305 | Lilliana Mason on Polarization and Political Psychology

Political outcomes would be relatively simple to predict and understand if only people were well-informed, entirely rational, and perfectly self-interested. Alas, real human beings are messy, emotional, imperfect creatures, so a successful theory of politics has to account for these features. One phenomenon that has grown in recent years is an alignment of cultural differences with political ones, so that polarization becomes more entrenched and even violent. I talk with political scientist Lilliana Mason about how this has come to pass, and how democracy can deal with it. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/17/305-lilliana-mason-on-polarization-and-political-psychology/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Lilliana Hall Mason received her Ph. D. in political psychology from Stony Brook University. She is currently an SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity https://www.amazon.com/Uncivil-Agreement-Politics-Became-Identity/dp/022652454X/ and co-author (with Nathan Kalmoe) of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy https://www.amazon.com/Radical-American-Partisanship-Hostility-Consequences-ebook/dp/B09RVFRDVM. Web Site https://www.lillianamason.com/ Hopkins web page https://snfagora.jhu.edu/person/lilliana-mason/ Google Scholar publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hAKarYwAAAAJ&hl=en Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/lilymasonphd.bsky.social

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:03Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You may have noticed, those of you who live in the United States, and I think that many other countries have the analogous statement that could be defended, that temperatures are running high when it comes to politics and political opinions. I'm not specifically referring now to the actual government, the new second administration of Donald Trump, and the actions that they and their allies are taking. That's kind of not what we do here at Mindscape, but we want to understand the phenomena. We want to know what the explanation is for why things are the way they are. So even putting aside actions of the government one way or the other, let's think about the attitudes of the people, of the people who went to vote

• 1:46Sean Carroll?

  for these government employees in the first place. There seems to be some intensity out there of feeling, intensity that even occasionally rises to the level of political violence against the people you disagree with. It wasn't necessarily always that way. You might imagine that maybe it was always that way, but you're just more sensitive now. No, it's actually Not always that way. It has been equally intense and violent at various times in the past, but it's not uniform. It's not constant. It comes and goes. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon of polarization, which you've certainly heard of. But there's different aspects to polarization. One aspect, which is maybe the one that comes to mind

• 2:29Sean Carroll?

  right away, is there are fewer people in the center and more people on the extremes, right? That's a kind of polarization. But there's a more important, I think, deeper kind of polarization, which is, as we'll talk about in today's podcast, there's various axes along which you can think about people, you know. There are actual, sort of, let's say, economic views, there are cultural views, various other kinds of views, there are religious views, how old they are, their gender, you know, various axes you can map people on. And what's happening now, more than has happened before, is that these axes line up with each other. There is an identification that is at least as cultural as it is political when

• 3:13Sean Carroll?

  you call yourself now a Democrat or a Republican. As we'll see, this wasn't always the case at all. In the 1950s, here in the United States, it was kind of hard to discern the difference between the official political parties, Republican and Democrat. I know a lot of people still say that is true now. Those people are wrong. There's very, very big and important differences between the two political parties right now. And this kind of polarization that lines up, that arranges correspondences with the different kinds of difference that we have, means that Democrats and Republicans become more different from each other. It becomes harder and harder to find common ground. We don't watch the

• 3:56Sean Carroll?

  same movies or TV shows, the Democrats and the Republicans. We don't go to the same churches. We don't go to the same restaurants. We don't eat the same foods, okay? We don't meet each other. We don't shop at the same grocery stores. These are the conditions under which it becomes easier and easier to turn your political affiliation into a tribal affiliation, one which plays such a large role in your identity that you begin to see the other side as the enemy. And in extreme cases, will lead to violence against the enemy because that's the only way they can be treated. They're not human, they can't be reasoned with. And this goes both ways, right? It's absolutely possible that it goes both ways. That is not to say that both political parties in the United States are equally culpable,

• 4:39Sean Carroll?

  whatever, but people on both sides have these emotional reactions to the others and they often don't meet people on the other side. So today, we're going to talk to Lilliana Mason, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins, here where I am. In fact, she's a professor at the SNF Agora Institute. I'm kind of a, I'm a faculty affiliate at the Agora Institute, which means like I get to go to the parties and things like that. But Liliana is a real professor at Agora. And the subtitle of the Agora Institute is "Strengthening Global Democracy Through Powerful Civic Engagement and Informed Inclusive Dialogue." So we're all about the informed inclusive dialogue. You can't get away from the fact

• 5:22Sean Carroll?

  that things are happening in politics and government in the United States right now. In fact, for very down-to-earth reasons having to do with my travel schedule, I am recording this intro two weeks before the podcast will go live. So I'm just kind of crossing my fingers, just for, you know, my own personal podcast reasons. I hope nothing really, really dramatic happens to democracy and the government of the United States in the next two weeks. It can happen, you know, I don't want it to happen at all. But if it does happen, just wait until the podcast is out, okay? Do me, do me that much of a solid. We'll see. I think that, as usual, the kinds of points that we try to consider here transcend the current political moment. It's impossible not to draw lessons and examples from things

• 6:07Sean Carroll?

  that are going on currently, but we want to have a deeper understanding than that, one that will still be relevant, let's just say, four years from now, eight years from now. I almost said like during the next administration, the one after that, but who knows? Well, those things will exist. Democracies don't last forever. But at least four years from now will happen. That I'm pretty sure of. Something to cling to. Four years from now will happen, eight years from now will happen. Hope. That things go relatively well in between now and then. That's something that we can hope for and more importantly, that we can work toward. And being educated about what's happening now is an important part of working toward a better future effectively. So with that, let's go.

• 7:03Sean Carroll?

  Lilliana Mason, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:07Sean Carroll?

  You know, thinking about what you do for a living and reading some of this stuff, maybe this is skipping ahead, but I got to ask like the big question. Is it kind of miraculous that democracy ever works? We're asking people with very different values and opinions to get together and they don't always get their way, but at least they're supposed to go along when they don't get their way. And that's a pretty big ask.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don't kill each other, you know, largely. This is, you know, difference, the political scientist Danielle Allen calls it difference without domination. And, and so the, the, this is really the only system that we've ever, that humans have ever made in which we trade positions of power without fighting, that we have, that, that, you know, at least nominally, every citizen has voice and has, and is treated with the same rights and dignity as other citizens. That's the ideal.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  We don't always live up to that, but, but that's what we're, you know, that's, it's nice that it's the goal, right? Like, there is no other system in which that is the goal. And, and so it's a delicate, it's a delicate system and it really requires institutions and rules and it requires buy-in from everybody in order for it to work. Because as soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears. And that's, that's really the, the truth of democracy. It feels, it feels strong and stable while, while it's working, but it's pretty easy to undermine and disrupt it.

• 8:51Sean Carroll?

  Is there some legitimate worry that this kind of utopian goal only works if the society is pretty homogeneous to begin with?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  That's an argument that I've heard. I don't necessarily think that that's a requirement. And that's partly because, you know, the United States is an extremely diverse place and it's the first democracy, the longest living democracy. So, you know, it's not a requirement to have a homogeneous environment. The challenge of democracy is to manage differences. And so, the challenge is bigger the more differences there are.

