Getting past the anger impasse

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to move forward after the November 2024 election results, both personally and professionally. The question that’s come up repeatedly for me is whether, now that Trump has been sentenced in the hush-money case and Jack Smith released his special report, we are so consumed by a thirst for accountability and justice that we’ve become trapped in a place where we can’t move forward, so we’re constrained on making progress on issues that matter – like healthcare and education reform, fair wages and taxes, childcare, and climate change. If the aftermath of 2016 is any indication, the people who were most equipped to move forward are the ones who never take off their battle gear, so to speak – the litigators, the activists, the advocates. For the rest of us – the ordinary citizens who try to show up in some way to support good causes – we may need more time and more answers about how to escape the trap.

Speaking only for myself, one of the worst aspects about the election results is feeling so much rage and disappointment towards even more people than I did before in 2016. So on top of wanting Trump and his many cronies to suffer answer for their crimes and misdeeds, I am now conscious of wanting an explanation and an apology from each and every Trump voter. At the same time, I’m conscious that nothing, probably, could satisfy my disbelief and outrage that they voted for a convicted felon, a rapist, and an insurrectionist. It’s a conundrum, for sure.

A dear friend and former colleague said to me after the election, “I have learned that I can’t metabolize rage productively.” I have thought about that sentence so many times because it resonated so strongly with me, then and now. I, too, find it debilitating to stay in a place of rage and disappointment and frustration. For me, that place has only two means of egress – either you’re checked out, or you’ve succumbed to despair – and I have yet to fully embrace a third way, which has to do with feeling inspired to work towards hope and positive social change.  

As I wrote before in 2022, I see the type of communications I’ve engaged in during my whole career as a form of understanding. In my opinion, you can’t be cynical about trying to engage with audiences or would-be supporters because your audiences and supporters can absolutely suss out when you’re reaching out for purely transactional purposes: to get them to do something, give money, or on the for-profit side, buy something. In other words, you have to respectfully show that you understand and care about your audiences in order to effectively engage with them. You have to listen to what’s on their minds, what makes them tick, and then you have to engage with them in a way that feels meaningful, authentic, and non-transactional.

This approach to communications – as a form of understanding, and as a way of making people feel seen and heard and valued – has been exploited in the most diabolical way by the far right. Somehow, Trump and his minions have made millions and millions of Americans feel seen, heard, and understood. Their approach involves a great deal of dishonesty and manipulation, of course, and also relies a huge amount on people’s ignorance of how things really work in society. But somehow, they’ve come up with a perfect messaging cocktail of white supremacy, racism, and misogyny that has somehow resulted in millions of people – from disparate backgrounds and cultures – believing that this grossly incompetent, deeply corrupt, malicious, petty, addled person should be this country’s President. AGAIN. The Republicans – with no small amount of assistance from the corporate overlords – are excellent at getting people to act based on the worst impulses that live within all of us.

The thing that sustained me during the first Trump administration was going small and local – working on projects about good people and organizations doing important, heart-lifting change work and helping these people share their stories and become more effective communicators. I have no reason to doubt that this approach would work again. But to do that work effectively again, I have to get back to the mindset that people are worthy of being reached out to. Like, I know that there were nearly 80 million people who voted for Harris/Walz, but there were more who voted for TFG, and my god, that’s just too many people to be mad at, to write off, to not want to bother with. I believe that truly getting past the rage and disappointment (and thirst for vengeance) so many of us are feeling is critical to moving forward with the work of making a positive difference in this world.

I did some work on a project a while back to explore whether or not people would be open to restorative approaches to families impacted by domestic violence. This was an extraordinary topic to work on, as a communications matter, because people’s reactions to domestic violence are often so visceral and emotional. (It reminded me of my days working in criminal justice reform, when people were thirsty to lock ‘em up – everyone! – rather than consider different approaches for, say, nonviolent drug offenders, or teenagers who had committed their first serious offense.) On the face of it, of course, it is absolutely unacceptable and wrong that a person would harm a loved one and it is particularly searing that so much of the violence involves a male towards a female. But once you get past those widely-felt visceral reactions, you realize that there are circumstances where people might need options other than the mass incarceration of domestic violence offenders. Restorative approaches in the criminal justice system, in general, place a high priority on safety and accountability. But importantly, they also prioritize healing, and they create safe spaces for people to understand, take accountability, and move on. These approaches are aiming to break the cycle of generational poverty and violence that so often show up in domestic violence situations and I think that goal is worth exploring, particularly if it’s what the families need and want.

Like the cycle that recreates domestic violence with successive generations, it feels to me like America, also, is trapped in a cycle. We’re caught in a cycle of inequity, racism, tribalism, conflict, and hatred and in the past decade and a half, the Republicans have exploited these circumstances with truly astonishing levels of cynicism and hypocrisy for their own political and economic advantages. I can’t see how we break this cycle without making the space for understanding and healing to happen – which likely means that we on the progressive side will have to tamp down our overwhelming thirst for accountability and justice (it’s not just me, right?) so we can lead on listening, understanding, and forgiveness.

If you are an observer of world history, you can find ample evidence that entire populaces can move forward from worse things than two Trump Administrations. In the early 1990s, for example, there was a horrific civil war in the country of Rwanda that resulted in ethnicity-based genocide. And now, decades later, scholars are still studying how the country was able to move forward with healing and recovery, which they did in part by setting up a government that prioritized unity and the empowerment of women, who suffered greatly in the genocide.

I don’t see how America is going to make progress until we elect better people to government positions and invest in a more informed and enlightened electorate. At the moment, I’m feeling like Michelle Obama, declining to go to Trump’s inauguration without any explanation. (I don’t believe she owes us one.) But I am clear-sighted enough to know that I and others who care about positive social change have to somehow heal and move forward from this and eventually get back to listening, understanding, and respecting the people we’re so mad at and disappointed in right now.