When Leaders Follow, Followers Lead
The sorry state of our leadership is yielding unexpected results
“Leaders are as much followers as anything,” former Congressman Adam Kinzinger told Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell on The Focus Group podcast. “Unfortunately, they all followed Kevin McCarthy right off the cliff.”1
This is how Kinzinger summed up one of his most important learnings three years after January 6, when more than 2,000 Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Although most Republican Congressional leaders were initially horrified and condemned the assault, Kinzinger recalls the day when it all changed:
“It was the day [McCarthy] went to Mar-a-Lago. That changed everything. . . That was a signal that Donald Trump has to be our future, and that's when they all came off the rails.
Had they just told the truth and just done what, frankly, their job was to do, we would be in a very different moment.”2
In the weeks between the assault on the Capitol and McCarthy’s Mar-a-Lago trip, what Sarah Longwell dubbed the “Republican Triangle of Doom” had worked its magic:
It is the toxic, symbiotic relationship between voters, elected officials, and the right-wing infotainment media working together to push the [Republican] party further right. Take something like January 6th or the idea the election was stolen.
At first, a portion of the Republican party said, “No, the election wasn’t stolen. It was free and fair, and January 6th was a terrible event.”
Then over time, the triangle of doom works on itself. The right-wing media says, “No, it was Patriots storming the US Capitol, and the election did look like it was stolen.”
That then moves more voters to believe the election was stolen. Voters then put pressure on elected officials, and elected officials come out and say, “January 6th was really just a protest, not an insurrection.” And that confirms it for another group of voters.
Before you know it, you’ve got 70 percent of Republicans believing the 2020 election was stolen, and they’re all reinforcing one another. It’s not just one thing.3
According to Pew Research, our views of Congress, our Presidents, and the Supreme Court have all taken a huge hit. Since 1985, unfavorable views of Congress have almost tripled, going from 26 to 72 percent. Our approval ratings of our current president and his immediate predecessor are lower than any presidents in prior decades. And 54 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the Supreme Court, almost three times worse than the 20 percent rating in the early 1990s. 4
That’s the bad news. The good news?
This sorry state of affairs is prompting more and more people to take the lead on problems we can’t wait for our leaders to solve or doubt they will solve well.
Among those people are three citizens who, along with their citizen-led organizations, are inventing solutions to some of the biggest problems we face as a nation: the misinformation, disinformation, and dispiriting information that pits groups against one another and disables us all.
Sharon McMahon at Sharonsaysso
In a 2022 Atlantic article, Elaine Godfrey recounts how a former high school teacher built an oasis of verifiable information and cross-group learning on Instagram. Her journey is instructive:5
[It] began with a small moment of frustration. It was September 2020, and McMahon had temporarily closed her photography studio because of the pandemic. She was scrolling through Facebook when she noticed that a stranger had responded to a friend’s post with an inaccurate comment. “When the Electoral College meets in D.C., they will look at all the evidence and decide they can’t certify the election,” he’d written. McMahon was instantly annoyed. The Electoral College doesn’t meet all together, and it doesn’t decertify anything. She decided to make a video using props from her photography studio—a ceramic bucket, a wooden box, a basket full of decorative pine cones—to explain how the Electoral College works. Her Instagram followers shared it, and some of their followers did too. McMahon already had a sizable audience thanks to her business—she estimates about 15,000 followers—but after the video, she watched that number spike. She made another video the next week, and a third after that. She described people’s reasons for voting for third parties and the constitutionality of mask mandates. She captioned each video “Completely factual and non-partisan.” She presented serious topics, with a lighthearted tone.
By late October 2020, the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was all-consuming. Emotions were high, and people were dreading what Election Day would bring. So McMahon added a new daily feature to her Stories: a question box asking, “How can I help?” Once her followers started sending in questions, they never stopped.
Since launching SharonSaysSo on Instagram, McMahon has become one of America’s most trusted sources for nonpartisan, factual information. In posts, workshops, book clubs, podcasts, and discussion groups, McMahon invites citizens from disparate groups to scrutinize the information they consume and to think together about our most divisive issues. Her secret sauce is her use of verifiable facts, genuine questions, balanced reasoning, and authentic conversation, offered up in an effort to help, not convince, cajole, or castigate.
