Once we’ve taken off our jerseys and decided that the team isn’t our priority, what’s next? What happens when we attempt to actually leave the playing field in pursuit of something larger? If the primary desire is no longer to win, what is there? If we aren’t a member of the team, who are we? If we take off the jersey, what will we find underneath?
The answer to all these questions comes down to one fundamental question: Why? Why do I care? Why is an issue important to me? Why do I support this policy? What outcome am I actually looking for? Why do I support this candidate? Why have I held on tightly to this position?
Leaving these questions unasked has left a void. It has allowed us to let politicians, issues, and controversies stand in for our values, resulting in disconnection from our fellow citizens and from ourselves. Political parties have become the cause rather than the effect of values for many of us. This is, to think of it biblically, like building our houses on sand. Our values are the rocks that should serve as our foundation—helping us weather all the controversy, change, and challenges of current events. From those rocks, we can construct policy positions, find our ways into parties that most closely align with those policy positions, and test our parties and candidates against those values.
Too many of us are skipping those steps and substituting the parties’ values for our own in the name of winning numbers games to “take control of the House” or “start a blue wave.” Beth loves the television show Survivor but worries that we’re starting to think of voting in the same bare terms that Survivor contestants use to “make sure our alliance has the numbers.” Our driving force shouldn’t be ensuring that a particular party controls a particular wing of government. Our driving force should be the values that are most important to us in living in community with other people.
When we take off our jerseys, we can start to see parties as they are: collections of policy positions animated by political personalities. We start to see how we as citizens and a country use them as cheap imitations of core values, how we use them as a shortcut for our own soul-searching and analysis. This is evident particularly with presidential candidates who become the embodiment of their political parties and their party members’ values. The GOP isn’t the party of small government. It’s the party of Reagan. And Democrats’ idolization of Obama stretched so far as to become the entire identity of certain groups inside the party, like the “Obama Bros.”
We understand feeling the pull of certain political personalities, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Sarah dedicated a year of her life to working for Hillary Clinton in 2007 and makes no apologies for her devotion. Beth snapped a photograph of Sarah weeping in excitement as Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 in Philadelphia. The photo beautifully reflects how profoundly impacted and deeply inspired we can feel when we gravitate to certain political personalities. But it’s one thing to be a fan of politicians; it is another to become a follower. Followers substitute political figures’ judgment for their own, excuse inexcusable behavior, and often accept unacceptable versions of events simply to toe the line with their preferred representatives. Politicians shouldn’t determine our positions and values. Our values should determine the policies and politicians we support. When we don’t understand our “why”—the values behind our positions—we are too easily tempted to follow our confirmation bias down an amoral or immoral black hole of support for politicians who simply don’t deserve it.
Another easy shortcut we use for our values is issues—particularly controversial social issues. Even when we fundamentally misunderstand issues, we hold fast to them as though they are critical expressions of our morality. Education Next (EdNext), an education policy journal, conducts an annual poll. Their findings regarding Common Core State Standards are an excellent manifestation of our abandoning the why and using policy positions as substitutes for our values. In 2012 EdNext asked about Common Core State Standards, which are intended to establish consistent educational objectives in all US states. That year, 90 percent of those polled supported the standards.1 By 2016 only half of respondents supported Common Core—a dramatic decline. However, when EdNext asked about “the use of the same standards across states” without using the actual term “Common Core,” two-thirds of respondents said they approved. In both political parties, the description of Common Core polled higher than the term “Common Core,” and the difference was even more dramatic among Republicans.2 EdNext’s polling shows that we aren’t having conversations that lead to a deep understanding of why we oppose Common Core. We fundamentally don’t understand what Common Core is.
Of course, these types of policy conversations are practically absent from the national conversation, because there’s no need to talk about specific policy if your why is advancing your political party at the other party’s expense. The Tyndall Report tracks each of the major networks’ nightly news broadcasts and tallies the total amount of time spent on substantive policy discussions during elections. In 2008, news programs dedicated 220 minutes to policy. In 2012, the amount of time had dropped to 114 minutes. By October 2016, a mere 32 minutes were dedicated to in-depth discussion of policy—both foreign and domestic.3 In December 2016, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy noted that 10 percent of total press coverage during the election focused on policy.4 Candidates are tracking this trend. Despite Hillary Clinton being a self-identified policy wonk, only 25 percent of Clinton’s more than $1 billion of ads discussed policy—compared to the traditional 40 percent from past presidential candidates.5
We have allowed real dialogue about the role of government and substantive discussions about solutions to our most pressing problems to become extinct. We should not be okay with that. How can we move forward in a fruitful way without taking the time to think and converse on a deeper level? We have to figure out why we care about abortion or why Obamacare ignites our rage. We have to examine our blind support for the social safety net and our mistrust of government. We have to ask ourselves hard questions about the role of our military and when foreign aid is appropriate. We have to delve deep into the issues so that we can find the values lurking below the surface, our whys.
