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Government and politics in America have become an epic drama that directly affects American workplaces. Therefore, the time-tested approach of tuning out the political noise isn’t an option for workplace leaders. The federal government is terminating grants, loans, and contracts for state, local, and private organizations. The feds are closing or downsizing offices that state, local, and private organizations have long relied on to do their work. Those organizations could soon face investigations by federal officials under civil rights or national security law. The federal government launched this series of immense, far-reaching actions with, let’s say, an untested theory of existing statutes and court precedents.

By the time the resulting litigation concludes, the results on the ground will be a fait accompli, virtually impossible to undo. The federal offices, workforces, and money might be reconstituted, in some form, eventually. They won’t be the same. Neither will anything else about how organizations function in America.

Trump supporters, I gather, believe the result will be a lean, mean government, and a dynamic private sector unleashed to build prosperity, and a golden future. I wouldn’t bet on any of that, because the wrecking ball approach guarantees a backlash that will never end — except by crushing it, which will cause backlash or authoritarian transformation of its own.

How did we get here? The answer is important, because it will suggest something about responses that are possible (or less so).

Organizational leaders need to understand why the big picture events affecting their work are happening. Unfortunately, they don’t have much time for understanding. Every minute of their day is taken up by emails, phone calls, meetings. They can’t just take time off to read oodles of content on politics, economics, society, history, and so on. So they get their understanding of the big picture from life experience, or trusted friends and advisers, or scraps of news. Then they muddle through.

What follows is a sketch, meant to aid in the muddling through, or maybe a prototype for what such a thinking-aid might look like — a basic picture of why things are happening. What I came up with below is already longer than what most organizational leaders have time for. For now it’s the best I’ve got.

For what it’s worth. I’m just some random guy on the internet, not a trusted friend or adviser. I’m hoping to trigger a spark, whatever a reader’s politics and beliefs may be.

To understand the world, data isn’t enough

America got to this dysfunctional time for a lot of reasons, which we could debate forever, but I’ll focus on one of them. We got here because the American workplace became a lot more psychologically dysfunctional over the last 30 years. Or maybe it was always dysfunctional, and the immense changes of the last three decades didn’t deliver on their promise of change. Either way, dysfunction ruled the day.

As I’ll discuss below, four big picture trends broke the psychology of the American workplace, making it seem to function but in fact turning it into a factory for malaise, fear, and resentment. I use the word “workplace” in the singular to stand for all of them. Millions upon millions of workplaces were broken, over the last thirty years. They kept functioning, obviously, but in a state of psychological distress. It’s a short leap from that collective psychological event to the political and social fracturing that we see today.

Here’s an important thing about my argument. It ultimately can’t be quantified. Economic and social data for the last thirty years can be produced, quite reasonably, to show a positive overall picture, of the kind painted by Steven Pinker or Matt Yglesias. Gross domestic product is up, for example, over the long term. Productivity is up, too. When a pollster accosts Americans on the telephone, most of them say, sure, their own, individual life seems pretty good.

The argument I’m making doesn’t live in data. It lives in the other realities that numbers can’t capture, like the everyday measure of place, love, and hope. In just that way, the following four things are real.

1: The pressure cooker of global economics

A capitalist workplace creates competition, inside organizations and between them, to produce positive outcomes for society. The globalized economy engineered after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 put organizations across the planet in competition with each other. Employees and communities had to contend for the best compensation and adapt to accelerating technological change. Some succeeded, others didn’t. The employee who couldn’t keep up and had to be let go isn’t only a statistic. For many such lost souls, a stable, predictable life of decent job, housing, and family was never going to happen. The global workplace told people this insecurity was good for them. The losers resented it. Resentment needs an outlet. It may not show up in opinion polls about politics, but it’s real.

2: Sterile, mechanistic workplace culture

Management theory tells employees they are “human resources.” The verbiage seems appropriate, and no one objects to it. No one objects either to the millions of other bullet points fed to workforces on HR Power Point slides, ever since digitized globalization exploded in the 1990s. The bullets have terms on them like “synergy,” or “bandwidth,” or “interface.” The language is mechanistic because organizations must function as machines, efficient and relentless in the great global game. The language has evolved to include terms like “ally,” “privilege,” and “microaggression,” or “trauma,” “affinity,” and “belonging.” The language serves as lubrication for the local mental parts of the world engine. Human beings sense this treatment, somewhere in the psyche, and they resent it. That’s why changing the jargon doesn’t make the resentment go away.

