It was one of those conversations you find yourself in a lot these days. A few weeks before Election Day, a civic-minded friend, beleaguered by the bared-teeth meanness of our politics, said he’d checked out. No more staying up on the news, no more wasting time thinking about how to make his neighbors’ lives — all our lives — better. He said he felt better for having disengaged — but I sensed he was really in search of a pep talk. “Someone always emerges to right our ship of state,” I reassured him.

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What I had in mind, of course, was Lincoln’s calm pragmatism as the Union was crumbling. A president in a wheelchair tackling national despair as his citizens, heads bowed, waited in bread lines. A young African American with the middle name “Hussein” amid a great recession, reminding the country of its founding ideals. I thought even of the mirror image: Illiberalism has always required an autocratic catalyst, as we discovered a decade ago.

It’s a story as old as our history: Someone always emerges. I just didn’t expect that someone to be you, my fellow citizens.

“We can’t defeat the politics of division with more division. We can’t win that game. We have to change the game.” — James Talarico

Watching the returns Tuesday night, the hand-wringing over progressive versus moderate, over polarizing policies and dispiriting, even hateful rhetoric, faded away. I’d spent much of this election decrying the lack of decency on both sides of the political aisle — for every Vivek Ramaswamy, running an ad that sided with a child rapist, there was a Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, reacting to a terrorist seeking to blow up a synagogue filled with children by saying “hurt people hurt people” — but all of that receded as the returns came in and the stories of those who had won began to emerge.

They were stories about ordinary citizens who had done something extraordinary; here was a new generation of leaders — call them the DIY Generation — who hadn’t waited for permission to stand up for the return of decency in our politics. To wit:

• • In Kansas, a pastor becomes his state’s first Democratic U.S. senator since Prohibition and dedicates his election night victory speech to leading the crowd in reciting the Golden Rule.
  • In Texas — Texas! — a former middle school teacher and seminary student takes a Senate seat and gives his election night stemwinder behind a podium that reads Love Thy Neighbor.
  • In Maine, a former logger unseats a longtime incumbent, while a pediatrician obliterates Lindsey Graham’s legacy in South Carolina.
  • A waitress and dairy farmer’s daughter in Wisconsin ousts a House Republican, as does a Veterans Affairs nurse, who speaks movingly about treating ER patients who’d been forced to ration their medications.
  • In Ohio, a union ironworker flips a House seat, as does an oncology nurse practitioner.
  • In Arizona, a one-time emergency room doctor flips a House seat.
  • And here in our Commonwealth, retired Bethlehem firefighter Bob Brooks leans into his blue-collar roots in his victory speech after he dispatches Republican incumbent Ryan Mackenzie in the 7th Congressional District: “Who would have ever thought a kid with no college degree who washed dishes, delivered pizza, drove a beer truck, snowplow, lawn mower, worked multiple jobs, coached baseball and spent 20 years on a firetruck, is going to Congress?”

Here we are, the original startup, and, as if on cue for our 250th birthday, this DIY Generation has risen up and said en masse, Get outta the way and let me lead. They offer a new twist on political populism: It need not be angry, divisive, or mean. We can have liberalism without elitism and populism without racism.

A wider lens, at last

Here in Philly, we can get so preoccupied with progressive versus establishment fault lines. Almost in unison, Tuesday night’s DIY leaders urged us to widen our aperture. Our rift, they seemed to be saying, is not so much ideological as it is philosophical. If you watch one victory speech, make it Texas Senator-elect James Talarico’s, the baby-faced pastoral insurgent who, in Obama-like cadence, delivers a sermon on what he calls “the politics of love.” Talarico and so many of the others give voice to what, in retrospect, ought to have been the answer to Trumpism all along: Communitarianism, a political philosophy that enjoyed a brief heyday in the 80s and 90s, when an ambitious young governor from Arkansas would show up at events toting books by an obscure George Washington University sociologist named Amitai Etzioni. Along with a handful of other scholars, Etzioni had launched a movement.

Etzioni et al. held that, beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, our politics became obsessed with rights — the granting, demanding and denial of them — to the exclusion of any meaningful conversation about responsibilities, particularly our obligations to one another and to our communities. When Bill Clinton announced his long-shot campaign for president in 1991, he promised leadership “that will provide more opportunity, insist on more responsibility, and create a greater sense of community for this great country.”

