America is angry. If we don’t speak to this anger, we’re in trouble

July 27, 2016 at 6:30 pm

While taking a short break from work this afternoon, I ran into my next door neighbor. She is an older lady who is about as liberal as I am. She said to me, “I’m afraid Trump is going to win.”

Recently, I’ve heard this from a couple of other people as well. It’s wise to never discount intuition—especially when I have the same feeling. So I started thinking about why I feel this way, as we often intuit things before we’re able to explain them. This was how I wrote about how “Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere” in August 2015. This is just how people’s brains work.

So I threw aside the piece I was going to write this week to think about why.

By now we all know that politics is about emotion, yet often we still don’t really understand this. Why?

Because it’s not translating into speaking to the outrage America feels. Because I keep seeing posts and discussions about policy and how Hillary is adopting policy changes. Because we seem to be talking about policy and relying on anti-Trump sentiment. Because we’re not speaking enough to this anger in a way that isn’t anti-Trump.

If we don’t genuinely speak to the anger America is feeling, we’re in a lot of trouble. Here are some examples and some thoughts on how to genuinely acknowledge the very real pain people are expressing.

[caption id="attachment_2132" align="aligncenter" width="640"]The famous moment where Bill Clinton went off script during the 1992 presidential debate. The famous moment where Bill Clinton went off script during the 1992 presidential debate. (Screenshot/YouTube)[/caption]

The people with the least amount of power are the people most likely to use it

May 10, 2016 at 10:42 pm
[caption id="attachment_2080" align="aligncenter" width="650"]Two agents in a contact center (Diana Varisova/Wikimedia). Two agents in a contact center (Diana Varisova/Wikimedia).[/caption]

One of my first jobs was at a call center. It was a while back but something one of the trainers said to us during onboarding stuck with me:

The people with the least amount of power are the people most likely to use it.

What he meant was that people who feel powerless seem to be more likely to try to exert the little power they have. For example, when someone is calling you and their computer is broken, they feel powerless. For this reason, they’re often quite angry and “demandy,” to coin a term. They’ll often demand that you do something immediately, as if somehow this is going to fix things faster.

Perhaps this lesson has stuck with me because of how often I’ve observed it to be true. Why care? Because I think this has a lot to do with the current state of politics. And if you recognize it, it can help you have better political conversations.

Limbaugh’s Bipartisan Stimulus

January 29, 2009 at 9:50 pm

I have to give Rush Limbaugh credit. He is an excellent communicator. In his article in today’s Wall Street Journal, Limbaugh does quite the job of making a case for a bipartisan stimulus package. When it comes to communicating with the public, Democrats could learn some things from Mr. Limbaugh. […]