150x150.jpeg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows whose testimony captured the nation’s attention in the January 6 Congressional hearings, joins us this week to discuss her time in the Trump administration and her new role safeguarding American democracy.

Hutchinson was faced with a choice between loyalty to the Trump administration or loyalty to the country by revealing what she saw and heard in the attempt to overthrow a democratic election. She bravely came forward to become the pivotal witness in the House January 6 investigations, as her testimony transfixed and stunned the nation. In her memoir, Hutchinson reveals the struggle between the pressures she confronted to toe the party line and the demands of the oath she swore to defend American democracy.

Hutchinson’s memoir, Enough, was published in September 2023 and is a New York Times bestseller.

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCartney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem And I’m Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week. We are very lucky to have with us Cassidy Hutchinson, who you may remember from her testimony in that now infamous white blazer in the January 6 committee hearings a couple of summers ago. She’s also the author of a new memoir called enough where she recounts her time working on Capitol Hill and later in the Trump administration under Mark Meadows. So lots of talk about and I think for somebody who’s only in our mid 20s. A lot to learn from Cassidy as well. We were very fortunate to have her spend the day with us here on campus.

Michael Berkman Yeah, Jenna, she was very generous with her time she was not wearing her white blazer she wore blue in honor of Penn State. She said if she visits a school she tries to wear the school colors I can think of a visitor we’ve had that has been received quite the way Cassidy Hutchinson was received, she got a standing ovation when she walked out on the stage at a packed auditorium, she was really a delightful guest. And very open. I feel like we learned quite a bit about Cassidy herself about what it was like to be working in the White House and about the personal struggle that she went through to find herself in front of that hearing, giving testimony that really, I think no one can deny blew open the January 6 hearings, and probably will continue to resonate as we go through court cases.

Chris Beem And also, you know, the other thing that struck me was kind of her humility, and the fact that she feels guilt and shame for for some of the things that she did. And, you know, obviously, for those of us who are kind of connected to the political world, that is an incredible rarity to see it at all, let alone see it express publicly. But I think there’s a connection between this sense of humility and her ability to summon the courage to do what she thought was right, irrespective of the costs.

Michael Berkman And I mean, one of my favorite moments sitting in class with her was when she said that, you know, she came to the realization that maybe she was going to have to do this, testifying that she understood clearly that her work with the Trump lawyers meant that she was being less than truthful, and that being less than truthful, was working on her internally. And she understood that it was bad for the country as well. But so she Googled Watergate, which gave me a clear indication of her age that she had to google Watergate. And she was looking to see you know, who was kind of like in a similar situation to her and she came across Alexander Butterfield, who was an assistant to the President was very different from Cassidy, Hutchinson. He was older, he advanced degrees. He came from an establishment family, he was an officer in the military. I mean, he was much more grown up than Cassidy was at the time that she found herself in this situation. But she did find Alexander Butterfield she got in touch with him. And he was a wise guy. I don’t mean that in the sense of a wise guy. I mean, it seemed like he was a wise man and older guys in his 90s Now, and he told her what she needed to hear, which was that he’s never regretted what he did. They remain good friends, and he provided a lot of inspiration for her. But Chris, I think just the parallels to Watergate itself are worth thinking about here.

Chris Beem Well, clearly, right. I mean, you know, when you will recounting that story I was thinking about, yeah, it’s much different circumstance between Butterfield and Hutchison. It’s also a very different context with regards to the culture and with regards to how we regard the presidency and it’s just not the same world and I think that makes Cassidy’s stand all the more courageous, right, because she didn’t have anything to rely on.

Michael Berkman I do think that Cassidy’s decision to go forward happened in a very different kind of political environment, one of you know, political retribution. depolarization one where she had real reason to care for her, you know, have concern for her life. And in the book, it’s really quite striking. I mean, she’s evicted from her apartment and no money at all. And you can’t underestimate I just don’t think the story is told enough about the extent to which the Trump people use their attorneys to represent people that you know, these people around Trump that don’t have the money, it saves in the money and they’re not acting in the best interest of their clients.

Chris Beem

No, they’re acting in the best interest As the person that’s paying the bill.

Michael Berkman Yeah, clearly were telling her to be less than forthcoming. I mean, they they tried a very careful line. They don’t say to her injury, they’re not saying lie, but they clearly did not want her to tell all that she knew. And I think what really troubled Cassidy and what she also learned from talking to Alexander Butterfield was no, it’s your responsibility to tell the truth, they, you know it, and she needed to do that for herself. And she needed to do it for the country. And now she’s, you know, a young woman trying to figure out how to how to get what to do, to get right how to get back on pass,

Jenna Spinelle I think that’s a good overview of who Cassidy is why her story is so important for our current political moment. So let’s go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle Cassidy Hutchinson, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Cassidy Hutchinson  Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Jenna Spinelle So you know, lots to talk about with your story and everything that you’ve been through. But I want to start with the formation of your political ideology you write in the book, I believe you were in middle school during the 2012 election and and had an assignment to, you know, compare Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. And I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, take us back to that time, and what were some of the things that you’ve saw in in the candidates and and how did you come to make that decision? It’s it’s rare that you someone can point to such a singular experience, that is the formation, especially with someone who has had a career in politics, as you have.

Cassidy Hutchinson  Yeah, it is interesting, looking back on that moment, and backtrack just a little bit more, oh, not a little bit more, sort of a lot. But but we’ll briefly get back up to this. I was four and a half years old when 911 happened. So I that was my first I had this surge of national pride. And it was natural miracles very united in that period. I was also raised, though, in a family that was had somewhat contentious views about the government and not very fond views about the government in some ways. So, you know, I wasn’t raised in a family that was very civically active, my parents had never voted before. But my uncle, my uncle Joe did serve in the Afghanistan war. So he was my first real example, and tangible example. And he was like a father figure to me to have a public servant. So I had this idea of like, I love my country, I want to serve my country in some way. Obviously, at this point, I’m very young. But I had this notion, right was very civic minded. I think from a younger age, although not conscious of it, obviously, that did continue through middle and high school. I was a sophomore in high school during the 2012 presidential election. And we were assigned, basically to write a little paper, but I turned it into this big case study of both candidates, and I still have the binder with all of it in it. And I watched all the debates, then I really started researching both party platforms. And, you know, I’ve thought a lot about this. And I’ve been asked questions about this. I don’t, there wasn’t really one specific issue that drew me towards the Republican Party, I think, you know, I was also raised in a blue collar family. My brother and I were the first in our family to go to college. And it’s because our parents worked so hard. And they gave us that opportunity to be able to do that and to be able to create a life better than what they had for themselves, but also that they were able to enable us to do that. I think what really attracted me to the Republican Party was more just the general belief system. And it sounds sort of silly saying that. But I just felt like what Mitt Romney was saying, aligned with my family, which was sort of anti government, but what I felt like they believed in what I felt like was reinforced with the environment that I lived in, made sense within the Republican Party. And I really liked Mitt Romney. I liked his character I liked Paul Ryan, I, I felt that there was I felt drawn to them as candidates, but I also wasn’t necessarily upset when Obama won the re election. But that was really my first taste of politics. And the years that fall to my junior and senior year of high school, I began to learn more about the party platforms. And that’s when I began to really believe in the Republican Party more across the board with issues which again, it propelled me to where I where I am now, but also to the feature career but also to touch on this to shows like how far we have gone from the difference between the party platform in 2012 versus 2016. And then what it has evolved to today I mean, it’s like IT company slightly different.

Jenna Spinelle Or maybe lack thereof,.

Cassidy Hutchinson  Romney and Paul Ryan, both are anti Trump and they are the two leading candidates and leader for the Republican Party just 12 years ago. And it’s Yeah, wild to think how fast we’ve devolved in to this.

Jenna Spinelle So to keep your your story going here, so you get to college, you really hustled and had several internships. And, you know, I was struck this is, I mean, one, your book is just a great behind the scenes look at like, what all of these people who make our government functioning like actually do all day. So that that piece of it is, is fascinating. But there’s I also thought about, you know, so I teach journalism, and I have students who will apply to Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, and NPR and Ben Shapiro’s podcast company, right. So there’s not always a partisan dimension to choosing where you want to work. And I was struck by what you said about sending out your resume to all 100. Senate offices, your career might have gone very differently had someone else. Yes, instead of, you know, Ted Cruz and where you went from there. But I guess I wonder if you can maybe talk about that. I think in these like polarized times, it’s easy to think about everything through this team red versus Team blue lens. But it also seems that there is an element of it that is maybe more nonpartisan, more focused on service and some of these other ideals that that you were just describing.

Cassidy Hutchinson  I applied for every Republican House office before I applied for every Republican and Democrats Democratic Senate office. And this was when I was a sophomore, going to my junior year of college, I considered myself a Republican, Trump had just been elected. I did vote for Trump in in the 2016 presidential election. But I entered public service with the mindset as quintessential as and cheesy as it sounds, but serving my country. And I really took that seriously. In the beginning. And I thought at the end, although there was a big period of disillusionment that I wasn’t conscious of, really at the time, which I’m sure we’ll get to. But yeah, I, throughout my internships on Capitol Hill, and then I ended up interning in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, I did always feel that there was an importance to bipartisanship. And there, you have 70 plus percent of what typically passes through Congress has done so on a bipartisan basis. And that’s, we often focus on the hot button issues. But there is a lot that is accomplished. Typically, when political tribalism isn’t at the levels that it’s at right now. What I think is, I mean, there are a lot of unfortunate consequences of the political period that we’re in right now. But that is a really dangerous aspect of all this is how divided that we have become. And it’s become really easy, whether on the left or the right to demonize the other side and not want to be receptive of the other ideas. And I, I did fall into that. And I don’t say that with pride I, as I interned in large affairs, and I worked in large affairs, eventually the Chief of Staff’s office, and I grew into that the vitriol and the partisanship that I didn’t want to participate in when I became a public servant. And I realized at a point that I was serving my principles, the P a, l s, not the principles, Pl e. S, that I signed up to serve. And I wasn’t honoring the oath that I swore because loyalty to the country is more important than loyalty to an individual. But right now, within the Republican Party, it’s the loyalty is expected to be pledged towards Donald Trump.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. And that leads us to a question I had about the idea of of power. I wonder like, you know, had you before you started working on Capitol Hill or on the White House? Did you had you kind of put some of the folks that you end up working for up on pedestals? And if so, how did how, if at all, did your feelings change, once you really kind of saw how the power they had was wielded. It also just seems that in some ways it felt reading your book, like you were talking about a bunch of like high school girls or something. And it’s not, not maybe the stereotypical image that we have of these big important officials in Washington.

Cassidy Hutchinson  You know, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this question before, but it’s something that I have spent time thinking about two answers to it. First part, just address the book part. When I made the decision to write the book, there were a lot of things that I kept in the back of my mind that I wanted to accomplish. But one thing that I really tried to be conscious of, was to be as straight down the middle with it as I could. I felt like a lot of the books that emerged from the Trump administration were either glowing reviews of him and what the administration accomplished or it was completely critical. And to me, there’s always a middle road, it wasn’t all bad. And at the end of the day, people are people and to be able to bring into try to humanize those moments and show the more vulnerable sides of people, but also who they actually are not the Kevin McCarthy who goes on and gives press conferences and has, you know, he is Kevin McCarthy. But then he’s, he is Kevin, and it goes to be said about every politician second part and more important part of your question. And, you know, I, I actually think it’s was sort of the opposite at the time for me, I could be wrong. But I think, because I didn’t come from a political environment. And my first taste in politics was working for Steve Scalise. Within five days of my internship, I was in a room with every House Republican talking to them, as if they were just people. So I always had this view of like, okay, there are people, I can talk to them, like people, we’re all trying to accomplish something. And I feel like that was beneficial for me in the job, but I also look back now. And I see not just abuses of power and irresponsible abuse of their use of power. But I see more so how political they actually were and how they play the how politicians play a character essentially. And it as humanizing as those other moments are, I was also naive, I think, because I saw them as who they were. And I was naive to the political power that they actually wielded, if that kind of helps.

Jenna Spinelle You know, it’s it’s interesting to hear you say that he’s trying to try to take the straight down the middle approach, because to me, your book is and what I’ve heard you say publicly, it is remarkably devoid of ego, which is also something that is very rare in in politics, I wonder how you do it both at the time, and you know, looking back how you think about the egos of the folks that you worked with and for and and how that might have played into some of the decisions they made, or maybe things that they didn’t do, because they were, you know, concerned about how it would impact them and their reputations, and that level of power.

Cassidy Hutchinson  I wasn’t completely naive to the egos, especially of some individuals in the administration on Capitol Hill, even like some of my peers and colleagues. There was also natural egotism in Washington, DC, or there was a saying, and it’s not completely flattering or true. But by and large, Washington DC is a city full of idealistic people who think that they can change the world and they can change the country. And it is true, and that it takes a little bit of ego to do something like that. And it’s also an element of how people can change things. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I was in denial of the level of egotism of some of the people that I did trust. And then I did place a lot of faith and hope in that it wasn’t their ego driving their decision making process, or it wasn’t their political capital that they were trying to save. I saw it as that’s what they truly believed. And like, for instance, my former boss, Mark Meadows, I, I really believed in him, and I really admire we politically were very different, but I admired him, I felt that he was a true believer in the agenda. I didn’t feel that I had to agree with him on everything in order to be an effective staffer for him. I also felt like we had a good dynamic that way. And I’m I’m not going to speculate or hypothesize whether Mark’s ego drove his decision making process or if it was his true belief system. But I see by and large in the Republican Party now, a lot of people who I know, know better who publicly on January 6, came out and denounced the former president for his responsibility that day, I think of politicians like Elise Stefanik, who I really admired. I wrote one of my college papers about her rise in the Republican Party and I, you know, the first years of the Trump administration, she didn’t want to come around the administration. She was a very moderate member and how quickly at least fell into the cycle of appeasing Donald Trump and being an enabler of his agenda, and has completely fallen beholden to Donald Trump now, and that is a trend that we are seeing continued to persist and especially as we go through this primary season, there have been a lot of people that have come out. And I believe a lot of it’s ego I think a lot of it’s trying to save political capital and to keep their power. And it does amaze me sometimes how desperate people are to hold on to that because you it this is still the ideal so maybe you enter public service to be an asset for your country and the most noble thing you can do is step down when you’re not no longer being that asset. But we’re seeing very few Republicans want to do that.

Jenna Spinelle What can Democrats and folks on the left do here because you know, you also write about the connection that you saw firsthand. Donald Trump make with people in the you know, formation of the mega base, you know, his rally These are compared to rock concerts. And people seek this out because they want that sense of community and to feel heard by him and also by other people. That’s just part of who we are as humans. And I think that notion is often met with condescension on the left, right, the basket of deplorables. And this idea that these people are just stupid, they don’t know anything, and they’re just how could they get kind of swindled like this? Right? So that seems to me to be not the most productive way to do things. So what? From where you sit, like, how can people who are not conservatives kind of aid in this this cause as you were just describing,

Cassidy Hutchinson  I really appreciate this question is, there’s not one clean cut answer, but it’s something that especially the last couple of months, I’ve, since the book came out, I spent a lot of time thinking about and you’re absolutely right there. And that was a big fear that I had coming forward. Frankly, too, I’d seen I’ll use my friend Alyssa Farah Griffin, for example. She has a long history of working in Republican politics on Capitol Hill, she worked for Mike Pence, who worked for the Secretary, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper Mark Meadows. She was the communications director during Trump’s last year in office. But on January 6, Alyssa came out and very fiercely denounce what was happening. And she was one of the first voices to do that. She was almost immediately demonized by the left, because they said, you know, she supported all of this. She doesn’t, she’s not welcome. She, she’s, I’m paraphrasing, but a bad person or she’s not. She was this she can’t ever change. She’s only trying to be advantageous. But then on the right, it was sort of the same thing. People were saying that she was an opportunist, that she was trying to make money and trying to appease the left. So she was in a no win situation there. That being said, That was a big fear that I had coming forward. And I’ve been really fortunate to have the experience that I have had. And I think part of its the changing, slowly changing dynamics of our conversations, but with the levels of political tribalism that we’re at, it is easy to just denounce one side. The focus of this needs to stay on Donald Trump, who is the perpetrator, and his enablers, the people who continue to surround him who are enabling the agenda, whether it’s his staff or members of Congress, the people, the voters, the average American person, in my view, I don’t like using the word victim, but they have been utterly artificially seduced by Donald Trump and his rhetoric, by his conspiracy theories and his promotion of conspiracy theories. He knows how to play on the fears of people and the anxieties of the American people. And he is portrayed as he is an honest man who is exposing the truth. And that’s that’s not the truth. So when we approach these conversations, and I think about even the first few conversations I had when I hadn’t formally broken from Trump world yet, but even the conversations I had, once I did, and I had new legal counsel and I was coming out and about to testify, and the most productive conversations I had with people personally, were approached, not from a place of HOW COULD YOU HAVE BELIEVED X was put me on the defensive. Because when people asked me to help explain certain things to them, I felt they’re receptive to how I could have once believed that, because I gave my mind the freedom to expand and to question things, and to also feel like I was talking to be listened to not talking to be heard and talked at. It’s a problem on the left and the right, the right doesn’t want to have those conversations with people on the left and the left doesn’t want to have, by and large with that with those conversations, the people on the right. But if we’re going to come out from underneath of this, we have to at some point, welcome people back. And we can’t blame the people who have been artists artificially seduced by Donald Trump, they need a home too. And we need, we need to keep them involved in civics and in politics, but also find a way to adequately educate them. And that happens through conversation that happens when we are able to talk to each other. And I think when we can keep that in mind, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s easier said than done. But when we keep that in mind, especially with levels of political tribalism, that we’re at, you know, people want to feel like they have a sense of security, we gravitate towards tribes, naturally as like a natural human instinct, but that doesn’t have to be the left and the right. We all want, I hope, a better America and doesn’t have to come down to our political belief system. You know, there’s room for change. There’s room for compromise, and that’s what we’re built on.

Jenna Spinelle I mean, some of this will often lead to a conversation. So there’s culture and then there’s their structure, right? So we have to change the culture to maybe you know, recapture a shared sense of patriotism and these things, but then on the other side of the coin, there’s conversations about well, what incentives need to change for the elected officials to whether it’s you know, gerrymandering reform or the electoral college or some of those things I, I know you’re not an expert in, in political reform, but just thinking are there is there anything that comes to mind as far as incentives for the people who are in power based on on what you’ve seen? Like? What what incentives for them might need to change to get them to do some of these things? You’re just encouraging all of us who are not in positions of power to do?

Cassidy Hutchinson  You know, I will use I hope this helped answer the question, but I’m gonna use the word power very loosely here because you know, that position of power typically is defined as you if you hold public office or what you who you are and what actual power you can wield. But, again, it’s cheesy, but it’s true power is comes from leadership. And you know, Liz Cheney, for example, staunch conservative, obviously, she is the former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, also very, very conservative. But part of Liz Cheney, Liz Cheney, I think wield a lot of power. But a big part of her power comes from the fact I look back at the her leadership throughout the January six investigations when she sat with Adam Kinzinger are the two Republicans on that committee on that Dyess are surrounded by Democrats, because they know that this moment is so much bigger and more important for our country than this political moment. And they sacrifice their career to do so. But what I think, you know, institutionally, what Liz Cheney has done is commit herself to saving the Republic. In the 2022, midterm cycle, she campaigned for Democrats. To me that is an extraordinary example of power and using money that is, she is fundraiser helping fundraise to put it towards candidates that are not promoting Donald Trump’s agenda, which is dangerous for our country. And seeing that if this means that we need to rebuild the Republican Party from the ground up and have a blue wave, and have Republicans hold Congress for a couple of years, so we can come out from this moment. No, that is, to me where there are, there are institutional reforms, like gerrymandering and things that I wanted, I’m not an expert and comfortable to talk about, there are much more more intelligent people that you could have to talk about the pros and cons of all that. But you know, I think about the power that we have in the power that Democrats also have to to welcome people like Liz Cheney, like myself, like Alyssa Farah, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Republicans who they might not agree with, but are willing to work with to help overcome this moment. But that’s where we are as a country because I’ve been really impressed with a number of people and even Republicans who want to learn more and who want and who are receptive to learning more about this period in our history. The second thing, I think, that has surprised me and been a huge blessing for me is the story was really difficult for me to write in to me, it wasn’t a me versus them. It wasn’t me versus Trump world, or me versus the Republican Party. It wasn’t me, it’s a me versus me story. It’s a story of how types of coming to age story. It’s a cautionary tale. But it’s also how I wrestled with my belief system, and how I was able to come out from a difficult situation. But that also requires a level of vulnerability that I had to exhibit, which was a learning curve for me. But even talking about family things and knowing that, you know, I always said that one person reads this and feels that they’re more understood. And I’ve had a lot of people come up and talk about personal situations that they’ve been in completely apolitical, that there is an element of my story that does not directly relate to a situation that they are in, but it helps them understand their situation more. And that’s the power of storytelling.

Jenna Spinelle Last question, Cassidy, what does democracy mean to you?

Cassidy Hutchinson  It’s a loaded question. You know, to me, the democracy means a lot, and there’s a lot of different, say, different forms of democracy. But you know, American democracy is rooted in this belief isn’t we’re not necessarily a two party system, but we function off of different ideas. And, you know, this country is filled with people who thought like Cassidy Hutchinson, we would not be in a great place as a country. And that’s not because my beliefs aren’t okay in some areas, but it’s they’re not perfect in a lot of areas. And the, you know, so the exchanging of ideas is how we have thrived as a country and we have been an exceptional nation for just under 250 years, as an American experiment, because we’ve been able to reflect on our history but also look at our past mistakes and how we can correct those moving forward. And we’ve done that keeping in mind that we are the shining city on a hill in this country that is low Got globally as what other countries want to model themselves after. What I fear about the future of our country right now is that we are not looking towards our future, we’re stuck in this moment of political tribalism where everybody thinks that they’re right, or correct, and we’re not exchanging those ideas. And you know, we’re, I think we’re moving to a better place, both on the left and the right with that. But I also think, looking at this next election, in my view, this really could be the election that solidifies whether we continue to exist and continue to be the American experiment, or whether we really begin our disillusion as a nation, which also sets an example and a global impact, it’s going to send a global shockwave through. So I think, you know, looking at this next election, I’m not here ever going to tell people who to vote for, but there are two primary candidates on the ballot. There’s Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. I disagree with Joe Biden on a lot of policy. But what I believe in Joe Biden is that he is a truly decent person who wants the best for our country who wants democracy to continue continuing, surviving, and thriving. And then we have Donald Trump, who has essentially pledged to begin dismantling democracy, we saw that happen at the end of his first term in office, and it could very easily happen again. So this next election is, in my view, the election that could really could determine whether we continue to vote under our Constitution as it is, or if we’re going to not correct or correct course become, look towards our better angels like we have in the past.

Jenna Spinelle Well, Cassidy, thank you for all the work that you’ve done to help people see their own better angels, hopefully, and for sharing your story. And thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.

Cassidy Hutchinson  Thank you, and thank you for having me here.

