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February 2022
Ep 5: Polarization: root causes and solutions - Robert Talisse, Vanderbilt University
Bob Talisse, Chair of Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University, on why we seem more polarized than before and what we can do to reverse the trend.
Unbiased Podcast
Ep 5: Polarization: root causes and solutions - Robert Talisse, Vanderbilt University
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Show notes
[0:01] Why everything is politicized
[7:33] In- vs. out-groups
[22:22] Why like-minded groups fight amongst themselves
[28:26] How can we reduce polarization
[31:58] Democracy is not just activism
Transcript

Dan: One of the main motivators for starting the Unbiased podcast was the polarization of nearly everything in American society. From the coffee we drink when we get up in the morning to the pillow we sleep on when we go to bed at night. Our guest for this episode, literally wrote the book on the subject, technically two books. Bob Talisse, Chair of the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University, joins us to discuss his two most recent books: Overdoing Democracy --Why We Must Put Politics In Its Place, which discusses, how politics have invaded nearly every aspect of American life, and Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side, a follow-up to the first that explore is why political conflict is not just necessary, but good for democracy. Welcome. Bob.

Bob: Thanks for having me Dan. And good to be here.

Dan: I think a good place to start out is the beginning of Overdoing Democracy, because I think it really tees up a lot of what we're going to talk about today. You start off the book with a story about your dad and his neighbor. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe why you chose to begin your book with that story?

Bob: Sure. The story is that my father for as long as I knew him was a Republican. He didn't only vote Republican, but he had pretty conservative political views. And also had very negative views about the democratic party and Jimmy Carter and, the candidates and the Democratic governor from New Jersey at the time.
The guy who lived across the street from us when I was growing up was a union guy. And he was very clearly a Democrat. He had some very liberal views. He grew up in the sixties. It struck me as I started working on the Overdoing Democracy book that these guys, weren't only neighbors, they were friends. Not only friends who, shared the end of a dead end street together, and, lived in houses across the way, but they were real friends. They would hang out together and, do stuff together and help each other, fix one another's car and things. And I thought that was peculiar. These are two guys who didn't let their political differences get in the way of a pretty deep friendship.

Bob: I started looking into some of the sociological and other kinds of data that we've gotten now about the United States electorate, and the citizenry more broadly. And those kinds of friendships have become in the past 30 years strikingly rare. That is the idea or the frequency with which people from not only different, but opposed political viewpoints would nonetheless have a healthy, supportive cooperative friendship is really uncommon in the country today. And that is in line with broader trends of the political, as you said Dan, invasion or saturation of our social lives in general. And so once I started seeing those trends from the data that liberals and conservatives in the country systematically shop at different grocery stores, enjoy different kinds of television programs, listen to different kinds of music, wear different kinds of clothes, even decorate the interior of their houses in systematically different ways, once I started seeing that I started thinking, wow, politics or more precisely partisan affiliation has colonized our social spaces in ways that have permitted it to organize and shape our relations. Even our relations that arguably don't have much to do with politics.

Arjun: Why do you think that is Bob? That's so fascinating. Why has this changed?

Bob: It would be surprising to me Arjun if it had a single explanation. So I'm sure that there are lots of factors that go into explaining how this is escalated since the eighties. And no doubt, technology has played its role. I'm not one of the people who thinks that social media is, the root of all of our political dysfunctions. It might be part of most of our political dysfunctions.
But I will say this: one possibility that strikes me as plausible is that since the eighties American citizens on the whole, more and more of our lives are the products of our own choices. Just give one very quick example. When I first moved to Nashville from New Jersey there wasn't an Ethiopian restaurant in Nashville. Now there are three, for example. And when I first moved to Nashville, if I wanted, good Greek food or good Mediterranean food in general, or maybe particularly good Ethiopian food, I was out of luck or maybe there was some way to, order ingredients online or something.
And so now, more and more of the conditions under which one lives in one's day-to-day life are selected, right? We have more options available to us.
Maybe because of the internet, the books that I can buy are not limited to the books that happen to fit on the shelves of my local bookstore. I can go buy any book that's in print practically. And I don't have to rely on a bookseller to choose that. And similarly, I just learned today I can get Indian ice cream across the street from my office here on campus. Again, amazing! This is all very good, but it also means that more and more of my life is the product of my choices rather than just the result of some constraint my environment has imposed on me.
And so what I think that means is that we have more and more leverage over how our lives are organized and who we interact with and, what kinds of messages we hear. Unsurprisingly,we tend to make our little slice of the world in our own image.
We like to hear the things that , sound good to us. We like to eat the food that tastes good to us. We like to interact with people who we think are simpatico with our values. That's quite natural thing. I think that the overall effects though of that ability to choose, which is also the ability to filter out and exclude, I think that when it comes to large scale effects, they can be very bad for democracy. And I suspect that's part of the story of the ways in which partisan identity has come to colonize our social lives... is that more and more is up to us.

