It’s fine and good to point out what values and attitudes most Americans share. There’s a great deal more, including the promise of the opportunity to “make it in America” and to live our shared and even not-shared values. And so we also share the sense that when we or our neighbors are deprived of their rights or of their livelihoods and left without hope or help to get through “the hard times,” eventually after the various stages of grief, the shit starts to stir us.

Polarization and things like MAGA Trumpism aren’t stirred by what we don’t share. They are stirred by what we do share or ought to share: Forty+ years of trickledown economics and unfettered neoliberal economic globalization literally decimated millions of families and untold communities in our industrial heartland and elsewhere. At the same time, Reaganism was built around the demonization of people who “relied” on welfare. So, tens of millions denied living wages and also denied any remaining sense of dignity that could be salvaged by a governmental handout/hand-up. Deaths of despair became a thing.

After 40 years, a candidate comes along who intuits the opportunity to turn the ensuing despair and resentment in these millions of people over the loss of things we ALL value, like opportunity to make it in AMerica — and dignity;, and he turns it into an almost instant political movement because he gives all of these people “others” to blame for their plights rather than themselves.

These millions of people did and do deserve a champion. In fact they deserve many, many champions, But Trump was about the worst such champion that could have come along because, embedded in all of his rhetoric was and remains the only cause he cares about: himself. He cares only about adulation (what he calls “crowd size”) and self-enrichment. And he has led millions of fellow Americans into the deep, dark black hole that is his depraved existence.

So yes, we all do share many fundamental values, views, and aspirations. And what the MAGA faithful need from U.S. (that’s “us” writ large) is champions who will work with them to bring back the opportunities to actually share in these cherished fundamentals — to live the American Dream.

So, while Trump and his thuggish, autocratic co-conspirators continue to plan and fight only for their own dark plans and power, there is now a new “sense” spreading like some of the wildfires our planet has recently experienced: It’s been labeled (and Trump-derided) as “Joy.” But that’s simply shorthand for “There are better, more dedicated champions now assembling all around you who see the pain and share the aspirations for somethings so much better than the dark depraved place that Trumpism has on offer.”

It’s because we fundamentally share so much, that there is an increasingly large and “Joyful” coalition now gathering to stop Trumpism. We the People are the champions we need to bring U.S. back together.