I want to know what smart people think. So, when I can, I read and listen to what they have to say. Jean-Jacques Rousseau identified our enslavement to appearances as the root of all societal ills. He believed that we are taught to crave the esteem of others, to mistake it for love, and to feel its absence as our failure. From day one, the need for esteem drives and compromises our actions and relations. We trade friends and principles for an estimation of success and deny our mistakes and misgivings lest we look like losers. Instead of growing toward wisdom and compassion, we seesaw between insecurity and narcissism, self-loathing and arrogance. We become political animals, wanting only to win.

Donald Trump, for whom the appearance of winning is everything, has lots of lesser company. The need to win casts a pall on confirmation hearings, Senate races and local elections. In Santa Cruz, it culminated in an election day spectacle on campus reminiscent of Tammany Hall, and it glowed that evening in the flushed and knowing smiles of apparent losers and smoldered in the game resignation of assumed winners. We live in a world turned upside down.

Times and demographics change, and prior regimes have left this community parched, congested, ill-housed and wary of winners who rely on their own electoral college on the hill to elevate them to power. Like the bankruptcies that made Trump rich, this form of carpetbagging is perfectly legal and a matter of pride.

Our parallel university on the hill is a political gold mine for those who put winning before community. UC administrators aren’t paid to pay more than lip service to city concerns. They are there to maintain strong borders between town and gown. They tax our resources and rent-gouge their students with impunity by deflecting student frustration and anger away from the regents and onto the town. To that end, they grant access to the student voting block only to those politicians who understand and respect boundaries. And those insiders were out in force on campus last Tuesday, offering free doughnuts and ballot recommendations to citizens-come-lately who hadn’t yet bothered to register to vote. Demagoguery and doughnuts may prove the winning combination when the provisional ballots are finally counted.

Rousseau’s winning at all costs is the order of the day. It drives Jim Crow laws, fearmongering, gerrymandering, voter suppression, influence peddling and carpetbagging. The very purpose of representative government — to seek unity in diversity — has gone missing. Division is celebrated and reasoned debate abandoned, all for the sake of one side winning.

But what are the sides, and what is being won? Certainly not some medieval rent board. That feast of fools will either fold its tent now or flame out later, having scarred both the needy and the generous on its way down. Measure M was just the latest any-means-necessary pretext for winning a City Council majority. Majority power is the end game for small potatoes. No grand plan. No brave new world. Just the appearance of winning.

Santa Cruz moms and dads, those with no moms and dads to support them. Cabrillo students. No residents were offered the easy last-minute voter registration access afforded students on campus on Tuesday. So I’m not ready to pin medals on the hundreds who voted for nothing but doughnuts.

We’ll know soon how many were served up, and how far those empty calories skewed local elections. Last week I was prepared to support the winning candidates, whoever they were; that’s democracy. I may feel differently next month. Those who bought those votes have already begun touting their success at making Santa Cruz great again at the expense of others. And they will no doubt dismiss any inquiries or investigations as the spiteful witch hunts of sore losers. We can expect a boatload of righteous rationalization. But we don’t have to accept such sophistry. The health of this city rests on the line we are still capable of drawing between truth and appearance, winning and co-existing, and between doughnuts and democracy.

Mark Primack is a former city councilman and author of “Divisible Cities: Acting Local in a Transient World.” Reach him at mark@markprimack.com.