Your why is often closely connected to your identity, loved ones, life experiences, and traditions. We are not asking you to change those things, to give up your fundamental values. On the contrary, we’re asking you to embrace those values more wholeheartedly and to hold your parties and representatives to higher standards. We are asking you (1) to be clear about what your fundamental values are, and (2) to be clear about why you have arranged your politics around those values as you have. Why does a party that speaks to your values on one particular issue of importance inform all your other policy positions? Why does that issue occupy such a place of importance to you?
We have to let go of the idea that there is too much at stake or that one issue is too important to honestly and realistically question our positions on other issues. Abandoning our whys and allowing politicians or single-policy goals to stand in for our values keeps the stakes too high. It means we can never focus on a bigger perspective where values such as liberty and equality are dynamically playing out across our communities and country—instead we must be willing to sacrifice everything for this election or that legislative fight that has come to represent all we hold dear.
But, in theory, we live in a democracy for reasons that are more fundamental and enduring than taking “control” of the Supreme Court or changing certain laws. It’s important to ask ourselves what we value about America. When we frame up our participation in a democracy, what core beliefs matter to us? It might sound basic to start naming values like liberty, equality, and justice. However, without these fundamentals, our government has become rudderless. Our Congress acts like a business or nonprofit with no mission statement; short-term revenue in the form of reelection next November becomes the goal, and no one ever asks, “Reelection in service of what?” Defining our values allows us to move past a transactional view of politics, which has us too focused on maintaining our ground, and instead gives us plenty of opportunities to look at issues with fresh eyes, trained on the things we hold most dear rather than clouded by old allegiances.
Getting to these fundamental whys can involve difficult introspection. When we name our values clearly and start to test issues and candidates against those values, sometimes ideas and people we have vigorously supported will fail those tests. Sometimes we find ourselves feeling critical of people we’re accustomed to defending. Sometimes it makes us realize that we don’t have enough information to test a policy or person against our values. And sometimes it requires us to think differently about the experiences in our lives that form the basis of our values. That can be uncomfortable, and it can leave us feeling vulnerable and afraid of being exploited.
But finding our why is essential. Using “winning” as our why isn’t working for our country, our parties, our politicians, or ourselves.
• • •
Beth attended an event not long ago with people she loves very much. She sat on the floor playing with her younger daughter, who preferred reading books to playing with the other kids. Adults in the room, munching on carrot sticks and sausage balls, started talking about doctor’s appointments, various maladies, and prescription drugs. Eventually health insurance came up, and the uncomfortable dance of talking without “getting political” commenced.
You’ve probably had this experience. It’s hard to talk about health care because very few of us can get to a why at the core of a national debate. If we have a serious health issue or love someone with a serious health issue, it’s hard to see past mounting bills, long waiting-room visits, and the fears that accompany illness. If we are relatively healthy, perhaps we think mostly about our premiums and our taxes. But these are concerns, not values from which good policy can spring.
Since the Clinton administration, we’ve been debating health care in extreme terms without making material progress on the cost of care, the outcomes of care, and a sustainable system for access to care. We keep arguing. Meanwhile premiums continue to rise. Health insurers continue to consolidate. Too many of our citizens do not have consistent and affordable access to high-quality health care. Nearly everyone laments the experience of being a patient in America. And yet we struggle to come to the table and have thoughtful, civil discussions on what to do about the problem.
During 1993 and 1994, the Health Insurance Association of America spent well over eight figures on the “Harry and Louise ads,” depicting a futuristic couple grappling with the fallout from a government health-care takeover.6 One such ad said ominously, “If we let the government choose, we lose.”7 Those ads appear quaint compared to the vitriol that followed when President Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “Obamacare,” as Republicans derisively branded it, drew hundreds of Tea Party activists to town hall meetings. At one such event, the father of a man with cerebral palsy accused Democratic representative John Dingell of “order[ing] a death sentence” for his son.8 On August 7, 2009, former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin shared a Facebook post containing what would become a central talking point in the health-care debate:
As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.9
Despite Palin’s statement becoming PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year,10 the “death panels” talking point stuck. Americans across the country railed against what they believed was a government that would literally choose who received critical treatments and who didn’t. The length and complexity of the Affordable Care Act didn’t help a bitterly partisan divide over the bill (neither did Nancy Pelosi’s often-quoted-out-of-context statement that Congress needed to pass the bill so that the Americans could see what’s in it outside the “fog of controversy”).