Chris Beem Terrific interview. I mean, again, you hear this measured tone, and this, you know, overriding desire to say what’s true, and to say it in a way, that’s fair. And I really think that’s admirable, you know, so now I’m going to take it all back. No, that’s not true. I do think that, you know, I wonder how much she’s really come to terms fully with what went on in that White House, right? You know, she talked about at the, at her talk about how she came upon, and this is in the book to where she came upon Mark Meadows, burning documents. And, you know, it’s just hard for anybody not to kind of see that as deeply suspicious at best, but she was not willing to do that. And the other thing that struck me is, you know, she said that doubts started to slowly creep into her mind, about, you know, whether or not Donald Trump was serving the best interests of the nation. And, you know, I mean, I think that is a reality. And it’s impressive to me that she was able to get there. But you know, I mean, those signs were always there, right? I mean, you had this stuff with COVID. And, you know, even during the campaign, you had, you know, making fun of the disabled person and making fun of the Gold Star family. This is just not the way that a president normally behaves. And, you know, I don’t want like I say, I don’t want to, you know, use this as an opportunity or an occasion to say negative things about Cassidy Hutchinson. But I do think it reflects on the kind of the, the world in which we find ourselves where, you know, I and I think most people like me, are continually amazed that all these all this evidence, all these examples of unprincipled behavior, to say the least, just does not register. And it’s just to say that, you know, when you have hitched your wagon to the star, that becomes kind of an armor that surrounds you, and that nothing will penetrate and, you know, I do think it speaks better, of Cassidy that she got there. Anyway, Michael, what do you think?

Michael Berkman I didn’t really see her that way. I didn’t think she had hooked herself to Trump star at all. You know, my reading of how she ended up where she was, was not a typical to me of ambitious political science students who send off a million resumes to Capitol Hill and hope that one of them is going to land because you know, what they really want to do is be on Capitol Hill. When I read about how she got into the Republican Party in the first place, it didn’t have anything to do with Donald Trump at all. And it was, you know, based on a notion of the Republican Party as promoting strength is maybe promoting the best response to 911, which, you know, for kids who grew up in New Jersey was awfully traumatic events, especially in working class communities, which lost so many of their population and 911. So I didn’t see any of that as what brought her in. She was no true believer by any extent. And she ended up I fought in the White House purely in from a careerist perspective. Like here, Mark Meadows, who she met in the house, invited her over for a significant promotion actually started in the Office of Legislative Affairs. So she was working in this sort of policy like shop within the White House. And then Meadows brought her over, you know, she talked, I thought that I did think it was striking to talk about going to a Trump rally for the first time once she was already in the White House. And looking around and seeing people that looked like the people she grew up with. I thought that was a really telling statement, and also talking about how these people who she had grown up thinking like her parents, that government had nothing to do with them and no interest and they had no interest in government, that they were being heard. And she related to that, and she could see the appeal of Trump. But also, I mean, a multiple times she talked about how, you know, I didn’t like everything that was going on, it was really not all from me. But there were certain things where I really believed people around me were acting in the best interest of the country. And actually, I think she’s probably, you know, I don’t think we give people enough credit for that who was in the Trump White House or were in the Trump agencies, and many of them were doing exactly what they thought was in the best interest of the country. And they recognize that Trump was maybe not a very good person, but this is what they thought was going on until they realized from whatever circumstances that it wasn’t, you know, and the thing with Mark Meadows was like, I thought, yeah, I guess she could have run to the FBI and said my boss’s throwing things into the fireplace. But she said, I certainly wasn’t in a position to tell Mark Meadows, right, what he should be doing. That’s not my job. And, you know, should she have run to the FBI? I don’t know, that might be asking an awful lot.

Chris Beem And you have, you know, people who have, you know, she, somebody at one point in the talk, someone asked her, How many Republicans do you really think believe, for example, that the the election was stolen? And she joked, and she said four. And that means there’s an awful lot of Republicans in his White House and elsewhere who are lying who are not representing their beliefs accurately. And that is a good explanation for how we, how we are where we are?

Michael Berkman Well, I was struck by her, you know, somewhat idealistic belief that it’s all going to be okay. You know, so she talks about the people that are really caught up in all of these lies, and, you know, the hardest of the hardcore and kind of thinks about reaching out to them. And I mean, my thought was, these people are never coming back to reality. They are so immersed in a world of disinformation. Yeah, at this point, that they’re gone. And, but she doesn’t, you know, she believes they can be brought back in, believes they should be brought back in.

Michael Berkman Right. And, yeah, and she believes The Republican Party can be rebuilt with Adam Kinzinger. And her and, and Liz Cheney, Liz Cheney, and some others like that,

Chris Beem I  guess I come down kind of between the two of you, I do think is possible. But I think it’s an enormous task that’s in front of us. And it’s going to take a long time. But long time or short time, whatever, you know, I kind of hope we get there. But regardless, you know, I think all of us who who met Cassie, over her time here, came away with just being so impressed with you know, you can always talk about poise, but in terms of her articulate pneus, her honesty, her self criticism. These are noble things for any human being, but they’re especially good for someone who calls themselves a democratic citizen. So for that reason, I think we’re all all in our debt. And I’d like to encourage you to read her book if you haven’t. Anyway, lots to chew on. For Democracy Works. I’m Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem Thanks for listening.

Idrissresized-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Cynthia Miller-Idriss, one of America’s leading experts on the far right, joins us this week to discuss what draws people to political extremism online and offline — and what we can do to combat it.

Miller-Idriss is the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University and author of the book Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. As you’ll hear, PERIL takes a public health approach to preventing violent extremism and provides tools and resources to help communities create resilient democracies.

In the interview, Miller-Idriss discusses how extremism and political violence are linked to our desire for community. This dynamic means that extremist ideas can pop up in seemingly innocuous places from martial arts groups to online wellness communities. She says understanding this dynamic is key to moving people away from extremist spaces and into constructive communities.

Miller-Idriss visited Penn State as part of the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar exploring the theme, “Birthing the Nation: Gender, Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries.”

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University, I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem And I’m Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. Our guest this week is Cynthia Miller-Idriss professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University. She’s also the director of the polarization and extremism Research and Innovation Lab, and the author of the book hate in the homeland the new global far right. Cynthia visited Penn State’s in January to present a lecture as part of the Sawyer seminar I project that will explore the role of gender sex and reproduction in ethno nationalism. But our conversation focuses mainly on the work of her research lab, and how to both recognize and combat political extremism. Something I think we can definitely use, especially in an election year.

Chris Beem It’s a very timely, sorry to say it’s a very timely topic, right? We all are aware of this, excuse me of this huge increase in domestic terrorism. anti semitism has exploded on the right and the left. There’s, there’s violence against Muslims, African Americans, gay and lesbian people, trans people, you know, we can go down the litany of, of events of mass shootings, where the person was motivated by hatred of the groups that they targeted.

Michael Berkman And so what we’ve got with Cynthia is a really interesting project, I think, because we have really powerful scholarly work on extremism that approaches it, I think, in a somewhat different way than most of the other work that I’ve read anyway. But attached to that is also a lab that really tries to make a difference. And that tries to see how you can apply what she’s learning through the scholarly work to actually undermine extremism. And our focus here, which is also different, I think, from a lot of work that we’ve seen is on younger people, mostly, I think, middle schoolers and high school, not really college campuses, I think her lab work is almost entirely with families with kids that are in middle school and high school, and she’s trying to understand how young people get sort of swept into extremism, adopt extremist viewpoints, and potentially act on that. And I think what’s so interesting here is that we’re used to hearing about the role of social media. In radicalizing people, certainly, we hear a lot about the role of social media, in mobilizing extremists for, say, ISIS throughout Europe when they’re trying to bring especially women into ISIS. But here, she really goes well beyond social media to talk more broadly about the kinds of spaces that younger people find themselves in, and she uses that word spaces quite a bit that young people find themselves in, where they develop these extremist views.

Chris Beem Yeah, you know, you read, you read the book, and when I said it reminds me of a whack a mole game, only the whack a mole game is, you know, 1000s of holes, right? And these expressions of far right ideology, and this kind of searching for people to kind of try to find where they are, and to connect to them, at a moment of some kind of vulnerability or lack of sophistication in their lives is just really astonishing to me, I had no idea that there were cooking shows and drywall videos that were were developed as a kind of means for introducing these kind of neo Nazi ideologies.

Michael Berkman I’m with you. I didn’t know about a lot of this. And I think it contextualize this, for me this notion of growth of extremist growth in a way that’s different from how we usually talk about it. Right. So, I mean, you mentioned even right at the beginning, the rise in hate groups. And so one way that we assess increasing anti semitism increasing right wing extremism, as we say there are more, we might say there are more hate groups around and other ways we look at crimes and we say the more hate crimes around and certainly in hate crimes, we’ve seen quite an explosion. But she wants us to think about this growth in terms of both supply and demand. And so she wants us to think about both, you know, sort of a top down approach or what she calls the supply side approach, which is how different kinds of organizations how different kinds of messaging how different kinds of structures sort of bring people As in, as well as on the bottom up, and that is or the demand side, like, what is it about young people, some young people today that makes them so vulnerable and open to extremism? I mean, what is it about their personalities? What is it about their sense of vulnerability? What is it about who they are, that makes them recruitable? And as I kind of mentioned before, I mean, I think you see this kind of work actually, in, you know, in Europe and understanding ISIS recruitment. And, you know, why is it that some young girls want to pick up and become an ISIS wife and how they’re recruited, say, through different kinds of networks, and through through social media or through other sources like that, but very rarely have I seen this kind of work done on the American side, or at least in a way that’s come to our attention at at democracy works. And I think that’s what makes it particularly interesting to me to move beyond just the groups to move beyond the X to understanding more broadly, the spaces and spaces that she describes as virtual spaces that she describes as real, and spaces that street described, even in purely as purely symbolic that attract, you know, young people today?

Chris Beem Well, you know, obviously, it is easier to count groups than it is to count 14 year old boys with their laptop open. Right. And so that’s part of the issue here. But yeah, I think, the spotlight exactly and and so you have, you know, I think the fact that so many young people have phones, and laptops, and you know, whatever those things are called the page things anyway, so many people have phones and laptops that so many children have phones and laptops, that it’s just the direct access to these, you know, let’s call them boys is just significantly higher now. And it’s harder for parents to know exactly what they are consuming, let alone, stop it or control it.

Jenna Spinelle And as she says in the interview, it’s important to make yourself aware of what’s happening in today’s media environment. It’s just as easy to bury your head in the sand and ignore all of this if you want to, but we talk in the interview about how everybody kind of has an obligation to keep this stuff in their minds disturbing as it may be. So let’s go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle Cynthia Miller-Idriss, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle So you are one of the country’s leading experts on the far right, and extremism. And you’ve been studying these areas for a long time, I thought maybe we could start with your definition of the far right maybe how you think about it today and how that definition has evolved in the time you’ve been studying this field?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Yeah, well, first of all, I often consider myself an accidental expert on the far right. It wasn’t what I intended to study, I spent the first 1520 years of my career in Germany, studying school based responses to resurgent anti semitism and Neo Nazism there, and was sort of tracing aesthetic changes in the far right, they’re the change from the skinhead kind of racist scene to a much more mainstream, commercialized appearance. And then Charlottesville happened sort of right after I finished a book called The extreme gone mainstream. And so everything shifted. So you know, I wasn’t really working on us contexts, very much at all, although there’s a global dimension to this until around 2017 2018. And I use the term far right, which I often say is the best bad term available for the phenomenon, in part because that is a term that’s used by global databases by scholars around the world. It’s recognizable, but I don’t like the term because it’s often very easily sort of turned into political partisan tensions. But the way that I use the term the definition is it’s loosely gathers two clusters of problematic beliefs and behaviors that are related on the one hand to supremacist to thinking which is thinking that sets up a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority between groups of people in which the other poses an existential threat that often has to be met with violence in this country and globally, that’s most commonly white supremacist extremism, but we also have rising male supremacy, Christian supremacy, Western supremacy. So you have groups like the proud boys who call themselves Western chauvinists, for example, that would fall in that category. Then the other sort of part of the bucket is anti government, anti democratic movements and groups and scenes and that includes in this country, the unlawful militias groups like the Oathkeepers the three percenters but also kinds of general anti government movements and anti democratic movements that seek to reduce the rule of law or the protection of minority rights. And then there’s some other kinds of clusters of things that don’t fit neatly conspiratorial movements like Q Anon, which actually cut across the spectrum. And the last thing I’ll say is that there are a lot of things that fall under those categories that also cut across the political spectrum. So anti semitism, misogyny, male supremacism, for example, are a part of the far right, but also appear across the political spectrum, including on the left,

Jenna Spinelle And you write in your book hate in the homeland about needing to think about shifting our focus to the ways that people enter far right movements enter extremist spaces. I wonder if you could talk more about generally what some of those pathways are? We’ll get down to more specifics later on. Sure. But and to what extent those pathways are similar, from country to country.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Yeah, so one of the things that frustrated me and when I first started working on this in the US, in part because I live in DC, and so I’m often kind of invited to meetings with policymakers who work in the national security space. And during that kind of post Charlottesville period, when we saw a series of horrific attacks, both in the US and overseas in Christchurch, and El Paso and in Pittsburgh, and you know, then eventually Buffalo and more there was a real shift in the US is interest and willingness to discuss and eventually willingness to acknowledge that as the Department of Homeland Security eventually did in October 2020, that domestic violent extremism is the most pressing and lethal threat facing the homeland. So that finally happened in 2020. So we’re not even that far from that period of time. We’re only about three years into acknowledgement. I say that because that meant, you know, prior to that, for 20 years since 911, the focus had been on international Islamist forms of terrorism and extremism. And so all of the questions that I was getting in those early years were about they were using frameworks that that made sense for ISIS and Islam, you know, and I’ll cut it. And so they were asking questions like about the hierarchy of the groups, the chain of command? How can you infiltrate them? How you know, so all as if this is all organized top down by an ideology, and a structure and a group that can be infiltrated and broken up? And I’m there trying to explain that, you know, actually, what happens in most domestic violent extremism movements, including white supremacy and anti government extremism is the ideas come to you rather than you seeking them out? Especially in online contexts? There are groups producing propaganda. So groups matter. But groups are not where the vast majority of violence comes from, in fact, every major terrorist attack on the far right going all the way back to Oklahoma City, has been at the hands of a person who was not a formal member of a group. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time on groups, including in the media, because they’re understandable. They’re definable, and we think that we can just say like, that’s the problem over there. But actually, I think a lot of the problem is right here on your screen in front of you and your kid’s room and your brother’s room and whatever, as they’re on their laptops, and they’re in online gaming platforms, or they’re in self help forums, or they’re in I mean, really, anywhere. It’s the you know, the point of that book, hate in the homeland to talk about those spaces and places is to show how ordinary these early exposures are. They’re ubiquitous, and they’re everywhere. So hateful, conspiratorial ideas are everywhere. And it doesn’t mean that everyone who encounters them is going to go down those rabbit holes, but the rabbit holes exist, meaning it’s pretty easy to click on the next recommended link and get to ever more salacious content because of how algorithms themselves for social media companies prioritize salacious content, and pretty quickly get to content that’s banned actually pretty, you know, afterward, but has been viewed and downloaded millions of times before it’s banned. So you know, there are cooking shows, there are livestream MMA tournaments, there are online gaming chat rooms and servers that get either infiltrated by or, you know, deliberately introduced by people who are deliberately introducing extremist ideas, or they’re just somebody sharing a link, they get into a chat room, it’s a meme sharing site, and they’re sharing evermore scientific, racist and gross content to try to kind of continue to shock each other. And somebody you know, follows a link to an encrypted chat room and then that leads them down a rabbit hole. So it’s just the pathways are endless, I think at the beginning, and you know, those become more narrow and focus as you move, but there are many different points for potential offer and being early on and it’s one of the things I tried to emphasize.

Jenna Spinelle And speaking of offering I mean, I know that you communities, whether online or off, also police themselves. And so I wonder to what extent that happens. We you’re right, we do hear a lot about the rabbit holes and the people who become radicalized, but maybe not as much in the media about groups that keep those forces at bay?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Well, there are, of course, there are like trust and safety groups that are official parts of social media platforms that are trying hard to remove bad content, and they get a lot of, they get a bad rap. But I think actually, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of those folks. First of all, a lot of those teams have been decimated by layoffs recently, so they’re really stretched thin, but also they are, you know, they’re trying to work within a corporate structure that prioritizes profits. And that, you know, is always trying to play catch up with the guidelines of how to remove content and how to quickly remove content and use AI in many cases to remove content that AI doesn’t always right away, recognize as false or conspiratorial, or deepfake. Video, you know, the problem I have with the content moderation side of it is that even in the best case scenario, even when everything goes right, and the content gets removed, it’s always been downloaded millions of times and seen, you know, millions of times and so the harm is already done. It may we may stem the flow of the harm, but it’s not actually a preventative. It’s like a band aid, right, you’re stemming the bleeding that’s happened and stopping further harm, an infection from spreading, but you’re not actually like the cuts are already there and are in the in the fabric of our society, our social cohesion, etc, the harms that are done to targeted groups. And so sometimes you get stigma as a policing technique, you know, then sometimes you get individuals who just step up and say, like, that’s awful. But in teenage spaces, there’s not enough of that. And I think part of it is just it’s so normalized. You know, the talk I gave here on campus last night, a young woman came up to me, right at the end of the talk a student and said, you know, just sort of heartbreakingly that, you know, acknowledging just how desensitized she’s become to the, you know, horrific gender based violence that she observes, and you know, in online spaces every day, and just has come to accept it as kind of part of what one of the teenage girls who observed mass shooters online rage later said, quote, it’s what online is, why would anyone report it? I think that that’s a danger to when the kind of when we get so used to how awful it is that you just dismiss it, because there’s a kind of desensitization and dehumanization that comes from that kind of toxic stew, as well. So sometimes there’s policing internally, sometimes there’s external constraints, but I don’t think it’s a match for the kind of desensitization, that’s happening.

Jenna Spinelle And so you know, people find communities and want to join groups because they want connection, they want to feel validated. They want to feel meaning, and purpose. And so I wonder how you think about that side of the equation. It’s like an extension of the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone problem, right? And so how do we keep all the good stuff about communities and being part of them, but without some of these more nefarious forces that find their way and as we’re discussing,

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  I mean, it’s one of the, you know, one of the pieces of advice we give to parents and our parenting guides and tools and trainings is to think about fostering a healthy sense of connection and belonging and identity, like a lot of teenagers who go looking for this kind of stuff, both on the Islamist ISIS related recruitment. And on, you know, domestic, violent extremist groups here are actually looking for some way to belong, to have meaning to have purpose to contribute to something that they think is bigger and better than themselves. It’s a major set of vulnerabilities. This is a generation of young people that’s more isolated than any generation and previous record. And yet they are connected online. Often they don’t, that doesn’t make them feel less isolated. Right. They have fewer people who they count as friends, they have fewer people who they think they can ask for a favor, or rely on for help. And so those are all things that create vulnerabilities. And it’s one of the reasons why we saw such a surge in both the circulation of online propaganda and in weird kinds of radicalization during the pandemic like QAnon.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. And one of the guides that your team put out, you talk about the principle of civic courage, I believe that was in the one for for just general community members, bystanders who might witness forms of extremism. Can you talk about what that is and how it plays out?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Yeah, I mean, so one of the things we find is that there’s really interesting data on this is that people’s willingness to intervene with a person who they know has expressed radicalizing ideas harmful content conspiratorial content is dependent on their knowledge of that, right. So they because they may doubt themselves right to do I really know is that definitely, what did he mean by that? Right? And so we find this with parents, for example, their knowledge of harmful online content, predicts their willingness to engage and their confidence to do so those two things really interesting. We’re doing longitudinal study. These are the parents, we find that they start to forget what they learned about six months after the intervention, but their confidence and willingness to engage stays high for another three months. So you know, what we’ve been talking to funders about is like, that tells us people and then it drops, right. So it trails after they realize they forgotten, then about three months later, they stop being willing to intervene or being confident that they can do so effectively. So we’ve said, you know, look, I think people need a booster, basically, about six months after we’ve had an initial intervention. Can we send people a short video? Can we do a short primer to remind them what they learned and keep their knowledge high, in order to keep the confidence high. And so I think this notion of civil courage is, is about, you know, you know, willingness to step up willingness to speak up to intervene, but I’m also cautious about it, knowing what we know, from the data that that’s also connected empirically, to people’s awareness of the problem. And their, their confidence and willingness to intervene depends on how much they know, right?

Jenna Spinelle And then I mean, in our media world, it is, as we’ve discussed, you can create a world in which this extremist content is the only content you’re exposed to. But you can also create a world where you never ever have to encounter it, if you don’t want to. And so how much, how much duty do do we all have? I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say people listening to this podcast are probably not mostly consumers of our right or extremist content. But how much duty do we all have to know what’s out there and to and to stay apprised of what’s happening?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  I think, I mean, you know, I’m a compassionate person about how busy people are and how you know, so I’m not going to wag my finger and say, you know, everybody should be doing better. But I think there’s this principle that says, like, we’re all doing the best we can, and we could all be doing better, right, like, and so I think if you acknowledge and recognize that, that we’re doing the best we can with constrained times, and schedules and balances, and overwork, and under, you know, a lack of time for ourselves. And I think staying informed in this moment of real democratic crisis is critical. And I think, you know, one of the things we found with our parents guide is that it only takes parents an average of seven minutes to read that guide. And so we then wrote an op ed for USA Today that said, it only takes seven minutes to keep your kids safer from online harms. And we found that by studying those parents, after even just seven minutes of reading, on average, three months afterward, we had 6% of the 1500. Parents we studied, say that they use what they learned in the Guide to directly intervene with a child who they now understood, was exposed to or expressing radicalizing content. 11% said they, after reading that guide, in just seven minutes, they joined or created a group of other parents to talk about the online harms that their kids were exposed to. And that really, to us says that you can have that’s about 75 people who said, they use what they learned in just seven minutes of reading to intervene. So you know, I think it’s really important to know, you don’t have to go to a whole weekend workshop, you don’t have to take a semester long class, you don’t have to write a book on this. But you can pick something up parents told us they wanted it in a PDF downloadable. So we made it as a PDF downloadable, but it’s also available online, on our it’s all free on our websites, and doesn’t have to be our tools, I think there’s a lot of things that can inform you while you’re drinking a cup of coffee, that actually just helps you. The last thing I’ll say is this data isn’t published yet, but I just heard yesterday, so kind of hot off the press that our 12 month data where we also talked to parents about parenting styles indicates that actually parenting style is a huge predictor of their willingness to engage in their effectiveness at doing so. And so that’s, you know, parents who are so you know, I won’t go into more detail on that. But I think stay tuned for that publication and for what we’re learning about the difference between say being an authoritative parent versus authoritarian versus permissive in terms of how willing and how confident parents are that they can engage effectively with a child turns out to have a lot of impact on whether they can do it. Yeah.

