The Problem of Character in our Current Political Climate
Why do we see our politicians as righteous or wicked. Is leadership dependent upon character? The 2020 presidential election is dominated by emotional connections to the righteous or wicked candidate. Levine writes: “What we need, then, is not to rely on office holders to act out of their “good character.” What we need is a government that we can rely on to act in a thoughtful way that takes into account the complexity of issues and the importance of deliberation.” In this blog, David Levine examines how emotions charge our perceptions of a politician’s character and the psychological mechanisms that support polarized politics.
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Guest Contributor David Levine
Does character matter in politics? The conservative movement in the US, as represented by the Republican party prior to the nomination of Donald Trump, placed considerable emphasis on the idea that it does. To many pre-Trump conservatives, those who aspire to public office ought to be people who care about more than themselves, people who respond to a higher calling and embody a higher purpose. One reason for this is typically expressed in the idea that office holders should be people who use their moral authority to elevate the standards that we should all seek. By being a better person, the office holder makes all of us better people and makes our nation a better nation.
Lack of character has been a significant element in the indictment of Donald Trump both by Democrats and by disaffected Republicans. As Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who headed the National Security Agency and the CIA under President George W. Bush, comments in a video endorsing Joe Biden: “I absolutely disagree with some of Biden’s policies, but that’s not important. Biden is a good man. Donald Trump is not.” Hayden was quoted with approval in a column by Matt Bai of The Washington Post. There, Bai insists that “the candidates’ specific policy differences don’t seem as defining as they might have in past elections. Because underlying all of it is the disconcerting sense, at least among a majority of the electorate, that Trump isn’t simply a bad president. He’s just bad, period.” In other words, what makes Trump a bad president is that he is “bad.” The point is not to attempt to fix bad people, but to get them out of positions where their badness affects the rest of us in significant ways.
My concern here is not with Donald Trump or the question of whether he is or is not a bad person. My concern is with the tendency, exacerbated by Trumps’ presidency, to conceive the problem of politics as one of determining who is bad and who is good. To see how widespread this can be, consider the issue of inequality. Many people have come to think of inequality as little more than another term for racism. Equating the two makes a particular kind of badness the reason for inequality: the badness we associate with hatred for members of a particular group.
Of course, policies that exacerbate the problem of inequality can be, and sometimes are, motivated by racism. And, whether that is their intent or not, policy can have the effect of increasing racial inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunity. It is also true, more or less by definition, that measures designed specifically to address problems originating historically in racism will reduce inequality. All of this matters. But none of it offers any definitive argument or evidence that it is helpful to equate inequality with racism. It does not prove that those who advocate policies likely, even certain, to assure that inequality will persist or become more severe, are ipso facto motivated by racism or that their opposition to policies advancing equality of income can only be explained by the racism of their advocates, whether they are aware of it or not.
Those who advocate for policies that adversely affect inequality of income might, for example, be motivated by a strong commitment to an idea about the way free markets assure steady growth in incomes and standards of living. Or, those who seem indifferent to inequality might insist that to rid ourselves of inequality we would need to place limits on the use of private property inconsistent with individual freedom. We can appeal to reason and evidence to argue about whether it is true that free markets exhibit the virtues attributed to them. But, even if the proposition turns out not to be true at all, or valid only in some cases, so far as the proposition is subject to reality testing, it would be problematic simply to dismiss those who support it as racists and therefore bad people. Perhaps they just got it wrong. Perhaps their emotional attachment to the idea of free markets clouded their judgment. Being wrong about something does not, in itself, prove that your motives are “bad.”
If we refuse to subject propositions about inequality to the test of reason and evidence, we are, in effect, reducing policy issues to moral tests and insisting that good policy making is done only by those who pass the test. Rather than assuming that we must consider the problem on a moral plane, what if we consider it one subject to the test of reason and evidence. We would then move away from moral thinking, which only identifies who is bad and who is good.
Morality can be considered a theory of causation developed early in life, a theory that, when used to explain why the world is the way it is, can enable the individual to make the decisions necessary to find his or her way. Put simply, these theories help us with our difficulties by identifying who caused our problem and who can decide to make it to go away. In the primitive world of causation, that is, in the early child development sense, someone is always responsible. Early in life, many of our problems are rooted in the failure of parents to do the work they are needed to do to care for us. For the child, the compelling question is: why did this failure happen? And the only method the child has for finding an answer to this question is by determining where the badness lies: in those responsible for care or in the child him- or herself. In other words, care fails us either because our caretakers are bad or because we are undeserving because we are bad. Later in life, so far as we hold to this primitive theory, we can apply it by making those in positions of authority surrogates for our parents (by projecting onto them the early relationship as we experienced it). When we do this, we reduce the complexity of the adult world by interpreting it as good or bad.