• 9:33Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  However, you know, you can also make the argument, and, you know, Robert Dahl is a political theorist who was writing about democracy a lot in the 60s, and he made the argument that actually, a pluralistic society is a requirement for democracy. That in order to have a functioning democracy, you have to have a lot of different interests. Otherwise, we would all just want exactly the same thing and it's not necessarily required to have this whole system. And so, you know, so his idea was that we flourish if we have a number of different ideas and a number of different interests, all kind of pushing in different directions. Ideally, according to a lot of theory, that keeps us stable as a democracy.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  To have multiple interests pushing in different directions, that way we don't fall into any extreme, right? Because there's always somebody pushing back against these kind of, you know, totalitarian extremes that, you know, that's the other option to democracy. And so, there's an argument to be made that the more diverse pressure you have, this more stable a democracy can be.

• 10:42Sean Carroll?

  And that leads us right into, I think, what is the meat of our conversation here, which is there are many dimensions or factors along which we can disagree with each other. And arguably, to oversimplify, it used to be that the different ways in which we disagreed were somewhat uncorrelated with each other, and more recently, they've been lining up, and that's given us a degree of polarization we hadn't had before.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is, we call it cross pressures, which is basically that there's an old sociological understanding that if we have all these divides in society pushing in different directions, none of them is very dangerous. Like, any single one of them can't bring the whole thing down. And so if we think about, and I call this social sorting, this is a process that happened in the United States over, basically since the civil rights legislation in the 1960s, where the parties have become much more socially different from each other. And so it used to be, it used to be the case that, you know, you have, within one identity,

• 11:50Speaker 03

  like a church, you have Democrats and Republicans there. And so you are opposed to them politically, but in terms of your weekly worship, you see members of the other party, and you think of them as part of your in-group in that way, right? They're your out-group politically, but they're your in-group in some other way. Those types of connections have declined in the last 50, 60 years. And that's part of the reason that I think that, according to my research, right, this is part of the reason why we hate each other as partisans so much.

• 12:23Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. And so it's always, to me, like, I always have to be wary about comparing to the good old days. But this is a quantitative, measurable thing, that we used to be more diverse along different axes and mix more than we do now.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Well, the parties, right? So this is important, because the, as a society, we were quite segregated before the 1960s. But we're talking about the political parties, which are important because they structure our politics. Politics and they determine the levers of power. They determine, you know, the sort of the hierarchy of power. And when the political parties were uncorrelated with, you know, racial identities or religious identities, those, those political identities only affected what we thought of as, you know, the, the realm of government. So how much investment in society, what the taxes should be, um, things that we, that were kind of more economic.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Which is, you know, economic questions, we can, we can find compromises on it's, you know, is it a hundred or is it fifty? Let's go to seventy five, right? But what happened is as the, really as the Republican Party became increasingly associated with white and evangelical identities. And the Democratic Party became associated with sort of everyone else, sort of just diversity. It, it, the outcome of an election now doesn't just hurt your partisan identity. It hurts you in all these other ways, right? It hurts your racial identity and your religious identity and all of these things. So that, so that, you know, when we think of the social psychological under, underpinnings of this, you know, our identities are part of our sense of self-esteem.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  We have, you know, the status of our group matters to us and it, and it changes how we feel emotionally. Right? If you're, if you think of an identity as a sports team affiliation, right? When they win, you feel great. When they lose, you feel terrible. And that's true of any identity that we have, any identification, um, psychological identification with a, with a group. When they win, we feel great. When they lose, we feel bad. And that can, you know, for sports, it's fun. But when we start applying those emotions to politics and to racial identity and religious identity, these really deep seeded identities that can really drive, you know, historically have driven war, right?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  That, that those types of identities, when we, when we involve them in our, in our political process, the stakes become much more dire. And, and as individuals, we start to feel like politics is existential. And that's where we are now.

• 14:57Sean Carroll?

  I read, I heard from you and stuff that I read that, and this was completely unbelievable to me, that in 1950s, the American Political Science Association urged the political parties to become more different from each other.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:11Sean Carroll?

  They wanted more, more sharp contrasts in political parties. This seems not something we would get right now.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the report was called Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. And the plea was, um, basically, nobody knows what the two parties stand for. Like, it's not clear. And you have to think of it as like coming out of like the Eisenhower era, when, you know, when he ran for president, it wasn't clear which party he was gonna run, right, under. And, and so, for, for that era, the, the parties themselves weren't really shaping the politics. Um, and, and so, you know, we're coming out of sort of a wartime politics. It wasn't, according to this report, individual citizens kind of felt like they could vote

• 16:01Speaker 03

  for either party and they would get the exact same result. We definitely don't feel that way today. It's like the opposite of how we feel today, but, but what the, what the political scientists were asking for was, you know, ideological diversity, like just, you know, stand for something and stand against something so that people have a real choice.

• 16:22Sean Carroll?

  I guess, to be fair, there are people on like the very far left or the very far right that say, oh, the two parties are the same, but it doesn't seem to be the consensus view that we once had.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  No, no. And, and, and, you know, particularly because at the time, in the 1950s, this is right, you know, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, um, there were, you know, the, the questions that really divide us, um, you know, racial equality, for example, there were white supremacists in both the Democratic and the Republican Party. And there were raging misogynists in both the Democratic and Republican Party. And in the 60s, we started seeing this real progress towards racial equality and gender equality. And that created this new opportunity for the parties to disagree on these questions. And those questions are not questions we're very good at talking about without getting really, really angry, right?

• 17:15Speaker 03

  These are questions that have always made Americans quite uncomfortable, and we made it the center of our politics.

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• 18:22Sean Carroll?

  And so, what, you mentioned the civil rights movement, et cetera, but I'm wondering about exactly what happened. If you say that when I used to go to church, there used to be Republicans and Democrats there, so what happened? Did the people in a certain church all become Republicans or Democrats? Or did certain people stop going to that church?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's both. So what happened within the parties is that like the Democrats, the Democrats who were angry about the civil rights legislation that their own party promoted, they grew disaffected with the Democratic Party. And so what that means is, you know, the party identity is a really strong identity, especially for Southern white Democrats at the time. They thought of Republicans as, you know, they're still mad about the Civil War. They thought of Republicans as the aggressors in the Civil War, and they would never, ever, ever call themselves Republicans. You couldn't find a white Republican in the South during this period of time. What happened was that they were very angry about the civil rights legislation.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  They gradually drifted away from the party by voting for Republican candidates sometimes, and then over decades became maybe independents. And then their children were more comfortable identifying as Republican. So it really took a generational shift because they hated the idea of Republicans so much.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  And so that's why I say it really took, it took decades, right? It took, you know, sort of the next generation to come in and say like, actually, I'm a Republican and I'm going to run as a Republican. And the same thing was happening in churches, right? The same thing is happening in communities where, you know, people who didn't like the rhetoric of a particular church would just stop going. Or people who felt really committed to that church and were really compelled by the leadership of the church might have changed their minds, might have changed their attitudes to conform with what the, what the church was preaching. And in fact, over these years, we saw a, a big, you know, the big religious shift that we saw was that what we call mainline Christian churches, which are like the more mainstream

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Protestant churches, they basically emptied out. And the, and evangelical and more kind of charismatic type of, of Christian churches became much, much more popular. And that's when we saw the emergence of mega churches, right? Where there's thousands of people and there's a rock band and people are swaying, you know? All of this happened really through the 1970s and 80s. And, and this, and that process made the religious part of it an even more extreme part of it, right? And the Republican Party intentionally, they saw this as an opportunity, right? They saw the religious right as a real opportunity for them to politicize something that had previously been considered the secular world, right?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Like, politics was considered to be the secular world for evangelical Christians. Bringing them into politics really created this kind of theocratic element of, of the Republican Party's platform.