Dan: One of the things you bring up here is the fact that we really have the ability to self-select our environment in a way. And so where we all watched the same newscast and maybe read the same newspapers if we lived in the same city, now we have our choices and we can go down our own preferential habit trails, so to speak. One of the concepts you talk about, in your work is the whole idea of group polarization. The idea that when we continually surround ourselves with people who are more alike, we become more extreme in a way. Can you explain how that works and maybe give a couple of examples as to, that process in action.

Bob: Sure. What's called group polarization, or sometimes I call it belief polarization, because there are lots of different ways to talk about polarization, all of them are about groups. And I'm just going to say belief polarization, cause it is a cognitive phenomenon, right? We tend to think of polarization in the Joe Biden sense or at least the sense that Joe Biden highlighted in his inaugural address. Which is the ranker, the division, the seeing the other side as the enemy, rather than as somebody who needs to, be convinced the cure for polarization in that Joe Biden senses what he said, it was, unity, unify, hear each other again, listen to one another! And that is one sense of polarization. It's the pulling apart of partisan opponents. So the point that the common ground that they might occupy on the basis of which they might cooperate, falls away. And so all you have is intransigence and animosity and log jams and paralysis. That is bad for democracy.
Belief polarization is a cognitive phenomenon though. It's something different. Belief polarization is not a measure of the divide between two opposed groups. Belief polarization is a dynamic that occurs within the minds of members of like-minded groups. So we're only talking about one group now, right? The Republicans, the environmentalists the skateboarders, whoever it may be. It doesn't matter much what the basis of the like-mindedness is even, but it is a formal version of what we sometimes think of more colloquially as the yes- man phenomenon.
The more you surround yourself with people who just tell you how smart you are and how great you are and how everything that you think is right. How everything that you believe is true. The more confident you get in your own judgments of things, the more disposed you become to dismiss counter evidence and critics, but also here's the kicker. As you surround yourself with people who confirm your views, you also become more extreme in your thinking.
That is you become a more radical proponent of the view that you hold. So in some experiments and I'll just use one intuitive example, I think with juries-- you get a bunch of jurors in a jury room together. If they are like-minded about the guilt of the defendant, and if they are like-minded that the infraction is serious, the longer they talk about what the right punishment should be, the more severe the punishment is. So the more they interact as a like-minded group, each member of the jury, starts recommending a higher punitive damages award, for example, or a longer sentence, for example.
I've done these sort of mock jury kinds of things, these sort of simulated jury contexts. They asked the jurors before jury deliberations about punishment. The guy's guilty. Yes. Is the infraction serious? Yes. What do you think the punishment should be? And jurors give various answers. Oh, he should be forced to pay, $10,000 in damages. And then the experimenter says, would you support a punitive damage award of $20,000? And the subject sometimes says, oh no, that's too severe. And then you put that subject in about 30 minutes in a jury deliberation. And , if there are other members of the deliberating body that want the more severe $20,000 punishment, they quickly escalate beyond 20,000. Even though none of the facts have changed, even though it's often not a matter of hearing new reasons or all the thinking about the severity of the infraction has been done already. They're already all convinced it was severe and that the guy's guilty. It's just a matter of group dynamics that the individuals start endorsing much more severe punishment. Even more severe than what they said antecedently before they started talking was the cap.
So that's just one kind of example. Let me give another one. Cause it's funny. You get a bunch of people together who all agreed that the city of Denver, Colorado is notable for being high above sea level. The longer they talk the higher above sea level. They think Denver is it's remarkable. So you might think that the jury case is about a normative judgment. It's about what somebody deserves. This is just a banal matter of fact-- how high above sea level is Denver. It's a widely documented cognitive phenomenon. It doesn't vary significantly with any of the demographic features of people that you might think it would vary. It doesn't vary with level of education. It doesn't vary between political affiliation, ethnicity, economic status, religious conviction. And it's been found to be pretty stable it's been found all over the world.

