It would surprise very few if surveys revealed that the vast majority of scientists and academics find the US presidency of Donald Trump abhorrent. After all, the scientific community shares values that are clearly not held by the Trump administration and its supporters: among them, the importance of diversity and the crucial role of evidence in the process of making smart decisions.

What has been surprising is that the scientific community has not fully upheld these values in their initial responses in opposition to the Trump administration’s words and deeds over its first month in office. We need to up our game. We need more diverse ideas, more critical debate and more effective actions backed by evidence of what works.

The scientific community has so far followed three approaches to resisting the Trump administration’s tone and actions. Each of these is unlikely to have much practical effect.

The primary response of the scientific community to the Trump Administration has been to organize a March for Science to take place on Earth Day, April 22. Marches are a great way for citizens to express themselves, and if scientists wish to invite others to join them in expressing support for science, then more power to them.

Some have debated whether a march is a good idea or not. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has endorsed the march. However, experience tells us that while marches are important symbols of democratic expression, they are also very blunt tools. Whatever consequence of the Earth Day march, on April 23rd Donald Trump will still be president and the science community will have to consider what next.

A second approach asks President Trump to make a deal to earn the support of scientists. For instance, two prominent physicists argued in a New York Times op-ed last week that President Trump could yet create an “enduring legacy” by increasing funding for science. President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, suggested something similar when he said he’d accept a scientist out of the mainstream on climate science as Trump’s science advisor if he could whisper “in the president’s ear on the importance of basic research.”

Despite such appeals to the “art of the deal,” it remains to be seen if the scientific community would fall in line behind the Trump administration, even partially, if science budgets were dramatically increased. I suspect that the depth of commitment to widely shared values means that the vast majority of the science community can’t be bought off with an increase in support for basic research.

A third approach appears to be to follow the playbook used during the years of the George W. Bush administration – to argue that President Trump and his appointees are anti-science. There is no shortage of material to work with, such as the appointment to lead the Environmental Protection Agency of Scott Pruitt, who long opposed to action on climate and the EPA itself. Even more remarkable has been the suggestion that Robert Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccination activist, would be appointed to a panel to look at vaccines. The frequent misstatements and untruths uttered by Trump and his proxies (let’s not forget the fabricated Bowling Green Massacre) makes a strategy focused on fact-checking and truth-telling both tempting and satisfying.

However, the anti-science playbook certainty did not prevent the election of President Trump, and it may have actually contributed. As Dan Kahan, of Yale University, writes, invoking science and facts in such ways may serve only to reinforce cultural divisions:

Because the ascendency of Trump is itself a symbol of the status of the cultural groups that propelled him to the White House, any attack on him for lying is likely to invest his position with the form of symbolic significance that generates identity-protective cognition: the fight communicates a social meaning—this is what our group believes, and that what our enemies believe—that drowns out the facts.

In the work of Kahan and others, there is ample evidence to suggest that invoking facts and science as a strategy of opposition has the potential to backfire.

So what else might the scientific community do if their goal is to influence the words and deeds of the Trump Administration in a direction more consistent with the broadly shared values of the scientific community?

The glib answer to this question is to get smarter about politics. The more challenging answer is that the scientific community needs to eschew old habits that have manifested themselves in the march: calling for more funding and waging political battles through science. Here I’ll briefly suggest three different areas where the scientific community has an opportunity to up its game: propaganda, policy and politics.

Trump is a master of using propaganda to achieve his goals. Propaganda, according to political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1927, “is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols.” Trump’s use of symbols such as Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco and Crooked Hillary surely played an important role in how the public came to view his electoral opponents. Since the election, calling mainstream media “fake news” and the “opposition party” has offered similar rallying points.

As Lasswell and other political scientists learned during the Cold War, the only way to effectively counter propaganda is with better propaganda. Experts in the manipulation of symbols could help to develop evidence-based counter-propaganda that is more effective than what we’ve seen so far. You don’t need a PhD in political science to understand that as political symbol, “I’m With Her” (Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan) paled in comparison to “Make America Great Again.”

We are long overdue to see an orchestrated campaign of counter-propaganda. For instance, every time that President Trump whines about this or that, an organized promotion of #WhinyDonnie might trend. When he attacks the federal judiciary or the press, or praises Vladimir Putin, #DictatorDon might take off. And when he acts presidential, he might be labelled #PresidentTrump. If such symbols become widely disseminated, they have the potential to influence the future behavior of a president who voraciously consumes the media. But these are just simple examples. The bigger point is that the same strategies that Trump has used so effectively should be employed by those in opposition, informed by almost a century of theory and evidence.

Just as experts in propaganda might inform the actions of professional propagandists, the scientific community has an enormous opportunity to offer evidence-based policy alternatives across the entire spectrum of government to those being put forward by the Trump Administration. Similarly, support should be offered to those proposals that make sense. Writing on Italy’s experiences with Silvio Berlusconi, Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, argues that it is important to take the Trump Administration’s policy proposals seriously and to engage them substantively if they are to be effectively opposed or shaped.

Opposition is easy. Engagement is more difficult – especially if it means learning some difficult lessons of recent experience. For instance, we should openly discuss if the Keystone pipeline debate rallied a committed few but may have hurt the broader prospects for climate policy. Similarly, we should do better understanding how advancing technological innovation can lead to disruption in working class employment and a corresponding resentment towards elites. That the policy preferences of the recent past are unlikely to be sufficient in the coming years should present no obstacle to developing new policy options from a diverse and creative community of experts engaged with broader society.

There is an important division of responsibility between propagandists and policy wonks. These roles should be kept distinct from each other as they are applying knowledge in very different ways. The scientific community has enough expertise to fill these different roles without compromising the effectiveness or legitimacy of either.

These strategies might, at best, alter the trajectory of the Trump Administration in some ways. What will end the Trump era will be power politics, and specifically the elections of 2018 and 2020. Improved counter propaganda and innovative policy proposals will support efforts to displace Trump and his Congressional supporters at the ballot box, but they will not be sufficient.

The most direct impact that a scientist can have on ushering in a new political era sooner rather than later is by engaging in party politics – whether Democrat or (crucially in the Trump era) Republican. Expressing outrage on Twitter or at a march might be cathartic, but is far removed from the America that elects its leaders. At the same time, unthinking partisanship might be counterproductive.

To better understand and reflect such nuance, after the science march is over and the community thinks about what comes next, one strategy would be for leading organizations like the AAAS to facilitate the education of scientists who want to see change about the workings of electoral politics. To be most effective this must be intellectually rigorous, go beyond simplistic notions of science communication and above all, draw upon what works. Any such effort also must be truly bipartisan, and resist being co-opted by one party.

The debate over whether scientists should become politically active has long been over. We are and we should be. The more important debate is whether our political activity will be informed and evidence based, rather than instinctive and haphazard. The Trump era should make that choice easy.