• 21:25Sean Carroll?

  To, to the extent where, if I understand correctly, these days, there are voters who will identify as evangelical Christians even though they barely go to church or know anything about Christianity, right? Because they're Republicans first and the religion follows.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Those are the, actually, the, the most fervent Trump supporters are evangelicals who don't, they, self-identified evangelicals who don't actually know very much about the religion. And people who are evangelicals and are very well-versed. In the theology are less approving of Trump in general. I mean, partly because they know the rules of Christianity and he breaks the rules of Christianity constantly.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  It's people who are who are really thinking of that evangelical identity as a as a sort of a loyalty pledge to this this kind of Christian right movement.

• 22:15Sean Carroll?

  And many things go along with this. It's it's more like a kind of a a brand name or something like that, right? And it affects what movies you watch and what sodas you drink. And I mean, what are the factors that go along with this sorting?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So it's it's broadly cultural in the sense that, you know, they back when we had TiVo in in 2012, they did a study of what TV shows Democrats and Republicans watched. And they found that that they're on the top 10 list of shows. There was not a single show that was in common across the two parties. So you had to go pretty far down the list to find something in common. And and so even back in, you know, the 2010s, we had this cultural divergence occurring where, you know, Republicans were watching like Duck Dynasty. And Democrats were watching like satirical cartoons like Family Guy.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Which, you know, that that matches and sounds right still. But the but and then we started seeing, you know, with the emergence of like micro targeting. You know, the political parties could target people. As social media began to emerge, political parties could target people based on what kind of beer they drank, based on what kind of car they drove. These became like measurable differences between the parties that there were preferences in what grocery store you go to. And and some of this was rooted in kind of just culture that was being spread through media. But some of it is actually based on geographical sorting, which was also occurring where. People in rural areas are much more Republican and people in urban areas are

• 23:56Speaker 03

  much more Democratic, but even within a city, by neighborhood, people have been sorting. So there are certain neighborhoods within a city like Dallas that are more Democratic and there are other neighborhoods that are more Republican, even though the city itself is, you know, sort of, it's a blue state and a red, in a, a blue city and a red state. But there's, there's, you know, people want to live next door to somebody who shares their political party. And, and so that's also creating, like, you go to the, maybe you live, maybe the Democrats live near the Whole Foods, right? Because you like that grocery store. And so, and the Republicans maybe live near, you know, the Cracker Barrel, whatever, you know, like, these are the types of divides that they become more and more entrenched as we kind of stop seeing each other, even at the grocery store, right? You don't run

• 24:41Speaker 03

  into somebody at the grocery store anymore. It's not even just like sharing a church, it's shopping in the same place. And as those processes occur, we actually start to believe in the kind of humanity of the people that, that, in the other party, less, because we don't see them doing human things anymore.

• 24:59Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, we only see them through the lens of political activity that sort of gets our heckles up, yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 25:06Sean Carroll?

  This sounds like a very American story. Are things like this going on elsewhere in the world?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  It, I mean, so, yes and no. It is particularly American because, I mean, because really, the, the, the American roots in, in enslavement of Black Americans

• 25:24Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  is unique to us. And that, that racism that exists and has always existed in the United States is increasingly this, you know, one of the central divides of our politics. And so, and it's potent, right? We still have, we had a war about this.

• 25:40Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  So, so in that sense, for us, it is, I think, uniquely potent. But we're starting to see some of this with, for example, immigration in, in other countries. Like in Europe, right? We're seeing like the emergence of some more far-right parties that are responding to increasing immigration of, you know, largely brown people coming into their countries. And there are some good political science studies that actually show empirically that, you know, when, when migration occurs, right-wing media can seize on it and, and effectively move the entire population of that place, or the, you know, majority of population of a place, towards the right. And that combination of migration and and and right wing media is extremely effective

• 26:26Speaker 03

  at making people kind of more intolerant of outsiders, more protective of themselves, and less interested in kind of, you know, curiosity and tolerance for others.

• 26:36Sean Carroll?

  And is this where the idea of status threat comes in?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's part of all of this, I think, like, the the the idea, for me, the idea of status threat is rooted in social identity theory, which is the theory that I use to sort of explain most of this stuff. And it was it was developed by a guy named Henri Tajvel, who actually is remarkable. He had, he was studying for his PhD in Paris. He was, he was a Jewish man from Poland, and he went to to Paris to study chemistry. And during that period of time, World War II broke out, and he decided to join the French Armed Forces. He was almost immediately captured by Nazis and spent the six years in the Nazi prison camp.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And during that period of time, he lied about where he was from. So they, the guards knew he was Jewish, but they thought he was French. They thought he was a French Jew and not a Polish Jew, which he realized is the only reason he survived, because they hated Polish Jews and they killed Polish Jews. But he had been studying French, and he had such a perfect French accent, that he was able to survive simply by saying that he was a member of a different country. And so when he emerged from these camps after the war ended, I mean, horrifically, his entire family had been murdered. And he, you know, kind of thought about going back to study chemistry again and realized, like, no, no, no, I need to figure out why these identities

• 28:04Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  allow this type of thing, right? It was just the label that I had on myself that allowed me to survive.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And so, and it was unverified, you know, like it wasn't anything about me at my core.

• 28:16Sean Carroll?

  He was the same person. He just said, no, I'm French, not Polish.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that label, that identity saved his life. And so, so he started this, this study of social psychology, which in general was a field that was developed as a reaction to World War II. Sort of what makes people hate each other to such a degree that we can have a Holocaust, that we have these wars. And what he found was, so his, his theory, social identity theory, basically says that as long as you have a psychological attachment to a group, you have a, a deep seated need for that group to have status over some other group, right? It has to be a relevant group. It has to be a group that you feel like, that like you kind of compete with.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  And, and that, and that status is crucial for our sense of ourselves and our, and who we are, the type of status we have as individuals, the place we hold in the world, all of these things are, hu- humans naturally seek self-esteem and, and we suffer a lot with, when we don't have it. And so, the, the, the theory basically said, as, as long as you identify with a group, which is a basic human thing, you have to have an outgroup and you have to be better than them. And what we see here is basically, you know, like for example, with immigration in Europe, we have people saying like, well, these people are lower than me

• 29:44Speaker 03

  and they're coming into my space and they're getting some of the stuff that's mine, right? And so, I need to demonstrate to them how much better than them I am because if they start competing with me for status, like I always assumed they were lower. And if they start climbing up the ladder, they're getting closer to my status and that, that shifts my sense of relative worth in the world. And it doesn't happen necessarily automatically or for every single group, but, but right wing media is very, very good at stoking these feelings, at identifying these feelings for people. And, and for taking people who have low self-esteem already. And saying, but look, you're a member of this group that is superior to everyone else.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  And that status that you have because of this group, that's what will make you feel better about yourself. Right. That's the thing that you hold on to because the rest of your life is terrible. And, you know, you don't feel like you that you have any status in any other part of your life. But you have this one identity and that's the one thing that you can hold on to. And so that's where all this is kind of rooted. It's like really deep seated need for for status that we all have. And that we're willing to, you know, kill other people for. And that's and it's a it's a potent resource for particularly for kind of right wing provocateurs.

• 31:01Sean Carroll?