Arjun: So I wonder if Bob I think people have a pretty good bullshit meter. it's one of the reasons why we have low trust in the news and low trust in government is when people feel like they're being sold something or being pushed towards a conclusion, they have a natural reaction to be like, yeah, I don't know this guy's blowing smoke. First of all I, don't know how true this phenomenon is that it seems true to me. But if that's true, does that make us eventually fall out with groups that are so like-minded, do we all walk away after a while going, this was fun for awhile, but you know what? I'm beginning to get the sense that this is a little obsequious. It's stifling. It's actually monotonous. And I don't know if this is really a good thing for me. Do humans eventually get around to saying enough is enough?

Bob: My hope is yes, but here's the one feature that is less frequently modeled in the belief. Polarization experiments, but is more prominent in real life applications of like-minded groups, particularly politically like-minded groups. Our more extreme selves, as we shift to these more confident and extreme views, we also become more distrustful of anybody who's perceived to be outside the group. We become more likely to interrupt them when they're speaking. We become less likely to hear what they say as criticism of our view, rather than just whining and complaining. We become less good at reporting. factually reporting what they say. We've become less accurate reporters of what they say. And so, part of the phenomenon clearly has got to be the escalating distrust and animosity, and in extreme cases disgust with the out-group, whoever they may be and the tendency to perceive anyone who's not obviously a member of the in-group as the most extreme, radical opponent member of the out-group that we can conjure.
You see this by the way in real time, it seems to me, I just think not too long ago although it's not, as present now as it once was in political discourse, let's think about disagreements over immigration policy in the United States when Trump was president. It was very easy to find even, political commentators who otherwise you think might be more nuanced than this. It was easy to find people saying, oh, if you don't think there should be a border wall you're for open borders, you think anybody should come in. Or on the other side oh, if you think that there should be immigration reform, you must hate foreigners. Which again is attributing to all critics only the most extreme, usually the least plausible version of the opposing view. That's part of the phenomenon as well. And because it seems that especially in high stakes, political matters, unfortunately it seems to me, we really like disliking other people.
It's fun to hate people politically. It's fun to, own the libs were dunk on Ted Cruz. By the way, undoubtedly, it is fun. But that affective, It's not only we become more extreme, we become more hostile towards the other side, we get more entertainment out of seeing the other side put in its place leads me to think that if there are limits to this phenomenon the phenomenon has a pretty broad breath. I don't know that we're going to exhaust it anytime soon.

Dan: I think some circles would blame Donald Trump for the tone of politics. I'll ask for your confirmation on this. It doesn't seem like Donald Trump really introduced anything new. He just did it at the presidential level where most presidents were above it. Is that a fair observation?

Bob: Yeah, I would say that's probably right. I think that he captured and articulated a common view about American government. A common view among a certain part of the electorate about American government, that they're all crooks and everyone's corrupt and it's always everyone's lying. And, we're still not far enough away from that period in our history, I think to have really detailed, settled views about what we all just underwent, but, the way I think about it now is that what Trump did is Trump was the first to articulate the following kind of thought at the presidential level.
Since American government is all bullshit anyway, I'm going to be overt about the bullshit. I'm not going to hide it. I'm not going to try to dress it up. I'm not going to disguise it. The other people who talk about shattering democratic norms and, civility, that's all just a con. And I think that part of the appeal of Trump to the people, to whom he is appealing, is that persona of the guy who's tearing away the smiley face that's been plastered over the harsh reality of American government and not pointing to it and saying, look, we got to fix this, but saying, this is the kind of mess American government's always been. I'm just not pretending otherwise. I think that was the appeal.

