When We Stop Listening - 1/12/26

After the shocking death of Renee Good last week, erstwhile opponents Vice President JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz agreed on one thing: that Good’s untimely and violent demise was a tragedy. But otherwise, both of the 2024 running mates, along with the overwhelming majority of their respective partisan allies, quickly embraced altogether contradictory descriptions of what had actually happened.

President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem established talking points that their Republican colleagues embraced, referring to the award-winning poet, wife, and mother of three as a “domestic terrorist” and worse. Jonathan Ross, the 10-year veteran of ICE who earned multiple decorations while serving in Iraq, has been called a “murderer” by numerous state and national Democratic leaders. (Vance and Walz have not used those specific terms, but both have employed similarly inflammatory language.)

I used to live in a country in which people listened to each other. That didn’t mean we always agreed. But it meant that even when we disagreed—about how to resolve a difficult policy or political matter or even how to process a traumatic shared experience—most of us made some effort to prioritize a search for the truth before acting on our instantaneous initial gut reaction.

After the devastation of September 11, Americans understandably rushed to try to make sense of an unfathomable catastrophe. But amid the frenzy and panic, President George W. Bush appointed a bipartisan commission to provide “a full and complete accounting” of the terrorist attacks. While we were deprived of the immediate visceral satisfaction that a faster investigation might have provided, the years that five Republicans and five Democrats took to perform a more comprehensive review of the causes and critical failures that led to those horrible events greatly improved both our national security and our national psyche. Similar efforts that were authorized in the aftermath of the mid-1980s Iran-Contra scandal, the 2008 Great Recession, and the 1967 urban riots did not necessarily bring widespread agreement among representatives from the two parties, but all provided a greater level of clarity and understanding of the crises they examined. 

But no such effort will be made in the aftermath of Renee Good’s death. The FBI’s decision to exclude state and local authorities from the inquiry will fatally undermine its credibility with anyone who disagrees with their conclusions. Any Minnesota-based analysis will be dismissed just as quickly by those who object to their findings.

Most of us have watched the videos of the shooting for ourselves, and most of us are convinced we already know the truth. But on both sides, we bring our own ideological baggage to our observations and our conclusions. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle cites a study in her recent column in which participants watched a video of a protest shut down by police and were then asked if the police reacted appropriately. Participants who were told that the protestors’ ideological goals conflicted with their own decided that the police were justified in their actions. When those same participants sympathized with the protestor’s objectives, the observers condemned the police for improper conduct.

Projecting what the researchers refer to as “culturally motivated cognition” onto the Minneapolis video, it should not be surprising that those who support the Trump Administration’s immigration and deportation agenda are defending Ross and criticizing Good, while detractors of Trump’s policies strongly condemn Ross and praise Good’s efforts. The result is that the heartrending and avoidable death becomes nothing yet another predictable partisan talking point—on a political landscape already overcrowded with similar litmus tests.

Politics has always been a blood sport. (In an earlier life, I was an often too-excitable combatant myself.) But even while Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill fought fierce political battles, they also teamed up to rescue Social Security. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich despised each other but joined forces to balance the federal budget.  Going back further to our nation’s earliest days, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams leveled the type of shockingly nasty insults at each other when they competed for the presidency that would make Steve Bannon and Jasmine Crockett recoil. (Adams’ supporters charged that Jefferson would "ban the Bible," "abolish Christianity," and "abolish marriage." Jefferson’s advisors called Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character.")

But even while these adversaries maintained dramatically different world views, they were able to share a common reality, which eventually could lead to the possibility of cooperation and compromise. Last week in Minneapolis, that possibility seemed extremely remote.