Partisan polarization and the need for civic respect | CAS Inquire
CAS MarComm
Author
10/10/2022
Added
11
Plays
Description
Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, political science, gives the CAS Inquire talk on Oct. 4, 2022 for the theme "Searching for common ground in a polarized world".
Searchable Transcript
Toggle between list and paragraph view.
- [00:00:05.038]Good evening. I am Dr.
- [00:00:06.573]Taylor Livingston and I'm
- [00:00:07.841]the director of the College of Arts and Sciences Inquire Program.
- [00:00:12.212]Thank you all for coming tonight in person and via Zoom
- [00:00:16.349]to the second installment of this year's Inquire series lecture
- [00:00:20.186]Searching for Common Ground in a Polarized World.
- [00:00:24.324]The Inquire program structured around these lectures
- [00:00:27.093]allows students, faculty and staff, as well as the wider public,
- [00:00:31.197]the opportunity to investigate how we as individuals and a society
- [00:00:36.403]understand the concept of civil discourse.
- [00:00:40.340]Additionally, it creates an opportunity to learn about the fascinating
- [00:00:43.943]research faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences are conducting
- [00:00:48.515]and enable students to see the various disciplinary
- [00:00:51.184]approaches to the study of a topic.
- [00:00:54.554]It also allows and for students
- [00:00:57.057]to see the necessity of multi trans and interdisciplinary insights
- [00:01:02.228]to truly understand human thoughts, beliefs and actions.
- [00:01:06.332]And specifically tonight, being civil and respectful in the midst of the midterms.
- [00:01:12.672]Tonight's lecture,
- [00:01:13.706]Partisan Polarization and the Need for Civic Respect by all is by Dr.
- [00:01:18.044]Elizabeth Theiss-Morse.
- [00:01:19.813]Willa Cather, professor and political science, argues
- [00:01:23.049]we find common ground by moving beyond being Nebraska nice to being
- [00:01:27.921]willing and open to engage with those with differing political opinions.
- [00:01:32.792]Dr. Theiss Morse is a celebrated scholar and educator who has won numerous awards
- [00:01:38.731]for her books on American politics and electoral behavior,
- [00:01:42.602]including her work Who Count as American the Boundaries of National Identity,
- [00:01:47.407]which won the Robert Lane Award for Best Book on
- [00:01:50.076]Political Psychology and Congress as Public Enemy.
- [00:01:53.880]Winner of the Fenno Prize for Best Book on Legislative Politics.
- [00:01:58.351]After her lecture, Dr.
- [00:01:59.686]Theiss-Morse will take questions from the audience.
- [00:02:02.522]If you're in person, just raise your hand and someone will bring you a mic.
- [00:02:06.759]If you're via Zoom,
- [00:02:07.727]you can enter them in the Q&A and I will ask them on your behalf.
- [00:02:11.898]So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Theiss Morse.
- [00:02:25.745]So first of all, thank you all for being here.
- [00:02:28.948]I really appreciate it.
- [00:02:30.049]I also really want to thank Professor Taylor Livingston
- [00:02:33.553]for all of the work she does for CAS Inquire.
- [00:02:36.589]I also want to thank Associate Dean June Griffin, who she came
- [00:02:41.194]when I was up in the dean's office several years ago.
- [00:02:44.230]She came into my office with this idea for for what to do with this,
- [00:02:48.334]you know, getting our students together, getting students together to talk about
- [00:02:53.406]really interesting issues from lots of different perspectives.
- [00:02:56.442]And I thought it was the most brilliant idea in the world.
- [00:02:59.679]So I'm thrilled today
- [00:03:01.481]to have the chance to actually be part of this amazing series.
- [00:03:05.385]And I also want to thank Dean Mark Button for his
- [00:03:10.290]his support of this program and all of that.
- [00:03:13.660]I'm going to have a few jabs at him later on in the talks.
- [00:03:16.829]But for now, I'll be respectful. So.
- [00:03:19.032]So the project that I am working on, theoretically, yeah.
- [00:03:27.340]So the project that I am going to be talking about
- [00:03:31.311]today is based on a book
- [00:03:34.113]that I have been working on with a friend of mine, political theorist
- [00:03:38.952]at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill named Jeff Spinner.
- [00:03:43.590]It's been a really interesting experience to work with a political theorist
- [00:03:48.328]because we I'm a political psychologist, so we come at the topic
- [00:03:51.497]from very different directions.
- [00:03:53.266]And it's really been fun to get his perspective on how these things work.
- [00:03:58.271]So the book that we have worked on is called Respect and Loathing
- [00:04:04.244]in American Democracy, and it's currently under review at a university press.
- [00:04:10.049]So we're keeping our fingers crossed.
- [00:04:12.151]I am going to talk today about civic respect, so the respect side of that.
- [00:04:17.457]But before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit about the loathing side.
- [00:04:23.263]And so I'm going to get into the loathing side
- [00:04:25.898]before getting into the respect side, because I think it's important to keep
- [00:04:30.136]in context how we think about each other in our political system.
- [00:04:35.041]So partizan polarization in the United States,
- [00:04:38.378]as you are all very well aware, is just awful.
- [00:04:42.382]I mean, we are so far apart politically
- [00:04:45.418]and it's it's just it's just a mess.
- [00:04:49.889]So one thing that political scientists have been interested in
- [00:04:54.894]is whether this is really just an elite level phenomenon
- [00:05:00.066]or is this something that exists in the mass public?
- [00:05:02.669]And there's a group of political scientists
- [00:05:04.470]who basically say, you know, it's really about elected officials.
- [00:05:08.041]And elected officials are the ones who are really misbehaving in a way.
- [00:05:12.512]They're the ones who are who are polarized and the general public is not.
- [00:05:16.282]So I want to pull out a little bit of part.
- [00:05:19.118]So some political
- [00:05:21.287]scientists, Poul and Rosenthal, are the two big names in this area.
- [00:05:25.892]They have been collecting data and looking back in time.
- [00:05:29.329]And what they have done is basically measure
- [00:05:32.365]how much members of Congress vote together as a party
- [00:05:37.570]and then how much they vote against the other party.
- [00:05:42.175]Okay. So oops. Sorry.
- [00:05:44.577]I don't know why that did that.
- [00:05:54.087]So there we go. Okay.
- [00:05:56.122]So they they look at this difference
- [00:05:59.792]between party means and this axis.
- [00:06:03.563]The x axis goes from 1880 all the way to 2021. Okay.
- [00:06:10.536]What I want you to pay attention to here is that if we look at members of Congress
- [00:06:15.174]and how polarized that they are, how close they vote together.
- [00:06:19.011]You can see that they are more polarized
- [00:06:22.682]than they have ever been since these data
- [00:06:26.052]were originally collected in 1880. Okay.
- [00:06:29.422]So going back to 1880, this is right
- [00:06:32.892]after the Civil War, shortly after the Civil War.
- [00:06:36.562]And members of Congress are more more polarized
- [00:06:39.832]now than they were shortly after the Civil War.
- [00:06:44.203]I think it is very clear
- [00:06:46.339]that we can conclude that Congress is a mess.
- [00:06:50.309]And it is. I mean, there is no doubt
- [00:06:52.812]Congress is a mess. So.
- [00:06:58.551]The next question, though, is what about the mass public?
- [00:07:04.991]We accept that the political elites are polarized.
- [00:07:08.494]What about the mass public?
- [00:07:10.930]And there's some disagreement.
- [00:07:12.565]Political scientists don't all agree on everything all the time.
- [00:07:15.334]And so political science, some political scientists have said,
- [00:07:18.938]if you look at people's issue stance, they're actually not that far apart
- [00:07:24.610]. Most Americans.
- [00:07:27.180]Don't care about a lot of issues.
- [00:07:30.383]When oftentimes they're relatively moderate on issues
- [00:07:34.854]and so they just don't care that much or they are moderate.
- [00:07:38.925]And it does then that they're not that polarized. Okay.
- [00:07:42.528]But other political scientists said you're looking in the wrong place
- [00:07:45.932]if you're looking at issue stands and just focusing on issue stands.
- [00:07:49.802]You're really missing the polarization that's happening in the American public.
- [00:07:55.041]The polarization among us
- [00:07:58.511]is our identity with a political party that we strongly identify
- [00:08:03.049]as Democrats or Republicans, and that we hate the other side.
- [00:08:08.721]We hate the other party.
- [00:08:10.456]So what they have done, this is Druckman and Levy.
- [00:08:18.331]They told me I shouldn't be walking around with this, but I am anyway.
- [00:08:22.301]So what they have done is looked at a feeling thermometer
- [00:08:26.806]where they basically ask people how warm or cold you feel towards some other group.
- [00:08:31.677]Okay, so how hot or cold do you feel towards Democrats?
- [00:08:36.148]How hot or cold do you feel toward Republicans in this case?
- [00:08:40.253]And the higher the number, the warmer you're feeling. So you like them more.
- [00:08:43.623]Right. You feel better about them. You feel good about them.
- [00:08:46.058]The lower the number, the more you dislike them, the more you hate them. All right.
- [00:08:50.496]So what we see here, this blue line, and this goes from 1980 up until current
- [00:08:55.968]times, this blue line is how much we how we feel about the other party.
- [00:09:01.841]And you can see that this line has dropped dramatically since 1982.
- [00:09:08.481]Current times to 2020.
- [00:09:11.450]Okay. So what we see is that people increasingly hate the other party.
- [00:09:17.557]And these feelings especially started dropping in about 2008
- [00:09:22.228]when Barack Obama was elected to today.
- [00:09:25.431]When we're down at about 25 degrees for opposing parties
- [00:09:29.502]and both parties hate each other. Okay.
- [00:09:33.439]I think it's important to note, though,
- [00:09:35.675]that it's not that we are feeling better about our own party.
- [00:09:39.178]So the green line is what we feel about our own party,
- [00:09:42.782]and that's just stayed flat or even gone down just a little bit.