Arjun: That's a whole tangent on Donald Trump. I think. At least from talking to readers of The Factual, which is a fairly good cross-section of the United States, our readers and listeners are all across the U.S. And pretty politically balanced. One of the things that I've noticed is that there's often a failure to separate president Trump's personality and demeanor and composure from ,,policies and ideas that he had.
And so at least in our readership, we often hear from people who agreed with his ideas, but not necessarily his manner of execution. But the two get conflated. And so it seems like people are supportive of his style when sometimes they're not necessarily that it's just that they're supportive of his ideas or his policy direction which may be in stark contrast to what the Democrats were doing. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

Bob: I agree with that. And sometimes I think that very dynamic worked against him. Because the instinct or the strategy maybe was always to lead with the manner, with the style. Sometimes the policy messaging got lost that's seems clear to me. But I think also a lot of the policy thinking got muddled.
I'll just give one example. And, I've asked a lot of people this, and I have yet to find somebody who has been able to point me in the direction of what I'm about to ask about. Just to keep on the border wall issue, which was, just now thinking , in a way that political scientist does that was a signature central, campaign issue that he ran on. It was a thread that ran through the entire presidency was, build the wall. I don't know, and could not find a Trump administration policy discussion, let alone statement, of how the administration planned to acquire the land on the border. Much of which is privately owned. Some of which is owned by people who own contiguous plots of land in the United States and Mexico.

Arjun: I think they were going to issue eminent domain all over the place was my understanding.

Bob: Okay, good. Good. Now, a lot of people say exactly what you just said, Arjun. I think it was supposed to be, this is the government was going to come and acquire the property. And that seems to me like, that had to be the plan. If we're going to do this, what do we do with the people who don't want to sell their land?
But no what would happen to that? Very, I would say fragile coalition among conservative leaning voters, who don't like the man, but like the Republican party's general legislative agenda or very much don't like Hillary. And the part of the coalition that really likes this guy, likes to hear him call reporters idiots and all the rest, and, likes the chant, build the wall and lock her up and those kinds of things, and doesn't want to get involved or doesn't get involved too much in the policy particulars. It seems to me that the former group, the group of people who, like Republican policies and aren't thrilled with the man, it seems to me that group is going to be really suspicious of any large scale government project to acquire private property. These are supposed to be the lock-ins in the party. These are the private property people, the anti-big government people. This is a gigantic land grab. And so it was almost as if, the coalition between the two kinds of Trump voters, Republican voters that you identified Arjun, it seems to me that any more detailed policy statement was going to jeopardize the coalition. That seem right?

Arjun: Yeah. Yeah. I get what you're saying. Dan has a lot more information on this as well, but in speaking with our past guest, Diane Hasson who interviewed 500 voters across five years, roughly half Republican, half Democrat, what she found is a lot of times people are voting against something rather than for something. And so it wasn't necessarily that they had even thought the proposals through or were necessarily like, wait, is this going to expand government? It's just, it's a lot better than, you know what so-and-so said. So I think there's a whole bunch of that going on, but I feel like I've monopolized this a little bit. I can turn it back to Dan who I think wanted to talk closer to your books. All right.

