A Politics of Reactivity, and a Path Toward Repair
Why our politics is stuck in fight-or-flight, and how “adult” leadership can help a nation widen again
If you pay attention to your body while you read the news, you can feel it.
The tightening in the chest. The shallow breath. The reflex to roll your eyes, clench your jaw, pick a side, and brace for impact. That’s not an intellectual response. That’s your nervous system deciding the world isn’t safe.
And the truth is, a lot of our politics is not just “heated debate.” It’s mass dysregulation — a state where the nervous system is so flooded with threat and stress that clear thinking, empathy, and genuine deliberation become nearly impossible. Chronic activation. A culture caught in a stress response so constant it becomes hard to imagine there could be anything healthier outside the bubble it has created.
Our political ecosystem has become a machine for this. Leaders provoke. Audiences react. Media amplifies. Algorithms reward whatever spikes emotion fastest. Fundraising follows the outrage. The whole cycle trains us into a narrower and narrower state, where nuance feels like weakness and contempt passes for conviction.
In that environment, politics stops being an arena where we deliberate for the common good. It becomes a stage where we reenact our oldest survival patterns: fight, flight, freeze, and the desperate scramble for belonging.
What we’re living through isn’t only a policy crisis. It’s an emotional maturity crisis. A co-regulation crisis. A crisis of whether anyone in power can stay steady enough under pressure to help the rest of us widen, rather than collapse. It’s a game we seem to be losing.
We don’t just need smarter policy platforms (though we certainly do). We need leaders who can carry conflict without turning it into annihilation. Leaders who can tell the truth without contempt. Leaders who can model real adulthood in public. This would do more to open up our capacity for the positive change most of us long for than just about anything. But it’s a tall order given the limiting system we live within, and with the pool of leadership we currently have before us. Far too often modeling the worst of us, not the best of us.
The hidden loop we are stuck in
Here is the toxic loop as I see it.
Provocation gets attention. Attention gets amplified. Amplification triggers the crowd. The crowd rewards escalation. That reward trains leaders to escalate again.
A dysregulated leader dysregulates the room. The room dysregulates the country.
That is the trap. We spiral inside it, mistaking intensity for strength and cruelty for clarity or justice.
And if we wonder why whole and healthy arguments rarely break through, this is a big part of the answer. When already stressed and dysregulated people get activated, they can’t reliably take in nuance. They narrow. They sort the world into friend and foe. They may seek belonging through shared enemies. They reach for certainty, not complexity. In that state, politics becomes less about solving problems and more about managing fear.
A nation stuck in trauma response
Look at our political landscape honestly and what you see, underneath all the noise, is a lot of people acting from unprocessed psychological and developmental wounding. This is true of voters. And it is deeply true of many of our leaders.
When politicians attack and humiliate, when they perform constant public rage, when they govern through grievance and keep their followers in a permanent state of threat, they do more than model destructive behavior. They trigger the collective nervous system.
If someone experiences the world as hostile, maybe because they have spent parts of their lives feeling unseen, attacked, abused, oppressed, or not loved enough, they can gravitate toward leaders who feel familiar inside that hostility, even if those leaders intensify the very conditions that keep them trapped. It isn’t rational. It’s somatic. It happens below the level of conscious thought.
The allure of a deregulating leader isn’t always about the policies they promise. Sometimes it’s about the relief of being mirrored. The feeling that someone finally understands your anger. The camaraderie of shared grievance. The familiarity of chaos can feel safer than the unfamiliarity of calm, especially if calm has never lasted.
This may not be most people. But it is enough people to shape elections and dominate news cycles. And the more our political environment amplifies dysregulation, the harder it becomes for anyone, on any side, to respond from their best self.
We are spinning. We keep spinning. And a lot of us are exhausted.
Most People Know It When They See It
Here’s what gives me hope: you don’t need to have had a great therapist, a secure childhood, or an intact support network to recognize groundedness when it’s standing in front of you. Most of us haven’t had those things as deeply as we need them. But something in us still responds — to warmth, steadiness, and the sense that the person speaking actually means what they say.
We know it when we see it. We feel it in our bodies before we can explain it with our words.
This matters politically because it means the opportunity isn’t only for the already-healed. A well-regulated leader can help a dysregulated audience hear things they couldn’t hear before — not because the argument improved, but because the nervous system settled enough to let it in. The message hasn’t changed; the container for it has. And that changes things.
Most of us are longing for this, even those of us who can’t name it. We’re longing for connection. For someone to model what calm, introspective leadership actually looks like. For a sense that the adults are in the room.
I don’t mean bland. I don’t mean passive. I don’t mean “above the fray” in a way that excuses injustice or dodges righteous anger. I mean a leader who can carry conflict without turning it into all out annihilation.
Someone who can tell the truth without contempt.
Someone who can oppose policies without dehumanizing individual people.
Someone who can admit mistakes without collapsing into shame or doubling down in aggression.
Someone who does not need to perform dominance to feel powerful.
It is startling how rare this is now.
What We’re Really Voting For
There’s a version of this argument that says: voters should be smarter, more policy-literate, more rational. And sure, in an ideal world... But that framing misses something essential about what it means to be human.
We are social creatures whose nervous systems were built for small tribes and clear hierarchies. We look to our leaders not just for ideas but for cues about whether the world is safe, whether things are going to be okay, whether we are going to be okay. We look for healthy modeling. We always have. The question is whether we’re going to consciously work with that reality or keep pretending it doesn’t exist.
Here’s my theory: if more leaders modeled regulation, love, restraint, and accountability, our politics would not simply become nicer. It would become far more functional. People would be more able to listen. More able to tolerate difference. More able to update their beliefs without feeling humiliated. More able to stay in relationship while still advocating fiercely for what they believe.
In other words, we could begin to exit the trauma loop.
We cannot heal a traumatized society solely through better policy, though policy matters enormously. We also have to address the culture’s emotional operating system. And leadership is one of the fastest ways a society learns what is normal — what is possible — what it’s allowed to feel and do and become.
If we want a different political order — and I believe most people, across the spectrum, are hungry for one — then part of what we need to do is recognize and elevate the leaders who have done some personal work. Who aren’t playing the gotcha demonization game. Who can be a steady presence under pressure. Who aren’t just performing values but actually practicing them. Who make us feel, in our bodies, like things might be okay.
The work, for all of us, is learning to recognize what we’re looking for — and supporting it when it shows up. The system, of course, doesn’t make this easy — gerrymandering, donor capture, party corruption, an outrage-driven media, etc. all select for exactly the opposite. Which is why recognizing and actively supporting this kind of leadership, when it appears, matters more than ever.
The future depends, in no small part, on whether we keep multiplying dysregulation or finally decide to multiply the leaders who can model something better. That might be one of the most important political acts available to us — if we can find more of them.
Have thoughts on this? We’d love to hear who else you see modeling this kind of leadership — locally, nationally, anywhere.
Matthew Albracht is the Board Chair of The Peace Alliance (www.peacealliance.org), a U.S. based NGO which advocates for domestic and international peacebuilding priorities. His writings have appeared on CNN, Newsweek, Salon, HuffPost and other outlets. In addition to At The Root, he also writes on his own Substack, check it out!
There is so much truth to this. This is what mass dysregulation looks like, and I agree that the antidote isn't just better policy. It's more people who have done the work to resolve their own stress, because people who are happy, healthy, and whole build regulated systems.