One month to the day before the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. More and more of the average American’s day is being spent at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each extra hour at home, a bit of it was spent with family—7.4 minutes. More of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.

Obviously, because of the coronavirus pandemic, time at home spiked in 2020. Some of this homebody impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the isolating early days of lockdown. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 hit, time spent alone had been increasing as time spent socializing had been decreasing. Though solitude and loneliness are not the same, this downturn in social connection happened alongside a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general called it an epidemic.

And now this: the reelection to the nation’s highest office of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of a communal, democratic form of government, and who has indicated that he aspires to move the United States toward autocracy—auto, of course, meaning “self,” and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within the self. Self over others is one of Trump’s defining principles. In his first term as president, he used an office intended for public service to enrich himself. He has vowed to use it this time to take revenge on his enemies and—“within two seconds” of taking office—to fire the special counsel overseeing criminal cases against him.

Yet self over others, or at the very least self before others, has long been a prominent aspect of American culture—not always to Trumpian levels, certainly, but individualism for better and worse shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ responses to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of allowing despair to pull them into a deeper, more dangerous seclusion. On Election Day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in that story said they were deliberately avoiding social settings. To extend that strategy into the next four years would be a mistake.

[Read: Don’t give up on America]

In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its people and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report called Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s professed value of equality—which he wrote “possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree”—he warned of the individualism he saw as baked into American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone,” he wrote, “and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a sociological book by five scholars, followed explicitly in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as wildly prescient. The authors feared that the danger Tocqueville described had already come to pass. “It seems to us,” they wrote, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous … that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Tempering American individualism, in Tocqueville’s view, was Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These he saw as moderating the isolating tendencies of private ambition on one hand and limiting the despotic proclivities of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. But American associational life began hollowing out starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as people became less and less likely to attend any kind of club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone). Since the late ’70s, faith in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, organized labor, the media, and the U.S. government has also been dwindling; in 2023, Gallup declared it “historically low.”

A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the Heart. “We obviously did not succeed in having things go the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say that every horrible thing we worried about has gotten worse.” Americans are spending measurably more time shut up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps in the solitude of their own hearts as well.

It might be difficult to imagine the renaissance of many civic associations—the kind that could be good for both democracy and our relationships—given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has little interest in or respect for institutions beyond what they can do for him. If autocracy is indeed where the country is headed, Tocqueville’s prediction regarding our relationships is not a positive one. As he wrote in The Old Regime and the Revolution, his book on the French revolution:

Despotism does not combat this tendency [toward individualism]; on the contrary, it renders it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, mutual necessities, need of a common understanding, opportunity for combined action: it ripens them, so to speak, in private life. They had a tendency to hold themselves aloof from each other: it isolates them. They looked coldly on each other: it freezes their souls.

If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote, “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives,” it makes sense that people would reach for their mother tongue in times of upheaval. In the days after the 2016 election, for example, searches for the term self-care spiked. Caring for yourself takes different forms, of course, though in mainstream culture, self-care is commonly used to mean treating yourself, by yourself. Self-soothing, alone. (One can see in this echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”)

But caring for yourself doesn’t always have to breed isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so that they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles critique a focus on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception at least shows an understanding of the two types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Care for the self so that you can show up for others.

[Read: Focus on the things that matter]

What’s more, caring for others is a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for other people leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or indulging yourself. This is not to say there is no place for self-soothing or solitude, or for buying yourself a little treat. But it is to challenge the cultural message that turtling up alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.

Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) cruelty, not care, is the point, it falls to people to care for one another on scales small and large. This task is made harder not just by the cultural pressure for Americans to rely only on themselves but also by the slow, steady atrophying of the muscles of togetherness. “American individualism resists more adult virtues, such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. The inverse, I hope, is true too: that care and generativity—working to make contributions to a collective future—are the path to resisting hyper-individualism and isolation.

Even if turning inward is a big-picture trend, it is, of course, not the only development happening. As isolating as the pandemic lockdown was, those years saw the rise of mutual-aid groups determined to care for the vulnerable whether the government did or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People are always showing up for one another in quiet, everyday ways too. Building networks of support and commitment could provide some small buffer against the effects of a self-serving president-elect’s policies while keeping people from drifting further apart.

Americans’ skills of connection and care are not lost. But they are rusty. And all of us will need those skills if we are to find a way to turn toward one another instead of inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or reaching out to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you did. Those are tasks that people won’t be equipped to tackle if they’re struggling to show up for the loved ones already in their life. For now, it is enough of a challenge to attempt to reverse the isolationist inertia of decades. It is enough of a challenge to resist what has become a cultural tendency to withdraw, while also processing the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How do we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How do we proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.

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The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.

Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.

But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.

It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”

The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.

[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]

I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.

So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.

And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.

I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.

So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?

First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.

Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.

In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”

Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious.   

My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.

There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.

Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.

I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.

[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]

The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.”  

It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.

In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.

During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  

No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”

Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.

There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.