Can Respect be a Political Strategy?
The Democrats’ new pragmatism risks repeating the very mistake it aims to fix.
In the wreckage of 2024, Democrats have been doing some serious soul-searching. Party leaders like Gavin Newsom recognize the brand has become downright toxic to many voters. Losing both the White House and Congress has forced a reckoning with two deep failures: not getting enough done for Americans and looking down on them.
The first is a failure of delivery. Democrats have often been better at passing legislation than at executing it. In 2021, Congress allocated $42 billion to expand broadband internet in rural areas. By the end of Biden’s term, not a single new home had been connected, due to onerous permitting rules. California’s high speed rail project also remains stuck at the station, decades and billions later, serving as a powerful example of what to expect from progressive governance. Commentators like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have urged the left to embrace an abundance agenda: build homes, expand clean energy, curb addiction, unleash medical breakthroughs, and lower the cost of living. In short, demonstrate competence to deliver results.
The second failure is one of attitude. Many Americans feel Democrats are out of touch and condescending. Too often voters have been cast aside as racist, transphobic, gun-clutching, deplorables. Even the rhetoric of “I have a plan for that” or “follow the science,” while admirable in substance, can sound emotionally distant to voters who want to feel seen, not just managed. Some commentators sounded the smugness alarm soon after the 2016 upset, but the Left only seems to be hearing it after a second round of trouncing. The proposed fix here is an ethos of respect: less moralizing, more persuasion, a bigger tent.
Both reforms are sensible and necessary, but they seem to rest on the same underlying moral logic—and that’s the problem.
The abundance agenda is unapologetically utilitarian: focus on results, not moral purity. And much of the new “respect” talk takes the same instrumental shape. Be nice because it helps you win; broaden the tent because it’s smart politics. Klein gives the example of abortion: in conservative districts, Democrats should run pro-life candidates to keep abortion legal where possible. Better to have a Democrat who votes the wrong way occasionally than a Republican who votes the wrong way on everything.
The logic is easy to follow, and in this moment pragmatism is a breath of fresh air. But there’s an important tension: if your respect for voters is rooted in strategy, is it really respect?
Psychologists have found that utilitarian reasoning—where the ends justify the means—can come across as less moral and less trustworthy. People don’t want to be treated as instruments of someone else’s plan, even if that plan is mutually beneficial. As Immanuel Kant argued, people expect to be treated as ends in themselves, not as a mere means.
Herein lies the challenge of the post-2024 Democratic recovery. The party is trying to win back trust with a style of reasoning that could undermine it. Utilitarian thinking risks treating persuasion as performance rather than dialogue, coalition as arithmetic rather than relationship. Klein favorably quotes the political theorist Bernard Crick, who once wrote that politics is about “building genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people.” And yet real relationships aren’t fundamentally strategic.
Consider Daryl Davis, a Black jazz musician who has spent decades befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. Through patient conversations and mutual respect, Daryl has persuaded over 200 Klan members to renounce their robes, not by shaming them, but by treating them as fellow human beings. “I never set out to convert anyone in the Klan,” he says. “I just set out to get an answer to my question: How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”
Daryl genuinely regards these Klansmen as friends, to the point of even attending their weddings. For an Ask Me Anything event, Daryl wrote:
I know that you find it irrational for a KKK leader and I to be friends. I get that. But, what I focus upon is some of the things we have in common. Trust me, you probably have more in common with your perceived enemies than you have in contrast. You can find that out by sitting down and getting to know them.
It’s more than just “killing with kindness.” When I saw Daryl speak last year at my university, I was struck by how seriously he takes these relationships. Every person, he said, wants five things: to be loved, to be respected, to be heard, to be treated fairly, and for their family to be safe and happy. While he doesn’t respect racism, he respects racists as people who deserve goodwill if they return it.
The lesson is not that Democrats should emulate this exact method. (It’s hard to imagine a DNC training module titled “Making Friends with the Klan.”) But Daryl’s example captures something Democrats desperately need: curiosity without condescension.
Democrats aren’t primarily tasked with persuading Klan members either. They need to reach regular Americans who aren’t comfortable with open borders, race-based college admissions, defunding the police, or a ballooning deficit. Taking mutual respect seriously means treating disagreement on these issues not as a problem to be managed but as a chance to learn something.
If Democrats really want to build mutual respect, they need a different posture—not just toward voters, but toward truth itself. Respect isn’t merely about listening politely. It’s a genuine openness to being persuaded, even by those you think are dead wrong. And when moderating on policy positions is appropriate, it must be genuine, not merely expedient. Kamala Harris’s campaign moved toward the center, sure, but that doesn’t mean voters believed it.
Intellectual humility is uncomfortable territory for any political movement, especially one convinced that it’s on the right side of history. But moral conviction can coexist with humility that builds a strong and diverse coalition. The civil rights movement, for example, remained thoroughly pragmatic without compromising on its values. Legislative victories like the Voting Rights Act were passed not by brute force but by appealing to the conscience of the average person.
Modern politics can also promote pragmatism without condescension. Build genuine relationships with political opposites out of curiosity and humility, not strategy. Take a page from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia who attended operas and rode elephants together. Host more open forums and fewer scripted town halls. Highlight moments when leaders publicly revise their views. As any therapist will tell you relationship repair requires recognition of mistakes, not just post-election autopsies.
If Democrats want to regain credibility, they should pair pragmatism with a willingness to see voters not just as obstacles or converts, but as fellow citizens capable of insight. Real respect, like real abundance, requires building something — not just roads or houses, but a political culture grounded in humility without sacrificing moral seriousness.
Wait a minute, Davis is surely not open to being persuaded by the Klan!
Presumably he believes he's absolutely right, and the Klan is absolutely wrong.
He's just very nice to people in the Klan and apparently good at deprogramming them.
But that's completely different than thinking they might be right in their political position.
I think there is also something here in terms of outreach in terms of animals as well.