Dan: Well, yeah, no Arjun. You both bring up a really good point here, which is when it comes to the coalition you need to assemble in order to win office, you need two groups of people. You need the people who really like your candidate and the people who really hate the other candidate. And your ability to mobilize both is critical to getting an office.
And even if we look at the 2020 election, the enthusiasm surrounded Trump entirely. People either really enthusiastically like Trump, or really enthusiastically didn't like Trump. And in a lot of ways, Trump really dictated the election from that standpoint. And I think, as it applies to policy, Bob, this kind of gets back to what you were saying earlier, where if you look at the border wall, I don't think the pro- border wall side was really consumed with the cost or the constitutional aspects, because what they saw in a lot of the news reports was a mess at the border.. Immigrants pouring over. Drugs pouring over. And that was their main concern. And then on the flip side, on the left side, they saw kids in cages. And so I think the two were the two sides where irreconcilable.
I think, what I'm interested in Bob is, getting back to this idea of belief polarization. That at the end group becomes more and more extreme over time. What I'm curious about is how does that anti and pro coalition, how do they stay together?
I think with Biden, you have a scenario where there's a group of people within the Democratic party who think Biden won, we have a mandate. Let's go after things that we love: universal pre-K universal healthcare. And then there's another group of people are like, whoa, I just voted because I really didn't want the other person. So how do those dynamics play out?

Bob: Yeah, it's a really good question. And there are all kinds of different ways in which they do play out. But, political coalitions, especially, successful ones, the Democrats have the problems that they have because they won. So political coalitions often have this problem, where a lot of voting behavior, as Arjun was saying before, is driven by, negative partisanship. It's against the other side, more than I care about what my side's for. I don't want to see the other person get elected. That's all I need to know about, how to vote is, I don't want these other people in. Once it comes to the actual task of governing, of choosing policies, of drawing up priorities, a lot of the details and a lot of the policy specifics that, were papered over or glossed over when you were building the coalition have to now come to the fore.
Here's an example. If you want to see how belief polarization works on the left, go look at your social media feed on the night of the met gala where we all got a photo of AOC Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, wearing a dress with a message on the back that said "tax the rich."
Go back and look at the social media feed of people who vote Democrat vote for the democratic party, consider themselves liberals or progressives somewhere on that spectrum. See how the threads about that dress quickly devolve into fights over who's truly progressive. So note what's happened. We've got a occasion among people who on some metric are like-minded. They exhibit similar voting behaviors. Maybe Biden, wasn't their first choice for the candidate, but they supported them in the end. We get a slogan " tax the rich". No longer worried about defeating the MAGA people or, we're no longer complaining about Donald Trump's most recent outrageous thing.
Now, the question is what does tax the rich mean? In real terms? What's the policy that's being gestured towards or referenced by the slogan tax the rich. And what you see develop on social media that night is a bunch of people saying, oh, billionaires should pay their fair share. There shouldn't be loopholes. And then you get others, who also consider themselves progressive saying no no no no... tax the rich means there shouldn't be billionaires. And then other permutations come out where tax the rich means something far more leveling about wealth disparities.
Now, again, I'm not laying these out because I want us to talk about, who's got the right interpretation of the slogan. What I'm pointing to is the fact that like-minded groups do really well when they are fixated on their own commitments understood mainly as slogans and their animosity towards the other side. When you remove the other side from the conversation, when the group churns away from its cross partisan animus and towards the task of figuring out where they as a group stand with respect to positive commitments, you discover that, this is not a surprise, there's lots of disagreement among liberal, progressive coalitions about tax policy, about criminal justice reform, about environmental reform. The whole host of issues as there should be. Here's the thing that's distinctive about polarized groups. They become less able to navigate disagreements among allies and in the face of disagreement over the tax the rich message, what you find on the social media feeds is they very quickly stop talking about what the right interpretation of the slogan is. They very quickly dropped the topic what should our tax stance be and start fighting about who's an authentic member of the coalition and who's merely a poser.

Arjun: I think that makes a lot of sense. And it's such good guidance for what sort of exacerbating polarization. So I guess my question to you is what do we do about this? How do we get off this train?