The reason a child finds causation in this way is that at this stage of development, our interpretations or theories about our situation are mainly embedded in emotion. Emotion is how we know and express our self-states or give expression to a need that is or is not being met. To be angry at someone is the child’s way of holding others responsible. Because what we are primarily concerned with is being cared for, the emotions that matter are those experienced in connection with our caretakers: love and gratitude when we are cared for, anger and hate when we are not. These emotions draw us in different directions and prompt us to different actions directed toward others.
Having what is sometimes referred to as a moral compass means having the right emotions: care, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, and love. Good character, then, is character that leads us to act on the right emotions; in other words, it involves having a preponderance of those emotions. Our tendency to be driven by the more destructive emotions indicates the failure (or possibly absence) of a moral compass. So, rather than being led by gratitude, generosity and love, we are led by hate, envy, and greed. If we are primarily concerned about the growing influence of moral failure—too many bad people, too few good people—then what we really need to know is why the good feelings toward others do not predominate, and what we might do about it.
That’s not a bad question. There is, however, another way to look at the matter. Rather than concerning ourselves with the presence of bad feelings toward others, we might consider the importance of the inability to form an interpretation of our situation other than the one embedded in emotion. I would like to consider the possibility of moving away from the reductionistic good and bad people toward asking why bad things happen. One direction such a movement might take involves the role of thinking in moderating the intensity of emotions.
Our emotions do not like thinking. To think about something is to drop the assumption that we already know: what is right, what is wrong, and what to do. When we start thinking about issues, they tend to get complicated, or, put the other way around, thinking about them makes things complicated. Because of this, thinking or deliberation can be experienced as a threat to good conduct, even as evidence that we lack a moral compass. And, the more we resist deliberation as a threat to our moral standing and the gratification that will be ours if we follow this simple moral compass, the more we regress to simple binary alternatives as a defense against complexity. Intensity of emotions, combined with limits on thinking, leads to moral judgments about people who disagree with us and this serves to intensify conflict and push it into more destructive directions. Our ability to think about issues that involve relating to others depends on our ability to manage our emotions.
“Containment” is a psychological term used to refer to our management of our thinking. Containment is an idea in psychoanalysis developed most notably in the work of Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott. Normal emotional development entails the individual’s growing ability to contain anxiety and process it internally rather than acting out in an aggressive way.
Screenshot of a video showing two vehicles collide as Trump supporters follow and surround a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a Texas interstate. Twitter: @ericcervini
More specifically, containment refers to a relationship with a caretaker within which intense and potentially destructive impulses are contained. What this means is that those impulses directed at the caretaker for failing to care for us do not cause retaliation or withdrawal but provoke a relationship through which they can be managed and within which the continuing presence of someone who cares is assured. Here, continuity or reliability of care is the primary issue, and the threat felt by the child is loss of belief in the reliability of care with the attendant anxiety about being alone, unloved, and helpless. If this anxiety is not countered by the reality of a relationship, it can and will spin out of control.
Containment does not refer to repression. Repression simply fosters strong feelings of guilt and shame that must themselves be acted out in potentially harmful ways. By contrast, containment fosters feelings of love and gratitude, in effect replacing the destructive feelings directed at the caretaker for his or her failure with good feelings. Over time, internalization of the relationship with the caretaker allows containing emotion to become work the child can do for him- or herself. When it is possible for the individual to turn inward rather than acting out the emotion in the world outside, it is possible to overcome the absolute rule of emotion over conduct. Doing so creates space for modifying or even replacing the interpretation of the world embedded in emotion and acting on a different basis. This work of reinterpreting the theory embedded in emotion is what we speak about in the language of thinking and deliberation.
In thinking about the role of containment in politics, we might take note of Donald Trump’s greatest talent, if we can call it that, which is his ability to provoke others to heightened levels of emotion and to make them experience and take responsibility for his heightened emotional state. In other words, his greatest talent is his inability to contain emotion. His success in externalizing his feeling state not only promotes the translation of violent impulse into violent action on the part of his supporters, it also intensifies emotions, including destructive emotions, in his opponents. What Trump attempts to do, and to a significant degree succeeds in doing, is purging thinking and deliberation from his world. This is especially evident in his attack on the thinking organs of public life: the agencies that gather information and analyze it, the agencies that investigate, the educational institutions that foster teaching and learning; the intellectuals who, at their best, represent thinking as a vocation.