3: Addiction-based capitalism

Unofficial compensation for employee services takes many forms. Binge-watching on the weekend, for example; or scrolling a smart phone on the couch with a bowl of chips; or getting into online virtual brawls with social media shit-posters; or living for the endorphin rush of the gym. As the science of social media algorithms shows, addiction is quite literally a business model. When it goes awry, you get situations like the opioid epidemic, or online social contagions stoking monetized panic and cult-like frenzy about ideas in medicine, pharmacology, nutrition, exercise, and wellness. Human beings sense that they’ll never keep up, never reach the happy place, but they have no choice but to strive. And they resent it.

4: National management fails upward

After the Soviet menace imploded, the expert, credentialed leadership class in America collectively sought to exploit the dawn of unexpected global tranquility. They made a series of decisions that affected American organizations in various ways.

• The experts consolidated a global economy of workplaces with mechanized cultures fueled by addiction-based capitalism.

• The experts also launched a planet-encompassing war, fought by future members of the American workforce, to crush terrorism and reshape foreign societies to be better behaved.

• The experts deregulated financial and housing markets to unleash economic hyper-growth, for the supposed benefit of the workforce.

• The experts also relied on China as a venue for investment, manufacturing, and exports, plus cheap imports for American organizations and employees.

• The experts declined to regulate technology companies that used addiction to incite lucrative social contagions while also seeming to fuel opportunity and growth in the home and workplace.

These decisions blew up in their designers’ faces. The insecurity of global economics bred prosperity for some, resentment in others. The war on terror annihilated threats but also inflicted traumatic brain injuries on families, chaos on targeted societies, and destabilizing migration across borders. Financial deregulation enriched some but crashed the global economy, instilling more or less permanent economic anxiety in a whole generation. Investment and trade in China enriched some but aggravated economic precariousness for others, while also spawning a hostile military superpower. Technology companies made unprecedented social and economic cooperation possible, but they also stoked fear and rage for profit. Fear and rage became a way of life.

Consequences

The four corrosive psychological forces I described above — global economic pressure, sterile workplace culture, addiction-fueled consumption, and national management failures — combined by 2016 to create an American workforce marinating, to a substantial, ultimately unmeasurable degree, in anxiety and resentment. That helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, triggering panic and contempt in the expert class for the next eight years, as it collectively tried to discredit, disempower, or jail him. The effort failed. Arguably, the effort itself made Trump stronger.

After 2020, the Biden administration tried to immunize the nation against Trump with sweeping domestic reforms on Covid, climate, infrastructure, immigration, and culture war issues, including boutique progressive theories on gender and race. The reforms provoked resentment, not constructive change. The administration framed all of them as a whole-of-government, whole-of-society, all-hands-on-deck-emergency — as something even conservative Americans had no choice but to accept, whether they liked it or not.

This deliberate use of anxiety as a policy tool helped further aggravate resentment in wide swaths of the public against lockdowns, vaccines, prices, crime, homelessness, immigrants, and people on the other side of culture war issues. Resentment and fear continued to rule the workplace. The truth that Republicans exploited these things doesn’t change their reality.

The reality continues to unfold. The federal government under Trump retaliates for what it says was weaponized government under liberals with more weaponization. Democrats haltingly fumble for the usual playbook. They call up media blitzes and street protests, to stoke the resentment and fear for purposes of their own. De-escalation isn’t in the cards, at least for now.

Here’s the thing. Stress sustained over time makes people crazy. They don’t do their best work, make the best decisions, or live their best lives. Creating excessive stress, deliberately or otherwise, is how American workplaces, politics, and government became what they are. Further stress is inevitable at this point, because the whole country has entered the psychological equivalent of war. The war probably has to be waged to a conclusion, one way or another, for the stress to begin to dissipate.

How each side wages that war will matter. Since Inauguration Day, my writing here has blamed the war on Trump and his key advisers, who speak freely of radical social transformation as an end that, basically, justifies the means. But something bigger is going on, transcending either side. Conflict has a logic and a psychology of its own, independent of the reasons cited by combatants. Carried to the end, such logic and psychology simply destroy, as spoken of by students of human conflict from Christ to Clausewitz to Martin Luther King to Renee Girard. You have to define an acceptable end point before it goes that far.

Or you fight for what will be left if you win: freedom in the ruins, as good as nothing — or as good as continents full of corpses can be.

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