Belonging Is Bigger Than Politics

This week, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration is compiling a list of words to be erased from government documents and for federal workers to refrain from using. Many of the terms—like "DEI," "implicit bias," or "equity"—might be expected from the current administration. But I was surprised to see two terms on the list that are less commonly associated with political correctness than with widely accepted human psychology: “belong” and “sense of belonging.”

While the Trump Administration may face criticism for engaging in the kind of linguistic “cancel culture” that conservatives frequently condemn, there’s particular risk in rejecting a value that matters deeply to people across political parties—and that could be key to addressing crises of mental health around the world.

This month, on the other side of the Atlantic, my colleagues at the Belonging Forum and I released the results of a 10,000-person study that demonstrates why belonging matters now more than ever. The 2025 Belonging Barometer reveals a crisis: nearly one-third (29 percent) of respondents in the UK report frequent loneliness, with 10 percent stating they have no close friends at all. However, loneliness is only part of the story. The deeper issue uncovered through our research is a severe erosion of trust, solidarity, and mutual respect. Respondents described feeling disconnected from their communities, lacking meaningful participation and voice in decisions affecting their lives, and missing the reciprocal bonds essential to a healthy society.

The situation in the United States is similar. Over the past two decades, face-to-face social connections among Americans fell drastically, with a 30 percent decline among males and a 45 percent drop among teens. Trust in American institutions has similarly plummeted. Gallup research shows that, over roughly the same time period, the U.S. has moved from first to last place among G7 countries in terms of trust in institutions from government to media to healthcare. This loss of trust contributes significantly to social polarization, weakening community cohesion, and reduced civic participation.

There’s clear evidence that, around the world, we face a deficit of belonging. It’s a crisis that should concern people across the ideological spectrum.

For example, Gallup data reveals that U.S. church attendance dropped from around 70 percent in the 1990s to below 50 percent today, while trust in core civic institutions—such as government, media, and even schools—has reached historic lows among both Republicans and Democrats.

Looking to psychology research, there’s an irony to the current administration’s efforts to cancel the language of belonging. The effectiveness of the slogan “Make America Great Again” is about a widespread feeling of lost belonging among a segment of voters. For a decade, President Trump has sought to address anxieties about a disappearing sense of community, identity, and purpose. MAGA became a movement because it spoke to a deeply felt longing in a portion of the electorate—a nostalgia for an America where people once felt a sense of shared mission and deep connection and allegiance to their neighborhoods, their towns, and their country.

Through two decades of research, I’ve concluded that to belong is to be connected to other people, to be rooted in a place that feels like home, to have a voice, to have choice, and to be treated with respect. This is what Trump claims to offer to his voters. And there’s a reason why such promises have resonated with many people. More than half a century ago, Abraham Maslow identified “belongingness” as an emotional necessity and one of the most powerful animating forces in human psychology.

Still, to meaningfully address the crisis of belonging, it’s important to look beyond “us-versus-them” strategies. In pioneering work on social identity theory, the psychology researchers Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner emphasize that we often seek the straightforwardness of in-groups versus out-groups to understand how we fit into a disordered world. And there’s a strong case to be made that MAGA’s imagined vision is of a society that never truly existed—or at least depended on the exclusion of large parts of the population. The path to healing disrespect and restoring community lies in strategies for cultivating mutual interests and reciprocal connection across differences.

In times of so much disorder and change, it’s understandable for people to reject nuanced ideas about social connection in favor of exclusionary slogans.

But belonging shouldn’t be a point of controversy. It’s an answer to what ails people of virtually all political stripes.