Good riddance to 2019, a year that was politically messy, aggressive and often ugly. While it’s not exactly looking up in this new go ’round the sun, at least 2020 promises to be a banner year for trying out bold new ideas.

The dozen or so Democrats still in the primary are trying to decipher what, exactly, Americans who are politically progressive—and Americans who are perhaps left-curious—really want. Is it Denmark-style social democracy? A return to (perhaps imaginary) Obama-era values of cooperation and stability? Universal basic income and entrepreneurial solutions? Love and national healing?

But for all the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks ethos of this election, the Democratic candidates are missing one overarching philosophy that could justify and shape their policy goals and political priorities.

Happiness.

A politics of happiness may sound frivolous, and it is if you think of “happiness” as simply feeling good (especially since “feeling good” is also not an experience we tend to associate with the federal government). But happiness as shorthand for a good life, which is how a great many philosophers and theorists from Aristotle to Abraham Maslow (of that famous hierarchy of needs) have conceived of it for centuries, is a different animal. Happiness isn’t just an immediate and viscerally gratifying experience, although experiencing indulgence is key to a happy life. Happiness is the ability to pursue meaning, knowledge and experience; to enjoy connection, inquiry and pleasure. It is, quite simply, the point. If we aren’t trying to live happy lives—moral, social, full lives—what are we all doing here?

Feeling happy all day every day is not the measure of a good life, or even a happy one. But the ability to pursue happiness is a right so fundamental, and a quest so crucial, it was written into America’s Declaration of Independence. Let’s review:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The idea that government must facilitate the ability of the individual to seek happiness is in our national DNA.

So what would a politics of happiness look like? Researchers actually know quite a bit about what contributes to happy lives: a diversity of experiences; intellectual stimulation; deep connections; physical and mental health; and space for pleasure.

And we know that in the U.S., we’re missing the mark.

There are a few obvious places, like health, where the U.S. lags—and where our political failures also make us miserable. It’s very, very difficult to pursue meaning in your life when you’re sick and either scared of going broke or broke because you’re sick. How best to make American healthcare higher quality, universally available and actually affordable is a crucial policy debate for the very obvious reason that poor and pricey healthcare means more Americans get sick, go broke and die. A subtler purpose is also in play: The insecurity of illness in America means too many people see the rest of their lives’ potential thwarted.

And then there are the less tangible but just as crucial happiness-makers that the government has a role in facilitating. The first on that list, and the most expansive, is time. Americans work more hours than employees anywhere else in the industrialized world; we take fewer vacations and retire later. This is especially true of white-collar workers in demanding salaried jobs, who work extraordinarily long days. For wage laborers, the problem is even more complicated. A criminally low minimum wage coupled with bad policy that incentivizes businesses to hire a glut of part-time workers, thereby avoiding paying benefits and overtime, means that on the lower end of the economic spectrum people are cobbling together two or three jobs just to survive—all with unpredictable hours.

This doesn’t just impact “work-life balance.” It actively compromises our ability to experience the total potential of our lives.

We know that community and human connections, and especially connections in the service of some bigger purpose, bring happiness. That’s part of why people who regularly engage in religious services tend to be happier than those who don’t. It’s one reason why women, who typically have more friends and operate as their family’s social engine, tend to be happier than men. It’s why working mothers tend to be happier than mothers who stay home. But nurturing those social connections takes time.

Conservatives often talk about the nuclear family as the necessary organizing unit for a healthy society. It’s not true that happiness requires being one half of a married heterosexual couple with kids, but it is clear that kin and community relationships matter for health, happiness and longevity. And yet we don’t facilitate that. Take, most blatantly, the fact that new parents are not universally able to take the time to focus only on nurturing those connections with their brand-new children, a shameful stain on American life. Or that aid to poor families is so paltry that a marriage, even between two low earners, will often tip a household over into losing very necessary benefits like food stamps—disincentivizing marriage and fueling the kind of economic insecurity that tanks romantic relationships and destabilizes households.

Healthy romantic relationships—the kind conservatives say are the bedrock of society—require time. Couples need time to talk, time to have sex, time to engage in new experiences together. All of that helps to keep a relationship afloat. But our work culture, and the financial precarity and fear of economic failure that fuels it, means we see things like vacations, parental leave and even evenings off as enviable benefits at best, shameful indulgences at worst.