It seemed that the Obamacare protests and outrage had to be the pinnacle of polarized discourse. Yet a few years later, when congressional Republicans and the Trump administration set out to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Americans defended the ACA with a similar existential fury. In July 2017 a group of health activists bused protestors to the homes of senators Rob Portman and John Boozman. Disability advocates were arrested for staging a “die-in” in the Capitol building, and images of police officers handcuffing and removing individuals with physical disabilities flooded the media.
We are what we practice, and in America, we have practiced bitter partisan debates carried out in the most extreme terms possible—all framed in the context of a single question: Should health insurance be administered primarily by the federal government or not?
Coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, we knew we had very different answers to that question. Sarah brought absolute conviction in the Affordable Care Act and was open to it as a first step toward a single-payer system, in which taxes finance a single public system that provides essential health care to all residents. Sarah also felt that the profit motives of insurance and pharmaceutical companies were skewing the entire health-care system in ways that disadvantaged everyone. In her mind, a purely market-based solution to situations in which a vast majority of Americans don’t “shop” around (or, as she says, no one searches for the cheapest ambulance before they call 911) had created a system rife for exploitation. Beth, on the other hand, had real problems with the ACA, viewing it as federal overreach—a massive expansion of bureaucracy that had been ill conceived and poorly executed. But she felt guarded coming into the discussion, having too frequently experienced Democrats discussing any objection to the ACA as greedy, shameful, and even wishing for poor people to die.
We wondered how we might find any common ground and carry out a productive conversation. Starting with why was key. We decided to dive into the emotional and spiritual issues at the core of questions about health care, rather than starting and getting stuck on health insurance. It was difficult to unpack our values around health care (and it’s an ongoing discussion to which we often return), but it has taught us two very important things: (1) we have more agreement than disagreement, and (2) substantially improving health care in America requires a much broader discussion than whether the federal government has a role to play in administering health insurance.
• • •
Returning to Sarah Palin’s “death panels” for a moment offers a road map—not to good policy, but to good conversation. Why is the conversation on health care so emotionally charged? This debate represents different values for different groups. Almost all of us approach this debate with our values wrapped in an enormous amount of fear about our bodies, our families, and our economic security (and, deep down, probably death). Given that fear is not a prescription for problem-solving, we decided to approach the values underlying health care first.
The principal value that Sarah was bringing to health-care discussions was fairness. She saw the massive profits on one end of the system and the massive costs borne on the other and couldn’t help but feel frustration and anger. She felt genuine empathy for all Americans and didn’t want any family to have to choose between a doctor’s visit and groceries. She didn’t want any family to be bankrupted by an illness, and she didn’t want any parent to worry that the treatment a child needed was unaffordable. Sarah’s compassion led her to prioritize the issue of affordable care—or the absence of it—and she viewed it as a problem requiring the strength and resources of the federal government, which, for all its flaws, is not driven by profit.
The principal value that Beth was bringing to health-care discussions was federalism. She worried about how a nationalized health-care system could respond to specific needs state by state and how moving in that direction might impact other rights. In our home state of Kentucky, Beth had observed the difficulty state legislators had in dealing with requirements and resources for hospitals in rural versus urban and suburban areas. She feared that the raging debates over funding for abortion and contraception—as well as debates on other charged issues impacting women’s health and transgender health care—would escalate further if taxpayer funding underwrote everyone’s health care. She also saw the federal government as incapable of effectively administering health plans. How could a federal insurance program quickly respond to changes in the delivery of care? How could patient data be protected in such a system?
When we stepped back from the “how” (federal intervention or the private system of insurance), we found that our whys were identical. Both of us wanted high-quality health care at affordable prices for all Americans. Like Sarah, Beth didn’t want anyone to suffer from inadequate care, and she didn’t want families to have to make excruciating decisions because of injury or illness. As we discussed this topic, the parable of the good Samaritan kept coming up for Beth. How could she reconcile her beliefs about what a federal system can and can’t accomplish with her deeply held conviction that we are all here to be neighbors to one another—that we are all to stop on the path without excuses, carry the sick to places of healing, and pay for that care with quiet, generous hearts?