- [00:09:46.819]It's not like we love our own party.
- [00:09:48.955]We're more and more in love with our own party
- [00:09:51.223]and more and more hate the other party.
- [00:09:53.192]It's really that we hate the other party.
- [00:09:55.828]And this is what political scientists refer to as affective polarization.
- [00:10:02.368]This is our feeling, our affect and how we feel about the other party.
- [00:10:07.306]And we have just become deeply polarized.
- [00:10:10.509]This orange line is affective
- [00:10:13.879]polarization, and it's just the difference between those two measures.
- [00:10:17.850]And we just it just shows that this isn't going up
- [00:10:20.720]pretty dramatically in recent times.
- [00:10:24.490]So why basically, why should we care?
- [00:10:31.397]Why do we care if we have become so affectively polarized
- [00:10:36.936]in the American public?
- [00:10:38.070]And I do want to say we have
- [00:10:40.339]I mean, this is this is a major thing that's happening among people.
- [00:10:45.111]The effects are really pronounced.
- [00:10:48.247]So one effect is that people are much less.
- [00:10:53.853]Okay. With having their child marry somebody from the other party.
- [00:10:59.659]It used to be that people didn't want their child
- [00:11:02.628]to marry somebody from a different race or a different religion.
- [00:11:06.699]And now what we have seen is that people increasingly
- [00:11:10.603]don't want their child to marry somebody from the other party.
- [00:11:15.174]So back in the 1960s, about 5% of Americans said they would be unhappy
- [00:11:21.013]if their child married somebody from the other party.
- [00:11:24.350]Today, it's just under 40%.
- [00:11:26.886]Would be unhappy if their child married somebody from the other party.
- [00:11:31.290]Okay. So we are making social choices
- [00:11:35.461]based on partizanship and we don't like the other party.
- [00:11:39.765]The other way that this is manifesting itself is through discrimination.
- [00:11:45.104]So again, we often think of discrimination
- [00:11:47.206]in terms of things like race or gender or religion.
- [00:11:52.178]But what we're seeing nowadays is something different.
- [00:11:55.147]So to political scientist Shanto and Garth Garland, Sean Westwood
- [00:12:00.119]did this fascinating experiment
- [00:12:02.354]where they had they gave people two resumes and they said,
- [00:12:06.659]tell us which of these two candidates you would hire for a job?
- [00:12:10.463]Which of these two candidates would you hire?
- [00:12:12.832]And the the resumes were either
- [00:12:16.469]the two candidates were equally qualified.
- [00:12:19.939]Or one candidate was better qualified than the other candidate. Okay.
- [00:12:26.078]And then they they included in the resume
- [00:12:29.782]and some of the some people were randomly assigned to this.
- [00:12:32.551]They were they included in the resume a line that said.
- [00:12:37.623]I was you know, I was a member at lists that they were
- [00:12:39.825]a member of the Young Democrats when they were in college
- [00:12:43.095]or they lists that they were a member of young Republicans in college.
- [00:12:47.600]And these are the results.
- [00:12:51.270]So when the candidates are equally qualified. Okay.
- [00:12:55.441]And this is probability of of choosing the Republicans. Okay.
- [00:12:59.645]So when the candidates are equally qualified, Republicans pick the Republican
- [00:13:05.751]candidate for the job and Democrats pick the Democratic candidate for the job.
- [00:13:11.590]Now, this one is one.
- [00:13:13.025]The Republican is more qualified.
- [00:13:15.795]And this one, this one, the Democrat is more qualified.
- [00:13:19.598]It doesn't matter.
- [00:13:21.467]You couldn't be more qualified and it has no impact.
- [00:13:25.738]Right. You're still getting the same
- [00:13:28.340]partizan bias in who gets selected.
- [00:13:32.278]The qualifications of the candidates are irrelevant.
- [00:13:36.615]Okay, so I under and Westwood also included race as one of their conditions.
- [00:13:41.987]And I'm not going to include that here, but to show you the results here.
- [00:13:45.291]But the effects of race were much smaller.
- [00:13:49.428]It's just so much smaller than the effects of partizanship.
- [00:13:53.432]And they argue in their article that it is really partizanship
- [00:13:57.169]this polarization that is driving this discrimination in a major way.
- [00:14:02.208]So if you're on the job market, just be careful what you put on your resumé
- [00:14:06.545]because it has consequences as their research shows.
- [00:14:10.416]So discrimination is bad, okay? Hatred is bad.
- [00:14:14.153]Discrimination is bad.
- [00:14:16.522]But there's also been a bunch of work on how affective polarization increases
- [00:14:20.826]our tendency to dehumanize people from the opposing party. We, we, we.
- [00:14:26.098]We are more likely to think that opposing partizans are less human
- [00:14:32.705]than people in our party, which leads to all sorts of concerns .
- [00:14:37.009]I mean, people mistreat those.
- [00:14:41.413]They dehumanize horribly.
- [00:14:44.316]And people are also much more likely nowadays to say that.
- [00:14:50.723]To achieve your political goals.
- [00:14:53.492]It's okay to use political violence.
- [00:14:57.663]It's okay to use political violence to achieve your political goals.
- [00:15:03.736]And this is related to affective polarization.
- [00:15:06.505]The more you hate the out party, the more likely you are to think
- [00:15:10.809]violence is an okay solution. Okay.
- [00:15:14.113]So all of this stuff is, I would say, quite scary.
- [00:15:20.552]It's not something that I think that we we are okay about.
- [00:15:24.890]But I think we have to start thinking about what to do about this.
- [00:15:31.697]How do how do we live in a world
- [00:15:35.000]where people hate each other so much?
- [00:15:38.137]So I am going to talk about.
- [00:15:43.042]The importance of
- [00:15:44.209]respect in democracy and how this all plays out.
- [00:15:49.148]Just and I asked the question that we asked was.
- [00:15:54.720]In this polarized environment.
- [00:15:58.357]Can we respect opposing parties?
- [00:16:02.594]Are we able to respect opposing Partizans
- [00:16:05.698]in this very, very, very polarized environment?
- [00:16:10.469]And I think the question that probably comes to mind is why
- [00:16:13.939]the heck should we respect those jerks?
- [00:16:17.643]And I hear this all the time when I talk about my work on respect.
- [00:16:20.946]Everybody says to me, why would I respect whatever the other party is? Right.
- [00:16:27.519]And I think this is actually a really good question.
- [00:16:30.656]It's an important question to ask,
- [00:16:34.460]and it's one that I have struggled with.
- [00:16:37.329]So I have done work in my past on political tolerance.
- [00:16:44.303]And political tolerance is
- [00:16:45.804]the giving of basic civil liberties rights to those we hate.
- [00:16:49.641]Like if there's a group that we really hate,
- [00:16:52.111]we give them their basic right to freedom of speech,
- [00:16:55.581]freedom of assembly, due process. Right.
- [00:16:58.684]So if I really, really hate the Ku Klux Klan, for example,
- [00:17:02.388]I still believe that they have a right to free speech.
- [00:17:07.259]They still have a right to freedom of assembly.
- [00:17:10.229]That is tolerance.
- [00:17:12.164]And I understand that in a liberal, democratic political system
- [00:17:15.701]like we have in the United States, tolerance is incredibly important.
- [00:17:21.540]I fully understand that.
- [00:17:24.543]But when my coauthor, Jeff, came to me
- [00:17:26.712]and said, Beth, we really need to start looking at respect.
- [00:17:30.649]My immediate thought was, why?
- [00:17:31.884]Why do I understand tolerance?
- [00:17:35.387]I think we have to give people their basic civil liberties rights.
- [00:17:38.690]But why do we have to respect them?
- [00:17:40.459]I'm not convinced.
- [00:17:42.194]And he told me basically that political theorists
- [00:17:45.497]think it's important and and they've looked at it a lot.
- [00:17:48.667]And he assumed that I would immediately figure out why respect is important.
- [00:17:56.175]But I have to say.
- [00:17:58.877]But political theorist Dean Button
- [00:18:03.715]should not always make the assumptions
- [00:18:05.684]that they do because I didn't get it.
- [00:18:09.521]So it took me a long time.
- [00:18:10.923]I had to think and think and think and work through, read, talk to Geoff
- [00:18:15.828]constantly about why this was an important thing to think about.
- [00:18:20.332]And this is what I've come up with
- [00:18:21.967]with the help of Jeff, because I did not do this on my own. So.
- [00:18:28.907]Political theorists.
- [00:18:31.844]Basically make this argument.
- [00:18:35.280]They say that. They say
- [00:18:42.421]that respect is fundamental.
- [00:18:46.058]To democratic political systems.
- [00:18:49.528]Because democracy rests
- [00:18:52.431]on the idea of political equality.
- [00:18:55.934]Okay. Democratic political systems rest on the idea
- [00:19:01.306]that we are political equals.
- [00:19:05.110]And if you believe that we are political equals,
- [00:19:10.115]you have to think of the idea
- [00:19:12.117]that we all are equal agents.
- [00:19:16.522]With a voice in political decisions,
- [00:19:19.591]with a voice in political outcome.
- [00:19:23.662]And if we are if we are all equal moral
- [00:19:26.932]agents, then it's incredibly important
- [00:19:31.370]to respect our fellow citizens.
- [00:19:35.774]To acknowledge that agency.
- [00:19:39.278]And if we if we don't do that,
- [00:19:41.580]we are looking at them, at those we we oppose.
- [00:19:45.450]We are looking at them with disdain. With contempt.
- [00:19:51.223]We are considering them less than worthy.
- [00:19:56.161]And we are we are holding the position
- [00:20:00.132]that their voice is less important than other voices.
- [00:20:03.835]In other words, we are not giving them their political equality
- [00:20:08.240]to have political equality.
- [00:20:11.009]You need to respect.
- [00:20:13.378]Okay. Without respect.