Bob: It's a really good question. So there are a couple of things that I think are really important to mention. One is that the data that the evidence about belief polarization is so robust, it's just naive of any of us to think that our political judgment is not vulnerable to it. By the way, when I give talks about this and talk about belief, polarization, people very quickly see it in all of their political enemies. They're like, oh yeah, those people they're just like carried like they're on a boat and it's high tide. They just get carried along, with whoever the most radical among them is okay, you get the phenomenon.
But just be, a little bit humble about this. What makes you so special, maybe it's not impacting you to the exact same degree or whatever, but you're vulnerable to it. So that's one thing. Second thing is that, because when we hear the word polarization, we're so tempted to think about the distance between liberals and conservatives, or Republicans and Democrats, that we overlook what we've just been talking about, this internal cognitive phenomenon that drives us to shift to more extreme and insular positions.
Once we think that polarization is in part, the problem of that phenomenon, because notice more extreme coalitions that are more insular and more saturated with politics, this makes the job of, political campaigning really easy, right? If the candidate can say if you're going to vote for me, chances are you also like this kind of music, will drive this kind of car, live in this kind of home. Then, the actual, rhetorical project of campaigning becomes very easy. When you can count on, your likely vote or having, a pretty specific profile in their general lifestyle. It's very easy, which is why polarization isn't going to be fixed by politicians. They like it, no matter what they say. They benefit from it. But once we see polarization as this internal cognitive dynamic that we are vulnerable to you have to recognize that it's not just about the way that you dislike and are disgusted by the other side, polarization is about you and your allies. The thing that has to happen, I think if we're going to be better able to manage polarization, so we have to take steps to ideologically diversify our conception of who can be our ally politically.

Arjun: Got it. I think that's right. I think the challenge, as you've clearly said is we don't have the constraints we used to back in the days of your dad. And we can now pick and choose everything from our friends to the places we eat. So it sounds like your solution is that we have to consciously combat the easy decision. It'd be so easy to just go to this club. Cause I know everyone there thinks like me and rather consciously say, I kind of want some variety. I want a little bit of tension or differences. Is that too idealistic, Bob? Are people really going to do that or are most people going to be like those academics, Bob and company? Forget it. I'm taking the easy route.

Bob: No, I think you're right. That there is a real worry about, how, I'm tempted to say there is a point in the severity of polarization where we will have tipped over to a degree of this that is not really manageable anymore. So I'm worried about that.
Let me suggest one other thought because clearly one way to diversify your conception of who can be your ally. Maybe one way of doing that is to find people who disagree with you, but not too much. Maybe people who disagree with you, but you suspect that they didn't vote for the person. You really hate that they vote in ways that are similar to you. Maybe there's ways to build coalitions with people who are unlike you in lots of respects, but very much like you in some particular. So maybe that is part of the story. And I think that you're right to where are people going to do that? It sounds like a drag.
Here's the other thought which might make things sound even more academic and pie in the sky. And what a surprise is a philosopher. Who's about to say, I think that what we need is more occasion for solitary political reflection.
I think that part of what's happened to us as a citizenry is we've given over to media, social media platforms, podcasts, how ironic, time and space and energy that we otherwise might have spent reading a newspaper by ourselves. And I worry that, we have this conception of democratic citizenship. It says, what does democracy look like? It's people in the streets holding government accountable, blockading bridges, getting out there and acting in concert in a way to call attention to injustice and all the rest. And that is what democracy looks like. I'm not denying that.
But democracy needs citizens not only to be active but to be reflective. And a lot of the modes of political activity that we associate with the core of democratic citizenship are now engaged under technological conditions that dismantle our reflective capacities. And so part of the solution, I think, and this might be even further pie in the sky stuff. So we need to reclaim moments of our lives for political thinking for civic activity of a reflective kind that occurs outside of the gaze of allies and enemies alike outside of the conformity pressure that comes when we're engaged with people who are just like us. And outside of the triggers for animosity that occur when we're in the presence of somebody who we suspect voted for the wrong guy in the last election. Sometimes, democracy looks like people in the street carrying signs. Maybe it also looks like a guy sitting in the chair behind me, reading, Aristotle's politics and thinking about big obscure, abstract political ideas that aren't about us.