Jenna Spinelle And and we’ll certainly link to all of those resources in our show notes. But for, for listeners who, who have kids, or maybe who are teachers themselves, what are some of the warning signs to look for?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Well, you know, some of it is like, you know, if teenagers start to say something like, you know, just out of the blue usually like one of the ones we used to say is it probably a little less common now but but teenagers will say something like a joke that is, you know, sometimes quite obvious like we’ve heard parents tell us, a kid says some joke about the Holocaust, right? That’s a con and then when you speak up and say something to that to them about that. They say or something anti immigrant or mentioning the great replacement or something. Then they say, Oh, don’t be such a triggered snowflake. Right? So to me if you if a kid uses the phrase triggered snowflake, doesn’t mean they’re radicalized at all, but it means that they’re definitely exposed to something online. That is a narrative that positions this narrative about like kind of hateful and far right content as being you know, just a joke, and everybody else just can’t get the joke right? is just too serious. Like we’re the edgy ones using satire and humor and you just don’t edit. And so, you know, what we find is that parents actually, you know, usually know something is going on, they just don’t know what it is, right. So we’ve had parents come to us and say, I can tell something’s going on, I don’t know, if they’re doing drugs, if there’s like, if they’re involved in some new relationship, if they’re exposed to something online, but they’re changing, right, the personality is changing. And a lot of the warning signs about being withdrawn, changing relationships, pulling out from other friendships are actually the same across a whole range of problematic things that kids could be doing, or things that could have happened to them. And so talking to them, is really important. And that’s, you know, one of the things we really urge parents and teachers to do is approach the subject with curiosity, rather than judgment, because kids shut down right away, if you have judgment or shame. But if you can, sort of one of the best things is just ask them to explain how a meme works, how they, you know, how do you encounter means how do they work? How do you modify one, can you show me how it works? And then that can get a great conversation going about how awful a lot of these memes are, because a lot of this content comes to kids in the form of jokes.

Jenna Spinelle So you mentioned immigration earlier. And that was something I thought about as I was reading hate in the homeland, I think it definitely fits into this, you know, Western supremacy ideology you were describing before, but the same time in the US, I mean, there are problems and you know, things that need to be addressed. So how do you kind of focus on those things without, you know, completely giving into that supremacist line of thinking? Yeah,

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  I mean, our you know, in the lab, and my interest is in trying to challenge you know, five things really is what we work on countering and preventing in the lab. One is supremacist thinking, as I said, that sort of sets up this hierarchy of superiority, inferiority, that ultimately, and in many cases, leads to the idea that there’s an existential threat against your group. The second is propaganda, conspiracy theories, all kinds of information problems, so Miss dis mal information. And then the last is misogyny. So those are the kinds of five categories of harm that we work on about online and offline harms. With it, you know, beyond that, you know, we expect there we want a democracy to have a range of political opinions, a range of political solutions, there’s an Overton Window, of course, for any set of public policy decisions, including on immigration, that is always going to move back and forth. And that should move back and forth. And so my or anyone else’s in the labs, own political opinions should be kind of irrelevant to that as they are in my teaching. And we try to, you know, really keep that separate from combating these five things that we think are really undermining and problematic to inclusive democracy. And so the prevention of those five things should be able to be held separate from opinions about policy solutions. And we haven’t had problems with that, per se, I think everybody gets that. And it’s a pretty straightforward thing to try to be preventing violence. And so we haven’t had, I think, as many problems as some other research labs have had, in terms of political attacks on them, or threats against them. And I also think, because a lot of our work with parents and grandparents in particular, has really good evidence that it’s effective for Republicans and for Democrats. And everybody’s worried about what kids are seeing online.

Jenna Spinelle So the last thing I’m going to ask you about speaking of public policy, you’re often called to testify before Congress. And the popular perception of the way these hearings go is that the members are just looking to ask their gotcha question that they can post on social media or go on cable news later to talk about, I guess, I wonder, do you do you feel like you’re being heard, and that, you know, Congress is actually interested in trying to do their part to solve some of these problems?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss  Yeah, I think it’s changed a little bit over time. So I will say when I first the first time, I testified before Congress, I couldn’t always tell who represented what party and the kinds of questions that I was being asked. And it felt like a pretty civil discussion and dialogue, that’s really changed. And there definitely is a more performative aspect to it. Maybe there always was, and I just didn’t see it. But it felt more serious several years ago than it does right now. And so we have serious discussions, and I’ve declined, you know, times to do it. When it felt really like a circus, like the name of the hearing, you can tell right away, it’s disingenuous, or you just realize it’s just not going to be a good opportunity to share evidence. But even in cases where it looks like it’s going to be difficult, we will often agree to do it. But like, for example, the one we did just recently in May, which was a difficult hearing, we just focused on our parents evidence and just kept coming back to that anytime, you know, it steered away, which said, you know, we’re here to share I’m here to share our evidence about what parents and caregivers need and what communities deserve. And if it’s an opportunity to read that evidence and get academic evidence into the record and share and just keep trying to be civil ourselves, is worth it. And so we’ve been you know, I’m still doing it, not always I will say behind the Scenes, there are much more productive things that happen in the hearings, sometimes open up conversations, and can be opportunities to have further conversations with staff or with congressmen and women behind the scenes later, that can be really useful. And so that’s happened as well.

Jenna Spinelle Thank you for all the work that you’re doing. And thank you for joining us today to talk about it. Thanks for having me.

Michael Berkman Yeah, so that was a terrifically interesting interview focused a bit more on the lab and the work that they’re doing then the scholarly work in the book, which was made for a nice combination, I thought I wanted to, I wanted to comment on on something she said there, which talks about her efforts to sort of define the work that they’re doing, and that they think of their work, the work that they’re doing, in terms of evidence based tools using a public health approach. In other words they want to redefine through their lab and the work that they’re doing. They want to redefine this extremism among young people in particular as a public health problem. And good luck with that, because it reminds me of the many efforts that had been made to redefine gun violence as a public health issue. And the incredible pushback that Democrats have gotten from Republicans in Congress, indeed, just an out and out refusal to devote research funds into looking at gun violence as a public health issue, they always comes out well, it’s a mental health issue, which also would be a public health issue, but somehow that connections rarely made. And so I thought I thought that was a really fascinating part of of her discussion.

Chris Beem And, you know, just important ladles on the depressing bastion of all this, right? Because it just speaks to the fact that you have to stipulate that, you know, far right extremist language and expression is bad in order to do something about it. And, and if you are in Congress, saying things like, you know, alluding to, if not absolutely, Foursquare, appealing to this kind of great replacement theory, you’re not going to do that. And when you have, you know, the leader of your party saying, you know, good people on both sides. And, you know, and when you’re talking about a group of Neo Nazis, that’s very difficult to do. And so I do think it’s it’s just bespeaks kind of the condition in which we find ourselves right now.

Michael Berkman And she talks, in fact about her experience is trying to talk about this before Congress, where she says that there’s really been a change that when she first started talking to Congress, you couldn’t tell who was asking the questions. And now what’s coming out of Democratic and Republican members towards her is distinctly different than other words, she can tell you what party they’re from based on the question.

Chris Beem Well, you know, I mean, we could have a long argument about whether congressional hearings were ever useful. They were used. Yeah, in turn, they still are used. Yeah. Well, but But the objective of your average, a US representative, or at least a Yeah, that’s not fair. The objective of a number of important congressional representatives in a hearing is to get themselves viral, is to say something that gets picked up, and that gets put on, you know, cable news and then gets picked up in Twitter. And I think, given that it’s not a surprise that that’s where we are,

Michael Berkman I mean, reading the book, and listen to the interview. I was really brought back to a book I mentioned in our year rent show, not that I expect anybody remember to mention again, because I think it really is interesting pair these two books, and that’s just Charlotte’s book, the undertow where Charlotte sort of takes a tour through some of these far right spaces, as she would call them, not necessarily as he calls them, but you know, he attends and Ashley Babbitt Memorial, he goes to different festivals, he goes to Trump rallies and, and you know, when, especially when he goes to the Trump rally, you know, he talks about how it reminded him of, I believe I read this in his book that it reminded him of going to Grateful Dead concerts that it had that kind of festival feel to it, in fact that it had people that he’d seen it multiple ones around the country, they follow it around. So there really are these spaces of this kind of extremism that are developing. I mean, the Ashley Babbitt memorials that he talks about are downright frightening, that kind of delusional thinking that’s going on at them the effort to turn her into some sort of a hero. So, uh, you know, I take the two together to give me a much richer understanding of what’s meant by the kind of extremist spaces that are happening around the country, that it’s more than just an algorithm on social media.

Chris Beem Yeah, the soil is already ready to receive this. And that is a sign of mental illness in our culture, a well adjusted boy doesn’t go looking for neo Nazi propaganda. He’s not looking for groups to hate. And the fact that that is where we are the fact that that is happening so frequently. I think that’s why she’s right to say this is an everybody problem. Yeah. You know, I actually think that might be a good note to end on. You know, I mean, on this podcast, usually we are looking to politicians to solve this. The problem we’re looking at and, and in this case, you know, it looks like her point is Cynthia’s point is that we all have a role to play here. And I think we should be grateful to her for bringing that up making that clear to us. So, for Democracy Works, I’m Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem Thanks for listening.

150x150.jpeg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Chris Beem talks with journalist Tim Alberta about the role that Evangelical Christians play in the Republican Party — and what that means for the future of American democracy.

Alberta is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the books The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age  of Extremism and American Carnage: On the Front  Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. He’s also the son of an evangelical pastor.

This conversation covers both books and how the evangelical movement and the Republican party have been corrupted. They also discuss the role that religion should play in politics, and Alberta’s answer might surprise you.

Episode Transcript

Finale-2023-300x267.png" alt="" width="300" height="267">For our final episode of 2023, we revisit some of our episodes from throughout the year and reflect on what’s in store for democracy in 2024. We talk about:

• Mental health and media consumption
• Bureaucracy and the prospect of Project 2025
• The Republican party and threats to democracy

Plus, we share some recommendations of the books and TV shows we loved in 2023. Recommendations include:

TV: For All Mankind, Fargo, The Gilded Age, and Slow Horses

Books: The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet; Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody, Why We Did It by Tim Miller

Thank you to all of our listeners for another great year. We’ll see you in 2024!

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University, I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle and welcome to democracy works. So great to have all three of you here. For our final episode of 2023. It’s hard to believe we’ve come to the end of another year already. But we’ve had a lot of great episodes this year. And what we’re gonna do today is take a listen back through some of them, I’ve pulled out a couple of clips from our guests. And we’ll both reflect a little bit on what we heard, and also how what our guests shared this year will have ramifications as we look ahead to 2024. So the first set of topics that we’re going to talk about here is all about media and mental health. We began this year with two episodes about how political news and the way that we consume it impact our mental health. We’re going to hear first from Penn State’s Matt Jordan, who is doing some work on news avoidance. And then from Christopher, Ojeda, from the University of California, talking about some of his work on how politics impacts depression and other aspects of our mental health.

Matt Jordan News avoidance is something that people have been studying now for a while, because there’s a significant swath of the population that just because of the anxiety that news creates, the way that it’s framed the way that it’s kind of always kind of one bouncing from one crisis to the next, as kind of a wellness technique, what people tend to do is just to avoid it, right? That they’re really managing their own feelings and effect level by just avoiding this kind of tumultuous day illusion of bad news, we should be striving for a kind of a more holistic approach or kind of a balanced approach to the things we do, we should work out a little bit, we should maybe check the news a little bit we should eat, eat good food, et cetera, et cetera. And part of that mindfulness that comes to being wanting to be more realistic is also recognizing that the news is not the only important places that we’re getting stories about what makes people in a democracy work, right we’d from art, we get stories about what good virtue is, and what not. And I think the, the, the danger is that when we think that the only way we can be engaged in democracy or politics is by being a news junkie, then we get pulled into only one kind of story and attempts to send tends to only have the same kind of characters, villains, and people who are doing this bad or that bad. And so we’re talking about in a way, the worst people in the world, and not talking about those people who we see as helpers, or people who are going to help us be better news consumers.

Christopher Ojeda  One story might make us feel anxious, or might make us angry. But when we consume that sort of intense emotional story over and over and over again, it becomes depressing, because we start to think there are too many problems. There are so many problems that even if we solved one of them, a million other problems would exist. How could we possibly tackle all these issues? And so I think it’s the totality of media that we consume, that can be really depressing, rather than any one story. Now, of course, any one story can itself be depressing. We, you know, war, natural disasters, like these kinds of things. Make us feel sad, but but I think it is that sort of nonstop new cycle that really gets to our psyche. So there’s a lot of discussion about how echo chambers are not good for democracy, because we want people talking to people who think differently from them. We want people to be exposed to different ideas and engaging in informed debate with other people. But what happens if that in debate is really stressful, in damaging to our mental health in what is actually good for our mental health is being around people who are like us. And so these are serious conflicts that I think we need to think about as we think about how to make democracy work.

Jenna Spinelle So my questions for for all of you to get things started here is, you know, these guests seem to be suggesting that we need to be more mindful about how much news we consume, what kind of news we consume. I’m wondering how realistic that is in an election year when political news is seemingly going to be wall to wall.

Chris Beem You know, when I when I first saw this question, I remember talking to Matt completely outside of the podcast and, and I said that I found myself watching a lot more sports than I usually do. And he said, Yeah, me too. So so we are all guilty of this news avoidance. And I don’t think there’s anybody who really isn’t, though the world is in bad shape right now. And it’s scary and threatening, and it’s not likely to get better in 2024. So yeah, it’s totally understandable that that people are avoiding this and looking for other outlets.

Candis Watts Smith  I will say that it’s worth noting that there was, I was, I would say that it is worth noting that since 2021, I have perhaps, consumed less news, not out of avoidance, but because there are some, well, not, not recently, but over the past couple of years, there’s just been a level of normal miss. So you know, I’ve in comparison to the Trump era, where there was just something bizarre, something absurd, something ridiculous, something unheard of, on a regular basis, in comparison to where we’ve been over the past few years. And I’ll say, you know, let’s say before you, the Ukraine War started that, you know, I wonder if there’s a way that we can remember what the normal feels like. And, you know, how would How do you consume news in a normal space, versus when there’s just pure chaos? I think one of the things and I’ll just start really quickly, one of the things I’ve noticed and the in the past couple of years is how much news in the media is actually not newsworthy. And so I always think to myself, like, oh, there must be enough. If we’re talking about like, Sam Altman getting fired from open AI, like, why was that a huge story? But I think it’s perhaps because we don’t have a president who does unheard of things on a on a daily basis. So okay, so what’s the lesson here? Oh, not elect this person that is going to put us into a state of chronic stress in the media.

Michael Berkman Yeah, well, for the record, I thought the open AI news was huge.

Candis Watts Smith  At first, not Sam Altman, like the reason why we were talking about Sam Altman had to do with what, what we know about AI and its capabilities, but the whole kind of politics of the guy who got fired, and the personalities involved was not important, in my opinion.

Michael Berkman Yeah, well given. Right. So that’s, that’s the part that I just really don’t agree with you on Candis. Because I think that, that AI is huge, and will have profound implications for the world. And what was going on at open ai ai was a unique kind of arrangement, where they tried to have this sort of nonprofit board, really keeping an eye on the dangers of AI, I find it not only sort of fascinating, but also profoundly important. So that open aI mean, that company is billions of dollars worth of value. And a technology that, you know, could eat us all up alive. So I just just a difference of opinion on on that. But but but canvas, it does sort of play into sort of my sense of now I, I agree with you completely about Trump and the way that he dominated the news cycle with constant chaos. And I think it was a deliberate strategy, actually, to keep us from being able to focus on anything was going on because everything was being thrown. And Biden really does restore things to normality. But what I mean, my first thought when I was reading, like these, thinking about these clips, and the notion of news of whites is that I sort of feel like we’re at a sort of inflection point in not only this country, but maybe the world. There are, like profound things going on right now. So not paying attention feels sort of risky, to me, not not to the election, necessarily, because the Election coverage is awful. You know, it’s all these polls. And it’s all of these outrageous, ridiculous things that are said at these silly debates that they’re holding. Amen. And yeah, just focusing on the election like that does seem like a kind of unhealthy waste of time. But I don’t know the you know, the possible end of American support for Ukraine. The fact that hostages, including American hostages are still being held. And then, of course, some of the plants that Trump has talked about, and I know that we’ll get to some of them for, for his next term. It says to me that people really ought to be paying attention, not avoiding it. But that doesn’t mean to me watching CNN and MSNBC, I mean, people have to figure out their own ways of staying informed.

Chris Beem I actually think that’s, I mean, I want to make sure that we’re fair to Matt’s point. It’s not merely about how you how much news you consume. But what is your what is your stance towards this, and his argument is that it’s we’re watching news as if it’s a spectator sport, and that that’s how we’re engaging politically. And I am reminded of Jenna’s podcast how the people decide or when the people decide, sorry, the last episode of the second season two is Eric Liu. And he said something that, you know, that I’ve said, as well that, you know, if you want to engage politically, one way to do it is to engage in your community to become, to engage on a real basis with real people. And if you can do that with people who you disagree with all the better. So part of the issue here is how we understand ourselves, as citizens as political actors, and all the stuff you’re talking about Michael, especially, you know, the cable news channels, frames these things, as, you know, interesting competitions that are fun to watch. And let’s hope our team wins, when, you know, a, the stakes are significantly higher. And be you know, your, the demands that are put on you, as a demo democratic citizen, are much more robust than that.

Jenna Spinelle So something else that we talked about we as you all know, we love a good bureaucracy episode around here. And we did several of those this year one with Jennifer Pahlka, who talks about the ways that technology can improve the government and how the government can streamline its use of technology. And then we also talked with Jamila Michener, who studies administrative burdens and the way that people particularly poor communities and communities of color, interact with or maybe don’t interact with government services like Medicare and Medicaid, those those kinds of things. So, to refresh your memory about the state of our bureaucracy, let’s hear from Jennifer Pahlka and Jamila Michener.

Jennifer Pahlka I think that the connection between the public’s experience with government services and the public’s willingness to engage in democracy as we think of it on sort of the electoral side, like do they vote? Are they engaged in public dialogue? You know, do they believe that government can be even if they don’t feel it is today a force for good those things are much more deeply connected than we tend to talk about. Every public servant has many, many experiences in their life, where when someone finds out they work for the government at any level, you know, somebody they know will complain to them about being at the DMV or trying to get their SNAP benefits or they have a cousin who’s on probation. And these just terrible things are happening to people as they get stuck in the bureaucracy. And they hear from them that that experience, even if it’s second hand, makes them believe that our democracy isn’t working and they the public who has his periences don’t tend to distinguish between the bureaucracy and electoral politics. And I think that when we fail to make that connection, we are inviting greater populism.

Jamila Michener During the pandemic, there were a lot of things that sort of were further invested in that were ramped up. And that were extended in ways that helped a lot of people. And because I was interviewing people all throughout the pandemic, this really became clear to me people know, people don’t know the nitty gritty of policy. They’re not like this bill and that bill, you know, but they know that suddenly, they’re getting more benefits, food benefits, that the amount of SNAP assistance they’re receiving increases, and they can get some more food for their family, or at least offset the growing cost of food. And they know that they’re not having to do as much there’s not as much administrative burden associated with getting help from the government. But it’s worth pointing out that many of these folks are not sitting around at home, like I want the largesse of the government. They’re working really hard, getting paid not great wages, dealing with rising food costs, rising housing costs, rising costs of everything that aren’t keeping up with rising wages trying to survive. And during the pandemic, the government, federal state, local help, and more.

Jenna Spinelle So, as we heard in those clips, there were some some bright spots here, especially what Jamila talked about, during the pandemic, about the ways that, you know, the government was really able to do more to tangibly help folks in their day to day lives. I know that the work that Jennifer is doing, as well as is trying to strengthen some of these systems so that the government can be less bureaucratic and provide better services, and that she argues, will increase trust in in government moving forward. But on the flip side of this, there’s something called Project 2025. I will link in the show notes, a post from Don Monahan, one of our previous guests, he wrote about this in the New York Times, and I think he even touched on it a little bit when he was on the show. But that kind of threatens to undermine not just this work that Jennifer and Jamila talks about, but the entire way that that the government operates more broadly.

Michael Berkman When the Affordable Care Act was being developed and proposed, and one of the Obama team’s proposals, there were to have navigators, who would help people to become aware of the benefits that were available to them through the ACA, how to how to work their way through the exchanges, things of that nature, basically, to bring people into the affordable care. And man did people not like that on the Republican side? And you know, in some states, I remember, I didn’t go back and look this up. But my recollection is that in Florida, for example, they were just adamant that there’d be no navigators in their states. And what occurs to me I think about this whole question of, you know, government taking pride and what it does, and bringing people into the programs. It depends how you feel about government. And, you know, that remains one of the underlying conflicts within American society or between American political parties. And, you know, seems to be Democrats like what government does, and they want to bring people in and and, and promote what they do. But you know, this kind of, that’s a democratic idea. Republicans for the most part, or at least Republican elites, don’t like to talk about the good things, government does a much prefer to undercut it as much as they can. So it seems unlikely that they would promote programs like this. And I mean, I hope I’m not unfairly painting them there. But that really does seem over many, many years, my sense of how the party’s differ towards government.

Chris Beem Reagan said, Ronald Reagan, this was in the early 80s, maybe even the in the 70s. He said, The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help. You know, so it is a long standing notion, and I only think it’s it’s gotten more extreme with the, you know, decline of any respect for any kind of institutions in society and the denigration of any kind of authority. Right. So it hasn’t improved from those words of Reagan.

Candis Watts Smith  You know, I think just to say that I think both parties understand that policy, Telegraph’s messages to the public, it tells them who belongs who can play, how you know the extent to which your representatives believe that certain people should have a higher quality, citizenship and bundle of rights than others. So I am In, you know, like, we’re we’re making a broad brush statement about whether Republicans want to use government. They want to use it in a certain way. Right? So we can think about bureaucracies and areas of the government that are bolstered. Under, you know, conservative governments are under government. Think about exactly anything about policing, we can think about education, we can increase some we can decrease others, we can think about incarceration, we can think about public parks, we can think about national parks that, you know, there’s all sorts of things. So I think that both parties recognize that they can use the government to get right to to message what it is and who it is that the government works for how easy is it to get a concealed weapons license versus to get TANF? Right, it just, you know, it just these things right can be the government can be made more available or less available, depending on what it is that you want to get to the question about Project 2025. I think we can just think about Maya Angelou, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time, you know, Trump, you know, we can say like, oh, this is so crazy with this ever happened. And yet, uh, yeah. You know, will the cords let it happen? Will Congress let it happen? I mean, Trump has been very clear about his intentions. And we know now in a way that we didn’t know in 2016, the number of people who would be willing to be a part of, you know, a project that takes 10s of 1000s of Trump supporters to undermine the bureaucracy or or weaponize it for for the benefit of for the benefit of Trumpism. So, yeah, we should be we should be worried.

Michael Berkman But you know, I don’t think one thing that has got nearly enough attention, in my view is Nikki Haley calling saying that she wants to put a five year term limit on bureaucrats, which is nothing that I could think of would I can’t see anywhere in the world that happens. But but just the idea is so antithetical to the way bureaucracy is supposed to work effectively, which is that people are in a position, they learn how to do it, they develop expertise, they develop routines and procedures, they work with clients and get used to doing what it is they do. And what she wants to do is to just wipe that out. Every time somebody learns their job, replace him with somebody else. And there’s just nothing in that idea that is meant to strengthen government services or make them better, make them possible to be administered better or develop more wisely. And then 20, you know, the ideas in in some of this project 2025 really would have a significant impact on the federal bureaucracy. I mean, keep in mind already, that the United States has a much how I put this as a weaker civil service in most other bureaucracies that our, you know, our the extent to which we have political appointees extends much deeper into the bureaucracy than it does in other countries. This will just do that even further turning more and more people into political appointees, and therefore just sort of serving at the whim of the President and doing what the President wants. I think it’s a dangerous idea.

