Great leaders have the ability to look ahead and prepare to manage important issues and trends before they arrive. If you want to add another concern to your list, take a look at the results of The Wall Street Journal-NORC poll that were released on June 6, 2022. We're not only struggling with 40-year high inflation, we are facing similar highs in our lack of trust and faith in our national values and the sociopolitical institutions that bind us together. And people see things getting worse rather than better.
Consider these survey highlights as reported by The Wall Street Journal:
· “Some 86% of respondents said Americans are greatly divided when it comes to the most important values, and over half said they expect those divisions to worsen five years from now, up from just a third of respondents who were asked the question last year.”
· “About six in 10 respondents said they were pessimistic about the ability for most people to achieve the American dream.”
· “Nearly two-thirds of respondents, 64%, said platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are harmful for society because they emphasize differences between people, while just over one-third, 34%, said they are helpful because they provide a way for all Americans to share.”
· Just 13% of respondents said they were optimistic that people of different races or religions could come together and solve the country’s problems if they held different political views.
As our nation recovers from a bitter 2020 election and an equally bitter fight with Covid, we all need to think about what these trends mean and what we can do to reverse them.
Psychologists tell us that happiness is linked to anticipation of positive future events. People endure adversity better when they believe the future will be better. That belief is the essence of the American Dream. It is the power behind generations of immigrants who have come to our shores, enduring difficult, demeaning jobs as they build a new and better life for their families. It’s the incentive that fuels the creativity and hard work that inspire millions of Americans to aspire to making their lives and our nation better.
Destroy that belief by removing those expectations and everything changes. I am not talking about the classic political complaints that economic inequality is increasing or capitalism is failing and needs to be replaced with some form of socialist democracy. I am talking about the impending gloom that America is no longer good at doing the things that made it become the beacon of hope for the world—and a place where working hard and doing things together will give you the opportunity get ahead. This is not just political gloom, it’s cultural despair fed by three harsh recognitions: We can no longer count on our leaders to prioritize and deliver the things we most expect our government to provide; we can no longer trust the media to furnish us the objective information we need to make the decisions we need to make; and we can no longer look to our traditional social institutions to help us and our children learn to live and work together.
Everything we have counted on is failing us and the more we realize that, the more frustrated we become. We look for someone or something to blame. Trump, Pelosi, Biden? Democrats blame Republicans and vice versa. Conspiracy theories abound. Traditional and social media judge and misjudge truth or simply become echo chambers for one side or the other, firing up bitterness and disagreement. Following the science becomes political science. Covid. Excessive government spending or not enough. Supply chain glitches. The war in Ukraine. Fossil fuels. Assault rifles. It’s a long list.
Finding people and things to blame is easy in today’s world of sound bites and breaking news alerts. The hard part is going beyond the 25-word headlines and talking points to understand the background and the details—and most important, the pros and cons. Unfortunately, most of us act and react based on the sound bites.
The hard part is finding people we can trust to fix the problems. When people are despondent, they look for new leaders with new solutions. Whatever your political views, this reality had a huge impact on the 2016 election. People who felt left behind wanted to “Make America Great Again!” After 2020, the progressive wing of the Democrat party wanted to use their narrow margins in Congress to make their own sweeping changes. After Donald Trump was elected, the traditional media were filled with concerns that he would become a demagogue. But demagogues and dictators can come from either political party or from a third party. The important point is to remember that these tyrants are usually propelled by people who are frustrated and angry.
Anger is spiking in America today. Too many Americans are not just down about America, they are increasingly angry about it. You see it in the increase in homicides and other violence, in the deaths from traffic accidents, in the conduct of airline passengers, in the rudeness of customers and employees and, of course, in the bitter “winner-take-all” debates in our halls of governance.
Respect, especially mutual respect, is badly out of fashion, not just for each other but for our nation and its system of government. Compromise is viewed as weakness or selling out. Belligerence and “standing your ground” are in, whether you are defending your home, protesting in front of the house of a Supreme Court Justice or justifying your party’s unyielding position in Congress.
As our inflationary spiral continues and takes its toll on more and more segments of our society, as leadership failures and Black Swan events further shake our confidence in our politicians and each other, as we politicize everything and use identity politics to inflame passions and hate, as we move closer to the bitter politics of the fall mid-term elections, the second half of 2022 is not looking good. The next six months are almost certainly going to become more physically and emotionally dangerous as well as more economically difficult.
We are reaching a boiling point—a dangerous, difficult place where more and more people are expressing their frustration by lashing out physically, verbally and emotionally. We all need to do our part to lower the temperature instead of fueling the fire. We need to pull America back together. We need to do more to find common ground and less to divide and tear us apart.
NOTE: This article is based on an article entitled Anger in America Is a Business Issue that was originally posted to LinkedIn on June 10, 2022 at: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6941069319820783616/
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