- [00:20:16.915]It's impossible to have political equality.
- [00:20:20.319]So we argue, then, that
- [00:20:23.021]respect is fundamental to democratic citizenship in the sense
- [00:20:27.926]that we we are all equal moral agents in our political system.
- [00:20:32.698]So we we built on this idea.
- [00:20:37.569]Political theorists have really focused mostly on
- [00:20:42.140]issues of race, on gender,
- [00:20:45.510]on LGBTQ plus community.
- [00:20:48.614]They've looked at different
- [00:20:49.448]groups in society and said, we need to respect these groups.
- [00:20:52.451]But Jeff and I said, let's
- [00:20:53.819]let's put this in the realm of the real conflict of today,
- [00:20:57.756]which is partizan polarization and see if we can talk about
- [00:21:01.393]respect of those who disagree with us politically. Okay.
- [00:21:05.764]And I think this is an important area to put this in to talk about respect,
- [00:21:11.136]because the idea that we disagree on
- [00:21:14.840]politics should not make the people we disagree with less than equal.
- [00:21:19.678]It should not make them less moral agents right than we are,
- [00:21:24.082]that it should not make them unworthy, in a sense. So.
- [00:21:30.289]Political theories
- [00:21:31.290]have talked a lot about respect, but they haven't defined it terribly well.
- [00:21:36.428]So Jeff and I decided, okay, we're going to tackle this.
- [00:21:38.630]We're going to come up with these different ideas about what respect is.
- [00:21:41.867]And we came up with two different ideas about what respective.
- [00:21:45.737]So recognition, respect
- [00:21:49.041]is fundamental, we say to democracy.
- [00:21:52.744]It means accepting that everyone has intrinsic moral worth,
- [00:21:57.416]that we are all agents in our political system
- [00:22:00.552]and we have worth as fellow human beings,
- [00:22:06.291]we all have equal moral worth and that this is fundamental to democracy.
- [00:22:12.698]We argue that this is universal.
- [00:22:15.300]You should not deny somebody recognition, respect
- [00:22:18.870]because of something they've done or because of something they've said.
- [00:22:22.741]Everybody should have recognition. Respect.
- [00:22:28.146]Okay. So this is important.
- [00:22:31.283]Recognition, respect is important.
- [00:22:32.818]We found, for example, that Democrats tend
- [00:22:36.655]to have a richer understanding of equality
- [00:22:40.625]and they tend to have a greater belief in the idea of equal respect.
- [00:22:46.832]And they have a harder time giving respect
- [00:22:50.302]to Republicans than occurs vice versa.
- [00:22:54.005]And we refer to this as the liberal respect paradox.
- [00:22:57.042]And we we spend a bunch of our book talking about this
- [00:22:59.611]liberal respect paradox and trying to figure out what's going up.
- [00:23:02.848]But I'm not going to talk about that today.
- [00:23:04.883]So. Well, I want to talk about instead of civic, civic respect.
- [00:23:09.287]So civic respect has three components in our definition of what civic respect is.
- [00:23:14.760]Civic respect means listening and engaging with people with whom you disagree.
- [00:23:19.364]It's just this idea that we should be listening to
- [00:23:22.033]and engaging with people with whom we disagree.
- [00:23:25.070]A month ago, Professor Julia Schlick and her her
- [00:23:28.774]CAS employer talk talked about this need to talk to people you disagree with.
- [00:23:32.778]You need to be willing to listen to them. And she was right.
- [00:23:35.781]Okay. So we're saying this is part of what civic respect is.
- [00:23:39.584]It also means not politically stereotyping opponents.
- [00:23:43.755]You should not assume that all Democrats are X and all Republicans are Y. Okay.
- [00:23:49.861]And the last is accepting pluralism.
- [00:23:53.331]And pluralism is the notion that there are very diverse
- [00:23:56.768]political views in our political system.
- [00:23:59.337]And we need to accept
- [00:24:00.472]that these differences in views exist and we need to, you know, support that.
- [00:24:05.143]So that's the three components of respect and what we mean by.
- [00:24:12.083]So I will talk about the multifaceted nature of civic respect
- [00:24:16.121]and which means basically that I'm going to talk
- [00:24:18.056]about each of these three components and I'm going to show you
- [00:24:21.092]a lot of research that we have done on this topic.
- [00:24:24.596]So while Jeff is a political theorist and he is off there
- [00:24:27.833]thinking big thoughts all the time, I am into data.
- [00:24:31.336]I absolutely love data.
- [00:24:34.039]I cannot get enough data. So we did
- [00:24:38.343]three surveys in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
- [00:24:43.482]We did 27 focus groups,
- [00:24:46.651]which is way too many, and we did two experiments.
- [00:24:51.656]And so we have all these data.
- [00:24:53.792]We also included respect questions in a 2021 survey
- [00:24:57.662]to make sure that we weren't just getting a Trump as president effect
- [00:25:01.500]and we are not getting just Trump as president.
- [00:25:04.169]The fact that I could talk about that later if you have questions,
- [00:25:06.905]but basically we have a whole lot of data and that is what I'm going
- [00:25:10.175]to talk about next.
- [00:25:12.911]So. The first aspect of
- [00:25:17.382]civic respect is this idea of listening to and engaging with other people.
- [00:25:21.987]And our argument is that you can do this either interpersonally
- [00:25:25.390]or you can do it impersonally, okay?
- [00:25:28.093]You can either talk to people face to face,
- [00:25:30.829]or you can read a blog from the other side, from the opposing side.
- [00:25:36.301]You can listen to a podcast from somebody on the opposing side.
- [00:25:41.740]You can even listen to the news that the opposing side listens to
- [00:25:46.244]and get a sense of what they think.
- [00:25:49.180]So that's interpersonal and impersonal.
- [00:25:52.951]In our focus groups, we had a lot of focus group participants.
- [00:25:59.925]Talk about the fact that the divisions
- [00:26:02.761]between the two parties have harmed their relationships.
- [00:26:07.265]They have talked about how
- [00:26:10.168]friends they have had
- [00:26:11.770]for their whole life just cut them off.
- [00:26:15.574]They talk about family members.
- [00:26:18.777]Hanging up the phone on them or them hanging up the phone
- [00:26:22.714]on their family members, just angry as all get out about their stance on certain
- [00:26:27.786]political issues or because of their vote for certain candidates for office.
- [00:26:33.491]And we heard this over and over and over again.
- [00:26:36.328]So when we're talking about families and friends and coworkers
- [00:26:40.265]and the like, you know, people who you interact with daily,
- [00:26:43.368]this has had a negative impact.
- [00:26:45.270]But we could say that the focus groups are just
- [00:26:48.940]you know, they're they're small groups of people.
- [00:26:51.343]They might not be representative of society.
- [00:26:53.945]So we did surveys.
- [00:26:56.381]We wanted to figure out, does this actually carry out in surveys
- [00:27:00.085]that we have done?
- [00:27:01.086]And an argument could be made that the focus groups are wrong,
- [00:27:05.190]that people who say they're going to do a focus group somehow are different,
- [00:27:08.460]and that people really do try to transcend
- [00:27:11.529]political differences because these are close relationships.
- [00:27:15.834]These are friends and family.
- [00:27:17.202]These are people you love, right? So maybe
- [00:27:21.473]we've missed something.
- [00:27:22.841]So we, of course, ask questions.
- [00:27:25.210]We started just by trying to figure out how diverse people, social networks are.
- [00:27:30.081]You know, do people
- [00:27:31.316]have people who disagree with them politically in their social networks?
- [00:27:35.887]And we we we basically asked the questions up there on top, what's your best guess
- [00:27:40.525]of how many people voted for the opposing party candidate in the last election?
- [00:27:45.597]And what you can see is that so this blue column, which is the tallest one
- [00:27:50.435]for both Clinton voters and Trump voters, that's the largest one.
- [00:27:54.939]And that's where people say, well,
- [00:27:56.074]I have very few or no people who would have voted for the other side.
- [00:27:59.411]So these people live in very homogeneous groups, but everybody else has, you know,
- [00:28:05.150]at least some people who they disagree with politically in their
- [00:28:09.654]in their group of of of family and friends and coworkers.
- [00:28:14.492]In this case, we then ask them, okay,
- [00:28:18.530]did the election of Donald Trump hurt any of your relationships?
- [00:28:24.669]And about a third of respondents said, yes, that it hurt their relationships.
- [00:28:29.441]And then we asked those people, what did you personally do?
- [00:28:33.611]So what did you do?
- [00:28:35.180]And we asked if they argued with start talking to BLOCK on social media
- [00:28:39.751]or ended relationships with people
- [00:28:43.421]because of what happened in the election.
- [00:28:47.992]Okay. So these numbers, you can say, oh, that doesn't look bad.
- [00:28:52.397]You know, we're not talking about a whole lot of people.
- [00:28:55.166]This is this is the whole sample then.
- [00:28:57.102]So once I basically took the whole sample to see what this looked like.
- [00:29:01.106]So for I just want to point out that Clinton voters
- [00:29:04.943]there were just under 66 million Americans who voted for Clinton and
- [00:29:09.581]there were just under 63 million Americans
- [00:29:12.650]who voted for Donald Trump. Okay.
- [00:29:15.954]So when we are talking about
- [00:29:19.023]26% of Clinton voters saying that they argued
- [00:29:23.595]with somebody because of the person's vote for Donald Trump.
- [00:29:28.099]We're talking about a lot of people.
- [00:29:29.968]We're talking about, you know, what, 16% or 60 million people. Right.
- [00:29:36.040]If we go down to end relationships, these are people who ended relationships
- [00:29:41.780]with family or friends, ended relationships with family members
- [00:29:46.584]or friends because of their vote in the 2016 election.
- [00:29:52.590]This is a large percentage of people.
- [00:29:55.527]I have the numbers here somewhere, but now I can't find it.