Arjun: I don't know if this is coincidence, maybe a happy coincidence, Bob, but it turns out that some of the things that we're doing at The Factual may create the environment that you're talking about for some of these things.
So for example it's a place where people read and discuss the news on a daily basis. And first of all, it's nonpartisan. It has a very diverse population of readers, roughly equal Democrat, Republican, or conservative, liberal, whatever you want independents. And so in the daily discussion, you see a lot of different viewpoints.
And then secondly we remove many of the performative aspects of technology and social media. You can't see number of up votes on a comment. There's no followers and likes and hearts. We have a like button it's called the respect button indicating you can respect something you disagree with even. But there's no counts on it. And so it allows you to express admiration with something but not say things because you're going to get a lot of likes or votes. No one's ever going to know it. You would, but no one else will. And so what we've always said internally in the team is that, if you go through the comments of people, in the polls and Dan and I do this regularly on You Don't Have To Yell,. What we often see is that people who vote yes or no on an issue, a lot of times in the comments have very similar comments. It's almost the same thing. They just land slightly differently on either side.
And trying to show is that hey a lot of us actually have very similar policy ideas, maybe slight shades, one way or the other, but in a non performative environment, like The Factual,, you can express it and not feel like you have to say something that gets the lion's share of attention.
So maybe happily, we are doing a small bit of what you're saying, Bob, and bringing together people that are of different ideas, helping them to express themselves in a frank, honest way, but not in a way that's attention, grabbing and headline grabbing and helping people see that actually we're not that different actually.

Bob: That sounds right. And I tell people, audiences this all the time and they're astounded, despite the fact that partisan animosity, dislike for the other side has escalated significantly, over the past 30 years in the country, actual policy differences among citizens have remained steady. They haven't escalated. In fact, in lots of cases, they've eased.
So we're less divided over the rubber hits the road. What should government be doing? We're either no more divided or in some cases, less divided than we were in the eighties. We just think that the other side holds the diametrically opposed views from the ones that we hold and we dislike them for it, but it's all a kind of misperception. So anything that would help dispel that illusion the format that you're just describing seems to me to be a step in the right direction and a step towards depolarization.

Dan: I'll throw one more thing in here, Arjun, you both have given real positive direction to follow in terms of how to reverse the course. I'd actually like to give a negative assessment that will have a positive outcome. Which is, it's my belief, as I start to look at how the parties are sniping at each other, that we're now getting to the point where people who are in power and people who have influence are actually threatened by this degree of polarization. And a great example. that popped into my head about a week ago was when Donald Trump took a shot at Mitch McConnell for McConnell's statement on January 6th, or, the flip side of that could very well be, somebody like Joe Manchin, or Kirsten Sinema getting sniped at, from the left flank of their party.
And so I do feel like we're getting to the point where there are enough people in power who have something to lose with this, or by this, that they could take a direction that potentially breaks up this dynamic. And, one of the things that comes into my head as you're talking, Bob is, the only way this us versus them narrative works is if there's one us in one them. And, there's a bill on the floor of the house right now that's actually designed to really introduce the possibility, not only that more moderate voters will have an advantage, but also potentially more minor parties will have an advantage. So you could see three, four parties. I think at that point, it's very difficult to play the us versus them game when there's three thems or four thems as opposed to just one.

Bob: I hope you're right, because part of me, just to go back to an earlier comment in response to, I think the first question that Arjun raised, surely animosity and resentment and indignation are finite emotional resources for American citizens. Surely there has to be a part where we run out and where we get sick of it and where we don't want to deal with it anymore. And when that happens, if it does happen, some political agents, a party, a candidate clearly will be ready to fix on that and use it to marshal positive political forces rather than let those people divest from the process. So there's some hope in that, that, at some point we just get tired of hating each other.