Jenna Spinelle Well, that maybe leads us into our next topic. We did also talk this year about threats to democracy. In particular, we’re going to highlight two guests. One is Tim Miller, the former Republican strategists Well, you may know from his work now with a bulwark or on this, the circus on Showtime. The other is Barbara Walter, who wrote the book how civil wars starts. And she in her clip will introduce us or at least she introduced me in our interview to the concept of an autocracy and America’s status as one. So let’s hear first from Tim Miller, and then from Barbara Walter,

Tim Miller On the Republican side, you saw a lot of people that like we’re really almost nihilistic, you know, the chose to go into that because it was like, I like politics. I like the competition. And, you know, whatever I never had in the book about a guy who revealed to me during the interviews that they’ve never voted for a Republican for president and I visit the high level have power, but he just likes the rush of it. All right. So I think that that’s something a little different. Now, I think that that is getting exacerbated to a great degree. If you look at the type of people that are self selecting in to the Donald Trump party, like think about, you know, I don’t I don’t want to insult any students at Penn State that think about the type of person who’s 2022 is like, I like politics. Maybe I’m maybe kind of ideal, you know, I’m ideologically I’m forming my ideology. You know, I’m not talking about the kids that come that are super, you know, already ideologically foreign, but I want to go work in Washington, I want to go work in campaigns, the type of person that’s gonna say, Yeah, I’ll go take a job for the RNC. Like during the Trump era, after Trump, it’s a different type of person I get it is somebody that has that has accepted that they like that, that they’re cool with the trolling and the mocking, and the cruelty? And so I worry deeply about, like the self selection of who is who’s choosing to enter, you know, right now, and I think that that’s true as bait from like, the entry level jobs all the way through candidates, right, like what kind of candidate wants to run? You know, I would say I get calls, frankly, from from people who are conservative mainstream, like, Should I run in a Republican primary, and I basically have to tell them now, yes, and you should do what you want, I’ll support you. But I, there’s just not a path for you, unless you, you know, are willing to debase yourself, for Donald Trump, that has an effect on what kinds of people are going into Washington. So this is an ongoing thing that I think is actually getting a little worse over time.

Barbara Walter So we were officially classified as in an autocracy in December of 2020. That happened after the sitting President refused to accept the results of election and tried to overturn them. But when Trump did peacefully leave office, and we had a new administration, and that new administration, has been honoring the rule of law and and clearly supports democracy, our score was raised, we went from a positive five to a positive eight, we’re not back at 10. This happened after the after the original book came out. So the paperbacks coming out this month, and it will have updated data. And and so so we’ve kind of dodged a bullet. But but a really important point to make is our democracy score improved, not because any of our democratic institutions were strengthened, our our institutions are as weak today, as they were on January 21, there have been no reforms of the system. Since Biden came into office, the only reason we’re a little bit on unsteady ground, is because we have an individual who honors democracy. Boy, you know that that means that we’re putting a lot of, you know, we’re asking that individual to to hold up democracy. And if somebody else is elected, who who doesn’t want democracy, our system is is still vulnerable to rapid backsliding.

Jenna Spinelle So this year, our guests, not just Tim and Barbara, but I think across the board, we heard concerns about what’s at stake based on the outcome of November’s election. Think I know the answer to this based on what we’ve talked about so far. But do you share their concerns or other things that our guests maybe haven’t talked about? That you’d like to introduce his other concerns or things that you’re keeping an eye on?

Candis Watts Smith  One thing I think is worth emphasizing, that Barbara Walter mentioned is that one, so many of our ways of doing things is based on norms, and is based on people doing the right thing, and sometimes even just one person doing the right thing or the wrong thing. But also to know that there haven’t been any major reforms, please correct me if I’m wrong, that would prevent any of the things that we’ve seen before and the fact that I don’t know I guess I would be interested to hear your thoughts Michael and Chris, about whether the prosecution’s and the insurrection were is enough of a deterrent for people to try to use violence in the future. I just I’m not sure I get a sense that we have kind of reset or leveled up our expectations for our behavior in the future. If anything, they declined and have stayed on the decline.

Michael Berkman Yeah, well Well, I think the No, I don’t think that the prosecution’s in the insurrection are going to stronger as a standard as a strong deterrent, at least not to people how to answer that question.

Candis Watts Smith  I mean, the idea, right, is that I mean, the idea around punishment is that it’s supposed to deter people from doing similar behaviors in the future. Now, we know in crime that, for example, that the death penalty does not prevent people from I don’t know, shooting at schools, or whatever, you know, it doesn’t it like harsher penalties don’t seem to do it to what’s what’s the word I’m looking for, um, you know, prevent people deter, deter people from doing heinous things. And on some level, we’re like, you know, we want people to be held accountable. That’s one thing. But on the other hand, we also are hoping that people don’t do this again. And I’m not really sure that we are, there’s been a major signal or a major change in policy and rhetoric. And in much of anything that would deter a future insurrection, if the election doesn’t go the way some number of people think it ought to go. On some level, it seems like insurrection and violence has on some way become, it’s not normal. That’s happened once, but it’s like, we’re kind of in a situation where it, we might expect it. And we would maybe be surprised if it doesn’t happen that way.

Michael Berkman I think the comments from Tim Miller are valuable here, because as he’s pointed out, there just seems to be an endless pool of people that are willing to kind of do whatever it needs to do to be close to power, or to Close to close to Donald Trump. And, you know, we have seen in many state legislatures around the country that election denialism runs really deep and remains. And we’ve seen this with some with many of the local many of the state political parties as well, that they’ve been kind of completely taken over. So I’m not, you know, I’m skeptical that it’s going to be operated as a deterrent.

Chris Beem It’s hard to like, you know, put your hands around all the dimensions of this. But Trump gets indicted 91 times, and his fundraising goes up. And his number, his polling numbers go up. And I have no reason to think that’s not going to be the case. Well, you know, I hope it’s not but I don’t know, if and when the man is convicted, I don’t know that that’s going to change. And even the people that have been have pled guilty in the Georgia case, have then come back and said, Oh, well, it was an extorted confession. And so there is this, there is this, you know, argument that there is no rule of law outside of partisanship, that it’s only a matter of who gets control and who is able to employ the law in the service of their partisan ends. And so, you know, I’m not saying that’s true, but I’m saying that is how it is presented over and over and over within the Trumpian circles of the Republican Party. And so I don’t see how this changes. I mean, I don’t see how it changes.

Michael Berkman I don’t know, I still think that prosecuting these cases is extremely important. I agree. I think it’s very important that the courts are one way remember back to our Jonathan Rauch podcasts and visit they are an important part of the constitution of knowledge and institution that helps us understand what has happened and what the facts are around certain matters. And the courts are doing a pretty good job of that. Right now. It does feel though, like these prosecutions at the federal level just started too late. We just have never been there before. I mean, it has all the recipes. It seems to be a recipe for a constitutional crisis down the line as they kind of wrestle with Well, what do you what happens when the guy is in jail, but he’s elected president, but I also think it’s possible I continue to think it’s possible that it all just falls apart for Him. Once these once these trials begin could just be you know, I could could be just totally crazy of me. But, you know, we just don’t know how things are going to change because the same sort of argument I use with people that really pay a tremendous amount of attention to some of the polls right now, when we know that you can’t really pay any attention to presidential polls until after the Iowa, Iowa caucuses and maybe New Hampshire primaries because everything gets shaken up, and everything changes.

Chris Beem Well, and as you know, Tim Miller framed it. I have been, you know, continually surprised and disheartened at the degree to which Republican politician to absolutely no better continue to debase themselves to, you know, turn themselves into I shouldn’t say that. I really want to, though, continued to debase themselves for and, and for swear their oath to the Constitution for the sake of their seat of, you know, maintaining their seat. I, I don’t know, these people sleep at night, and I don’t say that facetiously I genuinely don’t. I mean, I assume they love their country. And I assume they, you know, they believe that when they, you know, so affirmed vowed their support for the Constitution. And yet, here we are, again, and I don’t you know, I mean, the latest I will pull, it would just be astonishing at this point. If Trump doesn’t walk away with it, and you know, the idea that something is going to intervene before say February to make people think, well, maybe he’s maybe I should look at Nikki Haley or Rhonda Santas again. I, you know, I would be thrilled if that happened, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

Michael Berkman Yeah, you may be right. I mean, it seems it seems difficult, it’s difficult to imagine. I think we also still have to remember that a lot of people don’t pay much attention, this URL we do, and hardcore partisans do. And, of course, the media does with their constant fixation on polls, which in itself, I think is pretty dangerous for coverage of elections, because it means that they’re not covering what the implications of electing one candidate rather than another actually are. But there are a lot of people that are really not all that focused yet. And I take as an example of that these crazy polls that came out.

Candis Watts Smith  You think they’re gonna pay attention before they before primaries? I mean, well, before caucusing. Yes, yeah, attention are the people who vote in primaries, and those are the people who have who are making the choice for the rest of us later.

Michael Berkman True. True. But still, I mean, when it comes down to time to caucus, you have to really sit down and think about it. And you have to do it in front of, you know, in front of your fellow caucus, mate. I don’t know. Maybe he’s gonna walk away with the whole thing. I he may well, I just think it’s a little early to be so sure of that. And especially given where we might be in some of the trials. But I don’t know. Well, just walk away with it.

Candis Watts Smith  I will just circle back to your previous point about Project 2025 Not being specifically about Trump. So he’s still may not be out of hot water.

Jenna Spinelle So we have a few minutes left. And I thought that we would just talk about the other things that we liked this year that weren’t related to politics. Clearly, there’s not much to like about politics right now. So let’s talk about some of the other things they other books, movies, TV shows that you might recommend. I was telling you all earlier that that my students really enjoyed playing their Spotify wrapped in class and looking at those. So for me, I really got into the show for all mankind on Apple this year, which is a alternate history of what would have happened if Russia or the Soviet Union had been the first to the moon and the space race had continued. It’s a little bit sci fi but also has some really interesting geopolitical ramifications. They look at how the continued space race might have impacted American politics and cooperation between countries around the world and also just some really great writing and characters. So it’s in its fourth season now. So lots to go back and catch up on. And then on on my Spotify wrapped. My Top Artists this year was a guy named Corey Huang, who is a guitar player and leads a band that’s kind of a mix between Steely Dan and tower power or Earth, Wind and Fire, some kind of funk groups, but he’s incredibly talented, and also very good on social media. He put out this comedy series on YouTube. So just really multifaceted. So those are some of the things that helped me. Keep my news consumption in check this year, was focusing on things like that.

Michael Berkman Well, I like that show to Jenna. Three. Oh, my God. Yeah, it’s really clever. And I mean, it’s not the best show on TV, but it’s it’s very clever and, and your suggestion had me thinking about a TV show as well. I think Jon Hamm playing a constitutional constitutional Sheriff on Fargo this year is just beautiful. I mean, the show is not everybody’s taste, I realized that but they did set up Jon Hamm as a constitutional sheriff and especially when he gives a speech right at the beginning all I can think about was the show that Candice and I did talking about constitutional sheriffs. They had it down I had it down pretty well my my Spotify revealed that that I have been listening repeatedly and by different artists to the Bob Dylan 2000 Song things have changed, which has a line that I just absolutely love these days. And a goes something goes like this. People are crazy. And times are strange. And every time I hear somebody sing that song, I think, Boy, you really had it in 2000 Imagine if you were writing that song today. And I had a book but I’ll save it because I’ve taken enough time.

Candis Watts Smith  So the TV show that I am living for right now is the Gilded Age is yeah, like, there are I mean, I’m really not into like period pieces, but this one I like because they’re, you know, it’s it’s between, you know, the Gilded Age. So right after Reconstruction right before that progressive era. And there are black characters who are central to the plotline in a way that other pieces around around this time are not and so, you know, there are some ways that are very romanticized like we don’t see. Anyway, we, anyway, I really like it. And I like that, like, they’re the, you know, it’s historical fiction. So there’s elements of real events and real people that you kind of want to like, look more into, right, so Thomas fortune shows up who is a black journalist. Why Frederick Douglass hasn’t shown up? I don’t know, but Booker T Washington has anyway. I accidentally read over Thanksgiving, this book called coming of age in Mississippi by Anne moody. And it is about a foot soldier in the civil rights movement. And it’s one of those, it was written in 1968 is written in vernacular, more or less. And it’s about one of those people that we just don’t know, despite the fact that we’ve benefited from her labor, her insight, bravery, she was exiled from her hometown in Mississippi, as a teenager, because she wanted to help people register to vote and to get access to better schools. And so, you know, it’s just one of those, you know, a story about a person who we don’t hear enough about, though the fact that their work changed our society.

Chris Beem Well, I you know, reading or listening to that, Tim Miller quote, remind me that it his book, why we did it is real really good. It’s really engaging and seriously honest, and, and introspective, which is, which are words that are not commonly associated with politics these days. So that that I would recommend. So I have two TV shows. One is Slow Horses on an Apple TV, Gary Oldman, I don’t know what it is about Brits and their ability to act, but damn, it’s good. The other thing I wanted to say is I am embarrassed how much of a Star Wars geek I am. But if you haven’t seen Andor. Oh, my God. I mean, it’s it’s really good. Not if you’re just the Star Wars geek, but it’s just really, really good. And so if you haven’t seen that I would really recommend it to.

Jenna Spinelle All right. Well, I’ll link all of those in the show notes, so folks can check them out, as well as the episodes that we play clips from today, if you want to go back and listen. And while we are on winter hiatus, the show will be off until mid January or so dive back in in 2024. But I hope everybody has a happy holiday season enjoys a little bit of rest at this time of year. Thank you as always to our partners at WPS you for making the show happen. Thank you to all of you, Michael canvas and Chris, for the whole team. I’m Jenna Spinelle. Thanks for listening.

Two of our Penn State colleagues join us this week to discuss their recent findings on the connection between state-mandated civics tests and voter turnout. Jilli Jung, a doctoral student in education policy and Maithreyi Gopalan, assistant professor of education and public policy, recently published the paper “The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From State-Mandated Civics Tests” in the journal Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

In the paper, Jung and Gopalan study the Civic Education Initiative, a framework adopted by 18 states since 2015 that requires high school students to take a test very similar to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Civics test. They found that voter turnout among 18-24 year olds largely did not increase in states that adopted the Civic Education Initiative compared to states that did adopt it. The reason for this, they argue, is that the knowledge of civic facts alone is not enough to motivate someone to vote for the first time.

In this episode, we discuss how to structure civic education that could increase voter turnout and lead to more engaged democratic citizens. For more information on this work, check out the CivXNow coalition, which is made up of hundreds of organizations across the country that are working to strengthen civic education.

Jung and Gopalan also recommend the following books and papers to anyone who wants to take a deeper dive into the role of civic education in a democracy:

Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action

abstract.citing-articles.4">Refocusing Civic Education: Developing the Skills Young People Need to Engage in Democracy

I  Will Register and Vote if you Teach Me How: A Field Experiment Testing Voter Registration in College Classrooms

The Impact of Democracy Prep Public Schools on Civic Participation

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem And I’m Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with two of our Penn State colleagues, Jilli Jung who is a doctoral student in educational policy. And Maithreyi Gopalan, who is Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy. And they are the authors of a new study, which looks at the effects of a mandated civic education test for high school students in many states across the country and how that translates to voter turnout does requiring this civics exam, increase voter turnout, and spoiler alert, it doesn’t. We’ll we’ll talk with Jilli and Maithreyi about that. But before we get to that, I thought it might be helpful to just take a step back and talk about why we even think about civic education in democracy in the first place.

Chris Beem As we’ve talked a number of times, the founders were nervous about popular sovereignty about giving, you know, so much power to people who were, you know, most people at the time, didn’t want to give power to right. And so one of the ways that they saw as being a remedy to the problem was education. Right. And so you have almost every founder that I know of talking about how education generally, and education in politics and civics, specifically, was essential, right. And I just found this one little quote from Madison, which I think is representative knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and the people who mean to be their own governors must armed themselves with the power which knowledge gives? So I don’t think that’s a distinctive quote, I don’t think you know, I really do think it’s kind of representative. But, you know, in United States and in democracies, generally, civic education is broadly understood as a way to prepare people for the burdens and privileges of sovereignty.

Michael Berkman Yeah, I would not actually have taken this back to Madison, because there was no particular discussion of public schooling among the founders. And of course, they didn’t really think of the public in broad popular terms, they thought about politics as being restricted to landowning white people. And they had a very elitist view. And true, they were all highly educated. But I don’t really pick up much in what I’ve read about the founders, to say that they saw this as important for the population at large I, I really trace it more to the development of public schooling in the United States, which was really in the 1800s. And public schools were set up to be controlled by their communities, not by the parents, but to be controlled by their communities. And that it was seen that one of the responsibilities of public schooling had to be to help to create train, nurture democratic citizens. And so I would trace it more to the public school movement than I would to the founders. But you know, we’re basically saying the same thing, I guess, which is that we think that there is reason to believe that in the past, there was a belief and there continues to be that students needed to learn about their country and about their system of government than about what it means to be a part of a democracy.

Chris Beem I would just say, you know, civic education in this regard is no different than just about any other question about the curriculum in public schools, right. I mean, you know, in the library’s in, how do we read, what do we teach? What’s the right way to teach math? I mean, every question about the curriculum is contentious. I mean, Michael, nobody knows more than you about how it’s impacted science curriculum.

Michael Berkman It’s very contentious. And and, you know, I mean, it comes down to fundamental questions about who should decide, right, but students learn.

Chris Beem I think that’s a very good segue to the Civic Education Initiative. Right? It’s not particularly old, like it’s what about 10 years old? Right. And it was driven by the Foss institute at Arizona State. Michael, do you want to say any more about that?

Michael Berkman This civic education test that they have gotten many states to adopt is modeled either exactly, or very closely on the American citizenship test? And I have to say, as I read about it, read some articles about it, and keep coming up with sort of two possible reasons that they wanted to do this. Okay. One is a sense, and you see rhetoric around this very much so that the sense that there’s some kind of national embarrassment, that when kids or many Americans, I guess, are given the citizenship test that citizens have to take, they get much lower scores, and that this is considered a great national embarrassment. I don’t fully get this, because it’s not like the immigrants that come to the United States are randomly selected somehow. So I always have found that comparison, absolutely silly. But when you do read about this, it comes up quite a bit. The other is that there is research that’s out there in the education world, that having a more solid knowledge of the nuts and bolts of American government and American history and American institutions, American processes matters, that you have a higher level of engagement for it.

Chris Beem I mean, I think it is fair to say a matter of fact, they do say right, that this is understood to be the bare minimum, that students should know, this is the model that has been adopted very quickly by a number of states. And they’re, you know, these two researchers are looking to say, is it doing what they hope it would do? Right,

Jenna Spinelle Right. Yeah. So let’s go to the interview. We’ll hear Jilli and Maithreyi explain their research and their findings and their methodology in a bit greater detail, then maybe we can come back in and pick up the question of, if not this, then what are you know, what, where do we go now with this information? So let’s go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle Jilli Jung and Maithreyi Gopalan, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you for joining us today.

Jilli Jung Thank you for having us.

Mathreyi Gopalan  Thank you so much for having us, Jenna

Jenna Spinelle Excited to talk with you about your new paper, which explores the connection between civic education and voter turnout among young people. And before we dive into the specifics of that work, I’d just like to talk for a minute about that connection, or the perceived connection between civic education and voter turnout, jelly, it seems like kind of an obvious point on some levels that of course, if you have more civic education, voter turnout will be higher. Right. I wonder if you could just talk a bit about where that assumption comes from and what underlies it?

Jilli Jung Yeah, that’s a good question. Because it’s like, kind of untested assumption that we have had for a long time. And I think it comes from like, a political scientist view, educators view and then other citizens view. And it’s usually suggested as a solution to solve low voter turnout, because like civic education is kind of designed to prepare students as engaged citizens. And, um, like, for a long time, political scientists has concerned of low youth voter turnout. And then they have often mentioned civic education as a solution to this low voter turnout. And that’s the like, first thing we usually think of when he comes to like, how to fix our low voter turnout is especially among young people. And they like school is the like a great resource where we can start with, you know, like sometimes of intervention to improve those type of civic participation thing. So that’s the like, first thing that people think of, but at the same time, like, it’s not, like certain that civic education actually works well, to improve voting participation.

Jenna Spinelle And so is the thought here that the more information people have or students have, the more confident they’ll be or the more motivated they’ll be to go out and vote when they’re old enough to do so.

Mathreyi Gopalan  I think that’s just the traditional approach of like educators and political scientists and a lot of them, right. So it’s the traditional model for education itself, you just transfer knowledge, and somehow you hope that our children just take that knowledge, and then go and apply it everywhere. And I think that kind of has translated to this setup to thinking that if we give them civic knowledge, political knowledge and factual knowledge, it will translate to them using it, and to going and being more engaged citizens and in voting. So I think that’s kind of the traditional line that people are hypothesis people have about civic education affecting voter turnout.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. Yeah. And I’m glad that your work is testing that hypothesis, at least in one specific way. And that is based on the something called the civics education initiative. Can you tell us what that is and what It was intended to do.

Julli Jung It’s a civic state level civics test the policy, it requires high school students to take or pass the exam. And the exam itself is about like, basic US government, politics and history. And questions for the test comes from the US naturalization test, which is for immigrants. So like immigrants, if they want to become a US citizen, they have to take that test. So the policy supporters argue that it’s a bare minimum that, like US citizens has to have. So that’s the format of the test. And like states have really kind of like various forms, they how they implemented it, but like, basically, they use the same set of question and answers for the test. And it is for high school students. And some states require this is a graduation requirement. So they have to take or pass this test to get a high school degree. And like many states allow students to take multiple times. So it’s not a high stakes test. And because students also can see all questions and answers before.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, so if I read correctly, this initiative was launched in 17, or 18. States over the course of a few years, just as kind of a side bar, it seems wild to me that that many states implemented a new policy in such a short period of time. Did that seem kind of quick to both of you coming from your background in education policy? Yeah,

Mathreyi Gopalan  I was kind of surprised, just like within a period of like four to five years, like close to 18 states adopted it. But I think it goes back to what Judy mentioned just a minute ago that it is was not a high stakes test. States also had power to implement it differently across these different states, this own State Department’s of education, or the school districts kind of implemented this policy in a very, very ad hoc fashion. And those are all I think, the reasons why this policy seems to be widely adopted. But I think implementation varies dramatically. And that will be key, in some way for us to keep an eye out on how this policy gets implemented and rolled out. And multiple states are thinking about it, including Pennsylvania, which we might talk about. But yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the surprising thing about how this was quickly adopted in many states.

Jenna Spinelle Let’s come back to the implementation. I don’t want to bury the lede too much here about your findings from this research, to ask the question simply, did participating in the civic education initiative lead to an increase in voter turnout in the states that had adopted it?

Jilli Jung No. It’s too obvious for us. I mean, like, even before us, there are many scholars who argue that this policy wouldn’t work. And there are many like educators, scholars arguing there like this learning basic facts about like civics and government wouldn’t increase any types of civic engagement among students. But there was no research empirical research on there. So that’s why we look at it. And then we use like rigorous methods to see the causal effect of the policy on Bora Tana, and with a lot of like, alternative methods, we use a lot of alternative methods to make sure our conclusion, and our conclusion is that the civics test policy did not improve young people’s vote on turnout, at least in the short term, we couldn’t see the long term effect because we only look at the 120 20 presidential election and one midterm election, post implementation.