- [00:29:58.229]So it's a large it's a large number of people who did this.
- [00:30:01.399]It's millions of Americans.
- [00:30:04.836]Who ended relationships.
- [00:30:07.472]So what I would argue in
- [00:30:09.741]this case is that. The.
- [00:30:15.146]We are allowing our polarization
- [00:30:17.315]to get in the way of a lot of stuff that matters to us.
- [00:30:21.186]And we are not giving people civic respect.
- [00:30:23.822]When we when we just cut them off. Okay.
- [00:30:27.458]But it could be that we were just being really too hard on people.
- [00:30:31.462]We were we were asking too much of them.
- [00:30:33.765]Maybe it is easier to have conversations
- [00:30:37.535]to listen to and engage with people who we don't know.
- [00:30:41.005]You know, it's more it's more distant.
- [00:30:42.907]You know, we don't care as much about them.
- [00:30:45.276]So maybe we can just say, okay, well, whatever, you know,
- [00:30:48.947]whatever they believe, we don't have to agree with them.
- [00:30:51.950]We can also do this.
- [00:30:53.017]And personally, as I said, we can read blogs, listen to podcasts.
- [00:30:57.222]We don't have to engage with people one on one.
- [00:31:00.692]So we did an experiment.
- [00:31:07.365]What we did is we had people,
- [00:31:09.100]we randomly assigned people to read about an issue.
- [00:31:13.504]They had to read statements about an issue.
- [00:31:16.608]The control group got statements about the health benefits of hiking.
- [00:31:22.146]Okay, which is kind of fun to write.
- [00:31:23.948]But the other two conditions that we the other two issues that we dealt with
- [00:31:28.386]was a liberal issue, social justice issues and a conservative issue.
- [00:31:32.690]Set of issues, what we call national solidarity issues.
- [00:31:35.793]So we had some of the both of those and then people either got pro
- [00:31:39.197]or con statements on these issues.
- [00:31:42.500]All right. So you're reading something, you see it, you get these issues.
- [00:31:47.272]And then after that, after they read these statements, they were asked
- [00:31:51.442]if they agreed or disagreed with the position taken in the statements.
- [00:31:56.915]Following that question.
- [00:31:58.683]They were they were told. Okay.
- [00:32:01.352]So some people are interested in finding out more about this issue.
- [00:32:07.592]And then half of the people were randomly assigned to get the prompt.
- [00:32:11.696]So we have some articles that you can read at the end of the survey.
- [00:32:17.502]Would you be interested in reading these articles on this point of view?
- [00:32:21.906]Other people were told.
- [00:32:23.441]We have a panel of people who are eager to talk with you
- [00:32:27.545]about this particular side of the issue.
- [00:32:30.348]Would you be interested in talking to a person after the survey is done? Okay.
- [00:32:36.220]So this is a measure of whether they actually are willing
- [00:32:39.090]to engage behaviorally in interpersonal
- [00:32:44.128]or impersonal civic respect.
- [00:32:47.665]And these are our results.
- [00:32:50.468]So first of all, I think it's important to note that people
- [00:32:53.905]are less willing to talk with somebody than they are to read about a topic.
- [00:32:59.978]Obviously, talking to a stranger, a lot of us don't want to do that.
- [00:33:03.181]And so it's easier for us to just focus on, you know, well, I'll read something.
- [00:33:08.586]I'm not necessarily that keen on talking to somebody.
- [00:33:11.089]So hiking, everybody agreed with it.
- [00:33:12.991]Nobody was against the health benefits of hiking.
- [00:33:15.560]And so everybody agreed with this.
- [00:33:18.696]For the people who agreed with the two sets of political issues.
- [00:33:22.600]So they got one or the other, but then those who agreed with it,
- [00:33:25.603]you can see the number drops a bit for each of these
- [00:33:28.373]for both interpersonal and impersonal respect.
- [00:33:32.610]The interesting thing is that these are people who agreed.
- [00:33:36.681]What a lot of people don't really like politics.
- [00:33:39.050]So the idea of talking to somebody or reading more about a topic,
- [00:33:42.954]dealing with politics, it's not that interesting.
- [00:33:46.657]So what about people who disagreed with the stance
- [00:33:49.460]taken on the issue that was presented to them?
- [00:33:56.100]We hypothesized that people
- [00:33:58.936]would be more willing to read an article than to talk to somebody.
- [00:34:03.741]And we also expected the numbers to drop quite a bit.
- [00:34:08.146]We didn't expect that.
- [00:34:12.550]Less than a quarter of people were willing to read more about
- [00:34:17.955]or talk to somebody about an issue they disagreed with.
- [00:34:23.294]So I think we can say that for the listening and engagement
- [00:34:28.032]part of civic respect, people just don't have a lot of civic respect.
- [00:34:32.170]They just aren't willing to engage with other people's ideas.
- [00:34:39.177]So that's a major part of the puzzle, and I think it's an important one.
- [00:34:44.715]We also looked at Partizan stereotyping, which, as I said before,
- [00:34:47.819]is this idea that we just assume,
- [00:34:51.122]you know, we tend to see other people
- [00:34:54.325]as being more extreme, more different.
- [00:34:57.662]They're all the same, you know, the opposing parties, all this.
- [00:35:01.032]So this is what we looked at here.
- [00:35:03.534]Our argument was that people tend to live in political bubbles.
- [00:35:07.772]We tend to talk with people. We already showed this. All right.
- [00:35:10.508]We tend to talk to people who agree with us.
- [00:35:13.211]We tend to pay attention to news media that we agree with.
- [00:35:17.815]And so we aren't we were kept in these political bubbles.
- [00:35:20.952]And what that does is it actually allows us to stereotype the other side.
- [00:35:27.492]So I think it is fair to say
- [00:35:30.294]that not all Democrats are socialists and anti patriot.
- [00:35:36.100]And I think it is fair to say that not all Republicans are racist
- [00:35:42.573]and sexist and anti-democratic.
- [00:35:47.178]I think it's fair to say that.
- [00:35:48.980]So when we stereotype people,
- [00:35:53.151]we put them into these boxes, and because we don't interact
- [00:35:56.454]with them enough, we tend to think that they are all the same.
- [00:36:00.358]So we did this. We looked at this
- [00:36:02.093]in various ways to figure out how do people think about each other.
- [00:36:06.230]First of all, I'm going to talk about social justice issues
- [00:36:09.000]and then I'll talk about national solidarity issues.
- [00:36:11.602]But we asked people where they personally stand
- [00:36:15.573]on these different issues and Democrats personal support
- [00:36:20.344]for these more social justice issues, combating climate change,
- [00:36:23.881]ensuring equal access to voting and prioritizing social justice.
- [00:36:27.985]Democrats are more supportive of these than Republicans.
- [00:36:31.756]No surprise there.
- [00:36:34.792]But we also asked people,
- [00:36:37.061]where do you think people in the other party stand on these issues?
- [00:36:41.432]So for Democrats, we ask them, where do you think Republicans stand?
- [00:36:44.602]And for Republicans, we asked them,
- [00:36:46.237]so where do you think Democrats stand on these issues?
- [00:36:49.073]And for Republicans, they generally thought so.
- [00:36:53.511]These Hatch lines are what Republicans think about Democrats.
- [00:36:57.982]So Republicans think that Democrats
- [00:37:01.319]are supportive of these issues, not as much as they actually are,
- [00:37:05.223]but that they are supportive of these issues. Okay.
- [00:37:09.860]We also ask Democrats about Republicans
- [00:37:12.063]and this is where they thought Republicans are on these issues.
- [00:37:17.635]This is very low.
- [00:37:18.703]I mean, so the scale.
- [00:37:20.304]Point five is where you basically neither agree or disagree.
- [00:37:24.208]So .25 is very low.
- [00:37:26.577]It's really that they disagree or strongly disagree with these issues.
- [00:37:29.880]So Democrats think that Republicans are really opposed to these issues.
- [00:37:35.853]But they aren't,
- [00:37:37.221]you know, most Republicans are just kind of in the middle,
- [00:37:40.891]you know, so, you know, but there's first of all,
- [00:37:45.263]they tend to be more in the middle on average.
- [00:37:47.932]But even looking at people at individual Republicans,
- [00:37:51.569]there's wide variance on where they stand on these issues.
- [00:37:55.139]So Republicans in the audience might say, yeah,
- [00:37:57.975]those Democrats are just like a Democrat to do this. Right.
- [00:38:01.746]But to be honest with you, they do the same thing.
- [00:38:04.181]So when you look at the conservative issues, again,
- [00:38:06.984]Republicans score higher than Democrats on these conservative issues.
- [00:38:10.321]We did loving one country, defending religious freedom and gun rights.
- [00:38:14.558]And the Republicans were more supportive of these personally.
- [00:38:19.130]But then we have the same kind of effect going on. Right.
- [00:38:22.867]They, under Republicans, underestimate Democratic support for these different
- [00:38:27.038]things, whereas Democrats get closer to what the truth is.
- [00:38:31.642]All right. So the stereotyping that we do
- [00:38:35.646]means that we are assuming that people hold certain political views.
- [00:38:42.453]When they might not.
- [00:38:44.755]And that's what I think you have to be aware of, is
- [00:38:47.191]we just can't know without talking to people and finding out.
- [00:38:51.095]So we also asked them some bipolar adjectives.
- [00:38:54.031]We asked them if they thought that from a scale going
- [00:38:57.435]from condescending to not condescending from racist and not racist.
- [00:39:02.006]We asked people all sorts of bipolar adjectives.
- [00:39:04.942]And the blue line is what Republicans think Clinton voters are.
- [00:39:08.512]And the red patch lines are what Democrats think Trump voters are.
- [00:39:12.917]And again, you can see that
- [00:39:16.120]50% right here is where you would be if you were just neutral.
- [00:39:21.592]They're neither condescending nor not condescending.
- [00:39:24.195]They're neither racist nor not racist.
