Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of responsibility you are willing to shoulder. Jordan Peterson
On September 11, 2001, four al-Qaeda terrorists stormed the cockpit and hijacked United Flight 93. Within about 30 minutes a small band of brave passengers took decisive action to overthrow the hijackers. While unable to save the lives of those aboard, they likely saved hundreds of lives and the intended target: the White House or the Capitol. This diverse group mobilized to do something really hard and purposeful: They ended the hijacking.
The term hijacked defined: unlawfully seize (aircraft, ship or vehicle) in transit and force it to go to a different destination or use it for one’s own purposes. Hijacked is what many in this country are feeling today about our democracy. It is time for us to do something hard and purposeful – more on that below.
The latest Quinnipiac poll surprised no one. In a sharply divided country, Americans agree on one thing: the bigger danger to the United States comes from within. Seventy-six percent say they think political instability within the country is a bigger danger to the United States while only 19% who think other adversary countries are the bigger danger. A majority of Americans, 58% to 37%, think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse.
While this concern has many elements, let me focus on one. The chasm dividing and undermining our relationships keeps growing. Each side blames, sometimes demonizes the other without seeing how their own actions have contributed to our fraught situation. Elections provide a glaring example. Byron York has pointed out that today 58% of Republicans say President Biden was not legitimately elected. But in the fall of 2017, same pollster, 67% of Democrats said President Trump was not legitimately elected. President Biden, during his January 19 news conference when asked about the upcoming elections, said: “I’m not saying it’s going to be legit. The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.”
Our biggest risk is neither voter suppression or voter fraud but our leaders (looking at you Donald Trump and Stacey Abrams) and the citizens they influence being unwilling or unable to accept the outcome!
Polls are polls, and they come and go. But the contentious way both Democrats and Republicans are going about promoting voting reforms by amping up the fear of the other side is further sowing seeds of doubt that undermine what meager trust remains. If each side continues to escalate mistrust, the 2024 election could present a crisis. If ever there were a time for our political leaders to create a bipartisan effort to address real voting problems without demagoguing the issue, it is now.
This divide is playing out across our country in a thousand places: locally, personally, destructively. One of the CEOs I work with has been dealing with a firestorm over Covid protocols, like so many leaders these days in business, churches, schools, and other non-profits in this Covid era. A very complicated question on stakeholder well-being quickly came down to a binary choice: for or against. Unfortunately, in his case a small group of passionate, powerful, polarizing stakeholders, from both sides of the argument, dominated the discussion, attention, agenda and actions of the whole. A majority of stakeholders who held moderate opinions that agreed with neither side, sat quietly and passively and let the chasm between the groups grow.
Hijacked. In fact, it has happened repeatedly in business, school and church board rooms, in the media and in groups large and small all over the country and collectively in our nation. A smaller, more extreme progressive or conservative group commandeers the easy button – for or against – and begins to rule our world by making it unruly.
These hijackers can be outspoken community leaders, dominant shareholders in public companies, radical cable-news commentators, social media activists, religious ideological zealots and political firebrands who assemble power and fame to exert disproportionate influence that shapes and dominates the issues, often counter to the will of most stakeholders. They reorganize our reality around narrow, simplistic slogans and fights that fit their world: Covid protocols, Critical Race Theory, Fossil Fuels, Defund the Police, Roe v. Wade, assault rifles. They put us in reactive, reductionist mode when we need to be in strategic, creation mode. Once we fall into that hole, it is very hard to work our way back up and out.
Polarization Fatigue: An Inflection Point of Hope
We are transformed by our suffering—not by bearing it apart and alone, but by recognizing our universal connectedness with each other and God. Richard Rohr
Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better—and it seems they have. After four years under President Trump, the most polarizing leader in our lifetime, came candidate Joe Biden campaigning as a leader who would bring us together and refrain from characterizing our political opponents as enemies. Then came his latest speech in Atlanta on voting rights where his message was: You either support his proposal to nationalize voting rights or you side with the late segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Biden was elected to “not be” Trump – which is why aping Trump is such a betrayal.
But defeating Trump is a tactic, not a strategic purpose, and the same applies to those who would attempt to defeat Biden. Condemning highly offensive behavior, like demonizing the other side, and then using the same tactics undermines you and your position. Sure enough, a Quinnipiac poll this week finds 49% say President Biden is doing more to divide the country and only 42% say he is doing more to unite it.
It is significant that a mere 34% of registered voters want Biden to run for president again and only 39% want Trump to run again. (These two actually do have something in common!) Most voters are looking for something different from either of them, and a part of that difference is a less polarizing figure who can get purposeful things done.
But maybe our despair is also a source of hope – that our pain will move us to make progress – the “getting worse before getting better” part. I see signs that give me hope.
First, voters now rate “division in the country” as the most important issue facing them personally, according to a recent Battleground Poll. My hope is that this growing concern will have a transformative effect on our attitudes and behavior, opening us and the leaders we support to work more collaboratively with others including those with whom we disagree. This poll finds that 66% of voters say they prefer a politician who is willing to work together with political opponents to get things done, even if it means compromising on values. Further, there is hope that the growth in independents in recent decades – 42% Independents, 29% Democrats and 27% Republicans per Gallup in 2021 – portends a large plurality of voters more open to hearing both sides.
Second, much of the fuel for our polarization has come from our consumption of (addiction to) highly charged media content, especially cable news. Edelman’s 2022 survey found 74% of respondents in the U.S., and 76% globally, worry about false or fake news being used as a weapon – and people are tuning out. In 2021 weekday prime-time cable viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox and 25% at MSNBC according to Nielsen. Broadcast television evening news fared better but still saw a 12% decline at ABC and CBS and 14% at NBC. Online engagement of political articles was down nearly two thirds.
