Before the election, I was on a panel discussing how its outcome might impact the pace of action on climate change. A consensus emerged that even though tackling climate change has become a partisan issue, many of the actions required to do so are popular. For instance, while support for the development of more solar and wind energy is high–89% and 83% of Americans are in favor, respectively–only “62 percent of U.S. adults say the government is doing too little to reduce climate change.” That last figure has a deep partisan divide, with 79% of Democrats, 67% of Independents, and just 39% of Republicans agreeing that the government is doing enough to address the climate crisis.

Given this reality, the thinking went, we need to learn to tailor our messaging. That is, when speaking to Republicans about climate action, we should focus on jobs and national security; when speaking to Democrats, focus on clean energy, justice, and climate action; and so on. On paper, this makes all the sense in the world. You wouldn’t market shampoo the same way to every consumer, so why treat climate change–or, for that matter, social and environmental justice, even democracy–any differently? And indeed, if you are in the business of, say, selling solar panels to homeowners, you would go out of business if you didn’t target your messaging.

What rubbed me the wrong way–and what, in light of the election results, is gnawing away at me–is that neither climate action, nor justice, nor democracy are shampoo. But because we have commodified everything, everything has become a transaction in which one side is selling and the other side is being sold to / buying; and once that happens, it is malpractice not to micro-target the message, the product, the idea, the campaign, the candidate. The fact that the Trump campaign and affiliated PACs targeted “Muslim voters and Michigan voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political” ads about Kamala Harris is the natural result of a transaction-driven democracy, as is the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, and more.

The problem with the commodification of democracy is that it almost by definition negates the possibility of shared values and instead promotes the fragmentation of reality, of truth. For when it comes to shampoo, it doesn’t matter whether all consumers believe in free speech, free and fair elections, or the rule of law: what matters is what the individual consumer values about his or her hair. Some buyers may focus more on the shampoo’s price or scent, the packaging of the bottle, how it feels on their scalp, whether it is organic, or any number of other factors. All of which is well and good for shampoo: the free market is excellent at incentivizing shampoo makers to develop products that compete on price, quality, etc.

But when applied to democracy, the transactional, commodified approach yields authoritarianism.  A nation cannot survive without a shared reality, shared truths, and shared values, values that are not merely uttered while singing the National Anthem before a football game, but which are embedded in daily life and carried out in word and deed, however imperfectly. Yet democracy-as-a-product requires micro-targeting, appealing not to shared values of free speech and tolerance but to whatever will get each individual voter to support the candidate, even if the appeal is based on hate–too often, especially if it’s based on hate.. Yes demagogs exist in every democracy. I’m not being Pollyanna: there is a long tradition of candidates appealing to people’s worst instincts. What’s new, however, is that the demagogs now control the levers of power in many democracies, and they have gotten there because it has never been easier to play on the psychology of the voters the way a casino gets a patron to keep playing the slots or a social media algorithm gets you to keep scrolling. Big data, AI, algorithms, surveillance capitalism–they all enable demagogs to reach and influence voters like never before.

The answer to this problem is not for those who respect democracy to get better at micro-targeting than the autocrats. We have tried and failed: the autocrats are like a door-to-door salesman pressuring an elderly homeowner to buy more insurance than she needs, and we are the reputable broker who only sells insurance to people who need it. The outcome? The salesman wins and both the homeowner and the broker lose. Let’s go back to the solar example. If all we do is sell solar panels to different consumers using different, targeted messaging, we will end up with a world in which the adoption of solar power is accelerating, but greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. For it it is simply not enough to sell a bunch of homeowners on solar: tackling the climate crisis can only be done through public policy, and public policy can only change when the voters demand it. If we never tell the voters that the reason for going solar is, yes, to lower energy bills but also, guess what, there is a climate crisis that is harming communities throughout the nation, then we will only go so far as the individual consumer is willing to adopt the technology. And climate action is about more than homeowners going solar: it’s about the electrification of transport and industry and buildings, the reshaping of our food and manufacturing systems, and more. These are the big things America was once great at–becoming the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, building the interstate highway system, electrifying the nation, getting to the moon, inventing the Internet and the solar cell–the things we can only do if the majority of voters are behind them. Of course, voters won’t get behind the numerous policy changes needed if they don’t believe that there is a collective American “we” that can take action, let alone believe in the reality of climate change itself.

What we have to do is rekindle shared American values, speak to those values, and demonstrate how our policies will enact them in the real world. This means that even as solar installers find the best way to get customers to pay them for their service, the task of those who want a habitable future, who want a free and tolerant nation, have to get voters to care about those core issues. That work is much harder; it’s not surprising, perhaps, that we’ve fallen behind the autocrats. To win back voters who have become jaded by, or disinterested in, our political system, we have to cut through the astonishingly effective and malign right-wing ecosystem, because we have gotten to the point where not only do a lot of Americans no longer believe in shared American values, a worrying percentage don’t even believe in reality. And yet. All of us have friends or family members who hold political beliefs that we abhor but who are also loving grandparents, parents, friends, spouses. People are not inherently bad, but we are inherently susceptible to persuasion.

I continue to believe that a vast majority of Americans yearn for a compelling vision of the future, for ideas and policies and politicians that can inspire them toward that vision. After all, Barack Obama, a Black man with the middle name Hussein, not only won election twice, he did so in a landslide, winning states like Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. The challenge is that, if every election is between a candidate who respects the rule of law and one who doesn’t, then every election will be an existential one. We simply have to find a way back to a nation in which the issues on which we disagree are within the bounds of values–the right level of taxation and government regulation, how much to spend on national defense versus welfare. The present situation, where one side doesn’t believe in democracy, won’t accept any election they didn’t win, and act like the law doesn’t apply to them, is utterly untenable.

Unfortunately, it falls on us to take on the challenge of reaching those who no longer vote, or who vote for the autocrat. That can’t happen overnight. There is no ad campaign we can spin up and get people to “buy” democracy. This is not a matter of a commercial transaction but rather rebuilding human relationships, something that has gotten harder as more of us have retreated to our own worlds, staring at screens that present content the algorithms think we want to see because we already agree with them. To succeed, we have to do the work year-round, in community centers, schools, and Churches; online and on radio, podcasts, newspapers, and other media outlets; in town halls and state legislatures and Congress. The task is as great as is the climate crisis, for it is all-encompassing, and the forces of evil are well-resourced. I am not here to give a specific remedy, but my hope is that we can start by identifying the problem: democracy is not shampoo. Everything we do should flow from that fact.