Having a range of meaningful relationships contributes to both health and happiness. And that also requires time: to foster friendships, to volunteer, to visit an elderly relative, to be a caretaker for a family member in need.

America is a work-hard culture, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Work brings purpose, routines help to foster dedication and the process of interacting with other unrelated human beings throughout the course of a day is necessary for social animals like us. Problem-solving keeps us mentally sharp: Navigating complex social dynamics refines our emotional competencies. But while work for pay is one component of a happy life, overwork at the expense of all else undermines its benefits.

It also contributes to our poor physical and mental health. Being healthy contributes to the ability to seek happiness, but it’s hard to maintain your health if there’s no time in the day to exercise, grocery shop, cook for yourself and clean up afterwards. Because of our insane time constraints, too many Americans find themselves having to choose between necessities: Do I microwave a frozen burrito but have the time to eat dinner with my family and read my kids a bedtime story, or do I make a meal from scratch that requires I sit my kids in front of the TV for an hour? Even more starkly: Do I work the extra shift to make enough to buy healthy groceries this month? Or do I dedicate that time to helping my child with his homework so that he has a fighting chance of doing better than I did?

Politicians often talk about struggling Americans. What they don’t do is make the case that we deserve more than just keeping our heads above water. America is one of the most prosperous countries in the history of the world. There is no reason so many of us should be struggling to survive, and no reason politicians can’t promise more than mere survival. They should think (and we should demand) bigger: What can our laws, policies and institutions do to make sure that every person in this country has the chance to flourish?

There are two parts here: the social and the political. We’ve so far approached happiness as an individual mandate, achieved via “self-care,” meditation apps, yoga retreats and gratitude journals. And that’s great—it’s tempting to snark at individualistic and often commercial paths to gratification, but at the very least they suggest that Americans crave the meaning and pleasure we’re missing. The problem is that the proposed solutions are inadequate and only on offer for a privileged few.

So what can individuals do? There are the things we know work on a small scale: Foster meaningful relationships. Exercise when you can. Do your best to be fully present and embodied for pleasurable experiences rather than rushing through or letting your brain wander off. These individual pleasurable experiences matter, and ideally they add up to the conclusion that all of us deserve pleasure in our lives, and everyone deserves the chance to pursue happiness. That pleasure isn’t hedonistic, indulgent or sinful, but moral and necessary—a gift, even. A society is better off when its citizens are given the tools to pursue meaning.

From there, the solutions must be collective and political. That means a push-back against pleasure-haters: the people who want their politics in your bedroom and in your uterus, who want to slash funding for literature and the arts and direct it to telling kids that sex is scary and bad, who think an honorable life is not one lived in the pursuit of knowledge and experience but one spent working yourself to the bone and hoping for something better in the afterlife.

But that part is easy. More challenging is a progressive happiness politic.

No Democratic president will be able to walk into the Oval Office on day one and accomplish the entirety of this agenda. And so the first step is a rhetorical one: Emphasize that the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and we absolutely can provide more than the very basics for our people, and that a primary function of government—written into our founding documents—is enabling a citizenry that can thrive. Filtering any given policy through that lens is also clarifying. Does it help Americans to do better not just in terms of saving money but in living expansive and meaningful lives? Does it promote health, connection and knowledge?

At the top of the list, then, are the things that give us more time and help us to live better and longer: Universal health care. Paid parental leave and universal childcare so that no one has to choose between a family and a full life outside of the home (and let’s be real, it’s usually women who are expected to make that trade-off). A generous social safety net not just to catch the unluckiest few, but to allow the many to take leaps of faith. Workplace regulations that raise wages, require predictable hours, and crack down on worker exploitation.

A happiness politic would force us to ask: What do we want from our government? What do we want from our society? And it would provide a crucial counter to our dark and miserable present moment. We are living in a time of anger, fear and hate, where the American right has busied itself with punishing those it sees as somehow deviant, deficient or just different. They’ve developed a politics of dominance, cruelty and vengeance, where there is an us who must use our power to hurt them. Progressive politicians have an opportunity here to transcend this narrative and instead sell a vision of government for the people.

And what is government doing for the people if not making it possible for all of us to pursue what we want: safe, healthy, purposeful and ultimately happy lives?