- [00:39:26.564]But almost on almost all of these measures, people are to the low end.
- [00:39:31.969]So more negative.
- [00:39:33.671]And Democrats tend to be more negative about Republicans than vice versa.
- [00:39:39.543]But both sides think the other side is pretty bad.
- [00:39:43.881]All of this political stereotyping has negative consequences
- [00:39:48.519]for our ability to give respect to them.
- [00:39:51.922]We are assuming that they are bad people and we move forward from that position.
- [00:39:58.529]So then accepting pluralism. Pluralism
- [00:40:04.702]is the idea that we live in a political system
- [00:40:09.140]that has diverse political views.
- [00:40:12.343]We have a two party system in the United States, so two major
- [00:40:16.147]political parties.
- [00:40:17.848]Both of them have a chance of winning in elections.
- [00:40:22.019]They both have a lot of followers.
- [00:40:24.488]It tends to be the case that liberals tend to vote
- [00:40:27.858]Democratic and conservatives tend to vote Republican.
- [00:40:31.829]And this is the natural way of the world.
- [00:40:33.731]Right. My colleague Kevin Smith and his coauthor John Hibbing
- [00:40:37.935]have argued that people are predisposed
- [00:40:40.905]to be liberal or conservative and to end to disagree about political
- [00:40:44.275]issues and about where society should how society should be set up and run.
- [00:40:48.679]People disagree about these issues.
- [00:40:53.050]So we decided to ask
- [00:40:55.052]questions on people stand on the two party system.
- [00:40:59.457]So where what do you think about the two party system?
- [00:41:02.960]You know, do you do you agree with these various things?
- [00:41:06.497]It's not surprising, I guess, that
- [00:41:09.099]our partizanship kicks in and we want our party to win.
- [00:41:12.903]So I'm not surprised that people think everyone
- [00:41:15.773]if everybody voted for my party, we'd be better off.
- [00:41:18.409]You know, it's a little weird, but, you know, we can we can agree with that.
- [00:41:22.480]But the one that I think is pretty astonishing is this one right here.
- [00:41:26.450]So about 50% of Democrats and Republicans.
- [00:41:30.921]Can think of no good reason to vote for the other party.
- [00:41:35.359]50% say that there is no good reason to vote for the other party.
- [00:41:42.733]Now, if you accept pluralism, if you accept the idea
- [00:41:46.971]that some people are going to be conservative on issues and some people
- [00:41:50.307]are going to be liberal on issues, and that's that that's the way it is.
- [00:41:54.445]You know, that's reality.
- [00:41:55.880]And you can think of no good reason why somebody would vote for the other party.
- [00:42:01.018]That's astonishing to me.
- [00:42:04.121]When I saw that result, I was just astonished.
- [00:42:06.891]So we also asked people again on these bipolar adjectives,
- [00:42:12.229]if you think that people follow others without thinking
- [00:42:16.567]or act and think independently, and then if you think
- [00:42:21.505]people are misled by the media or are well informed by the media.
- [00:42:26.310]And we found that overwhelmingly and this came through
- [00:42:29.947]in the focus groups and it came through in our survey results.
- [00:42:34.418]People just think the other side is just misled.
- [00:42:38.656]They're misinformed.
- [00:42:40.057]They just don't you know, they're they're watching the wrong news shows.
- [00:42:43.928]This is a quote from one of the focus groups in North Carolina.
- [00:42:47.531]You know, it's basically
- [00:42:48.699]the idea that, you know, people just are not paying attention.
- [00:42:52.469]They're stupid, they're ignorant.
- [00:42:54.572]They just they're not understanding what's going on in the world.
- [00:42:59.710]So I want you to think a bit.
- [00:43:02.179]About what this means.
- [00:43:04.815]What people are basically saying is that if people were well-informed,
- [00:43:09.954]if people were not misled by the media, if people would just watch Fox
- [00:43:14.825]instead of MSNBC or vice versa, if people would just be better informed.
- [00:43:21.599]They would both like me. That's right.
- [00:43:24.735]Because that's basically what you're saying is you're saying
- [00:43:27.571]they would vote like me if they just were better informed,
- [00:43:30.641]if they were not misled by these crazies who run their party.
- [00:43:35.079]They would all agree with me and they would vote differently.
- [00:43:38.682]And it's not going to happen. Right.
- [00:43:40.651]So what can be done?
- [00:43:43.087]What are the steps that can be taken?
- [00:43:45.723]Before talking about this, what I think are possible solutions to the problem.
- [00:43:51.128]I just want to say that Jeff and I set some boundaries on civic respect.
- [00:43:55.299]I said earlier that recognition respect is universal,
- [00:43:58.969]but we do not think civic respect is universal.
- [00:44:02.473]In other words, we don't always have to give civic respect.
- [00:44:06.143]So one way that I think that we do not have to give civic respect
- [00:44:10.314]is if a person keeps talking about
- [00:44:13.283]their stand on the same issue over and over and over again.
- [00:44:16.420]At some point we can say, okay, I and I understand where you're coming from.
- [00:44:20.024]I understand your position. So I already get it.
- [00:44:22.693]So if your Uncle Joe is a climate change denier
- [00:44:26.163]and you know that, and your Uncle Joe has told you that a million times,
- [00:44:29.933]you can just say, Uncle Joe, I'm not going to talk about this with you anymore,
- [00:44:33.804]so let's not talk about that.
- [00:44:35.439]But I do want to say that if Uncle Joe,
- [00:44:38.308]that we cannot assume that Uncle Joe
- [00:44:40.678]has certain positions on other issues, we can't make that assumption.
- [00:44:46.016]I think we need to talk to Uncle Joe and find that out.
- [00:44:49.086]I also think that Uncle Joe can change his mind over time.
- [00:44:53.023]Uncle Joe might not always be a climate change denier.
- [00:44:55.959]Uncle Joe might say down the road, I'm going.
- [00:44:59.363]I see now that climate change is an important issue.
- [00:45:03.567]The second thing, the second
- [00:45:05.135]boundary that we put on it is that we place civic respect
- [00:45:09.206]in the context of a Democrat, liberal Democratic political system.
- [00:45:13.877]It is about democracy and political equality.
- [00:45:18.916]And we therefore say that you do not have to give civic respect
- [00:45:22.519]to somebody who wants to undermine our democratic political system.
- [00:45:28.058]If a person wants to get rid of our democracy
- [00:45:31.261]and undermine our democracy, throw it out the window.
- [00:45:34.865]We don't have to give them civic respect.
- [00:45:36.834]Civic respect is within the confines
- [00:45:39.703]of a democratic political system. Okay.
- [00:45:44.308]So those are our two main things.
- [00:45:46.910]That's a third thing that I'll just mention is that we argue that if civic
- [00:45:51.348]if giving civic respect undermines recognition and respect.
- [00:45:56.253]We should not give civic respect.
- [00:45:57.921]It's more important to protect, protect
- [00:46:00.090]recognition and respect than it is to protect civic respect.
- [00:46:04.261]But having said that, I want to make an argument
- [00:46:06.196]for why we should what we should do to try to increase civic respect.
- [00:46:10.467]So, first of all, a major thing that is increasingly on the radar
- [00:46:14.738]of political scientists is how do we decrease affective polarization?
- [00:46:19.243]Because if we can decrease deaths and I argue if we can decrease
- [00:46:22.312]affective polarization, I do think there is a possibility
- [00:46:26.383]that people will be more willing to give civic respect.
- [00:46:29.553]So the less you hate the other side, the more likely you are to give civic respect.
- [00:46:35.259]So there are different things that have been argued about how civic
- [00:46:38.996]respect, how effective polarization can be decreased.
- [00:46:43.967]And I just want to talk about a few of those.
- [00:46:46.637]One is if we give people correct information about opposing partizans.
- [00:46:53.577]You can learn better where they actually stand on the issues
- [00:46:57.080]and you might end up not hating them quite as much.
- [00:47:00.684]So there have been some there's some research that suggests that that is true.
- [00:47:04.388]A second solution is having a common in-group identity.
- [00:47:08.725]So Matthew Levandowski has looked at getting people
- [00:47:13.230]to think about themselves as Americans and not as Democrats and Republicans.
- [00:47:19.203]And when you get people to think about themselves as Americans.
- [00:47:22.806]Affective polarization decreases.
- [00:47:25.676]The problem with that solution is that anti-immigrant attitudes increase.
- [00:47:30.080]So we there's there's a there's a problem with that one. Right.
- [00:47:33.717]So but that is a possibility.
- [00:47:36.587]The third is that if you interact with opposing partizans,
- [00:47:40.724]especially in nonpolitical settings, so if you interact with them
- [00:47:44.394]in a nonpolitical way, it increases or decreases your affective polarization.
- [00:47:50.601]So if you interact with other people, you talk about, you know,
- [00:47:54.004]your family, your cooking, whatever it is that you know, that you enjoy,
- [00:47:57.741]it tends to decrease affective polarization.
- [00:48:02.012]This works best when you have a good moderator
- [00:48:05.349]who's moderating the discussion, and it works best
- [00:48:08.452]when there are rules in place to guide that discussion.
- [00:48:12.856]And I think it's obvious that rarely
- [00:48:15.092]when we are talking to Uncle Joe do we have a moderator.
- [00:48:18.795]Nor do we have rules in place to guide that discussion.
- [00:48:22.232]So I'm not convinced that that's a really good solution.
- [00:48:25.569]Another set of solutions that would deal with our institutions
- [00:48:28.405]and our our practices are political practices.
- [00:48:31.541]There's some research that suggests that the way we do politics
- [00:48:35.746]exacerbates affective polarization.
- [00:48:39.149]So the fact that we have single member districts,
- [00:48:43.020]the fact that we have
- [00:48:45.722]a minority based Senate,
- [00:48:48.625]so the Senate is based on a minority level system rather than the majority.