Knowing that we wanted affordable care for everyone, we decided next to talk about what that care actually looked like—a question we both felt was ignored in most health-care policy enacted in the past several decades. We found that we wanted a system dictated by patient values rather than by “what my insurance will cover.” We found that the imbalance of power between the medical community and the patient bothered us both tremendously. We found that we weren’t just bothered by the cost of care, but also by the quality of care in the American health-care system. We also both realized our perspectives were significantly informed by our experiences with maternity care and end-of-life decisions.
Throughout our pregnancies, we’d had the resources to do enormous amounts of research. Beth always tells people that she studied harder for labor than she did for two bar exams, and between us, we have a library on pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. We realized that what insurance covers for pregnancy and birth didn’t always align with our values. We wanted to be treated like pregnant women going through a natural, healthy human condition instead of patients presenting with an illness. Sarah wanted to have her children at home (so did Beth, but that’s a story for another day). We both wanted to have our children with as few interventions as possible. When Sarah dealt with a miscarriage, she wanted to discuss as many options as possible and deal with that loss as a loss, rather than as a condition requiring treatment. When Beth’s baby was breech in month nine, she wanted to talk about options to move the baby rather than scheduling a C-section.
We both ultimately had births without pain medication and with healthy children—but it required us to employ our educational and financial resources. We were able to pay out of pocket for chiropractic care, massage therapy, doulas, and midwives. We were able to advocate for ourselves using our training as lawyers when we disagreed with doctors’ recommendations. This was a springboard of serious agreement for us. We found common ground around the principle that a woman shouldn’t need a law degree, research abilities, and disposable income to have a positive pregnancy and birth experience. We also had an important realization. Because we approached our pregnancies and births as a part of life instead of as pathology, they cost our insurers substantially less. What impact might it make if our health-care system broadly empowered women to understand their options and make decisions about maternity care?
Instead care is seen as something to consume, not something to engage in. In America more care is always better care. This phenomenon seems to create both a culture of scarcity and a culture that is overprescribed and overtreated. We constantly worry about whether we’ll be able to pay for the care we need, while at the same time defining “need” very broadly. We’ve determined that if we have any symptoms, they must be treated with the maximum care available. In his article “Overkill,” Atul Gawande wrote:
In 2010, the Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that waste accounted for thirty percent of health-care spending, or some seven hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, which was more than our nation’s entire budget for K-12 education. The report found that higher prices, administrative expenses, and fraud accounted for almost half of this waste. Bigger than any of those, however, was the amount spent on unnecessary healthcare services. Now a far more detailed study confirmed that such waste was pervasive.11
Gawande explained the prevalence of overtesting and the two disturbing outcomes it creates: (1) heightened levels of cancer in the population because we’re conducting so many forms of radiation imaging, and (2) overdiagnosis—that is, correctly diagnosing issues in the body that would never have manifested in significant ways absent their discovery and unnecessarily treating those issues.
We can relate to Gawande’s findings. Beth had to fight with a hospital to release her daughter Jane three days after she was born. The hospital pediatrician wanted to keep Jane multiple nights following her birth because her bilirubin levels were slightly elevated. When Beth asked for specifics, she learned that the pediatrician was using bilirubin levels for a premature baby as his baseline. Jane had been born fourteen days after her estimated due date. When Beth insisted on signing an “against medical advice” form to be released, the nursing staff tried to persuade her otherwise. It wasn’t until she shared that she was a lawyer and fully understood the ramifications that they made arrangements for both Beth and Jane to go home. Beth immediately took Jane to the physician who would be Jane’s long-term pediatrician. That physician was astonished and annoyed that Jane and Beth had been hospitalized for so long for no real reason. Beth (under her high-deductible plan) and her health insurance company incurred several thousand dollars in costs for unnecessary treatment. She also lost skin-to-skin time with Jane because the physician insisted that Jane be placed under lights and wear goggles. And the entire family experienced the discomfort, intrusion, and inconvenience of an extra hospital stay. We wish this experience wasn’t so disturbingly common.