Mathreyi Gopalan  So we do look at that 20 year panel and look at how the voting rates have changed and states that had adopted it versus not. And we can talk about the method in detail later. But in terms of the post adoption outcomes, we only had very limited short term outcome results. And so yeah, in the short term, it looks like this approach does not work.

Jenna Spinelle So you said you weren’t surprised by that. Angela, you mentioned that, you know, even before this CEI policy was rolled out, it was kind of questioned. Do you think that this is basically just I don’t want to call it a bad policy design. But uh, you know, is this a problem of the way that this particular policy was structured, rather than a comment on the power of civic education as a whole to impact voter turnout?

Jilli Jung Yes, it says like specifically about this policy. I still do believe that civic education is super important and it’s grateful and then it’s almost like only thing that we have, like, as a educator to improve students voter turnout, because so many things come from, like family background, but like we can improve things through public education that I still believe civic education, but this policy specifically was not designed well.

Jenna Spinelle So, you know, knowing that there was this kind of there was this difference of opinion or the skepticism going into it? Why did the people behind the Civic Education Initiative think that this might be a useful thing to do? Or what were you able to find about their rationale for wanting to implement it in the first place?

Jilli Jung I think basically, their argument was that its minimum test students should know. And it’s doesn’t cost much it doesn’t customers, it’s not a high stake test. So and the students take the test multiple times. So people can implement the policy without worrying too much about on intention or consequences. And I think that convinced legislators alike, because, you know, if it doesn’t work, okay, but if we work is great

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, there’s really no downside.

Jilli Jung Yes, but like some scholars actually concerned of negative impact of it. Because we have really limited instruction time in school for civic education. And if we implement this policy, it means that students have to learn about this. And it means that it takes up some time of civic education that could be used for other more important civic related activities that might improve civic skills, like, for example, like mock election, or discussing like interesting and important social issues. But rather than doing that people, students just like learned, like, really basic history stuff, and they memorizing answers. And it’s not a good use of time. And given that we don’t have much time for civic education at school, it was concerning

Mathreyi Gopalan  In the world of limited time and instructional time and schools and opportunity costs of Vegas, other policies, taking the space, there is always a downside, when you adopt a policy like this, if it’s not designed well, in the sense that what else could you have done, what else that might have been effective could have been done. And so I think that’s something that these trade offs, we should be thinking about both policymakers, researchers, as well as practitioners, because there’s always an opportunity cost when you’re adopting a policy, what else are you not doing?

Jenna Spinelle Can you give us a sense of how states and schools within those states implemented this test? You said it’s, you know, kind of an open book sort of thing there. It’s very low hanging fruit. But what does that actually look like in the classroom? To the extent that you are able to look at that information?

Jilli Jung Yeah, that’s good question. This policy implementation varies a lot across state. So some states even doesn’t require to pass the exam. Some states require students to take and pass the exam to grade your high school by like in other states thick, you know, you can just take and then you don’t need to pass the exam. And then you can take multiple times, but it varies across like state law. And there’s some states does not even track students record at the state level, they just let school district or school implement the policy, and they just provide some guidance, or you can use these questions, you can, you know, follow this instructor like to implement the test. And you can’t have this, you can scoring with following this. And you can record your scores based on this. But then many states allow schools to stick to like, whatever they want. So it kind of varies a lot across schools and across school districts.

Jenna Spinelle So let’s talk a bit about the research and the methodology that you use to match up these different sets of data. Right. You know, on the one hand, you have the state that that implemented CEI, but then you have, you know, the voter turnout data over here, and, you know, students may go to high school in one state, but go to college in a different state. There’s a lot of moving around that happens at this particular point in someone’s life. So how did you attempt to reconcile those things or how did you go about comparing these different data sources in your work?

Jilli Jung That’s a great question. We mostly relied on Current Population Survey data, which is a nationally representative data or the US citizen, and it has self Polit voting, participate and information. And we used from 1996 cycle to 2020 cycle that has presidential elections. So we compared. So like, let’s talk about, like design itself first to understand why this method works. So let’s say Pennsylvania implemented this policy in 2008. And we compare, we can compare a voter turnout in 2016 to 2020. So after the policy implementation, does voter turnout has increased, we can look at that. But the problem is that it’s possible that 2020 election was just, you know, like, really, like interesting election that many people go for both. So we cannot know that it’s because of the policy, or is the election specific thing. So that’s why we needed other states that did not implement the policy, but probably experienced the same 2020 election event. So that’s why we need a treatment group which implement the policy and then we need control group that did not implement the policy. And then we can compare whether this golf before and after the policy are differ. So that’s our basic setup. So we calculate we captured like, we aggregated and gathered all individual level voter turnout in each state across 1996 to 2020. And we use the difference in difference to see whether this change comes from policy, not other factors. And you ask the great question that what if people move around? Because our data is from like, 18 to 22 years old? So they already graduated high school when we capture their, like voter voting participation? And our assumption was that, okay, let’s conservative Tivoli assume that they did not move because the previous research show that they people don’t move a lot, and they can move within states, but across this move is quite small. So we based on that assumption, we just linked the high school policy at state level and then 80 to 22 years old voting participation.

Jenna Spinelle Can you give us a sense of of some of the questions that are on the Civic test? What what kinds of things does it ask?

Jilli Jung

So I have two examples. First, the name of the territory the United States purchased in 1803. The second example, is that the name of the longest reverse in the United States?

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, so not, not necessarily things that are connected to voting in any way, or the things that you mentioned at the very beginning, right, like, how to vote why voting matters? You know, none of those questions are on our ballot, and I could see how, for a high school student, it might be difficult to make the connection between these seemingly random questions and what they’re expected to do as citizens in our democracy.

Jilli Jung Yes, and it is important to this, say that, like specific politic or knowledge really helps actually, like there are some previous studies finding, find that if you give students really specific information on how to register, how to vote, like, you know, like those type of intervention helped students to go out for vote. So like specific targeted knowledge intervention, helps improving voting participation. However, this just broad, general political knowledge that is not related to voting participation does not help. That’s yeah, that’s the takeaway.

Jenna Spinelle And so that leads us into, you know, what, what do we do next? Or what follows from this? Is the Civic test still on the books in the states that adopted it? And is it still growing? Or is there is there still a push to get it into even more states?

Mathreyi Gopalan  There are other groups that are really trying to add to what we can do to implement this policy in a more effective way? So maybe changing the kinds of knowledge they get the kinds of knowledge students get tested in these civic s policies. So we’ve been talking to organizations like PS civics, where they think knowledge is just one of the three pillars to improve civic participation, right, but their skills but there’s also action, and so maybe they will add on other layers to this policy where students might Get a more direct feeling of what civic engagement really means by like, say mock elections are participating in other local volunteering activities. Maybe if they add some of these other components in this test, maybe it will be useful in improving their knowledge and changing their actions. But I think adopting the policy acids, it’s probably not a good idea.

Jenna Spinelle I guess I just wondered too, about like layering on the culture war aspect of this. I know that wasn’t something that came up in your specific paper. But just as people who study education policy and who worked with future teachers, I could see a scenario in which a school might say, well, given how much controversy there seems to be over, anytime we bring up history or civics or you know, maybe this test is all that we’re really able to do, or we don’t want to go any further, because we’re afraid I might make some people mad.

Mathreyi Gopalan  Education and public education in this country is constantly polarized. There are wars about everything, not just culture, like there are reading wars. What’s the best way to teach kids how to read? Are we providing them the right kinds of knowledge? What kinds of maths teaching works, what kind of math knowledge works? And so I think education across the board is just a very politically charged environment. And my hope, as an educator, is to promote research and other kinds of ways in which we can look at data look at policies and effects in as nonpartisan a way as possible. And which is why I think policies like this and data like this should be broadened, and people should have access to such data to do more such analysis to try and ask in a nonpartisan way does it work? If this works, we would have come out and said it works. And the provision just is, I guess, popular and picked up by some groups. But I think we should use good data and good research methods to ask in an, in a nonpartisan way, what works and what doesn’t. And it’s been a deeply problematic issue in very many education related topics. And I think we’re hoping that our work can encourage more researchers to come and study policies and topics like that in a dispassionate fashion as they can.

Jenna Spinelle To bring things to a close here. So we are heading into an election year. What do each of you, you know, how should educators and people who support civic education which I would love anyone who listens to a podcast about democracy as a supporter of civic education, what should we all be thinking about or striving to do to make sure that our young voters have the information that they need to be, you know, informed and successful in this coming election and to set them up to be lifelong voters?

Jilli Jung I think just giving them like basic information of how to vote and they How to Register vote is super important. It seems very, you know, easy and Meinl but like previous research shows that that actually increase voter turnout. And like voting participation in all the age impacts their like, lifelong voting participation pattern. So I think those small interventions that teachers can inter, you know, help us to help implement, can have huge effect in the long term. So I would encourage teachers and principals at school to have a like little session of like, giving really specific targeted information to students how to vote how to register.

Mathreyi Gopalan  If there’s one takeaway from our study, it’s not that civic education doesn’t work, but civic test policy does not work. And we want to be really, really clear about that distinction. And I think we should rethink how we educate our kids, to get them to get excited and engaged in the political process. Either side, I mean, you can decide to vote, whichever side you want to go, but you want to be energized about the causes and the issues at stake in the democracy. And so civic educators already know this, many of them. If you talk to social studies, teachers, they’ll be like, this study is not telling us anything new. We knew about this. We didn’t think that policy is going to work. And so I think social studies educators already know this, and I want to encourage the public, the wider public to force schools and policymakers and school districts to rethink their civic education. of curriculum to move away from rote memorization and test based approaches to engaging their students in the political process in the debates that matter in our democracy.

Jilli Jung Previous research mentioned that young people are fully like politically motivated enough, because I can one credit toward young people is that they don’t care about politics. That’s why they don’t vote. But that’s not true. previous study found that they are motivated enough, but they just don’t have much experience to transform those motivation, intention to rear action. So I think it’s important for us as a society to give them a tool and the power and like, you know, kind of like non cognitive skills to like, transform those motivation to rear action. And that’s what civic education should go for.

Jenna Spinelle Thank you both for joining us today.

Mathreyi Gopalan  Thank you so much, and I really appreciate you having us.

Michael Berkman Yeah, well, that was an interesting interview. And really cool work being done by our colleagues up in the ed school here at Penn State. I wanted to pick up Zina from something that came up right at the end of the interview, and that was where they talked about how when they restricted this analysis, as I understood it, to basically information that’s provided to students about how to vote, like where to go. And, you know, where’s your polling place, how to manage mail in voting, all of this kind of Federal Register, where do you not exactly how to register, they’re very clear here that if you want, that’s what increases voting. And I thought this was really quite telling and set a lot about the states that adopted this Civic test as well, because the states that adopted the Civic test are not, from my analysis of it, all that particularly interested in increasing voting, because many of the states that adopted this test actually do as much as they can to make voting difficult. And so some of the states that adopted this, for example, don’t even allow students to use their IDs, to vote their student IDs to vote in states that have strict voter ID laws. They make registration very difficult. You could go on and on. But there’s a big analysis called the cost of voting. And we’re a state gets a score for how difficult they make it to vote. And states that adopted this, with a couple of exceptions tend to be Republican controlled Trifecta states. And they tend to be states that make voting very difficult. And if you want more people to vote, but their analysis shows is that you need to give them information on how to overcome the hurdles that states set up to make voting difficult. So that’s not what’s happening here at all, because they understand that’s the thing that makes voting difficult. So I thought, you know, the real nugget of interesting information was at the end there. And it does make you wonder why states adopted this, if their interest is really not in increasing engagement and voting, because I don’t believe that it is. I think it’s more to do with some notion of citizenship or something where you have a responsibility to know all of these details, every single detail that somebody trying to get citizenship would need to have.

Chris Beem My assumption was very different. My assumption was that because we are in an era of such controversy, and because there is a, you know, despite all this controversy about what we teach in terms of civic education, there is a fairly universal notion that we should teach something about civic education. And so here comes this very basic, very bland, very uncontroversial set of criteria that the Jo sauce Institute has produced. And is that right, Jo? Sauce Fosse, sorry, Foster. Jo sauce is a professor at Minnesota anyway, here comes a solution, right? And so everybody can just kind of implement this and all these issues go away. But your argument is that that’s not at all what’s going on that this is a decision where we can press present this curricula around civic education that has that, you know, crosses all the T’s and checks all the boxes, but doesn’t move any student any closer to be an actual voting citizen.

Michael Berkman To me, this is symbolic politics. So these are states that make it as hard as possible. Not all of them but as a, you know, on average, these are states that make it as difficult to vote as possible. Both who are now saying, Look how much we want our young people to vote, we’re requiring them to take this test before they get out of high school. Yeah, I think that it has nothing really to do with voting. And so we shouldn’t be surprised, even though these researchers know exactly what will improve voting, which is giving people the information to come up with the hurdles to overcome the hurdles that the states are setting up.

Chris Beem So here’s what I would want to see in a civics education curriculum, I would want to see, I mean, very briefly, I would want to see them talking about controversial issues, and then practicing argument, right practicing how you listen and how you evaluate and how you talk about these things with people who don’t disagree with you. Yeah, that don’t agree with.

Michael Berkman Democratic skills rather than

Chris Beem Right. And, but I think that’s an incredibly cheap, far more challenging thing to do. And I also just think in this in the current climate, there’s just no way that’s going to happen. It’s going to be agreed to.

Chris Beem So that’s what we’re left. And so if that means the only thing we can do, that we that we can plausibly get past and, you know, in a red state is to say, here’s how you register, here’s how you find out where you vote, here’s a website that you can go that’s run by the government that will tell you all of this information. If you can’t even agree to that, well, then then your agenda is laid bare. I think that’s I think it’s just pretty much fair to say.

Michael Berkman Yeah, well, another way of thinking about this is at the state level is just the wrong place. And so states to set up these tests that we know that tests affect what’s taught in the classroom, so I understand why they you know, why states want to set up a test because it’s going to direct classroom instruction, whether or not tests determine what students learn or not. I don’t know that literature well enough, but it does. It does lead teachers to teach to teach differently. But I wonder if you know, some of the political heat on it could be pulled down a little bit, if these kinds of decisions were being made at the local school district level rather than the state. Awesome. Yeah, so different school districts could come up with all kinds of different ways of teaching democratic skills that fits their community. And that fits with, you know, what they want, that they want to do. By, you know, once you take it up to the state level, like with this, then you’re getting right into the middle of partisan politics. And I mean, I understand school district politics have become quite controversial as well, but not everywhere, not on all things. And it’s still nothing like a State Capitol.

Chris Beem And you’re talking about 1000s talking about

Michael Berkman 10,000 school districts.

Chris Beem And there is evidence of that.

Michael Berkman Laboratories of democracy.

Chris Beem I mean, his paper is, as you say, Michael, a very solid research agenda and presents the data really well. And the conclusions, even as a negative are extremely important. And it’s you know, it’s fun to, to talk about it from the context of political science, you know, with a paper that’s really written by education’s kudos to Julie and Maithreyi. All right. Okay. So for Democracy Works, I’m Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman I’m Michael Berkman

Chris Beem Thanks for listening.

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions were embedded in tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members—mostly men—and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man.

Today, unions play a much less significant role in American life. In industrial and formerly industrial Rust Belt towns, Republican-leaning groups and outlooks have burgeoned among the kinds of voters who once would have been part of union communities. This episode explores why that’s happened and whether new unions coming online at places like Starbucks may change the picture moving forward.

Our guest is Lainey Newman,  a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and co-author with Theda Skocpol of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. Newman is a graduate of Harvard College and a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem I’m Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week we are talking with Lainey Newman, co author with Theda Skocpol of the new book Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. So this is quite the partnerships. It’s quite the opportunity for a young scholar like Laney to work with kind of a titan of the field like Theda Skocpol, who, of course, has been on our show before. And also, I know that these books take years to write and to plan. But that happened to I think, come out at a pretty good time when unions are in the news right now the you know, the auto workers and FedEx workers recently, we’re hearing about union drives at Starbucks and Amazon and all these places. So it’s an interesting time to consider the evolution of unions over the years, which is what they do in this book in one specific part of the country in western Pennsylvania.

Chris Beem Yeah, it is a striking moment, right. I mean, we have support for unions higher in the US than it’s been since I think 1965, which is a long time ago. And you know, a lot has changed in the world and in the United States since then. And you also have a Joe Biden, who calls himself the most pro labor president ever. And whether you think that’s true or not, he was the first acting president to be on an active picket line. So yeah, it is a moment for labor in the country. And so it’s a timely topic for us to take up.

Michael Berkman Labor unions seem to be at a peak of influence and impact, probably very much a consequence of high employment and low unemployment, which puts them in a strong position. The screenwriters did I think better than people thought they would. The UAW is obviously holding out for significant concessions, there have been others that we could point to across the country where unions have done pretty well, or where you’re organizing has gone pretty well, Starbucks is becoming unionized in a lot of different ways. And, of course, part of that, as we’re seeing very much the new face of labor, this book is the old faith, of labor. And the new face is much more likely to be to be minority, to be female, and even to be college educated. And it was at the time, when the people that she’s talking about who were in the trade unions, or in the old steel unions, or factoring manufacturer unions were at the peak of their political power and their economic power in the 1950s and 1940s. And early 1960s. You know, I kind of read her book as another story of loss and change. And the challenge that that presents for populations, that groups of people that saw themselves as really ascendant and maybe are not so scented anymore.

Chris Beem Yeah, I mean, so the question that they want to ask is, you know, when you’re looking at this time, when unions were as powerful and as well established, as they ever were in American history, they were also almost exclusively if not exclusively democratic, right? It just was a given that if you were in a union, you are going to vote democratic. And that has, you know, that was part of kind of the idea of what it meant to be in a union, it was putting you up against people who were rich and powerful, and, you know, controlled capital, and who, you know, owned the factories, what have you. And so this was part of their identity was that they were Democrats, and you know, whether or not it is we have to be careful. And Michael, you pointed this out, we have to be careful that when we’re talking about unions, that’s almost too broad a brush to say anything meaningful about, but in terms of these unions, and the place that she’s talking about them, right in western Pennsylvania, manufacturing, steel workers, whatever, they are not largely Democrat anymore, and many of them and in terms of the kind of little pieces of data they have, most of them are now kind of identified with Trump with Q anon with, you know, just kind of an 180 degree switch, right. And so that’s what they’re trying to kind of account for. What is it that changed and what Why is it that we find ourselves in this position?

Jenna Spinelle So yeah, you’re right that this book in this project raises a lot of complicated questions about this region and the people in it and how things have changed and the role that the unions have played in their lives and their communities. I think we will get to all of that with Lanie in the interview, and then maybe we can unpack some of them a little bit further after the interview. But let’s go now to the interview with Lainey Newman

Jenna Spinelle Lainey Newman, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Lainey Newman Thank you so much, Jenna, for having me.

Jenna Spinelle So lots to dig into in your new book, Rust Belt, union blues. But before we do, you know, this question of how the Democratic Party lost support of union workers and blue collar voters in the Rust Belt has been a subject of question for journalists and scholars, many of them over the years, this has been an oft interrogated subject. And, you know, it seems that this is in addition to being an academic question for you, you also have a personal connection to this topic. And this region, I wonder if you could start off by telling us a bit about that.

Lainey Newman I got interested in this question of why there’s been so much drift from the Democratic Party amongst union members, initially, because I had extended family members who were members of the United Auto Workers Union, which, of course, is very much in the news right now. And when I was growing up, these older members have now passed, but they were very staunch, you know, Union men, sort of as we define that term in the book, meaning they were very passionate about being members of their union, they were loyal to their, to their union, and really believed in the Democratic Party and in a working class coalition. And so I just in sort of observing, you know, growing up in western Pennsylvania, and observing the changes that had happened in the region, particularly like culminating in, you know, ended up being 2016, I was just interested in sort of understanding where that identity had gone. And you know, what was left, you know, in its stead. And so, that’s sort of the combination of my, you know, my extended family members. And then also the region that I grew up in my family members were actually up in Minneapolis. But you know, Western Pennsylvania, of course, is one of the real sort of bedrock union towns, I think of the rust belt. And so that those two things sort of what grew into this larger project that I started when I was in college.

Jenna Spinelle And, you know, you interviewed, I believe it was 50, union members, or former union members and leaders for this book, correct me if that number is wrong, but I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you found them. And maybe if you encountered any hesitancy or skepticism for people about being interviewed, given all the media interest, right, journalists from New York and Washington wondering and asking them to talk about what once was, and and all of that,

Lainey Newman I initially started reaching out to whoever I could sort of get in contact with. And at first, I was actually talking to some of the leadership, some of the members of the leadership of large international union. So this is like the very upper sort of side of the Union. And I realized pretty quickly that that wasn’t really the perspective that I was looking for. And though that I did get valuable information from those people, that some of which, you know, there’s a couple of things from that, that we incorporate, but, you know, what I really wanted to know, is how the how the rank and file union members were feeling, both retirees who could speak about their past experience, and current members who could speak about their, you know, current experience with the union and how they felt what importance they attributed to the Union. And so I think, initially, just trying to get in contact with really anyone, whether that was reaching out to locals, you know, directly or there were some people, some older labor, basically just, you know, people who really feel really passionately about labor in Pittsburgh, and, you know, have these sort of communities that I was able to, you know, then groups really, that I was able to get in contact with these informal groups, or, you know, whatever people that would meet up and, you know, get together, mostly retirees, and so I was able to get in contact with some of those folks, and then essentially snowball with different people within that community. Sometimes it was, you know, again, cold calls and cold emails, but a lot of times it was saying, developing a relationship with certain members of the community, and then having those people refer me to others. There were some people who sent me essentially like lists of people who they were like, you know, this is my friend in this logo, and, you know, you can try reaching out to them, there were definitely times where people were resistant, but I think more than anything, people were actually appreciative of someone, you know, being interested in curious and wanting to hear their stories. That was what I found overwhelmingly to be the case. I think it also helped that for at least part of these in some of these interviews, I was a student and so being a young person reaching out, you know, and especially talking to the old folks think that they liked that and a lot of them did open up to me which I you know, Wouldn’t made the book possible, really. And so, you know, when people were resistant, I kind of just accepted that and you know, didn’t push it too hard. But a lot of times people were thankfully pretty open with me.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. And so you spend a little bit of time in the beginning of the book, kind of defining both what the Rust Belt is and what unions you’re looking at in this context, I feel like that, you know, both of those terms tend to get thrown around a lot in all of this coverage about the changing attitudes and whatnot of this region. I wonder if you could just give us some definitions there. We have listeners across the country and around the world. You know, what is the rust belt? And how are you thinking about what a union is in the context of this project?