- [00:48:53.597]A majority views different different ways
- [00:48:57.100]that our system is set up exacerbate affective polarization.
- [00:49:01.171]And part of the reason for this is that politics becomes a zero sum game.
- [00:49:06.310]And the more it's a zero sum game, the more you win.
- [00:49:10.047]I lose, or vice versa, the more threatened we feel
- [00:49:13.684]by the idea that the opposing party will win an election.
- [00:49:17.654]We're afraid of what they're going to do because it's a win or lose situation.
- [00:49:21.191]A zero sum game.
- [00:49:23.126]So all of these things add to affective polarization.
- [00:49:27.364]I'm not optimistic, I have to say, about these working.
- [00:49:30.500]And so I'm a little concerned about how it plays out.
- [00:49:33.070]We're not going to change our institutional structures any time soon.
- [00:49:36.940]There is some suggestion that having ranked choice
- [00:49:39.643]voting decreases affective polarization
- [00:49:43.647]that one is in the works in some parts of the country.
- [00:49:46.283]So potentially that could decrease affective polarization.
- [00:49:50.387]But in general, I think it's these solutions are problems.
- [00:49:53.724]Let me talk about two that I think could work.
- [00:49:56.593]One deals with education.
- [00:49:59.896]I always have my students in my capstone class.
- [00:50:03.066]I ask them, how many of you discussed controversial
- [00:50:06.169]political issues in your high school civics or government classes?
- [00:50:09.873]And I always have a couple who raise their hands.
- [00:50:12.042]But most of the students don't.
- [00:50:14.077]And then we get into a discussion about why this is and what's going on.
- [00:50:17.781]And basically, they say, no, our teachers were they they were hands off.
- [00:50:21.251]They didn't want to deal with controversial issues.
- [00:50:23.854]I think there's a good reason for that.
- [00:50:25.655]I mean, teachers are afraid of getting in trouble.
- [00:50:28.358]They're afraid of raising controversial issues
- [00:50:30.961]and having to deal with the emotions that are so strong. They're afraid
- [00:50:35.265]of parents going to superintendents and complaining about them.
- [00:50:39.536]They're afraid of some kind of fallout from this. And I get that.
- [00:50:44.808]But I also think that to really develop civic respect,
- [00:50:48.011]we really we need to discuss controversial issues in schools.
- [00:50:51.882]It is in schools starting in elementary school, actually,
- [00:50:55.952]where we can teach people how to have these conversations.
- [00:51:00.323]It's we can get people to do this in a way that is respectful.
- [00:51:05.028]And I think it can increase respect if we are able to develop this
- [00:51:09.332]through the system, if we allow everybody to have their say,
- [00:51:12.502]we get to hear what other people think and we get to learn that the other
- [00:51:16.106]side is not monolithic.
- [00:51:18.608]And so doing that is a start.
- [00:51:21.211]The other thing is that I think we need to Jeff
- [00:51:23.980]and I make a very controversial argument as political scientist, which is that
- [00:51:27.451]we just need to get people to pay less attention to politics.
- [00:51:30.754]We need to have politics be less important than their lives.
- [00:51:33.924]And I realize that's crazy.
- [00:51:35.492]But there's a political theorist named Robert Tellis who basically argues
- [00:51:39.863]that we give we put politics at too high of a level in our lives,
- [00:51:46.336]and we need to scale that back and interact with people as civic friends.
- [00:51:51.641]And his his big argument is that if we can get people to act as civic friends,
- [00:51:57.881]we can start having more discussions and get along better together.
- [00:52:02.185]I would also say that I am a proponent of Jonathan Rauch,
- [00:52:06.389]his new work, recent work on fallible ism.
- [00:52:09.960]And his argument is the more that we listen to the other side.
- [00:52:14.498]No. His argument is that
- [00:52:17.033]by having our bubbles, by living in our bubbles, we basically.
- [00:52:22.205]Have no humility when it comes to politics.
- [00:52:25.308]We think we are right 100% of the time.
- [00:52:28.478]And these solutions, I think, are geared towards trying to get people
- [00:52:32.115]to understand that they are fallible, that they might not always be right.
- [00:52:36.286]And if we can get people to do that, then I think we can increase civic respect.
- [00:52:40.957]So Jeff and I argue for the importance of civic respect.
- [00:52:44.227]I do think it is very important and I am eager to hear what you have
- [00:52:47.864]to say here. Use
- [00:52:59.109]so much structure for your travel talk.
- [00:53:02.812]If you have a question again, you're welcome to raise your hand
- [00:53:05.982]while you think about your questions. I'll
- [00:53:08.985]ask you some from Zoom.
- [00:53:11.354]So first, you have a compliment that this was a wonderful topic.
- [00:53:16.092]You're a wonderful scholar.
- [00:53:18.228]But from next month's speaker, Dr.
- [00:53:22.399]Graham says your analysis is based
- [00:53:24.201]on basic assumptions about democracy and pluralism.
- [00:53:27.804]And to what extent is respect possible between groups or individuals
- [00:53:32.642]as long as significant power differences exist?
- [00:53:36.046]If respect is based on the notion of equality
- [00:53:38.715]as a political actors plus agents, but some groups
- [00:53:43.119]or small groups of individuals overwhelmingly control
- [00:53:46.489]or perceived to control political representation in institutions.
- [00:53:51.294]Then how is anything more than tolerance even possible?
- [00:53:55.899]So that's a very good question.
- [00:53:58.101]I, I am a firm believer in the notion
- [00:54:02.572]that democratic political systems rest on this notion of political equality.
- [00:54:07.677]That means we need to make the system fair. I mean, so
- [00:54:11.214]we need to make it so that people who legally can vote are able to vote.
- [00:54:16.052]We need to make sure that people are given a voice in the political system.
- [00:54:20.357]All of those things are part of what basic political equality means.
- [00:54:26.229]So that means that since my argument is that democratic
- [00:54:31.434]a democratic political system is foundational to this notion
- [00:54:34.471]of civic respect,
- [00:54:36.439]I think we have to we have to fight for political equality.
- [00:54:41.144]It's still going to be the case that some people win and some people lose
- [00:54:44.814]in a political and a democratic political system.
- [00:54:47.651]There will be a majority vote in a minority vote.
- [00:54:50.053]And some people are you know, the majority is going to win.
- [00:54:53.790]What becomes unfair is when our system creates unfairness.
- [00:54:58.428]So I am opposed to super partizan gerrymandering.
- [00:55:03.867]I just think that's awful.
- [00:55:05.302]I also think that if we had
- [00:55:08.338]if we had more, if we had congressional races, House races
- [00:55:13.910]where it was close, where the outcome was closer,
- [00:55:17.714]then you would get better representation
- [00:55:20.617]and you would get less gerrymandering and all sorts of stuff.
- [00:55:23.753]So I agree that that this is
- [00:55:26.956]an issue, but I disagree with the idea
- [00:55:29.859]that because there are power structures in society
- [00:55:32.262]that we can't respect each other.
- [00:55:33.730]There are always going to be power structures in society.
- [00:55:36.533]That's just human nature.
- [00:55:37.734]I don't know how we get around power structures in society, but
- [00:55:40.737]let's make the system politically equal and fair.
- [00:55:45.308]And I think we can give respect to people within that framework.
- [00:56:00.290]So earlier you brought up that it seems like liberals tend
- [00:56:03.593]to personally disrespect Republicans a lot more than vice versa.
- [00:56:07.597]Like you said, the liberal respect paradox.
- [00:56:09.332]I just want you to go into that a little bit more.
- [00:56:11.601]So we find that when we ask people about different understandings of equality,
- [00:56:17.173]Democrats had a richer understanding of equality than than Republicans.
- [00:56:22.045]Democrats tended to believe in equality in all sorts of different ways.
- [00:56:25.915]The highest was equal respect actually in this list of things,
- [00:56:30.253]but they also believe in a lot of other understandings of equality.
- [00:56:34.591]Republicans tended to believe in equality
- [00:56:37.660]of opportunity and equality under the law and equality before God.
- [00:56:44.367]So those were the three
- [00:56:45.268]that they mostly picked as their main understandings of equality.
- [00:56:49.072]And Democrats believed in all of it, except for equality under God.
- [00:56:53.676]Democrats believed in
- [00:56:54.711]all sorts of different things equal, more or worse, equal and respect equal.
- [00:56:58.815]You know, there were all sorts of understandings of.
- [00:57:01.518]So they also then we asked them about there
- [00:57:05.388]whether you could respect the other party as human beings that everybody
- [00:57:10.660]had become more aware of, essentially, and Democrats were more likely to say yes.
- [00:57:16.266]So they have this higher level of recognition, respect.
- [00:57:21.438]Or they believe more that you ought to have recognition, respect
- [00:57:23.873]when asked about the other party. Then they just couldn't give it.
- [00:57:26.776]They were just more likely to say not.
- [00:57:29.112]Yes, I believe all humans should be respected, but I just can't respect
- [00:57:32.982]Republicans. Republicans
- [00:57:35.018]were less likely to do that.
- [00:57:36.186]One of the we looked we dug into this a lot.
- [00:57:39.456]Part of the thing that we found
- [00:57:40.790]is that younger Republicans seem to have more respect for Democrats.
- [00:57:45.295]Older Republicans were equally disrespecting,
- [00:57:48.531]but younger Republicans seem to be more open to the other side.
- [00:57:52.869]So we call this the liberal respect paradox,
- [00:57:54.871]and we try to figure out why it is and we look into how people moralize
- [00:58:00.043]their beliefs or their stance on different issues.
- [00:58:02.579]So moral assertion of beliefs really leads to a difficult
- [00:58:06.015]you just have a hard time accepting people who don't agree with you.
- [00:58:09.586]And we also look at the notion that people feel a sense of collective
- [00:58:14.657]responsibility for dealing
- [00:58:16.526]with these issues, that they more they hold so morally strong, you know.