This secret sauce has turned toxicity into curiosity, helping over 1.1 million followers see their common humanity and imagine a common path forward. One abortion workshop not meant to change anyone’s mind nonetheless changed some. “I personally believe in the sacredness of life,” a conservative participant told Godfrey afterwards. But “something that was important for me to learn was [that] my personal beliefs shouldn’t trump someone else’s body autonomy.”
It just goes to show what one fed-up citizen can do.
David Bornstein and the Solutions Journalism Network
Similarly fed up, Bornstein founded the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) in 2013 with Courtney E. Martin and Tina Rosenberg to counter the corrosive effects of mainstream news.6
“The animating motto of journalism for much of the 20th century was ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,’” Bornstein recently told In Reality host Eric Schurenberg on his podcast. “We use the light of exposure to kill the germs or to sort out the bad apples of society.”
That premise, says Bornstein, presumes that our institutions are basically sound and healthy, and all we need to do is keep them that way by making improvements around the edges. “It’s essentially an optimization approach,” Bornstein told Schurenberg. “Let’s make sure our government is not corrupt. Let’s make sure our hospitals are doing the right thing. Let’s make sure our schools are actually educating the kids and so forth.”
But that premise breaks down when institutions themselves break down and can no longer address the “challenges of our time,” as Bornstein puts it, “whether it’s global warming, our democracy, or what’s going to happen with artificial intelligence.” Bringing the disinfecting light of media to bear on today’s institutions exposes so many cracks it only leads people to despair—as happened with Bornstein’s dad not too long after his wife died.
“Dave,” his dad confided in a heavy voice during one late night call. “I’m convinced that humans are worse than animals.”
“Dad, are you watching CNN?”
When his dad said “yes,” Bornstein noted how this news-eye view of reality is very skewed. “It’s like looking at the human body as an oncologist,” he analogized. “You’re only looking for something bad.”
Like McMahon, Bornstein was disturbed enough by his dad’s reaction to do something about it. He figured, “We need to report not only how people are causing problems or neglecting problems, but also how people are responding to problems.”
“When you see the whole story, you have a very different idea of the country, you have a very different idea of your neighbors, and you have an opportunity to engage with the world with what we call hope with teeth.”
The insight that people are not getting the whole story stayed with Bornstein long after the call with his dad, eventually becoming the tagline of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). Since its founding in 2013, SJN has taken the lead in training thousands of journalists and advising hundreds of newsrooms on how to tell the whole story.
By focusing on positive deviants who outperform a system’s norm—in a school system, say, or a health care system—they are creating a news filter that ignites people’s energy for change. “When people see better options and better possibilities, it intensifies pressure.” That hope-fueled pressure is leading people in communities around the world to work together to reimagine and reinvent the systems around them. It just goes to show what another fed-up citizen can do.
Patrice O’Neill and Not in Our Town
The dominant news filter today standing between us and reality has a stress-inducing bias: “if it bleeds, it leads.” A 2014 Harvard Public Health study found that reading, watching, or listening to the news is our third biggest stressor out of ten—and this was before the trauma-level stress of the past decade. Small wonder Bornstein’s dad had a heavy heart after watching the news. We all do.
“America is in a united state of stress and disillusionment,” reads the headline of an August 2023 article in The Hill by John Kenneth White who goes on to say:
“Let’s face it. We are a stressed-out country. The COVID-19 pandemic, economic upheavals, racial injustice, gun violence, climate change and political divisiveness have dominated news coverage for years and served as major stressors.” 7
A 2020 study sponsored by the American Psychological Association found that three-quarters of adults said violence and crime were a significant source of stress, with 73 percent agreeing that mass shootings added to their stress levels.
Well, at least we agree on something. The problem is this mounting stress results in a collective sense of helplessness and despair.
A number of filmmakers are taking the lead in changing that result. Among them is independent filmmaker Patrice O’Neill of the Oakland-based Working Group. For the past 30 years, O’Neill and her team have spent their days documenting how communities respond to hateful events, including mass shootings. In each case, they go after a story mainstream media largely ignores:
What happens when the dust settles after a traumatic event? What do people and their communities do? How do they go on?