Some of that decline can be attributed to 2021 not being a Presidential election year. But how often have we vowed or been advised, in the midst of our political duress, to ‘turn off the news’! Many have grown weary of hot takes, often flawed or wrong, that leave us feeling burned and divided. The hope is we can stay engaged and informed but not inflamed.
Third, business, is a source of hope as it is significantly more trusted than government or media according to Edelman 2022. Yet it has also found itself in the cross-hairs of political polarization. Organizations like BlackRock, Facebook, Fox, The Business Roundtable, Major League Baseball, Chick-fil-A, along with smaller businesses have been both praised and mocked for being “woke” or not. Some have lost customers, employees and support from other stakeholders, and some have even reaped punitive actions by state governments. A recent American Compass survey of workers found that 59% of the American labor force would prefer their employers to focus on business and avoid taking public stances on social justice issues. Opposition to woke employers is strongest among those with the least education. Only those with post-graduate degrees prefer their employers to engage in social justice issues. The challenge for business is how to be purposeful without alienating key stakeholders.
As organized religion has become more political, membership has fallen. Many have lost members simultaneously for being too progressive and too conservative. Ryan Sanders laments: “When you mix religion and politics, you get politics.” Likewise, colleges and universities along with local schools have struggled to accommodate polarized stakeholders.
This polarization has taken its toll on leaders. Business CEO turnover in Q4 of 2021 was up 16% over last year, and the number of advertised C-suite openings has nearly doubled since February of 2020. School superintendents, head pastors, non-profit leaders – the great polarization feeds the great fatigue, which feeds the great resignation, everywhere. The good news is that leaders everywhere are looking for answers on how to be constructively purposeful without being divisively destructive.
Finally, what is most hopeful to me is a growing group of leaders whose moves appear intended to blunt our partisan divide. Regardless of where you sit on the political continuum, it is inspiring to see major leaders incur personal cost in stepping up to moderate our polarization:
· Chris Wallace, Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes leave Fox News.
· Bari Weiss leaves The New York Times and joins Substack, an independent platform.
· Republican Senator Liz Chaney condemns the January 6 attack on the Nation’s capital.
· Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose removal of Senate filibuster.
· Senator Mitt Romney votes to impeach President Trump.
· Christian writer David French criticizes politicization within the evangelical movement.
· San Francisco Mayor London Breed shifts her stance on supporting “Defund the Police.”
· Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot opposes the powerful teacher’s union strike.
None of us can know fully their intent, and no doubt self-interests is involved to some degree, but to me it looks like hard, brave decisions that risk money, power and the regard of their tribe for a higher purpose of countering partisan divisiveness – what David Brooks has called being “ruled by the radicals.” Leaders who sell the illusion that you can have it your way without compromise if you will but cede power to them are cutting the country in half.
Relational Advocates: Do Your Job!
King Solomon ordered, “Cut the baby in half! “Please don’t kill my son,” the baby’s mother screamed…He pointed…“She is his real mother. Give the baby to her.” 1 Kings 3: 26—27
Now it is our turn – yours and mine. If 2022, a year of big decisions and big elections, is to be a year where we are no longer ruled by the radicals, those hijacked must step-up. Earlier I defined the term Relational Moderate in this space as one who places a higher priority on constructive relationships and truth-seeking than on winning an ideological argument or cancelling/demonizing the opposition. Relational Moderates, it is time for us to do our job – mod-er-ate – make it a verb, not just passively, but actively in what we do, the leaders we select and in the way we support them. In fact, in moderating we must become Relationship Advocates. Perhaps we should take Yeat’s ominous line, “the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity” – as a challenge!
It starts with relational moderates doing something that may be hard and even sacrificial: taking the risk to speak-up on behalf of relational purpose—face the mob. Being a Relational Moderate is not for everyone. Those who are more extreme – the 15% or 20% on the left and on the right play an important role in injecting passion around their more outside-the-box ideological views. Relational Advocates are stakeholders passionate about keeping us from running off the rails. While we may also have strong partisan opinions, our highest purpose is to win the relationship war – to save the Republic.
Purpose is a much-hyped term these days, and it is often applied to ideological issues like saving the environment, the unborn, freedom – but it also applies to saving democracy. True purpose is higher than winning the argument at hand. King Solomon’s wisdom was to see above and beyond the dispute and to help reveal the higher purpose of saving, and by identifying his true mother, supporting the baby. His wisdom was to “re-frame” the matter, and that is one of the most important strategic skills of successful CEOs: re-framing narrow, zero-sum, relationally toxic discourse by tying it to larger, higher, more strategic purpose. Such purpose helps bind diverse and even oppositional groups together to do truly meaningful things.
Relational Advocates use re-framing to articulate strategic and shared purpose to enable “constructive relationships,” so crucial to innovative solutions that engage and serve all the stakeholders. One of my client CEOs has re-framed the differences among his stakeholders like this: “We are running in six different lanes but we are all going in the same direction.” The key is abstracting the vision up a level from negative into a more inclusive, unifying positive. For example, from:
· End fossil fuels to gain climate-sustaining energy supply
· End racism to gain justice for all
· Mask/vax protocols to medical and mental health for all
· Voting reforms that favor my side to reforms that build the nation’s trust
Make no mistake – eventually our purpose must be translated into specifics. But even the specifics, negatives and all, will work much better tied to elevated purpose.
If we are to succeed in moderating as Relational Advocates, we must match the passion of divisive ideologues. That means shouldering the responsibility – to end the hijacking: step-up, speak-up, re-frame. Now, in the galvanizing words of one of the heroes from UA 93: “Let’s roll.”
Robert’s latest book, “This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics and Faith,” is now in paperback. A “recovering CEO,” he has authored 200 published articles and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The CEO Magazine. His website: www.robertehall.com