  But it is interesting. You mentioned that the the message that needs to be you're really badly off. Except for this identity, right? Like it's it's kind of a mixed message. But I don't know whether they're trained or not, but a lot of political operatives seem to be, you know, intuitively understanding this.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a time, you know, time tested tactic. Like this is something that authoritarian leaders have done forever. It's, you know, we it's clear that it works. The problem that the only deterrent to using it is that it's morally wrong. Right. That it requires hatred and that it stokes hatred. It stokes anger and it's and it's something that motivates, you know, murder and war and genocide. And and the people who resist using it are people who, you know, are trying actively to resist murder and war and genocide. But it's, you know, it's a classic. It's a classic tool of getting humans to to destroy each other.

• 31:56Sean Carroll?

  So this seems like, again, a story of the non elites being, you know, stoked up this way. Is there sorting and polarization among the elite groups as well? There's, you know, supposed to maybe have a slightly different set of incentives.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So the the difference with the elites is that their incentives are all to retain power. And and so they they retain power by.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Simultaneously giving people what the people want and stoking in the people the the the sort of anger that gets them involved in politics and gets them out to vote and participate and volunteer and donate money. We think of anger as an approach emotion as opposed to like worry, which is an avoidance emotion. And and so anger, both anger and enthusiasm, actually, are approach emotions. It gets us up and doing stuff. It also turns off the critical thinking part of our brains when we feel angry or enthusiastic. When we when we're worried, we actually think more analytically and we but like we sit down and think when we're worried. When we're angry or enthusiastic, we get up and do stuff. So if we're angry, we're fighting. If we're enthusiastic, we're partying.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  And it we sort of just like click off that part of our brain that's like, wait a minute, is this the right thing? And and so that's, I mean, that's what politicians really want, anger and enthusiasm, right? Because it gets people participating in politics. It gets people moving. And that's what and so to the extent that they can motivate either one, right? I think Obama was a great example of motivating enthusiasm, right? Hope, enthusiasm. He really got people kind of out of their seats using that particular emotion. But it's a lot easier to make people angry. And and so for a lot of politicians, you know, especially if they don't have a very popular platform, which is the case really for for the Republican Party right now, most

• 33:51Speaker 03

  of the things that they want to do, the majority of Americans don't want, including abortion and gun control and and, you know, reducing taxes on billionaires and all of these things are just pretty unpopular. But if you can make people feel angry and remind them that their status is threatened, you can get them to be on your side and to and to fight for you pretty successfully. And that's and that's really, I think, the motivation of retaining power has been like, I need these people to just keep fighting for me.

• 34:17Sean Carroll?

  So the elites do get sorted, but maybe for different reasons?

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's I think it is for different reasons. I think it's more instrumental for them.

• 34:25Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Than it is for the rest of us.

• 34:28Sean Carroll?

  And is it symmetric? Or is this feeling like that the other side is bad? Is that held equally by Democrats and Republicans?

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yes, so in the public, Democrats and Republicans basically feel the same level of animosity towards each other, although.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Once we start talking about emotions like that we call moral disengagement emotions. So these are the emotions that people feel that allow them to hurt other humans and still feel morally good. And so this is dehumanization, it's vilification, thinking people in the other party are evil. Those are slightly higher among republic, among Republicans than Democrats. The vilifying and dehumanizing feelings. But, but they're, I mean, you know, they're higher, but they're like five to 10 percentage points higher. It's not huge. And so, you know, basically, all of us, all, anyone who's affiliated with a party is, is feeling this sense of like, these people are evil and they're a threat to the country and they, and they may even be subhuman.

• 35:30Sean Carroll?

  I, I certainly know plenty of Democrats who take the attitude that those people on the other side don't want us to exist, you know, they, they don't treat us as human. So I can't possibly imagine working with them, compromising with them.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And actually, there's, it's interesting how this, this interacts with, with racial resentment and, and actually, and also sexism, in that for Republicans, the Republicans who are the most willing to dehumanize and vilify Democrats are those who are really high in racial resentment. For Democrats, it's the opposite. The Democrats who dehumanize and vilify Republicans are the ones who are really low in racial resentment, right? They're anti-racist. And, and so those are the Democrats that think Republicans are evil and are willing to call them subhuman because they're like, look, they're so racist, like they're evil.

• 36:19Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  And, and the same is true to some degree for sexism, where Republicans who are high in sexism are the most likely to dehumanize and vilify Democrats. For Democrats, it's not. There's no relationship. It doesn't matter how sexist a Democrat is, they feel the same way about Republicans. But there's a really strong relationship for Republicans, where like the less, the least sexist Republicans are, are like much more tolerant of Democrats in general.

• 36:44Speaker 04

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• 37:11Sean Carroll?

  You mentioned a little bit about this, but what is the role played here by how the media and how we get our news has changed? I mean, you mentioned micro-targeting, et cetera, for advertisements. Is it...I get the rough feeling that I know certain Republicans, like my friend, most of my peer group are Democrats, but I know Republicans who seem to have a completely different idea of what is happening in the world than I do. And I presume that's because that's what they're hearing from their news sources.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think so a lot of people blame social media for this, and I think that that's part of it. I think that's a vehicle for misinformation. But I think honestly, it's just like the Internet as a whole. The breakdown of respect for kind of expert sources on the right in particular. We, you know, the right-wing media sort of, you know, system, ecosystem, is just follows completely different evidentiary standards from the traditional media. And so like traditional media, like, you know, newspaper, Washington Post and New York

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Times, they have very strict rules about what they can say, what they can't say, based on what they have evidence for. You know, OAN doesn't have those same rules, right? They're not like issuing corrections and saying like, oh, we got this one number a little bit wrong. They're showing the same, you know, garbage can on fire in Portland and claiming that it's in Minneapolis and New York and Washington DC and have absolutely no qualms about doing that, right? And Fox is doing a similar thing, though not to the same degree as kind of the more far-right information ecosystems. But this is how we get conspiracy theories. This is how, you know, we get QAnon emerged from people just sort of like getting deeper

• 39:09Speaker 03

  and deeper into this, into this idea that has no evidence for it. And, and that requires this sort of resentment of experts and expertise and therefore increasingly science and universities. But the, but the prevalence of, or the availability of misinformation, I think, has a lot to do with all of this. And I actually think that some of the recent developments have to do with COVID. I think that I have a suspicion, I don't have, I don't have data to support this. I'm not sure how you would get the data. But, but it's very likely that when COVID happened, first of all, everybody went onto the internet, right? Because we were all stuck in our homes and we had nothing else to do.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  But also, we were looking for comforting information. And so for some people, comforting information was COVID doesn't exist, it's a hoax. And, and a lot of people were drawn into those spaces on the internet that once COVID was no longer the main topic, were able to continue to misinform them on a whole host of other things, right? The economy is actually terrible. Joe Biden is a lizard pedophile. You know, like whatever these places were saying, like that a lot of people got kind of shunted into these places that provide both comforting information and also enraging information. And when you're bored and alone, rage can feel really good. You know, like it can feel really good to be feeling something. And you feel like you have, you know, something to do, like there's a project there and you

• 40:38Speaker 03

  feel important. All of that, I think, the, you know, just the, the internet itself has allowed people to get all those feelings whenever they want. And, and anybody who wants it can go find it. And so that's, I mean, I think there's just a, the amount of choice that we have in terms of our information has a huge amount to do with it.

• 40:58Sean Carroll?

