Perception is reality.

Resistance Democrats perceive themselves to be compassionate guardians of truth and justice. I can say from personal knowledge that, in their heart of hearts, most are just that. Yet, fallible humans as we are, we don’t always bring our best selves to the table (much less the social media scrum).

Outside of Team Blue, we’re often seen as condescending, self-righteous grandstanders who, when we’re not making fun of Republican governors who use wheelchairs, are shouting “Make America Smart Again” and vindictively applauding viral videos depicting farmers as braindead MAGA slobs who deserve their comeuppance. The hypocrisy is hard to miss, as is the crude inversion of the racial hierarchy.

Ridiculing Trump and his supporters has been a resistance staple since 2015. Where once the Left looked for inspiration to Martin Luther King’s call for “beloved community” or to Cornel West’s definition of justice as “what love looks like in public,” it now tunes in to John Oliver for stinging put-downs. When the professional comedy well runs dry, one can always dredge up painfully unfunny dreck like the video above.

The problem with attacking Trump is illuminated by retired West Virginia coal miner Phillip Hagerman:

[T]he media was helping to energize the Trump campaign by treating him as a joke...As the hit pieces kept coming, it seemed to many that Trump was being unfairly victimized by the media. Perhaps we sympathized with him because, as people from the hills who have also been rejected by the establishment, we know what it feels like [emphasis added].

Hagerman, a lifelong Democrat who voted for Trump, hints at a core dynamic driving political polarization: Contempt breeds distrust.

Public trust in media, government, and higher education are at historic lows. In the not too distant past, we looked to trustworthy authorities for guidance. Labor unions had our backs and so we were comfortable relying on their candidate endorsements. Union meetings and picnics were opportunities to talk things over with similarly situated people. If we weren’t in a union, we had other civic associations that brought us together to socialize, problem-solve and cooperate for the betterment of our communities.

Observing others showing up for their communities time and again fosters trust. But civic engagement has withered, as documented in books like Bowling Alone and Rust Belt Union Blues, allowing cynicism and distrust to take root. Misinformation flourishes, but is as much consequence as cause of social disengagement.

In healthy communities grounded in reciprocity, respect and a feeling of shared fate, trust is the default setting. But that default has flipped, and in its place we have a nasty atomistic culture of factional, zero-sum one-upmanship. In a time of social, political, technological and economic upheaval that cries out for coming together, we tear each other apart.

Every time the resistance Left inflicts shame, distrust festers. Why place your trust in a wiseacre who gets off on acting smarter than everyone else? At its best, humor can disarm and enlighten. But as currently practiced, it reinforces our mien of moral superiority and provokes that which it condemns: reactionary resentment, collective victimhood, vindictive counterattacks and a retreat into safe echo chambers.

Ridicule signals a departure from the values we claim to hold dear: caring, fairness, open-mindedness, cooperativeness, the common good. Trolling is done for individual pleasure or status, not for the advancement of the collective good. It’s basically saying, “I’m so right and good that I get to be cruel to those who are wrong and bad.” In fighting the monster, we become the monster.

Resistance activists often point to the use of humor in the ouster of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Student-led “Otpor” opposition activists staged comedic stunts designed to bring Milosevic down a peg and diminish Serbs’ fear of the tyrant. But the culture and politics of 1990s Serbia was unlike our own in important ways: Under decades of authoritarian rule, political satire was risky, making Otpor’s use of it a relatively novel feat of bravery. Moreover, humor was only one of many of Otpor’s tactics. With the backing of the US empire (!), Otpor organized in small towns and cities to mobilize sustained mass protests and general strikes. They appealed to patriotism and to the grievous loss of hundreds of civilians in NATO air strikes.

All of the above took place in the context of far more extreme poverty, repression and violence than anything we’ve experienced in the US. I’m not a Serbian history scholar but, as far as I can tell, the efficacy of Otpor’s antics tells us little about the efficacy of baby Trump blimps.

The overuse of mockery and contempt is a subset of liberals’ habit of defining ourselves by reference to what we are not: Trump. Musk. The Baddies. If MAGA is bad, what makes us good? What do we stand for? We’ve by and large stopped even trying to answer that question, and Democrats’ 27% approval rating reflects this abdication of purpose.

Only 42% of voters in battleground House districts say the Democratic Party shares their values, and 56% say Democrats aren’t looking out for working people. We’ve lost their trust.

We’ve been calling Trump and his supporters fascists and Nazis for more than nine years now (and applied the label to past Republican presidents as well). Now that Trump is brazenly defying the Constitution and abducting dissidents, we’ve got a “boy who cried wolf” problem that all the “Turd Reich” placards in the world will not solve. We’ve lost their trust.

Democratic strategists despaired at their inability to convince enough voters that Trump was a would-be fascist who would implement Project 2025. Why didn’t they heed our warning? Because we’d lost their trust.

One too many “deplorables” gaffes. One too many “mediocre white men are ruining this country” broadsides. One too many anti-Trump ads created by the Lincoln Project, a grift that raises millions off Democrats’ fears to produce obnoxious content. And countless too many vindictive tweets relishing the deaths of unvaccinated Covid patients or the suffering of MAGA-brainwashed dupes.

The message is clear: You exist outside my circle of care and have no more reason to trust me than I do you.

It isn’t only rank-and-file resistance liberals who have lost the trust of red and purple Americans. It’s the mainstream academic, government, public health and media institutions most Americans used to rely on for (relatively) unbiased factual information, only to see those institutions increasingly politicized. During the Covid pandemic, there was a full court press by the Biden administration, public health establishment, media and social media to denigrate, suppress and outright censor dissenting views on school closures, vaccine and mask efficacy, and the origins of the virus.

Because the rubes couldn’t be trusted to evaluate information for themselves, the authorities had to intervene. We lost their trust.

Workers in sectors devastated by Big Ag consolidation and deindustrialization are reeling not only from economic dislocation but from “stolen pride” as sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls it in her book by that title. Their sense of purpose shattered, they are more vulnerable than ever to being humiliated by educated elites. Enter master grievance manipulator Donald Trump to mine their shame like a mountain of coal.

It is unwise to heap shame on people whose votes one needs. The notion that Democrats can rely on base turnout and ignore persuadable swing voters was brutally upended in November, when shocking numbers of young, non-white and immigrant voters swung to Trump. According to electoral statistician David Shor, 70% of Democrats’ 2024 vote gain was from people who flipped from Trump in 2020 to Harris in 2024, while only 30% was a function of turnout. We need the vote switchers back, and deploring them will only push then deeper into Trump’s corner.

I’m sympathetic to the need for catharsis during these grim times. But there are other sources of joy that don’t turn people against us. At the end of the day, the question is: Do we want to taunt, or do we want to win? If mockery served to demoralize Trump or deflate his greatness in the eyes of his supporters, he would be long gone.