To find out, O’Neill and Rhian Miller went to Billings, Montana in 1993 to document how ordinary people responded to a spate of hate crimes across the city. That film, called Not in Our Town, was later aired on PBS and shown around the country, launching a nationwide movement by the same name focused on building communities strong enough to overpower hate.8
O’Neill’s 2023 film, Repairing the World, documents how people across the historically divided city of Pittsburgh picked up the shards of their collective trauma after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre and used them to build hundreds of relational bridges across lines of difference. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in the history of the United States, and O’Neill and her team wanted to record the city’s response long after the national press had left town.9
For three years, the film recounts, the people of Pittsburgh repeatedly asked some form of the same question: In a time of division, what will it take for us to stand together and stand up to hate? What can you and I do to overcome hate? Rabbi Ron Symons offered one answer:
We have to redefine the meaning of neighbor. “It’s not just about someone who lives next to you. A neighbor is someone who you actually have a moral responsibility towards and who has a moral responsibility towards you.”
As one national crisis gave way to another from a pandemic to a long-overdue racial reckoning, Pittsburgh had plenty of chances to redefine the meaning of neighbor. Looking back, Wasi Mohamed summed up his experience: “The story of what happened starts with some of the worst pain you can imagine and ends with some of the best and closest relationships I could have ever hoped for.”
Journalist Tony Norman had a similar experience. “The Tree of Life and George Floyd in a very horrific, ironic way made it possible for people to be vulnerable with each other. They forced people to cross bridges that they weren’t comfortable crossing. And once people got into the habit of crossing bridges, you began to see a new spirit emerge.”
So how did Pittsburghers cross bridges so many in our nation fear to cross? “The goal of preventing hate and violence pulls people in,” O’Neill told me in an interview. “It gets them working together.”10
A consistent theme runs through O’Neill’s work: the power generated by citizens when they come together and work toward a common goal. O’Neill and Not In Our Town are leading the way in helping us see that.
Looking for leadership in all the wrong places
All of us long for better leadership, so why can’t we get it? In the film An American President, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offers one answer. In a heated exchange between President Andrew Shepard and Lewis Rothschild, his Assistant for Domestic Policy, Lewis calls on the President to respond to his opponent’s attacks:11
Lewis: People want leadership and in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.
President Shepard: Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.
The leadership polls cited earlier “bring a murky problem into specific relief,” to use Rothschild’s policy-wonk language as the scene opens. Not only do these polls reveal our dissatisfaction with our nation’s leadership, they lay bare our inability to tell the difference between leaders who pursue our best interests as a people and those who cater to our basest instincts in order to satisfy theirs.
That is a problem only we the people can solve.
The three citizens cited here—along with the citizen-led organizations they founded—are all exercising leadership to ensure that you and I can tell the difference.
Let’s follow leaders like these and give them our support.12
Please let us know what this post sparked for you. And if you (or people you know) are taking leadership to help remake the space between us, tell us your story in Comments.
Notes:
“If They Had Just Told the Truth” (Sarah Longwell with Rep. Adam Kinzinger). The Bulwark Podcast, January 6, 2024. Edited for clarity and brevity. Listen to the whole interview at https://rb.gy/n2xlvg
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming
Sarah Longwell in a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, “Explaining ‘the Republican triangle of doom,’” CNN, April 19, 2022. Edited for brevity and clarity. Listen to the whole interview at https://rb.gy/gjghc
“Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics,” Pew Research Center, September 2023 and “Favorable Views of the Supreme Court Fall to Historic Lows,” Pew Research Center, July 2023.
Elaine Godfrey, “Sharon McMahon Has No Use for Rage-Baiting,” Atlantic, June 2022. It’s a great article. Read the whole piece at https://rb.gy/xpav35
Listen to the whole interview on the In Reality podcast at https://rb.gy/4w5yfm
John Kenneth White, “America is in a united state of stress and disillusionment.” The Hill, August 2023.
To learn about Not in Our Town, go to https://www.niot.org/about-us
Repairing the World at https://rb.gy/r3f023
Diana M. Smith, Remaking the Space Between Us. Ballast Books, 2024.
An American President (1995) produced by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin. Watch the entire clip on YouTube at https://rb.gy/ggoy8x. It’s a classic worthy of your time.
Follow these leaders: Sharon McMahon at SharonSaysSo; Solutions Journalism by subscribing to their newsletter https://rb.gy/7xg00r and/or by supporting their efforts by donating https://rb.gy/cr4sjh. And Not in Our Town by becoming an upstander https://rb.gy/17a4vy and/or by supporting their efforts by donating at https://rb.gy/kq4ga2