  And is some of it just that a lot of the world and a lot of politics in particular are more in our face now, like brought closer to us? Like in the days when you would read a newspaper in the morning and maybe watch news at night, you got a certain amount of politics in your life, a certain amount of world news. But now it's everywhere. It's like every minute, right? It can be right in front of us. And is that a force pushing us toward this sorting?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's true. I have a vivid memory when I was a kid of hating Dan Rather because at seven o'clock every night, my dad wouldn't hang out with me. He would watch Dan Rather and I really resented him for it.

• 41:38Sean Carroll?

  Not like that anymore.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  No, right? And because that was the only time that you got the news, right? He was like, at seven o'clock, I have to stop playing because I have to pay attention now. And that's just not the case anymore. And I think that it's a combination of sort of having politics available to us all the time if we want. Other people, you know, there are a lot of people who don't pay attention to politics at all because they don't want to. And they are in these other spaces that are, you know, attracted to them for a variety of reasons. In this particular election, a lot of that was like these bro podcasts that were actually implicitly including a lot of conservative talking points without explicitly talking about politics.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  But that's where we were seeing the like, the trans panic, the immigrant panic, the economy is terrible. All of those things were really being transmitted through these, you know, purportedly non-political podcasts that were fun. They're fun to listen to. They're funny. You know, half of the time they're doing comedy and half of the time they're talking about these real problems. And that was really attractive for a lot of, particularly for a lot of men in everywhere, like across the whole, across the whole world. It's a really, it's an attractive thing to pay attention to. So it's not just that politics is everywhere. It's that we can choose what we want to expose ourselves to. And there are certain things that feel good that are not, that are not necessarily connected

• 43:07Speaker 03

  to reality. And, and, and, you know, people can kind of move themselves entirely into a universe in which they're consuming these things that feel good that, that are misleading them about what's real.

• 43:20Sean Carroll?

  And I guess it's just easier to have information sources that are either lying or making mistakes, for whatever reason. Just because there are so many of them, there's not the corrective that there used to be. I mean, again, I feel that. I don't have the data, but it seems to make sense.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Well, and the correctives are a really important part of this, too, because there used to be social correctives, right? What we have is a bunch of social norms that tell us how to behave, and those norms are enforced by the people around us telling us to stop doing something, or making fun of us when we do something wrong, right? I mean, there's obviously, like, there's the downside of social norms, which is shame and abuse. But the presence of social norms altogether keeps society going. I mean, if you think about shame as an emotion, it is so powerful. When you think of times you've felt ashamed, it almost, like, hurts your body. And that feeling of shame is so powerful, like, basically

• 44:20Speaker 03

  because it is the only way that social norms are enforced, right? They're enforced through feelings, and talking, and being around other people who tell you to, you know, cut it out. And the other thing about being, you know, connected to all these people all over the world is that the enforcement mechanisms for norms disappear, right? Our behavior can be bad, we can become, you know, kind of abusive and intolerant, and do all these things that, like, our kindergarten teachers told us not to do. But there's nobody there to tell us to cut it out, or at least nobody that we care about. And so, and really, and Trump came along at a pretty unique time, I think, also, because while this was all

• 45:01Speaker 03

  happening, he emerged as a political figure who I do believe, like, psychologically is incapable of feeling the emotion of shame. He doesn't behave like a human who feels shame. And that allowed a lot of people who are already kind of practicing this stuff on the internet to be given a permission slip to just behave this way. And so that, you know, kind of was like, it was the right time for Trump to come along, because a lot of people were already kind of trying stuff out. And he basically said, like, you know, you don't have to feel ashamed of that. You can just do it.

• 45:31Sean Carroll?

  The permission slip thing is big. I mean, that was one of the quotes that got circulated around as soon as he won, that these, you know, people who are very, very economically successful right-wingers said, "Oh, good, now we can say all these slurs again and, you know, not get social approbation for it."

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was actually, I'm forgetting the authors of this study, but there was a political science study that tested whether Trump's attack on particular groups was encouraging other people to derogate those groups themselves. And actually, and so they asked people to, like, you know, I think they gave them an opportunity to, like, say bad things about this huge list of different groups. And some of them were groups that Trump had attacked, and some of them were not. Some of them were just like, you know, like alcoholics, or, you know, just like groups of people that are not usually well-respected, but like, you know, you try to be, you try to, like, maybe be respectful of if you're thinking about these norms. And what they found was the people that Trump had attacked, everyone

• 46:29Speaker 03

  in the country was much more likely to attack those particular groups that Trump had attacked, and not to attack the groups that he had never talked about. So it does seem like there was a real, practical, measurable effect of Trump kind of saying, "Look, I'm gonna say a bad thing about this group, you can too. It's time for you," you know? And that's what the political correctness thing was all about. He started off, you know, now it's anti-woke, but it started off as being anti-PC. And it basically was, you know, you're allowed to say bad things about groups that you don't like. And so, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. That's what that entire movement was. And so he really did, I think, just spread this.

• 47:07Sean Carroll?

  And this is something that is not, in any sense, unique to Republicans or right-wingers, right? There's a whole cadre of people who think of themselves, or want to think of themselves as liberal or progressive or whatever, but they're clearly affected by being told to be less racist, or to, you know, support trans people, or something like this. And it, I don't understand the psychology of it. I mean, it clearly gets under their skin to the point where they become a wee bit irrational.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that this is this is like the reactionary centrists kind of the and they I mean, I think honestly, for them, it comes, I think it does come from a place of shame, right, that that that they get told from their in group that they're doing something wrong. And that's a very bad feeling, right? Like, from a deep evolutionary perspective, like, getting banished from your own group is basically death, right? And so so having being told by your own in group that you've done something bad makes you feel ashamed, and that feeling is terrible, and we all try to avoid it. And so, you know, you have two choices, you can fall in line with what your group told you to do, or you can detach yourself from the group, right, and create a new norm for yourself. And and that's that's

• 48:20Speaker 03

  basically what I think we're seeing a lot of these people do is like, particularly men, that they're they're, you know, kind of, they're saying the rude and intolerant things. And then when they get called out for it, they are just sort of like, well, I don't like your rules anyway, you know?

• 48:39Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, to put in a tiny bit of good word for tribalism, I had Herb Gintis on the podcast a while back. And and he kind of made the argument that it's the only reason why anyone votes in a democracy, right? I mean, there's too many people and your vote probably won't count, but you're signaling your affiliation with your tribe. And so, like, maybe that's a good thing in that case.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's the it's the only reason we have civilization, you know, like, it truly it organizes society. And and so we have to have identities, we have to have we have to feel like there's a group of people who has our back. And and and by there's a there's a social psychologist named Marilyn Brewer, who she calls this optimal distinctiveness theory, we need to feel unique, but we also need to feel like we're part of something. And and you to get the right balance of that, you have to have a group of people that you identify with, and some people who are not in that group. That's just sort of like the that's what we're all looking for. We're all looking for this like, perfect optimal place where we're distinct, but also we belong. And and that's

• 49:47Speaker 03

  You know, that's it's the way that we've been the way that we make anything work.

• 49:52Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  And it does make us vote, but it also makes us, you know, participate in our communities and like and do, you know, do good things and and and do service work, you know, become teachers, become, you know, work for the federal government, for example, right now. You know, it helps it helps people participate in benevolent ways in in societies.

• 50:15Sean Carroll?

  So we can't get rid of it. We're going to have to figure out how to manage it somehow.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We can't get rid of it. It's very, very deeply, deeply embedded. There's no way that I I don't think we could be human anymore if we did get rid of it.