Lainey Newman Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I think that one thing that theta and I really care about in this project is, you know, the specificity of talking not only about unions broadly, but really about, you know, different, there’s a lot of variation within the category of unions. And it’s really hard to sort of lump all the unions together and say, and make broad generalizations. And so that’s something that I think is really important. And in this project, we’re talking mainly about industrial or manufacturing unions, or the construction trades, you know, in the industrial Midwest, so the Rust Belt region. And so, the industrial unions are, you know, sort of the broad unions that are organized, at least were initially organized by industry, whether that’s steel or auto manufacturing, or coal, but a lot of these industrial unions have really expanded into other sectors of the economy. So that’s one thing that we explore in the book, the implications of, you know, steelworkers expanding to organize librarians and nurses and, you know, teachers, etc, as you know, faculty, at various universities, and then the craft unions are more sort of traditional amount of the more traditional fields. So in that domain, we’re talking about people with a certain skill set, so like masonry or electrical workers or brick layers, I guess, you know, plumbers, pipe fitters, and so those unions are have, for the most part kept mainly to that specific skill set. And that specific trade, which stands in contrast to some of the industrial unions, those were mainly the unions that we were looking at, in the Rust Belt. Yeah, it is kind of an amorphous term, I suppose. But we look mainly at the region that I think had really had a lot of manufacturing in the mid 20th century had a lot of sort of industrial towns or small cities. So we think that our conclusions can be generalized throughout a lot of the region, whether it’s, you know, even like through Buffalo, New York, but also up through Minnesota, it’s hard to geographically pin it down, I think, a little bit. But you know, these areas that throughout what we consider what we think of these, you know, states that Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois that had a lot of manufacturing, specifically, though, on the local level, the smaller towns and cities that where those manufacturing were headquartered essentially North centered.

Jenna Spinelle And you know, so much of the Make America Great, again, rhetoric and ideology is tied to this notion of what it was like to be both, I would say, a union member, or maybe not a union member, but working in a blue collar job in these areas 40 5060 years ago. So I wonder if you could give us a sense of what life was like for a union member in western Pennsylvania in that period of time? What were their working conditions, their relationship to the union and how the union shaped the other parts and interacted with the other parts of their identity?

Lainey Newman Yeah, I mean, so that’s something that I think we really try to pin down in this research because it you know, what was the starting place, then, you know, that we’re thinking about? And so where have we come? Where have we gone from there? So I think that in the mid 20th century, I think that, you know, the union man, the union family, in communities was very sort of interconnected with other community members with other workers generally lived very near to their workplace, and as did the vast majority of those workers. So when you think about like a mill town, you know, everyone’s sort of in the same general couple mile radius, which stands in stark contrast to today where people are driving in from lots of different places, to wherever they’re working. And the union was connected with a lot of different institutions within those communities. And so whether that was, you know, through sponsoring different events, through relationships with the religious organizations, the churches, in the communities, whether it was directly to, you know, with the family members, or in this case, there were ladies auxiliaries that were organized in You know, connection to the unions, which were mostly white men, though not exclusively. And so I think that the picture and you know, the one that I think, gets a lot of this sort of nostalgia and, you know, the sentimentality from the Republican Party, and even from people who I talked to, in a sense that it was a very tight knit, tight knit community for a lot of people. And it was a way that you could be in the middle class and solidly so without needing, you know, a higher degree or needing some sort of specialization or whatnot. And so I think that that’s sort of what people’s picture, I think that it’s pretty accurate from the documents and from the interviews that we saw.

Jenna Spinelle So yeah. And so what does that look like today, you also write about some of the organizations that have come to take the place of churches and, you know, civil society groups, other things that weren’t union adjacent in the mid 20th? Century?

Lainey Newman Yeah, so I think that, you know, as unions sort of declined in the 70s 80s. And through today, though, you know, we’ll see what’s gonna happen in the next several years. But I think that what happened is that people have still, you know, saw, I think it’s human nature to seek community in some form. And whether that’s online communities, for some people, or, you know, in person communities, there’s still sort of a need for that. And when it’s not being filled by, you know, by local integrated civic institutions, like unions, or fraternal groups, or small ethnic churches, it can be filled in other ways, there’s a lot more sort of isolation now in the sense that people I think, are a lot more individually devoted to family and sort of keep to families. But then I think that, you know, one thing that we’ve looked at a lot is the presence of these gun clubs, which are local ones, we studied our local NRA affiliated organizations, fishing, hunting clubs, Rod, and gun clubs, that type of thing. And these institutions have actually remained in these communities and have actually, you know, grown in the numbers sense this sort of decline of unions. And so we look at how those institutions are actually playing a community gathering role and a social role, really, with clubhouses and you know, bingo nights and stuff like that, which is something that other civic institutions traditionally did. Now, those events are sort of happening under this in this backdrop of conservative influence by the NRA. And so that’s one thing that we look at, I think another thing is, you know, the consolidation of churches, which is a whole separate sort of body of research, but there’s been a lot of consolidation shutting in a lot of these industrial ex industrial towns, these smaller churches don’t really exist anymore. And there’s larger, you know, either mega churches or near mega churches that are sort of more streamline, non denominational, but conservative affiliated, religious institutions, and that’s having a very different effect on people’s social lives as well. So that’s sort of some of the things that we’re seeing. But, you know, there’s, it varies based on the community for sure.

Jenna Spinelle Sure. So you started to mention there the conservative affiliation with gun clubs and mega churches, which gets into some of the connection to the political parties. So thinking back to the mid 20th century, I guess how overtly tied to the Democratic Party were the unions and the other sort of auxiliary organizations that you mentioned. You know, contrast that with the political ties and political influence to the Republican Party that you were just describing in the present day?

Lainey Newman Yeah, I think one of the things that we sort of discovered throughout our research is, union members have and this sort of rings true today to union members have always sort of resisted a top down, you know, instruction or direction on how to vote. So, you know, there’s always been union endorsement by the leadership, and it still is affiliated very strongly with the Democratic Party. But union members even we discovered this really great survey from the 50s of United Steelworkers members. And, and one of the things that most people agreed with was, you know, they don’t really want their they don’t care for the union leadership necessarily telling them how to vote. They appreciated the for the most part, they appreciated the information that would be provided about candidates, but in terms of saying vote this way, you know, from the international leadership that wasn’t, you know, something that they necessarily cared that much about or adhered to, what they adhere to was the sense of loyalty and commitment amongst one another, I think, and a group identity that was formed based on sort of this understanding of mutual commitments and sort of an alliance with who supports us and who will we support in return? earn. And so I think that one of the things that we’re arguing is, it’s much less about, you know, it was, and it still is much less about, you know, official union endorsement than I think a lot of people probably assume. And we see that today too, with, you know, and clearly, you know, Trump understands that there’s a big difference between how the rank and file union membership votes and who the union leadership over in DC endorses. And he’s been capitalizing on that, and even with going to Michigan and, and whatnot. And so I think that’s one thing that we see. Now, I think that in terms of the conservative influences in these regions now, I think that one of the things that we’re talking about is that it matters where these social interactions are taking place. So the fact that they’re taking place, even if people aren’t talking about the Second Amendment, the fact that they’re taking place in these conservative institutions, has an impact. And it matters as opposed to, you know, taking place at a union hall, or, you know, at more of a sort of community, embedded institution that has either neutral or progressive values, such as a labor supporting church, back in the day.

Jenna Spinelle So we’ve been talking up to this point about how the unions have changed over the past four or five decades, I want to shift a little bit to talk about how the Democratic Party has changed in that time. I think a critique that I hear a lot, I’d say, both from the left and from the right, is that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is, you know, in that the same timeframe and the, you know, late 20th or 21st century shifted to focus on college educated city dwelling voters, you know, people like you and me, right, versus people in, you know, more sparsely populated areas are working class voters, the Bill Clinton and the Democratic leadership committee all the way up through Obama and Hillary Clinton, I guess, just to ask it simply like, does that critique hold up based on the research that you’ve done here?

Lainey Newman Yeah, I mean, I think that it does, I think it really does. And it’s something that the Democratic Party in recent years has noticed, and I think tried to, in some ways, address I mean, maybe not as much as not as much as they should, in my opinion. But yeah, I do think that it holds up, I think that there was a lot more sort of emphasis on local and, you know, non urban areas, you know, during this period that we talked about. So in the mid 20th century, and over time, I think that there was a sort of a national sort of consensus maybe, or movement towards really only prioritizing cities. And that coincided with more money in politics. And, you know, this membership to management trend that we’ve seen, which, you know, includes having a lot more sort of top down advocacy and lobbying efforts. So I do think that it’s a fair critique. I mean, you know, as a lot of people have pointed out, Hillary Clinton didn’t go to these places, and Trump did during 2016. And Biden, I think, has made a real effort to sort of remedy that. And he did go to campaign events in western Pennsylvania and in various other parts of the rust belt and in these x industrial areas, but it’s going to take time, I think, and one of the things that we talk about is that these efforts can’t just be the month before an election, you know, this has to be a continued presence. And that’s something that I think, you know, that both theta and I believe, you know, very deeply that the Democrats can’t just show up and say, Look, we’re in your best economic interest. You know, like, if you don’t vote for us, you’re voting against it. That doesn’t work, because politics is about a lot. Political loyalty, and political choices are about a lot more than that. And so I think, you know, there again, I think we’ve realized what we did wrong, or at least some people, you know, and and we’re trying, you know, some, you know, we’re trying to make efforts in that direction. But it’s, I mean, it’s gonna take time, I think, to end a lot more, a lot more of what, you know what we’re doing. So

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, I mean, especially given the, you know, what seems to be a steady stream of both messaging and activities and organizations from conservative identifying organization. So not only are Yeah. So you’re sort of battling that headwind, so to speak, but I wonder if the efforts that you mentioned by the Biden campaign in 2020, if the folks that you interviewed noticed that and if they did, how did they feel about it?

Lainey Newman

Yeah, I mean, so I think the difference, you know, between Biden and Hillary, I think people didn’t notice it and Biden lost less right in the He’s areas surrounding, you know, big cities in the Rust Belt, he closed the margin slightly, and just enough to be able to come out in the states ahead. And so I think that people didn’t notice. I think that there was enough amongst some people, there was enough attention to the issues and his messaging, as you know, being the most pro labor candidate slash president, I think that it has made a difference. I don’t think that for people that have completely lost faith in the Democratic Party that it’s, you know, and believe that Democrats have abandoned labor or banned in these regions of the country, I don’t think that it made all the difference. But, you know, we saw somewhat closer margins and in areas and in these counties where, you know, the margins were in the 20 percentage points, 30 percentage points where the Republicans consistently over the past 20 years have been just running up the numbers, a slightly smaller gap was really important.

Jenna Spinelle So you know, as we’ve gone through the 2020 election, and the insurrection on January 6, the people are still kind of scratching their heads, two plus years later about, like, how people could believe something that on its face, it’s just blatantly false. And you have, I think it’s one of your subheadings in the book is as a lie is better than nothing. So I wonder if you could unpack that for us?

Lainey Newman That was a comment that was very striking to me that when I interviewed you said, Yeah, I mean, I think that what that gets at is a sense that even if we understand that things aren’t going to go back to the way they were, you know, even if that’s the undeniable reality, at least someone is paying attention, at least someone showing up and talking to us, at least someone is, you know, thinking about these issues. And I think that that’s what, you know, the sort of Trump effect was essentially, a lot of people didn’t actually vote didn’t believe that he was going to bring them back steel, as he said, at one rally or, or, you know, a call, but just, you know, basically appreciated that he was paying attention to the, to the issues at all. And I think that one of the things as we discussed a bit ago, the Democrats have sort of, you know, had this pattern of just sort of abandoning these areas and abandoning labor and not not paying attention to what was going on. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that unfortunately, that was a sentiment that many of my interviewees had. And that was felt, I think, amongst working people across the Rust Belt. But I think to counteract that there needs to be the Democrats need to sort of, again, build their relationships in these areas, build back their relationships in these regions. Because if there is an existing understanding that these are lies, you know that and a lot of people do understand that. I mean, there are some people who believed everything, you know, what Trump was saying and what the Republicans were saying, and whatever. But then there’s room there. I think, I think that there’s room there. If since there is that understanding that these, this isn’t necessarily true, this isn’t necessarily going to happen, he’s not actually going to do and deliver on these promises. So I do think that that’s where that’s where Democrats have to sort of step up and get back involved in these regions.

Jenna Spinelle One last question here for you, lady. So I know that the the book is just out this month. We’re recording this at the end of September. But I wonder if you’ve kept in touch with the people you’ve interviewed, if they’ve had a chance to read it if they felt they got a fair shake, or just anything? You’ve heard? All those conversations have continued since you talked to them several years ago at this point?

Lainey Newman So actually, one of my interviewees got the book before I did. I don’t even I don’t know how that happened. But he got it in the mail, I guess. Before I did. And he sent me an email. It’s actually how I found out that the book was even being printed. And he sent me an email and he was like I agree with, he was really excited. And I thought it meant a lot to me. And he said he was he wanted to send the book to his union leadership, which was great. And so that was one instance. And when I finished my thesis, I also sent my thesis to one of different interviewee in the mail, I just sent him a copy of it. And he also loved it. And I had interviewed him and his son actually, both of whom were Steeler workers, and he read it and then gave it to his son. And so, you know, I think that’s honestly the best feedback that I’ve gotten is from, you know, the people who feel that I’m that we’ve represented their experience, accurately and, and, and in a way that is meaningful to them. And so that’s been really, really great. And I’m excited, you know, hopefully in western Pennsylvania, and we have, we have a couple events, they’ll come out and we’ll get to visit again.

Jenna Spinelle We will link to the book and perhaps some of those other things coming up in the show notes and hope for Folks will pick it up and check it out for themselves. Lee Newman, thanks so much for joining us today.

Lainey Newman Thank you, Jenna, this has been so much fun.

Chris Beem All right. That’s that was really interesting. Michael, this is kind of your, you know, your wheelhouse. What do you think about the argument that, you know, union members have become Republicans? And I mean, let’s start with that claim. And then we’ll go on to their argument about why things changed.

Michael Berkman Well, these kinds of union members have become have been more likely to become Republican, but it’s certainly don’t think it’s true in the public employee unions, or of the teachers unions, which are still critical parts of the Democratic coalition, certainly teachers for that matter of public employees. So certainly, it’s true, I believe about and data seems to support that. These trade unionists, maybe manufacturing unionists, or at least workers, because let’s keep in mind how much of these industries that were unionized at this time when they’re at their peak are now non unionized. So the auto workers in Tesla, are not unionized. And the auto workers that are down in Tennessee, where there are a lot of plants are also not unionized, but they are workers. But we’re talking here, I guess, about people that are very much specifically still within unions. And unions that are a declining proportion of the overall union population and a declining proportion of the overall population. But yeah, I mean, well, Ronald Reagan did pretty well with them. Ronald Reagan spent a lot of his campaign up in Macomb County, Michigan, you may remember, and Donald Trump clearly did very well with them. And we’re at least in these in there in those parts of the country. And Joe Biden and Fetterman of Senator Fetterman have made inroads, I think, at least in this state, but you know, I think if you look down at this party system, 10 years from now, I think it’s very possible that states that we think of now as such battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, they may not be, you know, they may just go Republican as this sort of pattern continues. But the Democrats are seeing ascendancy in southern states that actually don’t have a whole lot of unions in Georgia, in North Carolina, which I think will be very much in play 10 years from now, Texas, which could be in play 10 years from now, depending on how voting rules go. And these are states with large African American populations. Democrats do extremely well in their urban areas, and a lot of their messaging and a lot of their policy ideas are oriented towards these regions of knowledge workers, African Americans, not necessarily abled as much as they used to be to speak to these older union industries.

Chris Beem You know, I completely agree with that. I think that this, you know, the takeaway from this book, is not necessarily I mean, I suppose if you were a union executive, you would take the point that if we want to sustain unions and sustain their political, economic cultural power, we have to attend to Union individuals as members and create, seek to create these kinds of this, or maybe, maybe not create, restore these institutions, whereby people have a sense of identity and connection. But I think you’re right, that the, the takeaway here is a story of one, one slice of our society, were the foundation of identity, meaning community, have all kind of eroded in some significant ways. This I mean, it really is just kind of a restatement of some of the stuff out of Robert Putnams famous book Bowling Alone, right, where there used to be these institutions, not just unions, although unions are essential to that, but about ethnic churches and about bowling leagues and about, you know, clubs like Shriners and Kiwanis and whatever. And, you know, it’s not merely enough to say, well, they’re gone. And now what we’ve changed is to note that there is something significant that has been lost not just in terms of politics or culture, but in terms of just, you know, the human need for these things. And if you don’t get them at this face to face community level, you’re going to try to find them elsewhere. And so if you don’t have a union hall where everybody knows your name and where you go for parties and retirements and golf outings and saplings and everything else, then you’re gonna go try to find it in, you know, Fox and Friends, or some kind of online group or, you know, a big organization like the NRA or something like that. And it’s not it’s that is a way of creating community, but it’s not the same. And it’s not as doesn’t serve our very human needs as well.

Michael Berkman Yeah, I mean, but I mean, these are communities that in many cases had been sort of hollowed out. And so it’s, you know, they, other areas of the country, I think, have really quite vibrant civic lives and organizations that hold people together, you know, I sometimes feel like, this country spends a lot of time talking about what, you know, white people have lost, and not very much about what may be gained and what we might be developing and what we might be building in many urban areas in the United States and many areas of growth in the United States. But this, you know, I definitely see this in the context of other stories of loss and related grievance, you know, and, and it’s not surprising to me, that they would attach themselves to a candidacy, referring to Trump in particular, that’s built upon grievance and, and on capitalizing on the sense of loss that people feel that.

Chris Beem The thing that I want to, you know, leave our listeners with is that you know, this book if it does nothing else kind of speaks to the importance of connecting with your fellow human beings face to face carrying out with them and doing stuff that not isn’t even necessarily political.

Michael Berkman Yeah, I mean, I agree with that completely. And I really see this as the strength of this book much more so then which party union members support because I think that’s a larger story about the party coalition’s but this kind of micro look at what has happened in these areas, how it affects people, how it affects their sense of identity, how it affects how they inter relate with one another and then with the political system that I think is really, really interesting kind of micro look that I appreciated the the opportunity to hear about.

Chris Beem So thanks to Jenna for a terrific interview. Thanks to Lainey and Theda Skocpol for really interesting and book with really innovative research. I’m Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman I’m Michael Berkman. Thanks for listening.

Why do we disagree about the causes of and solutions to social inequality? What explains our different viewpoints on Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, income inequality, and immigration? Penn State professors John Iceland and Eric Silver join us this week to discuss how the discrepancy between social order and social justice impedes political compromise and progress.

Iceland and Silver, along with Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois, are the authors of Why We Disagree about Inequality: Social Justice vs. Social Order. In the book, they show how these competing worldviews are preventing Americans from solving their most pressing social problems. Iceland is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Demography; Silver is Professor Sociology and Criminology and recently won the Open

Inquiry Award for Teaching from Heterodox Academy.

In the interview, we discuss how the conflict between social order and social justice played out at different points in history going

back to the French Revolutions. Iceland and Silver also offer suggestions for how to move beyond these divisions to find consensus and common ground.

After the interview, Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith discuss whether social order and social justice should have equal footing and how looking to history might not be the best approach for how to break out of these silos.

Why We Disagree about Inequality: Social Justice vs. Social Order

Episode Transcript

Chris Beem From McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with John Iceland and Eric Silver. Both are professors in the department of sociology and criminology here at Penn State. And they are the co author, with Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois, have a book called Why We disagree about inequality. And this is one of those books where the title really says it all. And the the framework or the reason that they propose for why we have these disagreements is a conflict between social justice and social order. And this is something that we’ve talked about in different capacities on the show before, but I don’t think that we’ve ever really taken a dive as directly on these two approaches to how you view the world political and otherwise, and why they so often come into conflict.

Chris Beem It’s an it’s an issue that has some pretty thick research elements to it. But it’s also incredibly timely, right? Because no one is disputing that political argument seems particularly fruitless right now. And not to mention ugly and just serves to kind of drive us farther apart. And the book is trying to say, you know, this is what’s going on. And this is what we do about it. Right? And so this, you know, you you laid it out, well, you know, there’s this, there’s these two fundamental kind of orientations to how human beings approach these policy questions and social order and social justice, and you know, what we can let them kind of describe them in the interview. But, you know, the, the point is that these intuitions are these columns, strong and relatively stable. And so it’s kind of like a way that you perceive the world in a very basic sense, it’s kind of like, this is part of your wiring. And, and anyway, that’s, that is the right way they say, for us to kind of understand why it is we disagree so much, and then, you know, then we get on to what we do about it.

Candis Watts Smith  So I would say that this book, also kind of its contribution is that it adds to, you know, a conversation where we usually would talk about left or right Democrat, Republican, conservative liberal, and it layers on this notion that perhaps even among those kinds of divisions, we might think about people’s perspectives of the world, use the word orientation, and on some level, it seems to help us to understand why we see so much affective polarization and polarization generally, I think the argument here is that on some level, people are talking past each other, in part because they have different values, that some people, you know, ostensibly value social justice, while others value social order. You know, I am not sure that I see this as so cut and dry. But I think it’s an important contribution. And the discussion about how we got to where we are today.

Chris Beem Yeah, I think they don’t want to get tied down to, you know, a cut and dried answer of like, you know, is this hardwired? Is it? Is it social? Or does it depend on circumstances? I think they kind of want to say yes, to all that. But the one point that that I think is key for them, is that a society works better, not only when both of these prospective perspectives are operative, but when each side respects the inherent wisdom of the other side. And not to say that, you know, you’re not going to fight about it. But But the argument is that it is not good for a society to have either all one or all the other because it’s going to end up being either an unjust or or unfree or insufficiently free insufficiently.

Candis Watts Smith  The contribution then is something that kind of reminds me of something that Kimberly Crenshaw talked about, is that it is difficult to pinpoint a problem or pinpoint a phenomenon if we don’t have a name for it. And so here, what they make an effort to do is to give us a name for this kind of these two, these two basic intuitions around how we should move forward and What are how we should think about policy and their effects for our, the way we we live among each other. And so for that reason to say, I think it’s really interesting that you can look at some number of arguments around racial issues, or perhaps transgender issues, or sexism and racism, like all of the things and you can think, Okay, well, what is how is this person coming at this, and maybe one of the ways that they’re coming at this is through a lens of social justice or through a lens of social order. And perhaps putting it that way, giving the label then allows us to have a more constructive conversation about perspectives.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. And I think, as you said, we’ll hear more from John and from Eric about how they define social order and social justice and also how these sort of core belief sets impact the media that people choose to consume and, and how they really impact the other aspects of our political lives. So let’s go now to the interview with John, Iceland, and Eric silver.

Jenna Spinelle John, Iceland and Eric silver, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Eric Silver Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you.

Jenna Spinelle So I’m excited to talk with you about your new book, why we disagree about inequality. And I think we’ll just start with some definitions. dive right in, I will start with you, John, if that’s okay. The whole book is based around this social order and social justice framework, I wonder if you could just tell us what that is, you know, listeners may have some notion of of what those things represent from how those terms are thrown around in the in the media, but from your perspective, what do those things mean? And and how do they fit together in your framing?

John Iceland Sure, we see these as a distillation of moral and philosophical values that are often in conflict, if not in tension with each other. Essentially, social justice is caring for the vulnerable and freeing them from oppression, whereas social order balances these concerns with social cohesion and social stability. So for those from the social order perspective, they think that these things are necessary for a prosperous society.

Jenna Spinelle And Eric, in in the the media and other places, these notions of social order and social justice are often mapped onto the political spectrum with social justice being associated more with the left and social order being associated with the right. But in the book, you’re clear to say that it’s not always as cut and dry as that.