The defense against complexity and the flight into the binary world of good and bad, because it is a defense against deliberation, is a defense against turning inward as a means for the active management of emotion. Managing emotion means thinking about ourselves: why we feel the way we do, why we experience such powerful impulses and whether the theory embedded in our impulse is the only possible, or even a very good, explanation for our situation. Because of this, managing emotion can, from the standpoint of the binary construction of the world, appear to be an identification with our bad impulses. After all, turning inward means concerning ourselves with ourselves and therefore can easily be equated with greed, self-interest and indifference to the welfare of others, primary attributes typically associated with flawed character.
But, when we turn inward, we need not simply discover our self-interest and the best path to the gratification of greedy desire. We can also find alternatives to acting on our emotions. We might even find the basis for respecting the inwardness of others and protecting them from our more destructive impulses. Rather than attempting to protect others from our darker impulses by replacing them with good impulses or the appearance of them, we can protect others from our darker impulses by protecting them and ourselves from action driven by impulse however we might judge its “goodness.”
One way to summarize this idea with an eye to the problem of government is to emphasize the role of reliability of care as the means by which the transition from acting out to a thoughtful response to anxiety can be made. What we need, then, is not to rely on office holders to act out of their “good character.” What we need is a government that we can rely on to act in a thoughtful way that takes into account the complexity of issues and the importance of deliberation. Attentiveness and thoughtful response lower anxiety and reduce the urgency of acting out to relieve anxiety. Doing so reduces the harshness and implicit violence in society as a whole. In a way, it solves our most immediate and pressing problem: anxiety.
Because he is driven by impulse, Trump feels little or no obligation to be a conscientious steward of the welfare of the nation and its citizens. Given the importance of his office, this heightens anxiety both in his supporters and opponents. Heightening anxiety undermines the capacity for containment and increases the likelihood of regression to primitive defenses of the kind Trump himself employs, most notably projection. Placed in this situation, individuals seek out the kind of care they associate with more primitive states of being and relating, which is the kind of care provided by a relationship with a powerful and all-knowing parental figure ready and able to satisfy our needs. Whether the setting is our families, our work organizations, or public life, the consequences of regression are likely to be significant and problematic.
As the Trump experience has made clear, nothing is more damaging than a president who always acts on impulse, and only on impulse, a president for whom painful emotions are so intense that they cannot be contained. In so far as Trump has policies, they are little more than the shape his impulses take when he exercises his power to act on them.
At the level of social and political processes, it is not only the capacities of office holders that matter, structures and institutions can also play an important role in containing emotion and creating space for thinking about problems as a way of determining what are the central causal factors and what are the best policies for dealing with them. Here, government functions as the “organ of collective thought” to borrow a phrase from the sociologist Emile Durkheim. Regression to primitive mental processes promotes a movement to replace institutions and the deliberation that goes on within them by acts of will and the exercise of power. Distrust of structure and process is well expressed in hostility toward institutions and norms and the endless repetition of the idea that we must get rid of the “establishment” or the “deep state.” Driven by this internal situation, individuals conclude that what we need is not good institutions but good people. And, if we cannot have good people, we have no choice but to vent our aggression through destruction of institutions that represent the exercise of a capacity we do not have: the capacity to delay action, turn inward, and think about what to do.
I think it is important to emphasize that moving away from judgements about policy on the basis of morality and moving in the direction of thinking as an alternative does not exclude ideals from guiding policy making. As it turns out, there is an important ideal built into the rejection of the older binary method of decision-making. This is the ideal of containment and deliberation itself. Containment is not simply a means to finding better policy, it can also be the goal of policy. In other words, the ideal is to have a society in which individuals have the capacity and opportunity to turn inward and process their responses to others, a society in which fear of being left helpless in the face of need is not an ever-present danger that intensifies anxiety to the point that management of emotion internally is not possible.
In light of this, we might consider the possibility that there is a place for character in politics if by character we have in mind the capacity to contain emotion and act on a different basis, one that calls on delay and deliberation. Rather than telling people “If you are not angry, you are not paying attention,” we might tell them: if you cannot contain your anger, you cannot pay attention. If we link character to paying attention, then it can have a place in a politics that is not dominated by the struggle over where the badness lies.
References
Bai, M. (20200 “Voters know Trump isn’t just a bad president. He’s a bad person. The Washington Post, October 9, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/09/voters-know-trump-isnt-just-bad-president-hes-bad-person/, retrieved 10/11/2020.
Bion, W. (1967 A Theory of Thinking. In W. Bion, Second Thoughts (London: Karnac Books, originally published 1962)
Durkheim, E. (1958) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Glencoe IL: The Free Press.