• 50:27Sean Carroll?

  Is is part of the blame to be put on the two party system that we have here in the US?

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yes. So so part of the problem in the US in particular that makes it worse in the US is the two party system and not and and particularly the our sort of our, you know, we call it first past the post election system where if you get fifty one percent of the vote, you get a hundred percent of the power.

• 50:52Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  And in that type of system, it is very, very difficult, if not impossible, for third parties or multiple parties to emerge. It just doesn't really work because people vote strategically. And and so you need to get your group in power. And if you don't, then the other group is in power, right? There's no compromise group. And and so there are, I mean, the other thing about it is that because of our particular geography and the setup of our government, we can have a minority of people controlling all of the levers of power, right? That's that's the case right now with, you know, sort of Republicans being in charge of both of the White House, the and the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  That you can elect a majority of the Senate because of the geography of the country. You can elect a majority of the Senate with seventeen percent of American votes. It's possible.

• 51:43Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Because these states that are so empty, you know, they have very few people in them. They get the same number of seats as states that are, you know, the size of other countries. And so these types of systems allow us to give disproportionate power to smaller groups of people. And in fact, Trump himself, you know, was, he's, he's not beloved by a majority of the country. Like, in recent data I've been collecting, about a third of Republicans don't really like him, even Republicans. They still voted for him.

• 52:16Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, they're not gonna vote for the Democrat.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, exactly. But they don't, they don't feel comfortable with him, they don't like him, they prefer that somebody else was the leader of the party. That's a third of the party, which is, you know, so now we're looking at the, you know, the people that are really a big fan of the current, the current regime are two thirds of one of our parties. So, so that's, that's part of what our two-party system does, right? It allows these minorities that are well-placed in, in our, in our country to control disproportionate power outside of their numbers. And that, and that's, so that, that's part, that's part of the problem. There are people right now working on trying to get proportional representation in the House by basically taking individual states and having them

• 53:01Speaker 03

  decide to, let's, you know, a state that, let's say, has 10 representatives in the House, to just allocate those based on the number of votes that different parties get. So that if you get 15% of a state's votes, you get 15% of their House seats. And that would create new political parties, right? It would allow new parties to emerge, and at the very least in the House of Representatives, to, to have some voice and some, some power. But that's a, that's a long, that's a long road to get that done.

• 53:32Sean Carroll?

  It's a little bit of a long shot, yeah. But, I mean, just to get it clear, you're the professional political scientist here. I think a lot of people think, like, let's just start a third party, that's what we need. But my impression is, the system just doesn't allow that, or just, we'll never succeed.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. Like it, I understand, I understand the motivation, I understand the desire. But if you, if you start a third party and it gets less than half of the votes, then you have nothing, right? Right. The, it's not, it's not like you can kind of claw your way incrementally into power like you could in a proportional representation system. You have to make your, your brand new party, right? Which doesn't have a strong identity around it, right? Democratic and Republican parties have like, those are strong identities for people who identify with those parties. It's hard to pry them away, like even look at Southern Democrats in the 1960s, right? Like, they wouldn't call themselves Republicans. They hated Republicans. They're not going to call themselves anything else.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  So, not only is it like logistically difficult, but it is psychologically very difficult to convince people to identify with a brand new group when you've been rooting for your team the whole time. It's like creating a new sports team and asking people to root for that team, right? It's tough. People have their loyalties and, and they don't want to stop rooting for their team. So these, there are like human psychological barriers and strategic, I'm sorry, structural kind of institutional barriers that, that in our system make it very, very difficult to have multiple parties.

• 55:02Speaker 04

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• 56:00Sean Carroll?

  Is it possible to look around at other systems and, and get some good ideas about how we could do things better?

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, the, in, you know, sort of most European countries, there are many parties. And the nice thing about that is that they form coalitions. So not, no party usually gets 50% of anything. And so they have to work with other parties in order to govern. And the nice thing about that is that when we think about our kind of us/them thinking about our politics, for, when you have a party that's in coalition with other parties, sometimes the other parties are them, but sometimes they're us, right? When they're in the coalition, they're us. And so there isn't the kind of black and white, us/them, win/lose, zero-sum type thinking that American partisans are stuck in.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  If you can think of the other party as sometimes being on your side, then it's, it's much less polarizing. Although I will say, even in European democracies, we are starting to see a kind of left-right divide that has organized a lot of these parties. And so there's a sort of center-left resistance to far, far-right emerging parties that is creating kind of a similar zero-sum type dynamic. And polarization has been rising in those countries, right? Like, like, politics has become more emotional and more angry in those places where, where the divide is starting to kind of settle into two sides.

• 57:31Sean Carroll?

  But I guess, but you made a good point that I'd never quite occurred to me that if you have a system where the structure encourages multiple parties, then working with other parties is almost inevitable. And in the two-party system, it's, it's not inevitable, let's put it that way.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very difficult, actually, especially in a, in an environment like we're in now, where people really hate each other. Voters don't even want people to compromise. And, and democracy is a, the, the whole game is about compromising. No one ever gets everything they want in a democracy. And we now have, you know, two political parties and a, and a huge portion of the electorate that has rejected compromise altogether, which makes it very hard, as we saw in the last Congress, makes it very hard to govern, it makes it very hard to get anything done. And, and it, and it creates a dysfunctional system.

• 58:22Sean Carroll?

  Well, and more, another thing you've worked on a lot is that hating each other can lead to real violence out there in the world. And is it, again, just my impression? Or is there data? Is political violence growing?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  So it's not necessarily growing. So this is my co-authored book with Nathan Kalmo. We started studying these attitudes in 2017. These are like, you know, do you approve of political violence? Or that type of question has not really been asked of Americans very often. And we ask people in other countries all the time. But, you know, we're just like, we wouldn't need to, nobody's, nobody here probably wants violence. So we started asking in 2017. And in 17, I think we were seeing basically around like, it was under 10% of American partisans were willing to say that they, you know, they

• 59:16Speaker 03

  might think that violence might be acceptable. And then over, we're actually still collecting data on this. And by the time we got to 2021, it was closer to like, for Republicans, it was closer to like 20, 25% saying that violence is acceptable. But for Democrats, it wasn't that different, right? And there are some points in time when Democrats were more approving of violence than Republicans. During the kind of Trump impeachments and obviously January 6, Republicans were more approving than Democrats. So it kind of goes back and forth. But interestingly, it really depends on the politics, right? It depends

• 59:56Speaker 03

  on the circumstances. Like, we see big spikes when when Trump is under threat among Republicans. And during, you know, a lot of the Trump administration, we saw kind of slightly higher levels among Democrats because Trump was in power. And violence is a destabilizing, anti-status quo phenomenon. And so people who are out of power are generally more approving of violence than people who are in power. And actually, we had a crazy We did a panel study, which means we interviewed the same people four times, multiple times. And we did it in August, September, October, and then after the election in November of 2024. And what we found was that the like, super Trump supporters,

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  we asked questions about like, do you expect violence to occur after this election? And how close do you think America is to another civil war? And what we saw was the super Trump Republicans, 70% of them, expected violence to occur, and basically expected civil war. And like, 30% of everybody else in the country felt the same way. And then, this was in like, September. And then in November, after the election, those numbers for those Trump Republicans dropped back down to 30-ish percent to where everyone else was. So it kind of tells on who they thought was going to do the violence. But, but it, you know, clearly, these attitudes are related to political events and distributions

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  of political power.

