It has become increasingly common to hear calls for politicians to respect the values of communities and come up with policies that fit with them. But what are those values? Are they about civility, reasonableness, compassion, open-mindedness, cooperation? Far from it. The ‘values’ most frequently and loudly championed revolve around an exclusionary ‘us’ that is ill-at-ease with all kinds of ‘others’ – distrust of ‘foreigners’, resentment against immigrants, antipathy towards women’s equality, rejection of non-conventional forms of sexuality and gender, and dismissiveness towards concerns with issues beyond the local.

On the Right, Donald Trump is cited as the perfect example of how backing such values can deliver electoral success. On the Left, even those who have won power, such as Sir Keir Starmer, are pressed by many in their own ranks to align more with these values lest they lose support to the likes of Reform. Some commentators mistakenly refer to these as ‘communitarian’ trends just because communities are invoked to justify certain policy stance. In fact, communitarian thinkers (such as Bellah, Selznick, Etzioni, Sandel, Miller, Boswell, and Tam) have consistently argued that society should be supportive of the development of genuinely pro-community values, which must be protected from exclusionary proclivities that pull communities apart.

But how are we to distinguish between what we should help to advance and what to hold in check? Past attempts to come up with a priori principles, divinely-sanctioned codes, or ruling class edicts, have failed to draw a convincing line because they end up producing clashing claims that cannot be objectively resolved. There is no indubitable path to absolute moral ideas. There is no single religious denomination that commands universal acceptance as the only correct faith. Those in ruling positions disagree among themselves through their power struggles. By contrast, communitarian thinkers have explained why we should learn from communities’ experiences of their assumptions and practices, and how such evidence-based exploration can tell us what improves the quality of community life and what causes lasting damage.

Ideologues, fundamentalists, and manipulative demagogues go on and on about communities valuing above all those attitudes and practices that give their subscribers a sense of (imagined) superiority, and help them feel content with the misfortune and ill treatment that befall others. But any objective look at actual communities will expose that as a myth. In every country, region, city, neighbourhood, there are many different and overlapping communities. They have certain values in common but are rarely if ever identical in outlook. Indeed, any community exhibiting identikit features would alarm us as a cultish anomaly. Furthermore, over time, values, beliefs, social arrangements change in response to people’s interactions with the practical implications of what constitutes the status quo, and the impact of new ideas and experiments.

What communitarians have found is that communities with inherently destabilising factors – harmful false beliefs, divisive prejudices, indulgence in systemic exploitation, destructive hate and aggression – have, throughout history, been afflicted by the consequent destabilisation which led them to reconsider what they value and what they should do. In some cases the changes came gradually over a long period of time. In others, radical changes happened within a single generation. It is notable that the direction of travel (except in cases where people are kept in the dark by fear and deception) tends to point to the overcoming of distrust, the growth of mutual respect, the displacement of dogmatic pronouncements by objective examinations and impartial adjudication, readiness to cooperate, greater accountability of those with power, and better support for those who are vulnerable. That is not surprising since that kind of development is generally associated with improvements to the things that matter to people – health, peace, stability, prosperity, and the expanding opportunities to pursue happiness without everyone being forced to seek one exclusive type of ‘joy’ (or ‘glory’, or whatever some authoritarian leader declares as the goal).

So if we care to learn from how communities develop their values and practices, the lesson is quite clear: help communities move forward by steering social, economic, and political conditions towards being more supportive of the exercising of mutual responsibility, the conducting of cooperative enquiry, and the facilitating of power sharing and citizen participation. It is only when sections of communities are deceived or prevented from recognising what is happening around them, that some people still hold on to what has failed them. The appropriate response to that is to counter the spread of disinformation, break down divisive barriers, and work with citizens to build shared understanding of the real threats and opportunities before them.

Politicians should indeed pay attention to community values. But those values are not defined by individuals who are drawn to exclusionary attitudes and practices. What are truly important to communities are values and arrangements that enhance mutuality, cooperation, inclusion, and other bonds of reciprocity that communitarian studies have found to be key to better life experiences. They are what politicians ought to focus on in working with diverse communities to achieve.

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Henry Tam lectured at the University of Cambridge, and was the Head of Civil Renewal under the previous Labour government. He is the author of Communitarianism: a new agenda for politics and citizenship (Macmillan: 1998); and The Evolution of Communitarian Ideas (Palgrave: 2019). His latest book, Communitarianism: politics, society & public policy (Bloomsbury: 2025) is available from: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/communitarianism-9781350422421/