Seeing Differences as ‘Control’

Terry H. Schwadron

April 18, 2024

It turns out — once again — that we apparently care more about control than about the actual substance of our disputes.

Whether we see it in the constant testing in Congress or in the courtroom hosting the Donald Trump trial, in international diplomacy or even within institutions like NPR — all of which present very different challenges — the common factor is a desire to control power and image even more than deal with the substantive issues prompting the current issues.

In Congress, the issue of supporting military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan has turned again, inevitably, into a power struggle between Republican hard-liners and Speaker Mike Johnson, a hard-liner himself who somehow recognizes that resolution of these matters may require working with Democrats in the next few days.

Doing so, as Johnson has done twice over his most right-wing cohorts, may prompt a no-confidence vote in his speakership.  While Johnson has not been a brilliant House Speaker, a vote to vacate Johnson’s ability to keep the job will catapult the Congress into another political freefall that will mean the institution cannot officially act.

We’re watching as Republicans turn increasingly to Trump to tell the House what to do, and then as Trump tells it to take simultaneously contradictory stands. The vote on foreign aid was being held up because there was no agreement on an immigration bill; the immigration bill was ordered killed because it might make President Joe Biden, who had bowed to most Republican demands, look as if he is acting to solve border issues.  The Speaker went to Mar-a-Lago to receive an apparent Trump blessing, even as Trump allies in the House were calling for Johnson’s ouster.

None of it seems really to be about the issues at hand. Rather they seem to concern who’s calling the shots — something that most voters don’t care about.

Redefining Conflict as Control

Because there are technical deadlines and because Iran chose to send 300 drones to swarm attack Israel, there likely will be a vote on one of several plans that Johnson has been trying, even if futilely, to line up for his House Republican House majority. When one version passes, it will be as the result of support of Democrats.

And there’s the political rub. Our insistence on winning means throwing out bipartisanship even if there are enough points of agreement to look like movement towards resolution of an issue.

Months before the November election, the dominant theme is about twisting facts, arguments, visions of the country, even democracy itself to match the power of who controls rather than what we’re seeking from our government.

The control issue is at play daily now in the Manhattan courtroom where prosecutors will try 34 felony counts against Trump   The reported dramas this week over a muttering ex-president uncomfortable as a defendant with rules have mostly centered around various procedural matters that are covered not as legal matters, but of whether Trump or Judge Juan Merchan is in control of courtroom demeanor, scheduling, and the procedures for drafting jurors.  Trump prefers to see all his court cases as a personal struggle with Biden, as if it is Biden who created and pushes a New York district attorney office and multiple grand juries.

Internationally, whether and how Israel retaliates for the Iranian attack, is being depicted as a control match between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Biden — and other Western leaders. The closer truth may be that Netanyahu is overly tied to his own right-wing political coalition that defies international calls for less hawkish war plans.

Even at NPR, where a single editor has gone public with complaints about his perceptions of political tinge in programming, the issue finally being embraced is less about the programming and more about whether the individual or management is in control over public statements about the network.

Human Need for Control

We have an innate tendency to translate public policy issues into personality conflicts. Maybe it is our need to simply complexities or balancing into understandable personal contests.

The bigger truths behind most of these is that they defy definition as personality clashes.

A 2010 National Institutes of Health article notes that “belief in one’s ability to exert control over the environment and to produce desired results is essential for an individual’s well-being. It has been repeatedly argued that the perception of control is not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity.”

Whether the Speaker is named Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, John Boehner, or Paul Ryan, we’ve watched this very same struggle from the right-wing back bench play out before. It is about a perceived sense of control.

Similarly, we’ve seen the same in most venues where Trump’s obsessive sense of dominance conflicts with procedural rules or traditions, just as we have seen wars and clashes international or local bypass the public relations requirements of figureheads.

The perception of control issues as dominant is most annoying because it gets in the way of exploring solutions.

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