Throughout his presidency, Clinton governed as a communitarian, rejecting both the right’s “fend for yourself” ethos and the left’s habit of rewarding loyal voting blocs with new entitlements. Instead, programs like AmeriCorps and welfare reform — which rewarded work — reinforced long-frayed civic bonds. More than anything, the language of communitarianism puts the pursuit of the common good front and center in our politics. Of course, Etzioni’s emphasis on our shared obligations wasn’t new. It’s what Lincoln was getting at when he appealed to the “better angels of our nature.”

It’s what a skinny state legislator with a funny name touched on one night in Boston back in 2004: “If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child,” some guy named Obama said then. “If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent … It is that fundamental belief — ‘I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper’ — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: ‘E pluribus unum,’ out of many, one.”

That was classic communitarianism — the recognition that pursuing the common good benefits us all. It’s a politics where self-interest and empathy converge. Obama’s 2004 speech was heavily influenced by Mario Cuomo’s legendary 1984 Democratic National Convention keynote address, in which the New York governor urged Americans to think of their country as a family, one that functions best through the “sharing of benefits and burdens.” A new documentary, Mario, is available for free at lifestories.org, and it’s eerie: The decades melt away, and there is hardly any distance between Cuomo and Talarico.

“We believe in a government strong enough to use words like ‘love’ and ‘compassion’ and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities,” said Cuomo, in a rebuke to the “social Darwinism” of Reaganism. Now comes Talarico with his denunciation of “politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling” and his call for a politics of love, complete with a political truth: “We can’t defeat the politics of division with more division. We can’t win that game. We have to change the game.”

What does that look like in practice?

Which gets us to our word of caution. Democrats will falter if they mistake Tuesday’s results for a mandate. Tuesday night was a vote against something, as the exit polling bears out. Chuck Schumer, exhibiting a firm grasp of the obvious, pledged Wednesday morning to focus on “costs” going forward. Yes, but that’s at best a tactic or goal — not an idea.

Despite the landslide win, Democrats never really spelled out what they were for — they didn’t have to, amid the anti-Trump wave. But a communitarian frame just might capture the public imagination, as the fortunes of the DIY candidates suggest.

What might that look like? Well, you might start by resurrecting the Universal National Service Act, last proposed in 2014, which would require citizens and residents aged 18 to 25 to perform two years of military or civilian public service. After the election, Schumer was trying to give voters what they wanted, rather than — in the spirit of JFK — challenge them to give something of themselves. What of an inspiring “Ask not” call to service?

At a time when politics has devolved into vile name-calling, anger and othering, it was thrilling to hear ordinary people willing to put everything on the line to remind us that we’re all in this experiment in human liberty together.

What else would a communitarian do? Pass term limits, perhaps, and campaign finance reform — take on the corrupt system that produces all those godawful TV ads we have to endure. Maybe provide incentives for co-ops and worker-owned businesses and invest in third-place infrastructure that literally brings us together: parks, town squares, community gardens. How about restoring our sense of national mission by setting some stirring moonshots, from curing cancer by a date certain (and, in the process, doing more to reform our broken healthcare system than another round of political bickering) to creating a high-speed rail network that’s the envy of Europe?

Any of these would signal that we’re no longer content to argue solely about this or that tax rate or regulation, but are instead rethinking the relationship between the governed and their government. Most of all, such politics would return us to the notion that a nation needs a shared story. And that a great nation at least strives to leave no one behind. That’s what my dad was getting at on his deathbed 12 years ago. He was one of those Greatest Generation guys, a World War II veteran in a pilly cardigan who joked that, stationed in Seattle, he had protected the Pacific Northwest from Japanese attack.

One day he wondered just when paying your taxes had become so damned political. “It was always just something you did because you were part of a community,” he said, “and you had an obligation to the next guy.”

An obligation to the next guy. At a time when politics has devolved into vile name-calling, anger and othering, it was thrilling to hear ordinary people willing to put everything on the line to remind us that we’re all in this experiment in human liberty together. That’s what we heard for the first time in a decade Tuesday night: a call from patriots we hadn’t even known existed to renew our vows to one another.

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