- [00:58:20.563]So anyway, that's the liberal respect that.
- [00:58:25.902]As Ethan makes his way.
- [00:58:26.803]I'm going to see if this will let me allow Dr.
- [00:58:29.639]Schleck to ask a question.
- [00:58:36.112]Hi. Can you hear me?
- [00:58:38.915]Can you hear me? Yes. Excellent.
- [00:58:42.986]Thank you so much for a really provocative talk
- [00:58:46.623]and I particularly appreciate it,
- [00:58:48.725]as I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear about your argument.
- [00:58:53.062]The civic debate and should civic respect should be integrated into schooling
- [00:58:57.700]and be a kind of expected part of what we do as educators on all levels,
- [00:59:03.473]that, as you noted, that
- [00:59:05.808]that's something that I feel very strongly about on the university level.
- [00:59:08.811]And it was interesting to hear you extend that, make a good case for it
- [00:59:12.782]on the K-12 level as well.
- [00:59:15.618]But I had a response
- [00:59:18.454]to your focus on civic respect
- [00:59:22.125]that I feel like mimics your response to your colleague
- [00:59:27.297]when you were committed to tolerance but had to be persuaded on respect.
- [00:59:32.201]I when I listen to you, I feel like, yeah, I feel like
- [00:59:38.641]that civic respect is perhaps
- [00:59:40.610]even inadequate for what we need to reunite as a society.
- [00:59:43.980]Like, I'm wondering if what is what is needed are questions
- [00:59:47.450]about or a focus on a more solid a ristic approach. Right.
- [00:59:51.454]That and this is entirely a layman's perspective on politics.
- [00:59:55.458]So you can as an expert, you can correct me,
- [00:59:57.760]but it seems to me that one way of thinking about people's
- [01:00:00.897]engagement of politics is as a manifestation
- [01:00:04.667]of how they're thinking about how their lives are going
- [01:00:07.003]and how they think society is going at that point .
- [01:00:10.073]And when things are going really wrong, it's a question that, you know,
- [01:00:13.876]that's that's the question that they're answering
- [01:00:15.912]by voting or by engaging in public political discussion,
- [01:00:18.481]who will make things better for me and for my country?
- [01:00:21.517]And it seems like we're in a moment right when things are going
- [01:00:25.622]wrong and all kinds of very pronounced and obvious ways. Right.
- [01:00:29.659]And that all of us are experiencing those, you know, we're experiencing
- [01:00:34.163]a decrease in real wages and rises and prices and increased debt
- [01:00:39.836]and increased lack of health, increased crazy weather
- [01:00:43.306]or increased crumbling infrastructure .
- [01:00:45.274]Right. Like there's a palpable sense of crisis about society.
- [01:00:49.112]And the, you know, part of what people are seeking
- [01:00:52.382]is, is an answer to those questions.
- [01:00:55.385]And that one of the things that very partizan politics offer
- [01:00:59.522]is, is solidarity for the answers you've come up with,
- [01:01:03.793]you know, some sense of community that is otherwise being lost.
- [01:01:08.564]And so I I'm wondering if you've done
- [01:01:12.602]any polling or considered, you know, or thought through at all
- [01:01:16.873]questions that begin with observable problems in society,
- [01:01:20.276]a decrease, you know, all the things that I mentioned
- [01:01:22.712]and then asking how people choose to solve those.
- [01:01:26.549]Like if if starting from that position
- [01:01:30.186]not only integrates respect
- [01:01:32.121]but integrates a kind of solidarity, like, yeah, we're all going through this.
- [01:01:35.491]You may have come up with a solution that's entirely different from mine,
- [01:01:38.761]and I don't understand how you got there, but that could be then the question
- [01:01:42.865]how do you how do you think this could
- [01:01:44.634]possibly solve this problem that we're all facing? Right.
- [01:01:47.970]Because then it acknowledges a kind of underlying struggle
- [01:01:51.174]that we as a society are undergoing that gives us a ground work
- [01:01:56.446]and a practical groundwork for then kind of coming to
- [01:02:00.383]common solutions, because we can at least kind of speak
- [01:02:04.821]from a common starting place and a framework ,
- [01:02:08.658]right, that we're trying to solve these particular problems.
- [01:02:11.027]And you've come up with a solution that's different.
- [01:02:13.463]Tell me why you think this works.
- [01:02:17.967]So I think that is a good idea. I hadn't.
- [01:02:21.437]We did not have will.
- [01:02:23.940]Like in our focus groups, we did not throw out a problem
- [01:02:28.277]and ask for solutions to the problem.
- [01:02:30.580]I do think that working together to find solutions is a good one
- [01:02:34.283]and it could be tremendously useful in an educational setting.
- [01:02:38.221]I think out in the real world it's hard.
- [01:02:40.223]You know, as I said, people live in bubbles and so it's hard
- [01:02:43.559]to get people who disagree with each other together to figure out those solutions.
- [01:02:47.864]But I do think in the educational setting, that has real possibility.
- [01:02:52.668]We did give people in our surveys and in our focus groups
- [01:02:58.141]some real world situations and asked about their response to them
- [01:03:03.679]to try to kind of poke them, I guess, to think about how their views
- [01:03:10.153]might be a bit contradictory.
- [01:03:12.922]We wanted people to accept that there are competing issues that go into a problem,
- [01:03:18.694]and we wanted them to to grapple with those with those inconsistencies.
- [01:03:24.233]And they had trouble.
- [01:03:25.301]I mean, they just they they really struggled with it.
- [01:03:30.873]But some people did have that view and they were able to come at it
- [01:03:34.911]from from from different perspectives and try to bring that in.
- [01:03:38.114]But I do think, Julie, I think that's a really good idea.
- [01:03:40.750]It would be a good, good thing especially to use and I think
- [01:03:43.719]an educational setting.
- [01:03:48.991]Yeah. The question you hinted at,
- [01:03:51.260]you know, some possible solutions to decrease the polarization.
- [01:03:54.764]But I'm wondering what your thoughts are on
- [01:03:56.098]what actually caused it in the first place.
- [01:03:57.900]Is this just the Internet or what caused it?
- [01:04:02.271]Yeah. Good question.
- [01:04:03.873]So the hate, that sense of hatred,
- [01:04:08.077]I think of the other side.
- [01:04:12.048]Increases. So what
- [01:04:14.050]what ended up happening is that the two political parties sorted. So.
- [01:04:17.820]So basically it used to be that the Democratic Party
- [01:04:21.991]included northern liberals and Southern conservatives.
- [01:04:25.261]And the Republican Party included
- [01:04:28.164]kind of northern kind of moderates to conservatives.
- [01:04:33.002]And that was pretty much what the parties looked like.
- [01:04:34.937]So within Congress, when you look at the polarization
- [01:04:38.007]in Congress, you can see that as the party sorted,
- [01:04:42.511]it gets more and more and more polarized.
- [01:04:44.847]And I think in the general public, I think there are a lot of things that affect
- [01:04:49.051]what we what we think about ourselves and about our of the opposing party.
- [01:04:54.090]One of them is the media.
- [01:04:55.424]I do think the media play a role in this.
- [01:04:57.660]And the more that we hear in the media, a lot of.
- [01:05:03.499]More biased reporting.
- [01:05:05.201]You know, if you constantly hear the same tropes over and over and over again,
- [01:05:09.605]I think we tend to accept them, especially in our media bubbles.
- [01:05:13.542]I also think political leaders have become much more aggressively,
- [01:05:19.615]you know, you're in my camp or you're not in my camp.
- [01:05:22.251]And so I think political leadership plays a role in that. I think.
- [01:05:27.390]There is more and more of this notion
- [01:05:30.293]of identifying with the party than there used to be.
- [01:05:32.762]People care more about identifying with the party.
- [01:05:36.165]And it might be that we just hear about it a lot more.
- [01:05:39.635]But the parties have also tried to sell themselves a lot more.
- [01:05:42.738]It's funny, as the parties have become weaker.
- [01:05:45.441]Our party system right now is really weak.
- [01:05:48.110]As the parties become weaker, this affective polarization takes off.
- [01:05:52.381]So the party seems to be more in control of who got to run on their party label.
- [01:05:56.218]They got to you know, they were basically making a lot of decisions.
- [01:06:00.122]Now it's a free for all.
- [01:06:01.524]And we see that in this midterm election cycle that we've just
- [01:06:05.194]that we're in right now. I mean, it's it's just a free for all.
- [01:06:07.930]So the parties are themselves divided.
- [01:06:11.200]But but the real hatred is for the other party.
- [01:06:14.170]So anyway, I think all of those things contribute.
- [01:06:20.376]This has been a really wonderful talk.
- [01:06:22.111]So thank you very much.
- [01:06:23.646]You ended with the conception of fallibility.
- [01:06:26.782]And I wanted to just sort of talk a bit, ask you a bit about that,
- [01:06:30.052]because one of the things that fallibility would suggest is that we come to honor
- [01:06:35.091]and recognize the importance of verifiable facts.
- [01:06:39.061]And if we take that also as a. Given.
- [01:06:44.166]Is that a boundary condition for you, for civic respect as well?
- [01:06:49.772]Insofar as someone is not willing to recognize verifiable facts
- [01:06:53.676]to the greatest extent possible
- [01:06:56.078]within a condition, a certain reasonableness of disagreement,
- [01:06:58.781]is that to a boundary condition specific respect if one doesn't accept
- [01:07:02.151]verifiable empirical fact.
- [01:07:05.521]So we do not include it as a boundary condition.
- [01:07:08.791]But I understand where you're coming from.
- [01:07:11.193]I do think that.
- [01:07:14.030]There is. To get back to my Uncle Joe example.
- [01:07:19.201]I think that if Uncle Joe is a climate denier and
- [01:07:23.506]there's all this factual scientific evidence
- [01:07:26.742]that climate change is caused by human behavior, right?
- [01:07:29.812]I mean, it just to me that's irrefutable.
