Regaining the trust of 70m US voters, how can they be all that they can be?

The need for a New Deal and new thinking to unify a great country.

‘Men on Girder’ Rockefeller Centre NYC 1932 Classic picture of American workers. How did their descendants vote?

Joe Biden’s inauguration 20th January showed us the decency of a country we love and trust and so moving to see this celebration of its democracy. America inspired me as a 17 year old exchange student and I owe it much. But that day I felt a pang of regret as well as relief.

That’s because there was a missing group who felt they did not matter and that their views and lifestyles were out of line with today’s America. Yet within my lifetime this was a group that showed America at its best – robust, hardworking, forthright, confident, proud to be American and no longer teaming masses yearning to be free. Communism never had a chance with them. 70 million obviously covers a wide range and of course they are not all fascists and racists, but it will include many whose anger has lowered respect for democracy. Violent extremists will be a minority, but it is their behaviour which has created the reputation of this vast protest group. However, thinking you can ignore these millions is no way to bring them back into a truly united country which is where they were.

Their ancestors
The picture above – ‘Men on Girder’- makes me wonder what the descendants of that and earlier generations are thinking today? Their ancestors built America, worked the land, drove the trucks, manned the assembly lines and were parents of great people like President Harry Truman and Sidney Weinberg of Goldman Sachs. Writers like John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Heller and Clifford Odets described them. Some of them, in WW2, died on the Normandy beaches of Utah and Omaha. Thousands more in the Pacific, later in Korea and a high % of the 57,000 American war dead in Vietnam.

Do you agree with the line ‘There are no bad men only bad officers’? If you do then ask yourself why have recent leaders, not only in the USA, been so blind to the emergence of discontent and disengagement among millions isolated due to technological change, poor training, lack of opportunity and an increasingly wide gap, both economically and culturally, between them and the rest of America? Small wonder then that this group were so easily lit up in anger by a President who failed to be a President for all Americans. This was once again confirmation of the old line ‘A riot is the sound of people who have not been listened to’ and is so often music to the ears of would-be dictators, tyrants and cyber war mongers as well as, in time, their death knell.

What to do now?
Understand them, respect them and inspire them. Include them in a new deal greater and deeper psychologically than FDR’s. Lectures and arrogance will only harden their hatred of an elite they feel so distanced from. One personal memory maybe relevant. In the 1980s I ran an advertising agency in London and our partners in NY, NW Ayer, worked on US Army recruitment. That demonstrated an understanding of what potential enlisted men in America were looking for – recognition, experience and development. It led with the line ‘Be all that you can be’ -a message which dug deep into the realities of what American youth most sought – self-improvement and inclusivity, truly a part of the American Dream. It reflected changes in the military experience. No message can bring change unless it is alongside tangible action and new behaviours.

There’s a lesson here for so many employers. I have just read the depressing 2021 annual Edelman Trust barometer report highlighting massive declines in trust across Governments, NGOs and the Media. Business fares better and CEOs are now expected to be agents for change in society at large – on inequalities, education and the environment. Business leaders cannot ignore signs of distrust and disengagement in any audience. Neither today, in time, can any Government.

Simon Barrow