New Year’s resolutions are promises we make to ourselves. Social learning is something we do together, pooling our individual reflections to reach what we hope are wiser conclusions.

In a free and democratic society, politics should be a vibrant school for social learning. Many years ago, the philosopher Michael Sandel crafted my go-to definition of a decent public life: “When politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”

The politics of 2024 were a long way from that aspiration — beginning with how little in common one half of the country seems to have with the other. The year left us with a long repair list we should resolve to address in 2025.

None of us come to reflections of this sort as a blank slate. My perspective is broadly progressive and shaped by the fear that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will challenge democratic liberties. Battling for those freedoms is the essential task of the new year. Opposing Trump’s efforts to roll back the past four years of progress on climate change, public investment, labor rights and economic equality is another imperative. And as my colleague Eugene Robinson eloquently wrote, there is an obligation to fight with passion against the dehumanization of our immigrant communities — which, as he makes clear, is not inconsistent with confronting the problems at our southern border.

Yet even those who mourn Trump’s victory can’t afford to ignore its lessons. The most obvious: how the economic transformations of the past quarter-century have left large numbers of our fellow citizens seething over how precarious their lives have become and how disrespected they feel.

The good news (social learning again) is that in Democratic polemics between the party’s center-left and left, both sides agree there is no path forward absent earning more support from working-class voters of all backgrounds.

The warning here for Trump is also unmistakable — and so is the opportunity for his opponents if he doesn’t heed it. Many of his economically pressed voters expect him to deliver. If he instead delivers for the billionaires flocking to Mar-a-Lago, politics will look very different this time next year.

Talk of a working-class realignment inevitably turns to cultural issues, and Trump plainly succeeded in weaponizing opposition to transgender rights during his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris. Social learning requires finding ways to protect the rights of long-excluded groups — no liberalism worth its name abandons beleaguered minorities — “and not sound like you just got your post-doctoral thesis in sociology,” as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) recently told Politico. Schatz insisted it’s time to abandon the idea that “magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage.” That’s a good first step.

But the battles over both culture and economics, as Sandel has argued, are part of a larger distemper. “People have felt for some time that the moral fabric of community has been unraveling, from family to community to the nation,” he recently told PBS. “People hunger for a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, a sense of solidarity — and people feel unmoored.”

The right and Trump himself have intuited and responded to these yearnings more effectively than the left, even if the policies they’re likely to pursue would only aggravate social breakdown. It might seem paradoxical, but protecting individual liberty requires nurturing a strong sense of community. A society that remains indifferent to the solidarity and pride deficits Sandel describes will not thrive as a democracy.

One more bit of learning from 2024: Our old media system, for all its flaws, at least provided some basis for a common conversation based on shared facts. Our new media system does not. Those of us who are part of it have a lot of work to do.

Many who share my politics are upset that the second Trump victory has not unleashed an organizing wave of the sort that immediately followed his 2016 victory. If I believed this meant his opponents were destined to be passive and inert, I’d be unhappy, too. In fact, his winning a second term, in the face of all the evidence about who he is, has shocked his opponents into a period of reflection.

That’s a good thing. It means the activism that’s coming (and it will) can reflect a better understanding of how we got into this mess again — and how to get out of it. Happy new year.

E.J. Dionne is on X: @EJDionne