Eric Silver Right. So the social justice side, tends to emphasize, as John said, the concern for the well being of individuals, in particular, the weak and the vulnerable. And that’s a widely shared moral concern. Even those on the on the right, or what you might think of as having a social order concern, also care about people, right, and they’re all they have families, and they have friends, and people are important to them. But they balance that concern against the concern for the order and cohesion of groups. And they have an intuitive sense that order is important for the flourishing of individuals. And so that’s one of the places where the these two perspectives, diverge, and end up, you know, in conflict with each other and often talking past each other failing to recognize that they have some significant overlap in their concerns.

Jenna Spinelle And we’ll definitely get more into that as we go here. But I wonder if you could talk about the origins of this framework and how you kind of came to think that oh, wow, this I’m picturing like, a light bulb moment for one or both of you like, Oh, this is the thing that explains so many of these conflicts that we have in our society. So I wonder if you could talk more about, you know, how you arrived at it? And of course, I know, it builds on the work of scholars like Jonathan Haidt and others. But yeah, tell us about how you arrived at this framework? Sure.

John Iceland Well, I think we see this in general, that this balancing act between social justice and social order is not just a contemporary kind of problem that we’re facing in the US today. But it’s something that we see in other societies. I think we’ve seen it. Historically, there are a number of people who’ve written about some of this tension. As you mentioned, Jonathan Hite, Thomas Sol, talked about the conflict of visions as he termed them. But it’s about people through history being concerned about, again, freeing people from oppression, caring for those who need help, versus the concern for social stability and cohesion. This is a constant tension through history. and at different times in history, sometimes we have a little more social order, and we could use a lot more social justice. And other times perhaps it’s something where we need to, you know, vice versa.

Eric Silver Yeah. And John has a right as far as what we’re concerned with. And the term social order and social justice did come to us as a sort of aha, in the sense that there’s a balance between the ideas is captured in the terms, and that they are terms that are easy to grasp, that you don’t have to hear them or hear you have them explain before you understand what they mean. And they are more evocative, even then left and right, or other terms that academics have used to describe this, this kind of polarity and people’s beliefs. And so part of our goal here is to get these terms out into our field and maybe beyond, because we think that they are a nice heuristic for describing a lot of what’s going on in terms of polarization out in the world.

Jenna Spinelle Well, and speaking of polarization, I know the two of you are not political scientist by training. So this question might not be in your wheelhouse tell me if it’s not, but I’m thinking about, you know, the work in political scientist suggests that an effective polarization or the degree of animosity we feel toward people who hold differing beliefs than us has been on the rise for at least the last decade, if not longer, depending on on who you ask. I wonder if how that might play in here. So at times when the there’s more space or more distance between social order and social justice? Is that when an effective polarization rise? Or would you correlate these things at all?

John Iceland Yeah, I mean, I would say, certainly, this book came about because we see this growing polarization, and we saw, saw an urgency to try to talk about it to understand it. And from our perspective, I think it’s I’ve long been interested in issues of social inequality, there’s been a lot of discussion of these issues, Eric and I have been discussing these issues also in light of political polarization. So as we discussed, so you know, as we sort of, we’d get together every now and then and talk about them, we felt that we needed to sort of dissect it with this book and talk about it and, and shine a light on it. And not only just from one perspective, but if we want to sort of address polarization, we got to get people from different sides to understand each other better, to have better conversations about these issues.

Eric Silver And also, I started to realize that each side possesses some wisdom that the other lakhs, and that did a lot also to calm my emotional feelings. And I think part of the motivation for a book like this is to try to spread that kind of experience and enable that kind of experience in our own discipline. Maybe we’ll get to this at some point. But this is a very unusual book for disciplines like sociology, which tends to lean very hard left. So just the idea of trying to present both sides, and to suggest that they have wisdom that the other lacks is an unusual thing. But we think an important thing, not just for the discipline, but beyond. And I think it’s a way of trying to sue these intense feelings that exist on both sides. Yeah.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. Before we get to some of those conversations within the academy, let’s let’s walk through the social order social justice framework with one of the examples that you use in the book. You, you open with the summer of 2020, the death of George Floyd and the in the protests that followed, and then there’s a whole chapter about racial inequality. So walk us through what the social order perspective what the social justice perspective is, and those those points of tension and disagreement between them.

Eric Silver Yeah, so, so thinking of the George Floyd example. So that puts us in the the neck of the woods that is about race and racial inequality and racial injustice. And so the social justice perspective here is, as John said earlier, very tuned into oppression, and tends to view racial inequality through that lens. And so the reason there is inequality that some whites have more than blacks and Hispanics are somewhere in the middle and that Asians the reason that there’s a distributed distribution of inequality is from this perspective, oppression. There’s some something going on something being imposed on people that’s preventing them from achieving the equality they would otherwise achieve. And so that’s the the social justice perspective criminalized on the social order side. There’s the focus here is on stability and cohesion, group cohesion. And so if you’re looking at this from the lens, it says everything is ought to be in in its place, and ought to be balanced against itself. And that you want to create a world that is orderly and stable, well, then you tend to look at inequality as something more natural that people will have different interests, different abilities, different groups will develop and different cultural tastes and preferences and skills over time. And that those things could lead to different outcomes by race. And that’s not a problem from a social order perspective, it’s to be expected that you won’t have complete equality in everything all the time across all racial groups. And you can sense even as I’m saying that that’s a way of looking at the world as being orderly, even in its inequality. And so these two, these two perspectives come at the same reality and draw from it very different lessons, and therefore, have very different policy preferences when it comes to how you change things to become more equal, and how far you want to go toward doing that.

John Iceland And just to build on what Eric said, I think from the social order perspective, it’s not that no changes ever needed. But they wanted to see it more incrementally carefully, so that you don’t disrupt things too much. So the concern with the protests after George Floyd wasn’t all necessarily just said, No changes needed. But as the protests grew, and there were some riots across the country, that’s where when you heard a lot of people from the social order perspective, expressing greater concern, it’s that, okay, maybe there are some things that need to be done. But this is not the way to do with riots that are creating a lot of chaos in social disorders, destroying property. So you see a different focal concern there. So when they’re reacting to the same sets of circumstances.

Jenna Spinelle So John, you mentioned something at the beginning of the conversation that I that has been going through my mind as we’ve been talking through this example, and that is, sometimes in history, there’s been more social order than social justice, and vice versa. But I think people coming from the social justice perspective would say that there’s never been a time in history when we’ve had more social justice and social order, and that itself is part of the problem.

John Iceland Well, so I guess, you know, social justice or social injustice manifests manifests itself in different ways in history. So I would say a classic example of when social justice perhaps went too far, you know, again, this is all opinions, let’s say in the French Revolution, you take that a time in history, when there was a very oppressive, sort of, essentially kind of a feudal system, a monarchy. And there was a lot of resentment building from below about inequality. And there was, it was essentially a social justice movement, right? It had many aims that we would that we could see why they wanted to fight the oppression from above. But they had a sense of that they could sort of construct a society almost from a knew it had very utopian kinds of visions for the future. And in the chaos that came from this complete upheaval of society, and you had 1000s of people dying. And eventually, social order was only essentially restored once you know, Napoleon came to power, and a monic. monarchy in a different sense, not as oppressive was, was restored. So I think that’s an example where people could see that maybe social justice, who was a time when it went too far, when it tries to think that you can reengineer society in such a way and do away with every single tradition, some which may be pernicious and harmful, you know, a feudal aristocracy, whereas some elements that that are necessary for society to function at all.

Eric Silver Yeah, I did related to what John is saying is that it’s, it’s tempting to think that social justice has been on the back burner, or something along those lines. But you could look at the last one, I think, John’s example starts in this period, look at the period since the enlightenment, as the beginning of a social justice movement, that has been spreading in the West for 300 or so years, and that it has made in an enormous amount of progress in that direction. One of the characteristics of the social justice orientation, you is that it wants change fast. It’s never satisfied with the current amount of change. Why? Because people are suffering. People are oppressed. How can we just sit still, knowing that they’re suffering around us? And so it never seems like enough. But if you look at it over the longer arc, and I think Martin Luther King said something like, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And if you look at it over the Over the period that we would say, you know, beginning in the late 16, and 1700s, that’s a story that’s very easy to tell. And so there’s a lot of success that those on the social justice side could see and claim. But again, there’s something in the tendency to hold that position that wants more and wants faster. And so it tends to feel disappointed, even amidst its successes.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah. And we’re seeing and certainly have seen all kinds of government institutions wrestle with this right? What is their role in helping to ease some of these tensions or to adjust those ratios between social order and social justice? I’m thinking about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision over the summer. So given what you described earlier about the the racial inequality and the varying perspectives between social order and social justice on that, what do you make of what what the Supreme Court is doing here? Do you see that as their effort to, you know, I don’t want to say tip the scales that makes it sound like it’s some kind of rigged system, but to intervene in some way to change that the equilibrium here?

John Iceland Well, I would say the debate about affirmative action, you know, has that we can learn a lot by using the social justice social order framework, in the sense that affirmative action was devised as a way to try to engineer equity, equal outcomes across groups, which is a central concern for social justice. That’s how they see fairness, right. So to the extent that we don’t have people equally represented in institutions, such as Ivy League universities are highly ranked public universities, you know, the, the defendants, I guess, in the case were Harvard and University of North Carolina. So to the extent that we don’t see groups equally represented, that means that we have, we have an unfair system, and so that we we need to actively do try to achieve equity. Those from the social order perspective, though, are wary of attempts to engineer equal outcomes. And also they have a different sense of what fairness is, they don’t see fairness necessarily, not just in terms of equal outcomes. But are people treated equally in a process? Because they see this as the way you promote social cohesion, essentially. And so that’s why they tend to be against affirmative action, because it’s not well, it gives, you know, points to people based on their background in this case, race. So that’s where we see the tension between social justice and social order. It’s about they perceive fairness in very different ways.

Eric Silver Right. And And beyond that, the decision are beyond just the details of the decision. policies like affirmative action, while they are aimed at increasing justice by as John said, increasing equity, they do so at a cost. And we may not find it pleasant to recognize that costs, but something like an affirmative action policy is a zero sum game, right. And so some people have to be treated unfairly for other people to be treated better than fairly. And that creates disorder, it creates resentment. It causes people to lose their sense of legitimacy and institutions, if you’re the institutions that are supposed to be running things are designed to treat some people unfairly in order to help others. And this is destabilizing from a social order perspective. And the social order folks feel that in the same way the social justice folks feel the the the suffering of those who currently have less for reasons that are historical and outside of their control. So you can look at the Supreme Court decision as if you’re thinking of social order and social justice as a way of trying to rebalance this. Now, of course, the decision doesn’t produce a solution. Maybe we could talk about that later. But it’s it definitely is an attempt to, or one of the results of it could be to increase people’s sense of the legitimacy in the system if it’s treating everyone fairly, which would promote order the system.

Jenna Spinelle So one thing that that comes up fairly often when we’re talking about these kinds of things in a in a political sense, is the notion of asymmetry. Right? So things are not there’s the people are accused of both sides ism, or that’s kind of you’re you’re equating, you know, you’re saying that people who rushed the Capitol on January 6 that are on the same plane as people who participated in the riots, the of this in the summer of 2020. So, you know, people, as I said, in the political space are trying to grapple with how much this asymmetry should matter be taken into consideration. I wonder if you thought about that, as you were weighing the you know, social order social justice framework.

Eric Silver So we’re, we’re not saying that anything goes right yeah. That’s not our, that’s not our position. At the same time, I think we lean toward, let’s hear it out. You know, I think the idea that some perspectives are too dangerous to hear is itself a very dangerous idea. And so I think we would lean toward, you know, not worrying less about both sides ism and worrying more about suppressing points of view, because they are somehow problematic. I’m using air quotes again. And that would be more of a concern, at least speak for myself, for me, and maybe John has a thought about it, too.

John Iceland I think you’re right, Jenna, that there’s a lot of what about ism, you know, in debates, they point to the worst actors on the other side, often, which are, which, again, isn’t very helpful and understanding the typical viewpoint of someone on the other side versus the extreme person on the other side. And I think asymmetries occurred in different ways in different spaces. Sometimes you’ll have in some spaces where you see sort of, let’s say, views on the right dominate, maybe in some state legislatures, and in other places, more social justice voices dominate. So you’ll, you’ll always have some of that. But, you know, I certainly agree with Eric that we should leave enough room in all spaces, just to hear different viewpoints, and especially you sort of the root reasonable versions of the different sides are out there, you know,

Jenna Spinelle Well, and one of those places, as you were mentioning earlier, where you might say leans too heavily on on social justice, and your conception is the academy or, you know, obviously, every university is different. And it’s difficult to paint them with with a broad brush, but folks certainly have and it’s generally that, you know, they they are more oriented toward justice, and I don’t think you would disagree, you make the case for more viewpoint diversity. So yeah, talk about about that one. Like what, again, viewpoint diversity is a term that often gets thrown around a lot. So how do you define it? And then, you know, what would you like to see happen within higher education?

John Iceland Well, I could start briefly, at least part of it is that me and Eric come from the standpoint is that each side has some wisdom that the other can learn from, and actually, the tension between the two is often a good thing. And too much of one or the other, in a given circumstance doesn’t necessarily produce the right outcome. So we discussed that earlier on. So I think this is where in the university where it’s, it would, it’s often useful to have different viewpoints, because if we want to increase our understanding of this world, you need to have people push back on each other. This happens, you know, in the, in the hard sciences, when a new theory comes up. And, you know, we had Einstein’s relativity built on challenge something from the past. And then we had quantum mechanics, and not that I know much about these fields that sort of doesn’t disprove what was before. But likewise, in the social sciences, when we’re trying to learn more about our world, it’s important to have ideas challenged, and sometimes they’re challenged unsuccessfully, and that’s perfectly fine. But I think this is where, if we see one of the goals of the university, is to increase our understanding of our world, this is where different viewpoints is, is helpful and shouldn’t be, you know, viewed in in a negative light in that way. And also, just the last thing I’ll say is when I teach my own classes on social problems, all I like to have students at least consider different viewpoints, because this helps develop their critical thinking skills. That’s what we’re all about in the liberal arts. And of course, they might come to whatever conclusion they come to, and that’s perfectly fine. And that’s what we expect of our students. But I don’t like hand feeding them that this is this is necessarily the truth when it could be an issue, which which is contested to some extent.

Eric Silver Yeah, I to teach the value of viewpoint diversity, I consider it a value. And in fact, I consider it extremely troubling. That the term is troubling, right? Because viewpoint diversity simply means let’s allow each other to have different viewpoints. And let’s not leave the table because of that. And that some people seem to have recast viewpoint diversity as some kind of Trojan horse for conservatism is, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a it’s a PR campaign that is not grounded in what seemed to me like core values of a democratic society. I don’t think you can villainize viewpoint diversity and maintain democratic deliberation.

Jenna Spinelle So just curious, Eric, do you so you said the word balance several times, but I didn’t hear you use the word compromise. I wonder Do you see balance and compromise as a separate and how if at all, do you see them fitting together?

Eric Silver Yeah, compromise is a fine word to me. I think people don’t like it sounds like defeat. So I tend to avoid it. But in the end, if you’ve got people who are strongly committed to their different points of view, sometimes you have to just trust that each side possesses or wisdom the other lacks and be willing to compromise. And hopefully not see it as as a devastating defeat,

John Iceland I’ll only add to what Eric said that. So it’s important to, you know, to come to seeing the wisdom in the different sides. And I think what this can also help, and we’ve talked about this before, is we’re very concerned about polarization in society. So we want to find a way to have good and productive conversations about the social problems. And so we’re hoping that our book contributes to that. And again, that doesn’t mean that on every issue, the the answer is always in the exact middle. Sometimes on some issues, we do need a lot more social justice, there’s too much sort of hierarchy and structure that is not helpful. And then other times, we might, we might find the opposite. But let’s have a conversation about these things. That’s what we think’s important.

Jenna Spinelle Well, your book is, is very readable, very easy to help understand some of these problems that we face, I hope listeners will pick it up and give it a read. And I thank both of you for joining us today.

Eric Silver Thank you, Jenna, for having us.

Chris Beem Well, thank you, Jenna, that was really a really terrific interview. And, you know, there’s one point I think I want to get back to, but I wanted to just kind of start with, you know, we mentioned it in the front part about this, this question of where do these differences come from, you know, to talk about them as intuitions, it does really kind of, you know, brings to mind the idea that these are somehow innate, or that we kind of are born with them, or that they are, you know, dispositions, right. But, you know, it’s, it’s pretty obvious, I think, and I don’t think they’re going to dispute this, that when you look at people circumstance, in life, you you kind of get a, a, you know, people tend to line up one way or the other, right. So if you are wealthy and well established, and your life is going well, then obviously, you’re going to have an incentive to keep things the same to keep things stable. And it would seem to me that that is going to kind of make you more likely to prefer social order. And conversely, if you’ve experienced society in a way in which you’ve experienced oppression, you know, whether you’d be, you know, LGBTQ, or whether you’d be, you know, African American, or, you know, some kind of other group, a poor person, you name it, you’re going to have a much different experience, of stability and of order. And so of course, you’re going to want to be more open to the social order. Ideal. And so I just, I think, this question of, you know, where does this come from? How does what does it mean? And how do we rightly understand it? You know, it’s, it is complicated, but I think it’s essential to kind of figuring out, you know, what we do about this?

Candis Watts Smith  Yeah, so, I mean, there’s a social dimension to this. And the thing is, is that there is no one person who is always located in a position of power or on the top of hierarchies every single time. No, are there are people who are located on every, you know, bottom hierarchy every single time. So, you know, we’ve all experienced power and powerlessness. But we also know that there are some people who have greater experiences of oppression of exclusion of marginality. And we might expect those people to be more likely to align with the social justice framework. And just as you said, you know, those who find themselves in more powerful positions where the status quo is looking real good for them, we might expect them to feel a you know, be more aligned with have a greater probability of being aligned with the social order. And I just also want to say, though, that this is one of the reasons why higher education is so important, is because college especially and I’ve really been trying to think about this and I’m looking for someone to tell me, another case or where I’m wrong, is that college is one of the few places where you are shoulder to shoulder with people who are just not like you, where people show up from I mean, I have a good fortune of working at Duke and when I was at Penn State to there are people from all over the world from all walks of life. And so that education component serves to broaden people’s horizons and perspectives. I’m only saying this because during the inner Have you there’s this kind of notion that academics and academia leans liberal and leans toward the social justice idea. But I think that’s partially because when people are exposed to the circumstances of other people’s lives in real way and find themselves in proximity, or an ally ship, with people that are not like them are people that have faced marginalization, they are more likely to note and notice the unfairness of it all and the contradictions, of meritocracy of, you know, of liberty and egalitarianism and all of the things that we say that we want, and don’t necessarily have, I had a little bit of hard time. When I say this, I really have to wrestle with this kind of idea that social order, and social justice can be put on an equal more moral footing, at least in a real world way I can think abstractly about it. But when our examples are George Floyd, and me too, and the two intuitions here, for me are not morally equivalent. Because one perspective tends to be held by people who are people with power, and the other perspective tends to be held by people without power. So yeah, I guess the last thing I would say, and I don’t normally go on like this, but I cannot help myself is that for me, I think actually, this this kind of these two ideas are not social order and social justice, are not as cut and dry.

Chris Beem I think that’s a really good transition to the go. One other point that I really want to get to, and it’s something that all three of us kind of highlighted. In the interview, both you and I Candice, were like, Jenna, that’s a really good question about when is the social justice, intuition, the IT motivation? Conception? When has that ever been ascendant? Right? I mean, it’s all about, you know, structures are about social structures are about power. And people with power, create them, right. And they create them in ways to sustain their own power. I mean, there’s nothing weird or you know, I mean, that’s not a lefty thing to say, that’s just empirical. That’s the way it works. And so when when Jenna said, when was it? When was it the social justice conception ever ascended? And they said, the French Revolution, and both of us are like, you know, I mean, like, you know, it’s not, I mean, there’s an argument there, you know, you could say, Okay, I guess so. But first of all, I’m I’m not sure if it works on its own, because, you know, there was really It mean, is social justice, the same as just this kind of violent and really violent retribution against the ruling class? Is that what social justice is? I’m not sure. But even so even if you just accept it, as 250 years ago, right? And if that’s the case, if that’s the arc, if that’s the shining example, you point to well, then that kind of bespeaks the fact that social justice is really kind of always, you know, a legged out in this kind of, in this world we live in.

Candis Watts Smith  Yes, agree. I think for me, there was an implied notion, and maybe not intended by John and Eric, but the example was one that highlighted notions of disorder. And so then it was my question was, is there an idea that social justice and social disorder go together? And similarly then, on the other side, does social order and social injustice always go together? So I think, for me, there just needed to be a little bit more care and nuance around the subject of social justice and social order and, and the extent to which they overlap the tensions that are there. But I’m not I appreciate the discussion of tension, but I wish for just a little bit more nuance on both sides. I was trying to think of an example of when social justice has been like, ascendant and I thought maybe it would be like reconstruction, but even then, radical reconstruction did turn formerly enslaved people into Congress people, and that was a lot of change and a little bit of time. And, okay, yes, then we ended up with Jim Crow for another 100 years, but my point is, is that there there are moments when a lot of change can be made in a little bit of time. And if people stick with it, right if people have to Stuck with reconstruction, we might be in a totally different place than we are today.

Chris Beem Well, I mean, I think what you can take away from this conversation is that this book is full of ideas and concepts and, you know, ways of framing, you know, very topical issues that are really thought provoking. And, you know, I mean, I don’t know that, that you know, you and I Candice came down exactly the same on anything except maybe the French Revolution. But, but that’s, that’s to the books credit. Right. So thanks to Eric and John, for, for coming on for and for the terrific book. And for Jenna for the interview. I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candis Watts Smith. For Democracy Works, thanks for listening.

We’re back from summer break and diving into the 2024 election season, Donald Trump’s indictments, the spread of election deniers, and more. We also welcome Michael Berkman back from sabbatical and discuss the significance of “Democracy 2024” as the backdrop for the first Republican presidential debate on August 23.

For our listeners who teach American politics, we’ve put together a list of episodes designed to be a companion to your courses. Check it out at democracyworkspodcast.com/syllabus.

Referenced in this episode: Votebeat piece by Jessica Huseman on Trump indictments

Episode Transcript

Michael Berkman From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I’m Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith  I’m Candice Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Welcome back, everybody. We are back in the swing of things after our summer break from the show. I hope you all enjoyed the episode that we put out over the summer, you heard from some other podcasts and some things that we didn’t quite get to in the last academic year. But we are also excited, Michael, to have you back with us. You were on sabbatical last semester. So Michael, welcome back.

Michael Berkman Well, thank you. It’s great to be back. I missed the show. And I missed all of you.

Jenna Spinelle As per usual, and I pulled out a couple of things that I thought we could talk about just to reorient ourselves and our listeners as we head into a new election cycle, a new semester academic year for all of us. And the first thing is, the first Republican primary debate was held. As we record this on August 29, about a week ago, it’ll be just about two weeks by the time this episode comes out, and there have been countless takes about who did well, or not so well, and all of that. So I don’t really want to focus us on that. But instead, I know the first thing that caught my eye when I saw the stage itself was that it read democracy 2024. And I would just love to know what you all think about that. Does Fox News and the people on the debate stage they are Republican candidates? Are they thinking about democracy the same way we are? Or if not, what is behind it? What does that say to you that it was so front and center literally at the debate?