Arjun: Yeah, I think maybe I'm an optimist to a fault, but it feels like the people that I meet, day-to-day whether it's in my neighborhood or travels, or in The Factual first of all, it actually relates back to your book, Bob it's. When you talk about things other than politics, you realize there's so much more in common and people are actually quite nice and cordial and thoughtful. They may hold different political viewpoints, but who cares? That's not always the most important thing. And then even when we do get into the politics side of it, when it's not a combative discussion to start out with we're not there to pick a fight, you hear different points of view and you're like, oh yeah, I I don't necessarily agree entirely, but I can understand why you might hold that point of view, which is good. And, it makes me understand you better. It doesn't make me hate you, I don't think humans are wired to hate. It's too exhausting. I think we're wired to actually, maybe not necessarily trust by default, but certainly be friendly by default. How about that?

Bob: Yeah, , I just want to tell a story that is the story that closes the sustaining democracy bug, so the story came by way of somebody who is a philosopher, who I'd never met still to this day, haven't met in person, who got interested in my work and just sent me a note saying I wanted to tell you about this thing that happened.
She's a a pretty left leaning progressive philosophy professor who found herself after getting her PhD in Chicago, I believe in a rural part of Pennsylvania, pretty conservative part of Pennsylvania. And she said, I live next door to this older couple. It's clear that they're conservative and, I think it's clear that it's clear to them that I'm not conservative. And we both realize that we're politically on opposite sides of things. And she says, but we walk our dogs together. And I talk a lot, with my neighbors about dog breeds and dog training. And we take care of each other's dogs. And then there was part where they were sharing, vegetables that they grow in their backyards and things, which is the kind of thing that you're describing right. That, there's this other thing that, this other mode of engagement, that enables each party to the activity to see the other person's virtues in ways that are not tied to attributing a partisan identity to them.
And that's what I think is really important about nonpolitical engagement is we need occasions so that we can demonstrate our virtues to one another in ways that doesn't make it so easy to say, oh, he's a fellow Democrat.
Here's the kicker in the story. This person writes after a long time of, getting along with dogs and, gardens and everything. The guy, the male of the couple that's the neighbor on a dog walk, asks the philosopher can I ask you a serious question? And the philosopher says, sure. And the older man says does the Q in LGBTQ stand for queer? And she said, yes. And he says, that's part of my problem. I was raised to think that was an insult and a slur. And that's why I'm so uncomfortable. He goes on to explain about, some of what's going on in the country. I can't hear that word without thinking that it's being insulting, that it's meant to insult somebody or demean them . The philosopher writes to me, all of a sudden, I saw a kind of consideration about resistance to pronouns and other kinds of, more gender inclusive linguistic interventions. So all of a sudden I saw a different kind of reason that someone might be resistant to that. She says, I still don't think that's a good reason to, insist on, gendered pronouns, but it did strike me as a different, it wasn't just blatant, bald, discriminatory tendencies. It was just a slightly more nuanced, moral kind of motivation that, might still be objectionable or criticizable, but not what I was inclined to think it was. And the Sustaining Democracy book ends on that. I said, that's the kind of thing we need more of.

Arjun: I just saw this quote today someone that was on Twitter that said "don't attribute to malice, what could be sufficiently explained by stupidity." And a lot of times people just make mistakes or misunderstand things, or you haven't heard them, but it's very seldom malicious when something rubs us the wrong way. Very few people go out there going, I want to hurt you. I want to insult you and harm you. It's more, I didn't get it or you didn't get me. And that's most of the time, which I thought was pretty cool.

Dan: Yeah. I think too, I think we tend to assume that the people who don't think like us have either not thought it through or are dealing with some faulty reasoning and that they haven't really weighed all this out. And the reality is when you talk to folks, they're like, no, generally everybody puts the same amount of thought into things more or less, on average. And and they've just reached a different conclusion. The more you can dig into the why of why somebody thinks that way. At the very least you may not agree, but at least you'll understand how they got there.
Nicely sat Dan. Well, thank you so much Bob, for the delightful conversation today. Hope everyone listening got a lot out of it and hopefully it feels a little bit more positive about the ways that they can diversify their friend circle, seek out different opinions, and reduce the trend of polarization in their lives. So thank you very much for taking the time. Chat with us today.

Bob: Good. This has been great to talk to you guys.
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