• 1:01:24Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. Well, but the violence takes very different forms, right? I mean, the January 6th, 2021, when they stormed the Capitol, it's been fascinating, and I haven't followed it very deeply. But the narrative around that on the part of Republicans is weird and a little bit incoherent, right? I mean, on the one hand, it was good. On the other hand, it was the FBI and a false flag operation. On the other hand, it was just tourism. I don't know if they've settled down on the story.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  I don't know either. I mean, so I think for Republicans, right after January 6th happened, a lot of people were saying violence is bad. Like, they disavowed it, they thought it shouldn't happen. And then gradually, the story, the sort of like, the new story that everyone's supposed to tell, started coming out. And that was, it was a self-contradictory story, because it was partly, it didn't happen, everything was fine. And partly, it was Antifa and the FBI that inspired all these people to engage in violence. So-

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's unclear exactly what the Republican line is on violence right now. But one thing that we have seen is that during the Biden administration, like after Trump's presidency, we saw the number of threats to local elected officials, who especially election officials, people who ran the elections in 2020, violent threats to them increased substantially. And a lot of people who run the elections, including a lot of Republicans, were kind of being frightened out of their jobs because they, you know, maybe they certified the election for Joe Biden in a swing state, or they just were the target of a conspiracy theory, or they just were working that day and there was a conspiracy theory

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  about that place that they were working. And so, one thing we've seen is just like a, there was a huge surge in violent threats against these, against Republicans that worked on elections and that didn't participate in the conspiracy theorizing. I don't know if that's still happening now. I mean, that's something to ask, to do some research into is, are those people now all of a sudden being left alone?

• 1:03:33Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Because they certified the election for Trump. But there were a lot of, I mean, I spoke to a number of people individually who were actually really frightened. Some people had to move their houses, people's children were being threatened. It was actually, it was a really scary environment for a lot of people. These were just anonymous phone calls from angry guys.

• 1:03:50Sean Carroll?

  Well, you never know, an anonymous phone call can be a crank or it can be something very, very serious, right?

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:03:55Sean Carroll?

  I would be afraid if I started getting those in any systematic way.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Well, and a lot of those calls had like racist content or sexist content, like women and people of color were much more frequently targeted than white men were. And so, there was a, you know, there was a disproportionate level of intimidation that was, that was aimed at, you know, people who had, had some institutional power, but, but, you know, some people thought they shouldn't.

• 1:04:20Sean Carroll?

  And then we have, on the other side, things like the United Healthcare CEO being basically assassinated. And I gotta say, I was a little appalled at certain quarters of the internet kind of cheering that on in a way more enthusiastically than I might have guessed.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's, there, there is a sense, I think, in the United States of, of kind of class solidarity, but it's broken between the parties. And, and this is one of those things that's like the class, the oldest story in the world, right? It's like you take the, you take the, the working class and then you divide them so that they can't organize and against, you know, whoever the oligarchs are at the time. And, and this was a strategy we saw happen, you know, in during, like, during the Jim Crow South, right? So, so this is not a new strategy. I think there were both Republicans and Democrats

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  who were cheering, who were cheering that assassination on because everybody feels, you know, screwed over by their health insurance. It's a, it's a, it's one of those interactions that we can't avoid. And it's extremely, usually extremely frustrating. And so it's a common experience that, that kind of every single American has is sitting on the phone and being extremely frustrated by somebody telling you whether or not, you know, your kid gets to, gets to stay, you know, stay sick or get healthy. And so that's where I think that came from. I feel like it was actually kind of a, a unique cross cutting experience that we don't have very many of. But, but yeah, no, it was the amount of vitriol

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  that was, that, you know, and the, and the lack of sympathy that we saw was definitely evidence of, of some simmering anger that, that no one has really taken political advantage of yet, you know?

• 1:06:14Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. Well, I remember one of the very first episodes I had of the podcast, I talked with Edward Watts, who was a history of the Roman Republic historian of the Roman Republic. And he, you know, talked about its decline and fall lasted for 500 years. And the very short version is people who were politicians who were not doing well, realized they could raise a mob and threaten the Senate and get their way. And once everyone starts realizing that, there is a race to the bottom. And again, I don't, it can't happen here, right? Please tell me that that is not going to be something that happens frequently in the United States.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  It definitely can't happen here. We're human too, you know? It's like, we have this idea of, of, you know, that's sort of like the, the general story of American exceptionalism is that somehow we're uniquely immune to all of these basic human flaws and, and we're not. But, but the, you know, I think that one, one thing that is in terms of like race to the bottom that I'm seeing right now is not the like mass revolt against the government, but the, but the government turning against itself, right? Like this is sort of what we're seeing in the first weeks of the Trump administration is the, the government itself just sort of laying down and doing whatever they're told, even if those things are anti-constitutional.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  And, and so, you know, the institutions don't, who said it? Institutions don't maintain themselves, right? They have to be fought for and they have to be defended. And, and that's one of the more worrying things I think, I think I'm seeing now is that the institutions themselves, they're not, they're not defending, right? The Congress is not defending itself against the executive branch. That's what the, the founders designed, the, our government to be checks on each other instead of laying down and giving all of our power to one branch. That was, we were supposed to be fighting. And, and instead we're, we're kind of seeing all of this, all of these checks and balances kind of fall apart.

• 1:08:13Sean Carroll?

  Okay, so we're overly polarized. The checks and balances are falling apart and violence is on the rise. What can we do to fix this? This can't be something that we just like sit back and accept.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not sure violence is still on the rise. That's the first thing. Because partly because Trump won and the people who were really threatening violence were pro-Trump people. So maybe, you know, that's the one silver lining of this is that we don't have, you know, we don't have like militias marching down streets right now. Not that we won't in the future, but that currently that's not, that's not happening. I mean, I think the, the long story is that we have to reestablish democratic norms, right? And that is up to everybody. It's not something that can be done by one individual leader, right? You have to have, norms are enforced socially.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  And when, you know, when people are tearing apart democracy and each other and marginalized people and, you know, being intolerant and doing things that our kindergarten teachers told us not to do, we have to tell them to stop, right? And it's up to everybody to do that. It's like, we've decided to just cede power over the way that we behave as adults in this country to the people who want to behave the worst. And there aren't that many people kind of pushing back against that. And, and so this sort of like wave of like rejection of shame from people who are acting in intolerant and hostile ways, I think is, you know, it has to be rebuilt slowly. It's a difficult thing to do though, because this is one of those things where, you know,

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  we know from like cult psychology, that once you have rejected the norms of your main society to go into a group that has different norms, those norms are abhorrent to the main society, right? So that makes it very difficult for people to leave cults because the norms of the cult are very, very different from the norms of mainstream society. And so you, it's hard to come back because when you come back, you have to admit that you did some bad things. And nobody wants to do that. It's a very painful, it's a very painful thing to do. It's why it's so rare for people to leave cults is because it's, you know, a unique person who can go through that process and come out on the other side as still a whole and healthy person. So, you know, I don't know, man. I have a lot of optimism.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  I guess, you know, the optimistic part is like, maybe...

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Government is is invisible when it's working. And and this it's, you know, potentially that it will become so broken by this administration that it becomes visible to everybody and it starts becoming something that people realize they need.

• 1:10:58Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  And and so, you know, potentially by breaking the system, we can build it back.

