As a parent I have to help my child learn the difference between wants and needs. There are many things the kid wants, but not all of them are a good idea. As a mom I am constantly setting limits. In those moments, I offer space to listen to the upset, but I don’t get confused. I stay focused on meeting my child’s actual needs.

In this this latest election, 70+ million people voted for Donald Tr*mp. Despite our nation’s disastrous state. How do we make sense of this? What do we do as a nation that is so “divided”?

According to Anand Giridharadas in The Ink, “I hear too many empty calls for unity — and, by the same token, too few calls for real mind-changing…It seems to me more important to hold fast against such people in the short term, while seeking, over the medium and long term, to make those people — or at least a sizable segment of them — no longer want that.” He speaks of the “larger project of changing minds.” I agree with him about the short term, but I disagree about the medium and long term. Because I don’t think it’s about changing anyone’s mind.

Much has been said about Tr*mp supporters voting against their own interests. This is definitely true for Tr*mp voters who are poor or working class. His policies are devastating for poor and working class communities. But despite efforts to paint them otherwise, the majority of Tr*mp supporters are more affluent. As Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu explained in The Washington Post, “Trump voters were not mostly working-class people” in the 2016 electio, “about two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.” Some analysts had assumed that they were working class because they didn’t have college degrees, but Carnes and Lupu explained, “many of the voters without college educations who supported Trump were relatively affluent.”

This trend continued in the 2020 election, as Miranda Bryant explained in The Guardian, “Trump…lost some appeal among low-income voters, who were more attracted to Biden, but the president gained among voters with family incomes over $100,000 a year.”

Relatively affluent Tr*mp supporters have more to gain from a leader who governs for the billionaire class. Certainly they have a lot less to lose. But even the most basic demographics of a democracy would show that we don’t actually need the support of white racists who earn more than $100K to win most elections. Steve Phillips taught us that in his book Brown Is the New White. And it’s time for the Democratic Party to stop chasing these conservative white voters. Let’s stop trying to craft platforms and policies that will attract their support. I’m ready to write those people off as folks we don’t need to court or convince in order to win.

That’s the thing about the working class: there are many many more of us than middle and owning class people. And working people certainly vastly outnumber the billionaires. The best way to change the minds of working class Tr*mp voters is to give them what they need and not what they want. Working people need a system built on policies that benefit them. Period. Working class Tr*mp voters need to have representative who will govern in their interests in positions of power.

Is it condescending to say that I know better than working class Tr*mp voters what they need? I don’t think so. I am saying that this is a group of people who have been systematically manipulated. Just like people are dying of COVID because someone convinced them that science wasn’t real. The truth of human beings is that we do better when we organize our lives based on sharing, care, and cooperation than when we organize based on hatred, fear. and greed. But generations of people have faced different hardships, and that has left us traumatized, as a species. We think that individual wealth solutions will save us, but they will not. This country was founded by white people who held those deep confusions about human nature. They came and were met by Native people who shared what they had and cared for them. The white settlers stole the land and enacted a program of genocide as soon as they were strong enough to do so. Then they brought Africans whose labor they could exploit to enrich themselves. Then they brought indentured white laborers. Then they created theories of race to justify their greed and to pit everyone against each other. No wonder many white people fear people of color. No wonder people think that getting rich and protecting their wealth is the only way to be safe in this country. But it’s a lie. And the pandemic and the climate emergency and the economic crisis are all here to show us that this system of greed and competition and brutality needs to end.

The Democrats have proven themselves to be a slightly less brutal party that still serves the corporate and economic elites. But the two party system means that candidates who support the working class will generally be found in the left flank of the Democratic Party. The Dems overall will push back hard against us leftist Democrats, because like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.” AOC and other Squad members are showing us the way. It’s about taking the power to govern. I don’t want to waste my time trying to listen to or empathize with Tr*mp supporters. I want to put my energy into movements and electoral campaigns that will create a world that benefits everyone, including the Tr*mp supporters.

In her advocacy for the Green New Deal, Naomi Klein tells us that FDR specifically put New Deal projects in areas where people did not support him or his policies. Like FDR, we can govern in a way that shows the haters the benefit of policies that truly work for the good of everyone. The majority of Tr*mp voters–even those who are making above $100K–will learn over time that these policies benefit them, as well. The only people that they don’t benefit financially are the people with obscene amounts of wealth, who certainly don’t need any more money, who are only motivated by greed and thirst for power.

When Cuba went communist, they seized the land and wealth of many elites. These people fled to the US and have become the Florida voters who panic at any hint of socialism. But the reality is that Cuba was a much poorer country. In order for everyone to have enough, it may have been necessary to redistribute wealth more aggressively. The US is a much richer nation. We could follow the example of the social democracies of Western Europe. We could easily make sure everyone in this country had all they need, by just taxing the rich fairly and cutting the military budget. We could start with a more equitable distribution of wealth here, and then move on to the rest of the world.

In the long run, even the ultra-rich will benefit from progressive polices, especially the Green New Deal. While it may be to their material advantage to have so much, they too will benefit in the future, when their lives are not also devastated by the climate crisis. Because no one is rich enough to survive the worst case scenarios, if we allow our entire planet to pass some of these tipping points. Sustainability is the only option. 

So this holiday season, I will not be figuring out how to change any Tr*mp voters’ minds. I will be focusing on the senate races in Georgia. If we can flip Georgia blue, we can end the GOP control of the senate. That has been the bulwark of resistance to any real change in the interest of the masses of people of this nation. Either way, I will continue to participate in movements and organizations–like the Climate Justice Movement, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Working Families Party–that will create the world we all want and deserve.

In 1970, Funkadelic put out an album titled “Free your mind…and your ass will follow.” I’ll remix it like this:

Free your class, your mind will follow.