After Arizona: The Courage to Learn - and Lead

Saturday’s horrifying events in Arizona have prompted calls for national soul-searching about the polarizing and often vicious rhetoric that pervades today’s political culture. We may never know whether the prevalence of such rhetoric helped create an enabling environment for Jared Loughner’s resort to violence. But we know that words have consequences for feeling, thinking, and action – and there are important lessons to be learned from this terrible moment.

Shutting down the House of Representatives for a week in response to this tragedy is a dramatic gesture. It will be an empty gesture, though, if it is not coupled with a demonstrated commitment to learning and changing on the part of our national leadership.

What is it that our political leaders need to understand, and how might they go about acquiring those insights? First and foremost, our leaders need a much deeper understanding of how today’s profound public anxieties – about terrorism, the economy, our broken immigration system, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, the seeming inability of government to solve complex problems – and the deliberate manipulation of those anxieties have affected the social fabric and the nature of democratic deliberation in the United States.

Through U.S. in the World’s project on Managing the Fear Factor, we have reviewed and commissioned an extensive body of research into the impacts of fear on public thinking. One thing we’ve learned is that acute fearfulness or anxiety causes people to identify more closely with their “own” group and to suspect the motives of “others,” exacerbating stereotyping and scapegoating. This human tendency has been exploited for political gain in recent years – with the result that the category of the “enemy other” (once reserved for military opponents) has expanded to include neighbors with whom we disagree, leaders whose policy solutions we don’t support, or anyone who questions or challenges our beliefs. Differences are exaggerated and accusations fly — you’re either an un-American socialist who wants to redistribute wealth or a hardhearted plutocrat; a terrorist sympathizer or a bloodthirsty imperialist; a proponent of unlimited government intrusion into people’s private lives or part of a conspiracy to dismantle the entire federal government. It’s as if the “you’re with us or against us” construct, originally applied to international relations, has become the organizing principle for any and all policy debates here at home.

Acute anxiety and the sense of being out of control also cause people to favor an us-vs.-them leadership style and zero-sum policy approaches. In today’s political and media culture, leaders whose public personas fit this bill and who can issue catchy soundbites are rewarded; the spotlight shines brightly on them and other public figures then feel pressured to take the same pose. It is extremely difficult to have a reasonable public conversation about policy choices in this context; there is little space on the media agenda or within the political discourse for consideration of complex solutions to complex problems. And as the public watches its elected leaders trade insults and point fingers at each other instead of addressing pressing concerns, confidence in government continues to erode and the feeling of being out of control increases.

In order to play a constructive role in healing our traumatized society, our leaders need to learn or re-learn a different model of deliberation and dialogue. It’s not enough to express dismay at the viciousness of today’s political rhetoric. Congress should draw upon the expertise of psychologists and experts in post-traumatic stress disorder, and on insights from experts in conflict resolution, dialogue, and crisis communications. There are thoughtful experts in all of these fields who would eagerly contribute to this kind of reflective and educational process. Compromises and adjustments will need to be made by both parties – not necessarily in their fundamental policy priorities, but in how they communicate with one another and to the American public about their differences.

Here’s what we would have liked to see happen during the week-long suspension of activities in the House: The leadership of both parties should have spent the first couple of days in private meetings with the kinds of experts we’ve mentioned here. For the remainder of the week, leaders should have reached out systematically to their own parties and networks to share what they learned and to seek commitments from their colleagues to bringing civil, respectful debate and dialogue – and disagreement – back to Congress, Washington, and most importantly, the United States. Opportunists who continue to exploit public anxieties and exacerbate differences should be named and shamed.

This week isn’t Congress’s only chance to demonstrate its willingness to learn and its ability to lead by learning. But the “teachable moment” will not last indefinitely. Regardless of Jared Loughner’s motivations, the motivation of Congress should always be what is in the best interests of this nation.