The prevailing diagnoses for what has ailed American politics since the rise of Donald Trump point to widespread racism, ignorance, and self-harming irrationality. Although these observations are correct, they are not productive. Yes, people are racist, cruel, and irrational, but this is nothing new. Leaning on pop psychology to explain away political failures is dangerously inadequate as a substitute for genuine political response.

Trump’s bellicose public image allows many people to identify with him at the level of primal aggression. Clearly, a large segment of the electorate remains compelled by Trump at unconscious levels of desire. But such energetic attachments are fungible—and transforming those attachments is the task of politics. Trump’s ascent has followed a strategy more consistent with the promotion of a reality-television show than with advancing a coherent political ideology, and it should make clear a vital truth: Effective politics cannot simply reflect the will of the people; it must shape the desires of the electorate. 

If we rely on voters’ existing virtuous character, rational deliberation, or deep empathy as a starting point for democratic politics, we will never succeed. Cultivating an ethical responsibility to one another is precisely the work of political organizing and policymaking. The mass energy that goes into racist and authoritarian desire can be redirected, but such redirection can only be achieved by a politics that offers inspiring and inclusive policy agendas capable of addressing disaffection, and aggression.

To date, Democrats have shunned the basic political responsibility to engage with desire and have instead leaned on a mirage of morality and reason. President Joe Biden, who reassured wealthy donors during his 2020 campaign that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he’s in the White House, has failed to provide an ambitious policy vision during his reelection campaign. His case for another four years rests on little more than “we’re not Trump” and a promised return to the same pre-pandemic “normal” that set the stage for Trump’s emergence.

Campaigning to protect the status quo of profound inequality in both wealth and political power has, unsurprisingly, failed to galvanize the discontented segments of the electorate. And polls after Biden’s recent debate fiasco suggest that simply shifting to another Democratic nominee in his place is not likely, by itself, to overcome Trump’s primal appeal come November.

Biden, or whoever replaces him on the ballot, will need to offer something much more. To beat Trump, the Democratic candidate must rally the public around a positive vision for the future that excites mass enthusiasm through transformative policies and affectively rousing narratives. These could include a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, guaranteed basic income, mass student and medical debt forgiveness, a renewed public health system organized around community care workers, guaranteed universal rights to housing and healthcare, and large-scale investment in public arts initiatives to cultivate belonging and community in a nation currently plagued by isolation and despair.

With a short timeframe before November, candidates don’t need to invent such plans from scratch. They could draw from existing bills and policy proposals, such as the Green New Deal to address climate change, the People’s Response Act to end mass incarceration and build preventative community care systems, the Futures Agenda to revitalize youth opportunity and education, and various proposals for restructuring the anti-democratic institutions of the Supreme Court, Senate, and Electoral College.

For decades, at least since President Bill Clinton devoted himself to dismantling—or, as he put it, “reforming”—public welfare systems, Democratic Party leadership has refused to back ambitious policies for public programs and even frequently joined right-wing politicians in dismissing them as “radical socialist” utopianism. Democrats have instead repeatedly used their power to hollow out the state and empower profiteering businesses in its place, leaving struggling Americans at the mercy of private corporations and their lobbies. This has intensified inequality. It has eroded public trust in both government and civic institutions, including the Democratic Party itself. And it has pushed discontented voters to far-right demagogues who, having now taken over the Republican Party, validate their discontent while promising to give them a radically different future in which to believe.

Nearly a century ago during a political period with marked similarities to our own, an influential German legal theorist argued that the underlying nature of political struggle is defined by the distinction between friends and enemies. In this paradigm, you’re either with me or against me; either loyal to me or worthless. This man, Carl Schmitt, became a supporter of the Nazi regime. From his perspective, both liberal and conservative leaders had failed to embrace the power of mobilizing hatred of “the enemy” as a political strategy for unifying the masses to consolidate power and reinspire national pride and purpose. In contrast to this weakness, Hitler’s boldness in suspending legal codes, declaring a state of emergency, and mobilizing hatred for an enemy excited Schmitt, who praised Nazism for “recultivating traditional concepts.”

We saw elements of a similar strategy in the Trump administration, though we should be careful not to exaggerate Trump’s exceptionalism. As Corey Robin, Samuel Moyn, and others have pointed out, Trump implemented many of his most reactionary measures through standard constitutional structures, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s War on Terror—which only deepened under Obama and Biden—may be an even stronger illustration of Schmittian politics. Even so, it is not difficult to recall the invented enemies against which Trump has gathered his friends: He has demonized immigrants and Mexicans, Muslims, the news media, Black Lives Matter, and “the radical socialist left.”