• 1:11:04Sean Carroll?

  Lot of suffering along the way, but yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  A ton of suffering along the way, right? Government helps us do everything, really. And and a lot of people are gonna have are gonna be hungry, are gonna have, you know, housing, are gonna lose their education, are gonna lose medical care, like, all kinds of terrible things are gonna happen. But, you know, that's what happens when government fails is is your life falls apart, you know, society falls apart when there's no government.

• 1:11:28Sean Carroll?

  I certainly heard, and I'm wondering if there's any truth to this, people on the Democratic side saying that a message, a political message of let's restore norms, let's be pro-democracy and things like that is just not very compelling to the people. It's just too abstract.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And actually, the word democracy itself has become coded as liberal. So when we talk to Republicans about threats to democracy, they literally just blow it off because they're like, that's just a liberal thing to say, like, only liberals care about democracy, which is terrible, that the word itself has become partisan. But but the, yeah, so the the like, shaming is not is not actually gonna work from the leadership, right?

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  The democracy stuff doesn't work because nobody, first of all, you know, Republicans don't care and and no one actually knows what it means. Like, democracy does, it means different things to different people, and for a lot of people, they have no idea what it means.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  And so I think, you know, it might end up just being government, right? The government itself needs to function and it organizes so much of our lives. It tells us when there are hurricanes, you know, it does all of these things that we take for granted. And and and maybe that the the the kind of the new thing is like, hey, look at all these good things that your government has been doing for you since the day you were born and is supposed to keep doing for you until the day that you die.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  A new

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  There's a Suzanne Metler wrote a book called The Submerged State, which is basically like looking at how people, you know, the state itself is invisible to people and nobody understands what the government is doing for them. And therefore, they hate government, right? Because they only see government when it's stopping them from doing something. They don't see it when it's helping them do something. But, you know, maybe the state needs to reemerge and become more visible because, and maybe it will, because, you know, once we stop funding the government, it stops doing its job.

• 1:13:36Sean Carroll?

  Is there also, are there also changes that we can imagine at the more lower level, like the human interaction level? We had Hari Han on the podcast and she talked about, you know, this effort in Cincinnati on the part of an evangelical church to support some causes that would ordinarily be coded as very liberal and it worked. But I don't know how that scales, right? Like, I mean, just do we meet people and realize they're still human beings if they, even if they have political disagreements with us?

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that this is partly like the reason that I think that worked was that the leadership of the church really endorsed it and pushed it. And so it takes leadership.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  And the problem is that that means that we need leaders who are going to behave in a dignified and respectful way.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  And that doesn't get them any, it doesn't help them to do it. It's not really in their interest to do it. The more crass and rude and cruel they are, the more people like them or the more people pay attention to them at least, right? The more the media pays attention, the more people turn and look. We're built this way evolutionarily, right? We pay attention to conflict and good, nice things can wait till tomorrow. But if there's, if there's something bad happening, we need to know right now. And so we're attuned to that type of behavior and that type of communication. And so it works in, in politics, right? It's like the attention, like Chris Hayes's attention economy, right? Like, it's like, it gets attention, bad stuff gets attention. And we're all just, you know, all of these, all of these political leaders

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  are trying just desperately to get attention. And the easiest way to do that is to be a jerk. I mean, it's true, like that's how you, that's how you get it. And, and in addition to that, like there's something about. Like, the Trump rallies weren't just a bunch of really angry people, right? It's like, there is a, there's a thrill in transgressing norms. And, and there was just like, happy, you know, like, people were happy, they're excited. At, at Trump rallies, the crowd is, is thrilled, you know? They're having a great time, it feels really good. And, and sometimes breaking the rules, you know, it's like the kids taking over the, the school, right? The principal's gone and the kids are in charge and they, and like, you run crazy, right? Because you can.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Um, and, and so, there is an element of that, I think, in Trump's kind of rejection of, of polite politics. That, that he is, you know, he's breaking all the rules. It's fun for people, and he's not going to stop doing it. So, we need sort of more dignified leadership, but that's a, it's a tall ask.

• 1:16:14Sean Carroll?

  I mean, the optimistic side of me wonders whether or not, look, our, our system is almost 250 years old. We know a lot more about human psychology and technology now than we did back then. Maybe there's a way to build a system that enhances our, the better angels of our nature, and, and tries to tamp down our less admirable aspects.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Maybe, yeah.

• 1:16:36Sean Carroll?

  Maybe, I don't know what it is.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  So, we have enthusiasm there, right? Like, it's sitting there, and it works. It works the same way anger works. And Obama was able to bottle it somehow. But, but it's really hard to find other politicians who can do that. And it takes, I think it takes real authenticity, and it takes, um, a lot of work, and, and a lot of communication, careful communication. Not careful, but, but correct, like, authentic and good communication, right?

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Like, kind of more of the, of the, like, AOC-type honest and open-type communication. Because that stuff creates enthusiasm. And, uh, and it makes people feel happy to help you.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  And to participate in politics. And so, anger is easy, anger always works. Enthusiasm is not as easy, but it does work. And so, maybe to focus on, you know, focus on a politics that, that, that is, that is built around, you know, hope.

• 1:17:40Sean Carroll?

  I mean, yeah, that would be a perfect place to end, but I just have to, I want to just emphasize this last point, or let you amplify it, because there's a frustration on the part of myself, and maybe other people who vote for Democrats, that the party leadership does not understand the importance of fighting, of enthusiasm, of standing up for what we believe. They, you know, they seem to have this feeling, well, you know, we lost an election, we're going to have to try to find things to compromise on. And it just seems to be such a very basic political maxim, that people care more about seeing their leaders fight than literally what they are fighting for. And it seems to be lost among people who are professional politicians.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  I don't understand it. They, I mean, this is something, I have talked to Democrats, the Democratic Party fully believes that, that if Americans just knew what kind of policies they had enacted, everybody would be rational and would vote for them because of those policies, right? And like, everything I've ever studied, basically says, people don't care about policies, though. They like, they don't. They feel like, they want to feel like you're fighting for them, that you're part of their team, that you're going to win, and the, and the policies themselves are not that important to people. But, but somehow, in the Democratic Party, there's a sense of like, well, if we play on emotions, then that's, that's like crass politics, right? Like, that's not the kind, we're not going to stoop to the level of, of emotion, emotional manipulation. And it's like, no,

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  but that's all politics is. It's all emotion. Like, it's literally that feelings don't care about your facts, right? It's not, facts don't care about your feelings. It's like, you cannot convince somebody with facts to be not angry. It's impossible, right? And so, these are, like, there's no way to argue against emotions with these like, like sterile policy points. And I just wish they would understand this, and especially right now, when like, You know, you can argue that the Trump administration is doing some absolutely outrageous, historic level, sort of corrupt and broken policy. Democrats have the option to use anger right now, right?

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  It's totally within reason that they could actually get their base angry, because they already are angry, right? Channel the anger of their base and turn it into political power. It's great political power. It always works. And like, instead of stoking this anger that everyone's already feeling, they're just like, well, we got to be polite and like, make sure we're bipartisan, right? They have a perfect political tool in front of them and they're not using it.

• 1:20:15Sean Carroll?

  Hardest emotions to get good things done, not just bad things done.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Sean Carroll?

  All right. Maybe more psychologists, more political psychologists in the corridors of power. That's what I'd vote for.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Sean Carroll?

  Lillian Mason, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  Thanks so much. This was fun.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

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