I love to listen to podcasts, and it was The Mel Robbins Podcast that introduced me to a problem-solving exercise called the Five Whys.
The premise is straightforward. When you’re trying to understand a problem, you ask why. Then you ask why again. Then again. By the time you’ve asked the question five times, you’ve usually moved past the symptom and arrived at the root cause.
I’ve been thinking lately that politics might benefit from the same exercise. Not because I think it would make us agree. It probably wouldn’t. But it might help us better understand something very important: Why do you support the candidates you support?
You would assume most of us can answer that question quickly enough. We support them because of taxes, schools, immigration, healthcare, agriculture, the economy, faith or public safety. We support them because they’re conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, because they share our values or because they oppose the people we disagree with.
But what happens if we keep asking why?
Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people across rural Texas — school superintendents worried about budgets, hospital board members worried about staying open, farmers worried about water, business owners worried about finding workers, and parents worried about what kind of future their children will inherit.
The issues change from town to town, but the underlying concerns are remarkably similar. People want stability and opportunity. They want their communities to survive and their children to have a chance to build a life close to home. They want to believe that hard work still matters.
Take public education. Some people support public schools because they believe education is the pathway to opportunity. Others support school choice because they believe parents should have more control. On the surface, those appear to be competing positions. But if you keep asking why, you may discover that both people are ultimately talking about the same
thing: creating a better future for children.
The policy differences still matter — how we fund schools, protect water, keep hospitals open, support agriculture. But the starting point is often much closer than our politics would have us believe.
Most people are not sitting around the kitchen table talking in talking points. They are talking about whether they can afford groceries, whether their insurance will go up again, whether the school can find teachers, whether the crop will make, whether the hospital will still be there when they need it.
Instead, we’re handed a steady stream of controversies, distractions and tribal battles designed to keep us angry, afraid or outraged. We are asked to care deeply about every national fight, every manufactured crisis, every personality-driven feud that can be turned into a fundraising email or a campaign ad. Meanwhile, the things that actually shape people’s lives are treated like background noise.
Maybe that is because solving real problems is hard. It requires patience, compromise and a willingness to stay with issues long after the cameras leave.
Manufacturing outrage is easier. It is easier to tell people who to fear than to explain how to lower an insurance premium. It is easier to pick a fight than to fix a school finance formula. It is easier to turn neighbors against each other than to build the kind of trust required to solve problems in a community.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have built a political culture that rewards the fight more than the fix.
That is why I think the Five Whys exercise is worth thinking about. Not so we can interrogate our neighbors about why they vote the way they do, but so we can ask a harder question of the people asking for our vote.
Why are the things that matter most to ordinary people so often missing from the political conversation? Why does a political system that claims to represent us spend so much time pulling us away from the issues closest to our lives? And why do we keep accepting that as normal?
So maybe the Five Whys is worth turning on ourselves, too. The next time you pull a lever or fill in a bubble, ask why. Then ask again. If you follow it far enough, past the party and the personality and the things that made you angry last week, you may find that what you actually want is pretty simple — and that the politics demanding your loyalty is not always the politics most likely to deliver it.
Because when you follow the “why” far enough, you eventually arrive at the kitchen table. You arrive at the grocery bill, the insurance premium, the school budget, the water question, the hospital board, the farm note, the Main Street business and the future of the place you call home.
That is where politics becomes real. And that is where politics ought to begin.
Suzanne Bellsnyder is editor and publisher of the Hansford County Reporter-Statesman and Sherman County Gazette. Subscribe at www.TexasRuralReporter.Substack.com