This phenomenon of overdiagnosis and overtreatment helps explain the confounding statistic that the United States spends more on health care than any other country (whether you measure that spending per capita or as a percentage of overall wealth). On average other countries spend about half as much as the United States spends, and that gap has been steadily widening every year since 1980.12 Despite this spending, our outcomes are not better than countries under other health-care systems. We have higher rates of hospitalization for preventable diseases than comparable countries; higher rates of medical, medication, or lab errors or delays than comparable countries; and slower rates of access to doctors or nurses than comparable countries.13
Taking all the information available to us, we agreed that Americans are probably receiving too much care. We recognize that is a hard message, especially for anyone who has dealt with or is currently enduring a significant medical issue. We aren’t trying to demonize doctors or patients. We appreciate medical professionals and are thankful for the research and tools they bring to the table when those tools are needed. We don’t want anyone to go without the care they need. But we do think it’s important for patients and the medical community to discuss values around health care.
In addition to thinking that Americans are probably receiving too much health care, we found agreement on other issues that increase costs. We think it would be helpful under any health insurance system for prices to be presented to patients in writing in advance of treatments in non-emergency situations. While you can’t shop for an ambulance, there are plenty of circumstances while seeking health care where price shopping would be appropriate. Congress has required restaurants to put calorie counts on menus, yet during a doctor’s visit a patient might be escorted to an X-ray room after complaining of minor pain with no opportunity to consider the costs. More transparency in pricing is not a new idea, and it’s one we think should be seriously considered in any health-care reform efforts.
We also believe that we’re defining health care too narrowly in large part due to insurance companies. The push for greater wellness under the Affordable Care Act and many company policies has largely been about preventative medicine (i.e., receiving an annual physical, mammogram, etc.). These are important first steps. What would it be like, though, if our culture embraced greater prevention in the form of regular therapy, massage, acupuncture, and other forms of treatment that reduce stress? After all, since the 1980s, we’ve been talking about stress as an American epidemic, responsible for back pain, persistent headaches, circulatory problems, and increased violence.14 Rethinking the ways that we support ourselves and one another is a critical step toward reducing disease and conditions that consume enormous healthcare resources today.
Having defined some of our values and concerns around health care, we then were able to have a more productive conversation about health insurance and the government’s role in the health insurance system. In this conversation, we agreed not to talk about the Affordable Care Act as an all-or-nothing proposition. We frequently analogize the ACA to the woods. The woods are neither good nor bad; there are beautiful trees, dangerous animals, singing birds, and thick areas of brush that are difficult to navigate. That’s how the ACA is. The legislation spanned roughly 2,300 pages when it was passed, not counting more than 20,000 pages of regulations later promulgated to effectuate it. There is too much going on to say that it’s all good or all bad.
We disagreed about the individual mandate but found lots of space for agreement. Because we wanted greater transparency in pricing, more flexibility in what we spend health care dollars on, and more accessible health care for everyone, we agreed that the ACA’s individual marketplace concept is a good step toward unhooking health insurance from employment. We also agreed that the ACA’s emphasis on employer-sponsored health plans is the wrong direction in health-care law, that it undermines the individual marketplaces, and that overall it works against the goals of reducing costs and increasing access.
We saw employer-sponsored health plans as relics of the past that bear no relevance to the modern economy, that limit choice and transparency, and that are a lose-lose proposition for both employers and employees. Employers continue to deal with rising costs of premiums. Employees often complain about the options and costs of employer-sponsored plans or feel trapped in positions because of their plans. Meanwhile, insurers are not serving or negotiating directly with health-care consumers. Their customers are employers. As a number of conservative commentators, and particularly Avik Roy, have pointed out, this limits competitive pressure on insurers in terms of both pricing and service:
More portability wouldn’t only liberate workers, it would also rearrange incentives for insurers. If an insurer thought it might keep a 25-year-old patient for another 40 years, it would want to work with the patient to be healthier, with free checkups, a deeper discount on cholesterol medicine, fitness programs etc.15
Our sticking point remained the role of the federal government. Beth understood the individual mandate but thought it was government overreach. Sarah thought a single-payer system would solve the problem of employer-based health care, but we both worried about what would happen in a single-payer system in terms of administration, women’s health care, and the quality of care. Breaking down our areas of agreement and disagreement did not make health-care policy less complex. It did make discussing health-care policy productive and manageable. The two of us aren’t going to solve this issue, but we think we did solve the problem of shaming and blaming other people about health care to a point that closes off fertile ground for consensus policy proposals.
• • •
Fortunately, we aren’t required to figure out a comprehensive legislative or cultural fix for our health-care system. We are simply here to start that conversation afresh. Beth has conceded that “keeping government out of health care” is not a value for her. It’s fine to bring the framework of federalism to these discussions, but it cannot be the only consideration. Sarah has conceded that a single-payer system would not solve every problem, and while it might remain her preferred course of action, she sees possibilities for improving the system overall that stop short of single-payer. And we’ve both learned more about our own values and each other’s values when it comes to health care. Without examining why we want health care to be accessible and affordable, we can’t get to how in an accurate and complete way. Once we understand our why, then we can reach the how.