Chris Beem I was kind of surprised to see that side to be honest with you. Because what I hear at least well, more frequently than defensive democracy. Is this Republican saying, well, we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic. And you know, you expect to hear this from from the flakes of the world like Lauren Bobet. But Senator Mike Lee, Senator Ted Cruz, this is not an a fringe characterization among among Republicans. And let me just stipulate That’s wrong. That’s a dumb thing to say. There. You know, it’s like saying, it’s not a cracker. It’s a saltine. But it’s so so it’s nonsense, but it’s also pernicious nonsense, I think. And so if we’re not a democracy, will what do we care about efforts to make our democracy better or worse? You know, it’s basically not our concern, because we’re a republic. And so I was, like I said, I was surprised. And maybe that’s a little pushback from the RNC. I don’t know. But it was, it was a surprise. And I think, you know, I’m glad to see it.

Michael Berkman A couple thoughts on that I, you know, it’s an election. And so, you know, from, from anybody’s perspective, even if you think of the country as a republic, rather than a democracy, it is Republic, then elections are central to it. But what does strike me to the extent that I was watching the debate, or what I what I see on Fox News is that, you know, so this is a network that was sued, and had to pay a great deal of money because of election denialism. And so they’re cautious about that now, but at no point have I did they talk about on that stage? Or have I seen evidence that Fox talks about why election denialism is dangerous to democracy, how what they were doing was hurtful to democracy, not just hurtful to their own bottom line. I also just to just to respond to a crusade, on the mood of the nation poll, when we ask people what they value about democracy, we often get this response from conservatives, especially older conservatives, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I wouldn’t say we don’t get it from a majority of Republicans, but we get it from a not insignificant percentage. And I we look at that statement a little bit differently. We don’t necessarily think it’s dumb. We think that what they’re doing is expressing a concern with democratic rule with mob rule, in their own words, but certainly in majority rule, and I think it’s because they recognize that, you know, within the conservative movement, that they’re increasingly a shrinking part of the electorate, and they’re threatened by newly empowered groups, and they and so they want to emphasize that we’re not a democracy, but rather this republic, which, which we have always taken to mean and our interpretation of it goes back to Robert Dahl’s interpretation of it that this phrase captures the idea that there is a fear of mob rule of majority rule, and that goes back to the Federalist Papers, right? That was Madison.

Chris Beem Well, he’s talking about Athens. Right. And so that’s the one government in the history of democracies, that was actually a direct democracy. And that was 2500 years ago. So I mean, I actually think that the the issue is that they’re trying to legitimize the two most undemocratic dimensions of our government, which is the Electoral College, and the two senators for each date. And they are they are APA, politically undemocratic, and they’re not going anywhere. And, and they usually end at least recently, they end up benefiting Republican candidates. So they want to justify that ideologically.

Candis Watts Smith  But so just to dovetail on that point, Chris, is that one thing that I can say that conservatives are very good at, is CO opting particular concepts for their own meaning and purpose, defining them as they see fit. So for example, voter integrity when people are talking about voter ID or early voting or mail in ballots, and why we would want to, you know, raise the bar for people to actually cast their ballot. Some people will call this voter integrity, which sounds great. Democracy is also a word that sounds great. So this is very much in that pattern. I think the other thing that stands out to me or stood out to me, was the extent to which a group of people who say they love the Constitution, have policies and agendas that seem very anti. And so one of them, for example, is Vivek Rama, swamis idea that we should raise the voting age to, you know, your mid 20s, or something like that. Right. So this is a way to cut out a large portion of the population. Or as another example, both kind of Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, essentially kind of talking about federalizing policies that they say, like, that are supposed to be at the state. So which is it? Are we doing federalism? Or are we doing national politics where one particular party that is indeed shrinking? gets to say, what’s good for everyone? Right? So it’s very much moving away from local politics and states rights. And for these kind of overarching, let’s make the united states Florida kind of things. So I find it laughable that this kind of talk about lauding the Constitution and loving democracy are, this is the kind of that what we get, when we unpack it, we see that, that neither of these things are truly valued among these candidates.

Chris Beem You know, I had to just just to put a point on that just about every question that you asked, Jenna, I could like just summarize up with Talk is cheap. And you know, I mean, say you love democracy. Well, okay. But actions speak louder than words. So anyway,

Michael Berkman Well, I think we shouldn’t confuse democracy and the Constitution. The Constitution is a pretty undemocratic to che document. And that’s my point about Republic not a democracy in part. I mean, the Constitution is littered with provisions to try to protect not against direct democracy, but against majority rule in general. I mean, the Electoral College, we talked about Senate, we could go on and on. I mean, there were all kinds of restrictions built in there intended to No, just the whole creation of a Republicans sort of elite that would emerge through their filtering system of multiple elections, you know, having the state legislators vote for the senators and, and state legislators, picking the electors, and on and on, they wanted to remove things from the people as much as they possibly could. And they certainly I mean, Ramaswamy, in particular, has a shaky notion of the Constitution. And in general terms, he’s, he’s often sort of tossing things out there that have nothing to do with the Constitution. And I don’t even think he understands exactly when it when it was written. What we’re most alarmed me, though, Canada’s line in line with some of the things that you were talking about was, I think that some of them were talking about bombing Mexico, or maybe just putting heads on stakes at the border and using the military at the border. These are things that I don’t know if these are against the Constitution, necessarily. They’re certainly against the law. So there seem to be, they’re playing to the audience.

Jenna Spinelle And speaking of that, you know, we were chatting before we started recording about the growing number of voters who identify as independent. Now they may still vote Republican, or vote for Republican candidates. But I wonder what that says to all of you about the notion of a primary. And I’m sure there’s something similar on the Democratic side, as well. You know, we’ve talked on the show before about primaries tending to attract the extremes of the party in terms of voters. And I just wonder with seemingly more and more people, and more and more younger people identifying as independent does the system need to change to catch up with that? Or is it going to lead to the candidates that are selected through the primary process, perhaps being out of step when it comes to the general election?

Candis Watts Smith  So this is really tricky, because it’s even hard to say, the primary system, because it’s different in every place. So in Pennsylvania, you have to choose a party. And if you’re independent, you may not vote in the party. And so then we could see how independents can be locked out of that situation. In the product, Carolina, you can identify as an independent, but you must choose a party to vote in the primaries. And I wonder, I guess I haven’t I mean, this is a empirical question is do we get very different types of candidates out of the two types of systems, one where independents are locked out? And another way they’re not?

Michael Berkman I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything compelling that that is true, although it seems like it should be. Right, because the people voting in primaries are the most extreme members of each party, the Republican primary electorate is quite different from the electorate, that’s likely to vote for Republican candidates in 2024, for example, they’re just far more committed to Donald Trump, they’re far more conservative on some of their policies. And they do nominate some rather extreme candidates, you know, I think that the polarization from whatever the sources are the primaries or whatever, whatever is driving the polarization. And I believe it’s multiple factors. It’s been happening for a very, very long time. But I think the polarization does drive many young people in particular into calling themselves Independents. Because the one one thing that polarization does force you to do, and this is what tougher for a younger voter coming into the political system that it is for somebody who has been in it for a while, is you have to choose between two drastically different alternatives. And that might not be a two drastically different alternatives who seem to hate each other. And that might not be something that’s appealing to too many of them. I’m not the first person to come up with this. But I do think that’s part of what’s driving the rise of independence. And as more of these young people come into the electorate, we’re going to see the number of independents continuing to increase

Chris Beem The impact of that is going to be is that it’s going to further diminish the power of parties, which we’ve talked about being on issue and problem in terms of gatekeeping and and setting norms for behavior and expectations, things like that.

Michael Berkman Right. I mean, that’s what strikes me about the Republican Party right now is the complete abandonment of the role of gatekeepers, you know, so you mentioned Republicans and Democrats, the Democratic Party is operating as a gatekeeper traditionally has, I don’t think they’re holding primaries, in many states. Certainly, they are making it as difficult as they possibly can, for anybody to come in and oppose Joe Biden, because they’re playing gatekeeper. But the Republicans, I mean, the idea that a political party would nominate for president, somebody who is under indictment in four different cases, and is going to be out on bail, as Christie likes to bring up and maybe even is convicted. By that point, is just mind blowing. Like a political party doesn’t do that, as we traditionally think of the Republican Party, because the job of a political party more than anything, is to win elections. That is a reason for existing traditionally, as we thought about them, they exist to find candidates run them and win. Yet they know that running somebody who is in the situation that Trump is going to be in IS, IS is not going to go well for them. But they seem incapable of playing any kind of gatekeeping role on this. Got to kind of free for all and everything’s being driven by Donald Trump or letting it happen.

Chris Beem You know, we’ve seen this this show before. Yeah.

Michael Berkman Right. Mitch McConnell could have stopped the whole thing. I mean, if you think of Mitch McConnell, as sort of the leader of the establishment leader of the Republican Party, he could have stopped it. He could have stopped it in the second impeachment. Instead, he came out and he said, we’re gonna let the criminal justice system do this. We’re not going to do it this way. That was exactly what he said, Well, let’s move to the criminal justice system. And you can see all the respect that many Republican leaders are giving to the criminal justice system now that they’ve got Donald Trump in their clutches, but all he had to do was vote for impeachment. And that was it.

Chris Beem But you notice how silent Mitch McConnell has been over the last two months. But the other thing is, I mean, I’m quite confident that he thought he could have his cake and eat it too.

Michael Berkman American institutions, including the judicial system, are being routinely torn apart by many Republican elites. And very few of them, including Mitch McConnell, are standing up for them and saying, Look, we have a process. We’re now in that process. In fact, when I voted to not impeach him, I said it’s removed to the process. So we have to respect the process, we have to see what happens. We have to believe in the integrity of the system. He’s not doing that. And by the admission, what he’s doing is he’s allowing all these voices to adjust. Now, right now, we know that American public opinion, we’ve done polling on this as shifted, especially among Republicans strongly against the FBI, it’s strongly against the Justice Department in general, whatever the resolution of these cases now, right, the juries have been vilified, even before they’re chosen. Even before any of this happens. They have made sure that nobody will trust or at least people on the Republican side, many of them will not trust the system. So Mitch McConnell, silence is not to me, okay. His silence is going along with this, because he’s got responsibility. He’s the Senate Minority Leader. He’s a leading Republican establishment figure. I can’t think of anybody else. Who would who has that role book, Kevin McCarthy, but he doesn’t have you know, Kevin McCarthy has a totally different kind of thing. He, he does everything he can to decimate America, right?

Chris Beem No, I can’t argue with any of that. But none of this is new. Right. This is this is why are we 16?

Jenna Spinelle I mean, what is maybe new? And Michael, you started to mention this before is the is the Republican Party being becoming more and more one of those institutions that conservatives or Republicans are turning against? And what happens if that is indeed, the case? The incentive, as you said, has traditionally been to win elections. But are there other incentives that might knock that down from first place, so to speak, and

Michael Berkman Well, to me there, it’s the sort of attachment of the Republican Party to one person, as an instrument of that person. And to the extent that they’re not an instrument to that person, then they’re disposable to and I mean, I suspect and eager to hear from others to that, you know, as the thing plays itself down, and if Donald Trump starts to sort of crumble as I continue to believe he will, then that party is going to go to war with itself, as you already saw, at the debate, some policy routes about which there’s going to be really serious conflict within the Republican Party, over Ukraine, and especially when the funding bill comes up in the Republican House, where I think they’re probably going to vote against continued funding for Ukraine, and then the Senate is not going to be very happy with that. But you saw between pans, and Nikki Haley, right, and then Ramaswamy and some of the others, I think, I think there are real policy conflicts within that party, probably in a lot of other areas, as well, but they’re also around just this devotion to one person.

Candis Watts Smith  I would like to talk a little bit about that. So I was asked by a journalist why I thought that the question was, why isn’t DeSantis doing as well, as we thought and the questions that were posed to me around were around rhetoric. And I said that I actually think that that’s not the issue that we’re kind of in this moment where we are seeing a thing that maybe we haven’t seen before, which is kind of loyalty to an individual. And, you know, I think about, I remember when there was a shirt, someone bought me a shirt with Obama’s face on it. And I thought that was so weird, because I’m like, Oh, that’s not something that we do in the States. Like that’s something that other people do in non democratic countries to kind of focus on a particular human person. And I wonder to what extent we’re just not even tapping into this idea of loyalty because it’s not something that we’ve seen it. We haven’t seen it this way. And we don’t really seem to have language around it.

Michael Berkman I have that thought around the flags. Like I never remember flags before. For candidates, these, especially flags that are bigger than the house that they’re in front of, with Trump’s name on them and, and is there something really, you know, it’s kind of a cult of personality, and that’s that’s a dangerous thing, especially if the party He is a part of that. Right? Which very clearly seems to be.

Chris Beem It’s a manifestation of connecting a political leader intimately to one’s own identity. It’s not just a partisan choice. It’s not just an expression of opinion. It’s, this is who I am. And the fact that you, you can also do it in a way where you are thumbing your nose at everybody who doesn’t like it. That’s the other advantage to doing that. But yeah, I noticed that I mean, I canvass Robotham. I gave him money. And the I, you know, I put a sign in my yard and that was it. Right? That was it. But that’s not what’s going on here. And I really have tried to try to figure out what it is that accounts for this difference. And I think that’s it that is to be a Trump supporter is to attach one’s own sense of purpose, meaning value identity directly to that person, which is not a good recipe.

Candis Watts Smith  I guess my and I guess my question is, is have we ever seen this in our history?

Michael Berkman We’ve seen demagogues, we I don’t know that we’ve ever seen quite like this.

Chris Beem Not like this. I mean, you know, Roosevelt was president for what, 10 years for elections. I remember people saying, Yeah, Joe Lewis was always the champ the Yankees were always had world series champion. And Roosevelt was always the president. But that’s about as far as it went. It was never I don’t know, at least I don’t recall it being this kind of identification.

Michael Berkman You know, with Lindbergh, maybe with Father Coughlin, maybe even with George Wallace. But in all of those cases, parties played the role of gatekeeper they kept them out. Right. And, you know, this is this is really one of the really important insights from that how democracies die. That responsibility has been abdicated. So you get here, maybe, Jen a good time to transition to the indictments.

Jenna Spinelle Yeah, I was, I was going to actually. So I want to again, there’s so much changing. And, you know, I don’t want to get too bogged down in the weeds of every single indictment, I’m sure our listeners have sort of kept up with with some of that. But I want to instead focus us on an op ed that Jessica Hughes men from vote beat who was a guest on the show, last fall, she covers election administration, at the local level, and the people who make elections run and work. I’m just going to read a few lines of this, and I’ll link the whole thing in the show notes. But she says, I don’t have to tell you that an indictment won’t solve these problems. I also don’t have to tell you that things are likely to get worse before they get better. The push for hand counting paper ballots, the angry battles over control of elections, the rampant abuse of public records requests by bad faith actors. And the baseless lawsuits that demand so much taxpayer money are ongoing proof that his message meaning Trump’s message is still resonating. So I think it’s it’s tempting to see that yeah, you know, on one hand, Trump’s finally maybe going to get what so many people hope is coming to him. But yet there’s these other things that have already happened. And we’re going into another election with a workforce that is, at best burned out, if not left the public service or moved on to something else, because they’re getting threats. And, you know, just all as Jessica says, all these things that make it difficult, if not impossible to do their job. So I wonder how you all kind of square those things, and maybe how our listeners should think about squaring those two things like Trump being going through the justice process, but also the effects that, you know, what he is accused of doing seems to have already caused.

Chris Beem I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I think I’m less pessimistic than Jessica is. But you know, I don’t want to sound like do justice of the heavens fall. But I’m not far from that. I you know, I just the rule of laws, the rule of law. And I, you know, I’m absolutely certain that things might get worse. But I am even more certain that the alternative of doing nothing of establishing a two tier system of justice is absolutely and and categorically worse. And so that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.

Candis Watts Smith 

Well, let me just say we already have a two tier system of the criminal legal system, but not this way.

Chris Beem I mean, yes, we do. But the idea that a president we’re not we’re just going to let that go. You’re Write? Of course, that’s right. But it doesn’t change what’s at stake in this in this choice.

Michael Berkman I think Huseman is kind of mixing two things up together. And it’s a bit of a red herring. So nobody ever said that these indictments are the criminal justice system going after what happened on around the 2020 election was going to fix the problems with our democracy. And that’s not the job of the Justice Department. That’s not what they do. Right. They take write cases, and then they prosecute them and then judges judge them and, and democracies do this with former leaders all the time. There’s nothing new here in terms of democracies is not like, you know, the end of the democracy that we’re prosecuting a former president,

Chris Beem It’s happened in the phrase for us, we’ve never done it.

Michael Berkman But it is not an eight. It is not an undemocratic action. It’s happened in South Korea. It’s happened in men. It’s happened in Italy happened in other hands, it’s happened in Italy, right? So it’s happened in other places, once somebody leaves the office there, they’re just a citizen. And they’re liable to the justice system, which is treating him I think, quite nicely right now relative to the severity of the crimes. The other issue has to do with the ongoing threat to democracy from the perversion of our elections, in particular, along the lines of what happened in 2020. was putting the details aside was an effort to subvert the will of the people in multiple states. You know, one of the things that I was working on during my sabbatical was at my colleague, Michael Nelson, and I hear we’re working with folks at State United, who some of our listeners may remember was on the show last year, and one our brown metal, and we’ve been sort of cataloging very carefully precedents of election deniers and state legislatures. And so for example, in Pennsylvania, well over half the Republicans, well over half of the Republicans in the state legislature continue to deny that Joe Biden won Pennsylvania and won the election in 2020. And we know from other guests we’ve had from things we talked about this kind of election denialism. This is dangerous. This is a dangerous SOS to really be getting involved. We also know there has been all kinds of machinations in terms of the people that supervise elections in various states, changes in the laws, removing local control, all kinds of things like that. So whether or not we have disaster coming, I certainly hope not we require vigilance, continued vigilance on what’s going on. Because we we continue to have a highly decentralized system of elections in this country, where we allow states who are under the political control of people that don’t acknowledge even the last election, that they have the control over the election. So I think that is continued concern, a continued threat, something that needs to continue to be monitored. I’m not really sure what it has to do with Donald Trump, other than it is important that it be transparent. What happened last time, and the only way to achieve that transparency is going to be through the courts, or at least an important way to achieve that transparency is going to be through the courts. It came through the January 6 committee, but for half the country that was devalued, right? Oh, those were the Democrats. Now it’s going to come out of the courts. And that’s why there’s such an effort to devalue the courts as well. Because we can’t that way, we don’t have to accept what comes out of the way  and by come out of the courts.

Candis Watts Smith  You’re talking about Trump’s cases?

Michael Berkman Well, principally. But I also think you see what I’m really fascinated by the Georgia case. And not not actually because Donald Trump is at the top of it, but because of the people at the bottom of it. Because what the what the Georgia case does is show at the state level where these things go on what happened to steal an election. And so you’ve got the harassment, the utter harassment of these two election workers, right, that was perpetrated by people in Georgia and people from outside Georgia, in Georgia, that’s a Georgia State Crime, it should be tried there. You also have, you know, these fake electors, they’re prosecuting them in Michigan, because that was a Michigan plot, it should be prosecuted in Georgia to should probably be prosecuted in Arizona as well. These are state and there were other pieces of it as well. So it’s not just Donald Trump standing at the top, which of course, is what Jack Smith is all about with his case, and why he streamlines it the way that he did. But what I like about the George, because I think it’s important is it shows what can happen within the state, if there’s a concerted effort to steal an election. And you know, what bothers me a little bit about Jack Smith’s approach, although I understand why he’s doing it, I think is it feels a little bit like the January 6 committee to me, which largely coming from Liz Cheney, made itself all about Donald Trump, that this was Donald Trump. But what the Georgia case does are so no, this was the Georgia Republican Party. Again, case shows this was the Michigan Republican Party. Hmm. And I think it’s really important since that’s where elections are run. Okay, you got me on a soapbox on that.

Chris Beem The only thing I would say is that I think what is indispensable if this is to go well, or at least not terribly is for the judges and the prosecutor, prosecutors to conduct themselves with probity to conduct themselves with rectitude, and a sense of gravitas associated that’s appropriate to this level of indictment. And from where I sit, they have been I have seen, you know, I’m not a lawyer, but I have been impressed with their ability to wade through this chaos and and just say, This is my courtroom. And we’re going to do it this way, because this is the right way. And if there’s anything else, I think it just undermines the kind of the one shot we have of getting through this. Well. And so, I mean, so far, I think that just speaks well to what could happen.

Michael Berkman I mean, there’s nothing to disagree with there. But I’m struck by the fact that these federal prosecutors and judges who have for the most part acted with probity and professionalism, and all that are attacked is basically fascist pigs by Donald Trump, and nobody in the Republican Party with the exception of the Never Trump errs, who are no longer part of the Republican Party stand up and say, No, they’re not. They’re acting with profanity, because this is how the court system works. This is what bothers me about Mitch McConnell’s silence, as well as out of so many others that it’s not all but you know, it shouldn’t just be Chris Christie out there talking about how, you know, this is how the system works.

Chris Beem Well, we just had a conversation with Tim Miller, where we kind of go into some of the, some of the reasons for for this complete, cowardice, moral cowardice.

Jenna Spinelle We’re gonna have to leave it there. And it’s so good to have all of you back. I’m looking forward to getting back into our regular flow of episodes. Were going to stay bi weekly as we were in the spring, and lots of good stuff coming your way. So for the entire democracy works team. I’m Jenna Spinelle. Thanks for listening.

Santucci-1-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">Americans want electoral reforms so that they can have more choice in elections. Recent surveys show that 20 to 50 percent of Americans are open to a new electoral system, while demand for a third party has crept upward since Gallup began asking in 2003. More Americans now call themselves “independent” than identify with either of the major parties, but what happens when Americans try to reform their way out of a two-party system?

In More Parties or No Parties, Jack Santucci traces the origins and performance of proportional representation in U.S. cities, the reasons for repeal in all but one case, and discusses the implications of this history for current reform movements at the state and national level. In a two-party system, reform requires appealing to the group that wants to “get the parties out of politics” (or, in modern terms, to “reduce polarization”). This leads to ostensibly nonpartisan reform packages, yet party-like formations emerge anyway, as voters and governments need to be organized. However, such reform is not stable and has tended to make voting difficult for everyday people.

This conversation, originally recorded in August 2022,  looks back at the history of political reform and current movements like the Forward Party and the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Nevada and other states. As you’ll hear, reform is easy to put into a slogan, but much harder to implement in practice.

More Parties or No Parties

Jack Santucci’s website

225x300.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="300">Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century, joins us this week to discuss how the era from Barack Obama’s election to George Floyd’s murder compare to the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.

Joseph argues that racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020 marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. However, Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith are not so sure he’s right about that conclusion. We hope you’ll listen to the arguments and think critically about where you land on the question of whether America has experienced or is in the midst of a Third Reconstruction.

Joseph is based at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the following titles:Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Professor of History and Public Affairs, and Founding  Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies and political science. He is a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights.