity. But for politicians and activists to deploy the crude vernacular of the entertainment industry and online culture can only undermine confidence that the government can act on behalf of all of the people. Instead, Democrats can renew a vision of politics as a forum for service and identify acts of neighborliness as integral to this vision.
It will be tempting for the Democratic Party to find its purpose in opposing Trump for the next four years, while avoiding its own internal contradictions and aimlessness. There are some who seem to think that if Democrats would just fight, they would regain Americans’ trust. Newspaper columns and cable-news punditry are filled with calls for Democrats to fight, though specifics about whom or what they’re fighting for are more difficult to find.
This advice gets it exactly backwards. You don’t figure out what you believe by fighting. You figure out what’s worth fighting for when you know what you believe. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has argued, Democrats need “not just an opposition vision … but a proposition vision.” If Democrats want to effectively fight the Trump administration, they need to regain Americans’ trust by gaining clarity on what they believe, what they are willing to defend, and what they want to do with the power to govern again.
In order to regain Americans’ trust and deserve to govern, Democrats must become a prosocial party that filters all policies, tactics, and communications through a prosocial filter. Put simply, a prosocial filter means that what Democrats support and oppose must meet the test of improving our common life together, rather than just representing a hodgepodge of policies that please certain advocacy groups and the interests they claim to represent.
Democrats have allowed themselves to be tied to antisocial behavior, which undermines their vision of governance and America’s potential. In The Atlantic last year, Marc Fisher described the growing acceptance and prevalence of shoplifting, and how it is transforming retail operations. Likewise, in many cities, anyone who takes public transportation regularly encounters flagrant fare evasion. It is demoralizing to be unable to walk into a store and choose the items we need off the shelf, without a clerk having to unlock a shoplifting-proof cabinet. It assails our sense of dignity to be forced to painstakingly monitor our personal budget for what are apparently optional ticket fares.
“Democrats can renew a vision of politics as a forum for service.”
Democrats generally don’t actively support shoplifting or fare evasion, to be sure. But why is it that when you read criticisms of these behaviors, they are coded as conservative concerns? Rather than offer isolated, defensive pleas that they, too, oppose crime, and a reactionary plan to combat price-gouging as a talking point on inflation, Democrats ought to oppose crime and corruption because injustice makes life miserable, communities distrustful, and robust economic and community well-being unattainable.
Likewise, instead of accepting the unfettered advance of technological and business encroachments that promote antisocial behavior, Democrats ought to be the party that puts social well-being at the center of decision making. They should take New York Rep. Paul Tonko’s lead in seeking to rein in online sports gambling, a societal catastrophe everyone sees coming but acts helpless to prevent. Democrats should revisit their support for the legalization and public proliferation of marijuana in light of new scientific evidence of its harms; even if they do not go so far, their support for the legalization of marijuana must include a social analysis and policy attentiveness to the consequences of legalization. Does anyone really believe that the ubiquitous, public presence of marijuana or online sports gambling (as just two examples) have made our communities better, healthier or even more enjoyable?
Similarly, it should not be assumed that the policy task at hand is to simply help Americans adjust to artificial intelligence. Instead, the development and utilization of AI should proceed in negotiation with the demands of a prosocial vision for our communities and nation. How do the American people want AI to affect their lives? Shouldn’t that question at least be on the table? Politics should pose and help answer that question, not just go along with the profit motive and technological prowess for their own sake. Some Democrats are taking steps to address AI’s effect on Americans’ jobs. But many more should be taking seriously the consequences AI might have for our humanity: for the way we relate to one another as social creatures.
Then, too, Democrats need to take responsibility for the antisocial effects of their politics in recent years. As 2024 wound down, reports emerged of a Federal Emergency Management Agency official instructing government canvassers to avoid the homes of Trump supporters while offering hurricane relief in Florida. Democrats must ask themselves: have we conducted ourselves in a way that could give someone the impression that this is OK? Have we provided permission for this kind of behavior toward fellow Americans?
Democrats must stop being so concerned about whether there is a double standard for judging appropriate political behavior, and become much more concerned about their own standards, and whether they live up to them. The American people have less tolerance for feigned sincerity than for Donald Trump’s transparent insincerity.
The party doesn’t have to start from scratch in building a prosocial politics; there are leaders already showing the way. They can look to Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s service agenda; Senator Chris Murphy’s incisive work to address our nation’s loneliness epidemic and rebuild social capital; Senator Andy Kim’s focus on humble service, rather than self-aggrandizing condemnation or antipathy, following Jan. 6. It’s also worth revisiting Pete Buttigieg’s values-based “Rules for the Road” for his 2020 presidential campaign.
Donald Trump borrowed “Make America Great Again” from Ronald Reagan. Democrats would do well to take up the promise of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, to pursue a “kinder, gentler society.” We have become meaner, lonelier, and less considerate as a nation, often in the name of politics. Political ideology is increasingly used to justify and excuse interpersonal cruelty. It doesn’t take a prophet to foresee that in a few years, voters will have had their fill of conflict and cruelty. They will want community again, and they deserve a party that will help them build, nurture, and protect it.