- [01:07:33.082]Know there's too much science.
- [01:07:34.283]I mean it anyway.
- [01:07:37.820]I still think we should give civic respect to Uncle Joe
- [01:07:40.923]until he keeps insisting that his non factual stance is, is.
- [01:07:46.362]And then you can say, okay, stop.
- [01:07:47.930]So I do think that that condition of saying you're not going to keep
- [01:07:50.933]talking to somebody over and over and over again,
- [01:07:54.170]partly that that idea that they are ignoring fact
- [01:07:58.541]makes it so that you can say, okay, I understand your position.
- [01:08:02.144]Okay, fine, that's enough.
- [01:08:04.747]So it is in a roundabout way
- [01:08:06.682]part of the boundary commission, but simply factual, you know,
- [01:08:10.252]factual evidentiary basis, if not from the boundary commission.
- [01:08:14.190]I think you still need to find out what people think.
- [01:08:19.462]How do you maintain civic respect for someone when they're when you feel
- [01:08:24.500]that their political beliefs disrespect you or like some aspect of your identity?
- [01:08:30.539]Like, if I feel like I'm part of the LGBTQ community
- [01:08:33.943]and someone who I'm talking to is very against that politically,
- [01:08:37.713]or if I'm a member of the police force and someone holds the belief
- [01:08:42.184]that everyone on the police force is, you know, racist and overly
- [01:08:46.956]physically controlling and all that, how do you maintain
- [01:08:51.160]respect for someone when you feel like they're attacking you personally? Yeah.
- [01:08:55.064]So remember that civic respect
- [01:08:56.899]is just the idea that you listen to and engage with them.
- [01:09:00.703]You know, again, not forever, but you know, you find out where they're
- [01:09:03.606]coming from. You try to understand them and that you don't stereotype
- [01:09:08.210]everybody just because of one person in a group or several people in a group.
- [01:09:12.348]And that you believe in pluralism, you accept that people
- [01:09:15.317]are going to disagree with you.
- [01:09:17.153]I think that civic respect and I think we can do that.
- [01:09:19.955]I mean, that I think we can do that.
- [01:09:22.825]You might be asking more about recognition. Respect.
- [01:09:25.461]Can I actually respect you as a human being because you hold
- [01:09:29.298]these really abominable views, in my opinion. Right.
- [01:09:32.868]And our argument is that we have to give recognition, respect.
- [01:09:37.439]We just have to.
- [01:09:38.641]And it's just a condition
- [01:09:40.476]that no matter what somebody has said or done, it's not earned.
- [01:09:43.779]It's it is just that we should respect people as fellow human beings.
- [01:09:48.150]So I understand where you're coming from.
- [01:09:50.986]And I, you know,
- [01:09:53.556]we are put to a difficult test very often with civic respect.
- [01:09:58.027]But I think what we're asking people to do.
- [01:10:01.897]It's actually not that not that awful.
- [01:10:06.001]So especially if we can do it impersonally.
- [01:10:08.837]If I can find out why do people say, you know, why does this group think this?
- [01:10:12.408]Okay, now I understand. Now I don't have to read more about that.
- [01:10:15.144]I understand where they're coming from.
- [01:10:16.779]And then I'm going to put that aside. Right.
- [01:10:19.315]But giving that initial civic respect to figure out where they're coming from,
- [01:10:22.818]which I think is important.
- [01:10:26.655]Great talk. My question
- [01:10:28.724]I want to kind of follow up a little bit of what Mark was saying.
- [01:10:32.228]And I think even as a biologist,
- [01:10:36.699]you're using climate change as an example of Uncle Joe and why, you know.
- [01:10:44.473]Of what's a fact and what's not.
- [01:10:46.709]Yeah, it's there's a lot more nuance there then than that then.
- [01:10:50.379]It's hard to explain and there's a lot of data analyzed.
- [01:10:54.850]How would you answer that if Uncle Joe was saying the election was stolen?
- [01:11:00.556]I think those variable viable facts, at least from my point of view,
- [01:11:04.360]are much more verifiable than the facts about climate change.
- [01:11:10.032]So, I mean, it kind of gets to the point of what
- [01:11:13.068]what's an extreme that's too extreme.
- [01:11:16.538]Because I think that there's a lot more nuance in Republican versus Democrat
- [01:11:21.010]and that there's also these cold
- [01:11:22.444]there's ends where those people become out of bounds from.
- [01:11:26.315]From deserving civic respect.
- [01:11:30.152]And so if they're going to. And how do you deal with that? So
- [01:11:34.857]I think there's a question in there somewhere.
- [01:11:37.726]So I. I will come back to what I said about civic respect
- [01:11:45.401]being within the realm of a democratic, liberal, democratic political system.
- [01:11:50.172]And I think somebody, when there is no evidence whatsoever
- [01:11:55.177]to say that the election is fraudulent, the election outcome is fraudulent.
- [01:12:00.416]What the person is doing is undermining.
- [01:12:05.321]The Democrats democracy there.
- [01:12:07.823]They are trying to undermine democracy by saying that we can accept the outcome
- [01:12:11.960]of the election when it was a free and fair election. Right.
- [01:12:15.664]So so that becomes that question about democracy.
- [01:12:19.468]I also, though, think.
- [01:12:22.104]That if we give people civic respect.
- [01:12:24.807]I don't know that my coauthor would agree with me on.
- [01:12:28.177]But I've heard I've talked to quite
- [01:12:31.246]a few Republicans who who say that there was fraud
- [01:12:34.783]and that that this election, you know, Biden didn't win it.
- [01:12:39.488]And listening to them, they
- [01:12:43.492]they are afraid that our the Democrats are undermining our democracy.
- [01:12:48.864]So I, I don't think it's I mean, they're wrong on this issue.
- [01:12:52.901]On this particular issue. They're wrong.
- [01:12:54.770]But I do think that hearing it out
- [01:12:57.473]and hearing where they're coming from is important for us to do.
- [01:13:01.577]On the other hand, as I said, civic respect.
- [01:13:04.613]This is this in a democratic system.
- [01:13:06.515]I really do believe that
- [01:13:07.516]we don't have to listen to somebody who wants to undermine our democracy.
- [01:13:11.420]And I think election denial is an undermining of democracy
- [01:13:15.657]unless you have proof that there is some extensive fraud
- [01:13:19.628]that has gone on and so forth, and nobody has found it.
- [01:13:27.002]No, no, no, no, no.
- [01:13:28.837]I won't agree with that.
- [01:13:30.839]I do think a lot of the polling results that show acceptance of the election
- [01:13:36.044]fraud argument, I think a lot of it is just polarization and action.
- [01:13:40.849]I think it's Republicans saying it's my team, you're attacking my team.
- [01:13:44.987]And so I'm going to say this, even though I actually don't think that
- [01:13:48.023]there was actually election fraud, but I am with my team.
- [01:13:51.260]And so I think it's a problem.
- [01:13:53.128]It's a survey problem.
- [01:13:55.297]It's like that last question on an applied.
- [01:13:58.867]How do we find common ground?
- [01:14:00.002]So Corgan asks, How should a teacher bring up controversial
- [01:14:04.373]political issues with students respectfully without getting in trouble?
- [01:14:08.177]The school systems need to change in order to accommodate this change,
- [01:14:12.114]or should the teachers change how they teach? Or both?
- [01:14:15.951]So we political scientists
- [01:14:18.420]sit around at lunch on occasion and we talk about the fact
- [01:14:21.590]that we actually talk about controversial, controversial
- [01:14:25.027]issues in our classes all the time.
- [01:14:27.596]This is what we do.
- [01:14:28.964]You know, this is our job.
- [01:14:30.899]And I think that we have learned
- [01:14:34.269]to handle it pretty well because we remain analytical.
- [01:14:37.339]We don't take sides.
- [01:14:38.774]We we try to talk about the data.
- [01:14:41.276]You know, as Mark was saying, you know, you try to show evidence on one side
- [01:14:45.180]or the other and be fair on it
- [01:14:47.783]so that you can bring in some pro data and some anti data.
- [01:14:52.087]I mean, I think that we we try to do this all the time.
- [01:14:55.624]I don't think it's the problem is I if you feel really strongly about an issue
- [01:15:00.329]and you have the viewpoint that your side is right
- [01:15:04.666]and the other side is wrong, that can really undermine that kind of discussion.
- [01:15:09.404]But if you really want to hear what people say,
- [01:15:12.341]I've got students in my classes, say something where I was like,
- [01:15:16.011]Oh my God, I can't believe you said it out loud.
- [01:15:19.014]But my face is interesting point.
- [01:15:23.285]So, you know, and then other students will jump in and say, well,
- [01:15:26.622]I disagree and blah.
- [01:15:27.623]And so it really gets to be a
- [01:15:29.391]I think a fun it makes it a fun discussion, in my opinion.
- [01:15:32.294]But political scientists are a weird lot. So.
- [01:15:38.033]Again so much. Dr.
- [01:15:39.835]Face. First, another round of applause.
- [01:15:47.943]For giving us some things
- [01:15:50.279]to think about as we enter November.
- [01:15:54.917]Hopefully you will join us next month for
- [01:15:59.321]How Do We Talk to Uncle Joe about climate change with Dr.
- [01:16:03.292]Regina Werum, who will talk about human and environment interactions.
- [01:16:07.329]And I hope to see you there. Thank you so much for attending.
- [01:16:10.132]I hope you have a great night.
The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!
You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.
Log in to post comments
Embed
Copy the following code into your page
HTML
<div style="padding-top: 56.25%; overflow: hidden; position:relative; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1;"> <iframe style="bottom: 0; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; border: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%;" src="https://mediahub.unl.edu/media/19960?format=iframe&autoplay=0" title="Video Player: Partisan polarization and the need for civic respect | CAS Inquire" allowfullscreen ></iframe> </div>
Comments
0 Comments