Finding our whys also helped illuminate for us the importance of individuals and institutions closely examining a number of positions relevant to health care. The “death panels” controversy has helped us understand that many Americans are concerned about losing the ability to make health-care decisions—which is a fair concern, but it’s not accurate and complete unless we talk about the power of insurance companies. It’s also not an accurate and complete concern without examining other positions we stake out that impact health care—particularly issues of life, death, and identity.
Anytime we talk about our values, we are drawn back to our faith and to institutions of faith. We’re concerned that the voice of the church in America has been devoted almost entirely to a few divisive issues: restricting access to abortion and birth control, preventing assisted suicide, and limiting the medical options and protections available to LGBTQ+ people. Because these issues have received a megaphone from the Christian right, the church has, for many people, become a caricature of itself and alienated a huge population of people. Shouldn’t the good Samaritan parable (and its corollaries in other faiths) guide our why on health care? How would the world view the church in particular if it heard people of faith express an interest in ensuring access to good-quality health care at fair prices? As we’ve realized, we can lead with this common why and still reach vastly different conclusions about policy. We can lead with our values about caring for our neighbors without reaching the conclusion that there is only one right way to get there.
Leading with why should influence the how in terms of both the substantive outcomes we advocate and, more importantly, the way we participate in the process. When we lead with the values that inform our faith—compassion, forgiveness, and love—we enter into even the most emotionally charged discussions with a new perspective. We might not change our minds about the outcomes, but we can change our conversations by listening with openness and receptivity to those who think differently than we do. The two of us can change our discourse by expressing our intentions, rather than allowing those intentions to be distorted by partisan assumptions. Leading with why can also change our hearts. We find over and over that defining our values reminds us that political engagement is not the only and certainly not the ultimate vehicle for expressing those values, a subject we’ll return to throughout this book.
This philosophy is not confined to people of faith. Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on leading with why has been viewed more than thirty-six million times. In it, he explained that inspirational leaders work from a model that he encapsulates as the “golden circle.” In the center of the circle is “why.” According to Sinek, truly great leaders clearly identify, communicate, and act based on the reason their business or organization exists. “Why” is always propelling “how” and “what.” Sinek also noted that “why” should be expressed as a verb:
For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea—we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.16
This instruction is helpful in framing any political debate. Whether the motto is “Love thy neighbor” or “Treat others as they want to be treated,” we can all tap into a personal value that can guide a more inquisitive, productive discussion about any political topic.
Inquisitive and productive discussions can be the building blocks for a new kind of politics. One of the reasons that we’re able to talk to each other, fully aware of our many differences in thought, is that we trust each other’s why. We trust that we are both doing our best to love our neighbors. We trust that we both love our country and want to do what is best for the country and all its citizens.
We trust each other to care about “the least of these” and to think carefully about what data and research tell us about the effectiveness of different systems. That means we come to a health-care discussion or any other policy discussion trusting that we both want good outcomes for everyone. When we strip away the demonizing intentions, we can move our conversations out of the mud and into terrain that might help us start solving problems.
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
We find that leading with why in every aspect of our lives has been transformative. Our whys as people of faith are easily sourced from the commandment to love God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength. Our whys as parents—developing people who will be kind, respectful neighbors who think independently and contribute to their communities—inform how we spend our time and how we raise our children. Our whys in marriage—cultivating lifelong, loving relationships with equal partners that make both partners better people—inform how we interact with our spouses. Our whys in a podcast—modeling the conversation about politics we want to see happening in our country and inspiring others to engage in that conversation—guide our editorial and business decisions. Once you tap into “why” as a decision-making tool, you’ll never go back.
1. Why do you care about politics? If that question seems too big to answer (and if that’s the case, we love it!), take it in small pieces. Why are you reading this book? Why do you watch or read the news?
2. What values are most important to you? Choose two or three that really define either your faith or your personal ethics. Can you, as Simon Sinek suggests, frame those values as verbs?
3. Choose a policy issue that has been difficult for you to discuss with others. Consider that issue in light of the value statements (your “whys”) you just constructed. Are you approaching the issue from your whys? Are you approaching discussions about the issue from your whys? If the answer to either question is no, how might you rethink your approach without rethinking your whys?