Many Americans think Trump is harming democracy: see him as being undemocratic in various ways. At the same time, Republicans and Trump supporters can view Democrats/liberals as themselves acting in highly undemocratic ways: as embracing various beliefs and actions that violate the spirit of democracy. I talk to Elizabeth Doll, who has worked in the political depolarization/bridge-building space for several years; she is currently the Director of Braver Politics for the organization Braver Angels. She is also someone who has been frustrated with various stances of liberal “defenders of democracy” that she sees as undemocratic and hypocritical. Topics discussed include: Republican-side views that Democrats/liberals have behaved “undemocratically,” the debate over the electoral college; the debate over stacking the Supreme Court; the ambiguity in the word “democracy” and how that ambiguity leads to many things being called “undemocratic,” how misunderstanding each other amplifies our toxic divides, and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources related to or mentioned in this talk:
- Understanding different interpretations of “undemocratic”
- Elizabeth Doll’s Substack newsletter
- Elizabeth’s page on Braver Angels’ site
- On insulting framings that conflate conservative views with racism/bigotry:
- An excerpt from my book
- A talk with researcher Leonie Huddy about exaggerated views of American/Republican racism
- A seminar titled “Political Violence, Polarization and the Prospects for Democracy in the US and Abroad” at Western Washington University, which Elizabeth Doll references as containing liberal-associated ideas she sees as undemocratic
- A paper on left-wing authoritarianism
- Isaac Saul’s TED Talk on how language can add to our divides, and help reduce them
- A talk about the challenges of democracy and what we owe to the “other side”
- A talk about why anti-Trump people should have cognitive empathy for Trump supporters
TRANSCRIPT
(This transcript will contain errors!)
This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
This show sometimes focuses on political polarization and conflict. I see our tendency to get involved in toxic conflict as humanity’s main problem, while also being a problem that’s barely discussed – at least barely discussed in a meaningful, helpful way. That’s why I’ve written a couple books on the topic. I have an ebook written for all Americans titled Defusing American Anger; you can learn more about my work on this topic and see reviews at my site american-anger.com.
In America, we’ve heard a lot of people talking about “democracy” and threats to democracy and “undemocratic” behaviors.
This is mostly associated with concerns about and criticisms of Trump and Republicans, but it’s also true that many Trump-voting, Trump-supporting people see Democrats and liberals as the undemocratic ones. As is true in many toxic conflicts, both sides will see the other side as the ones behaving in the most underhanded and unfair ways. Seeing that this is just a basic aspect of toxic conflict doesn’t require you to think “both sides are equally right”: we’re talking here about perceptions. How we filter the large and complex environment around us to build our narratives. Perceptions are important.
What has been interesting to me is that people on both “sides” who see their opponents as behaving “undemocatically” are often speaking about entirely different categories of behavior. There can be entirely different perceptions and definitions of what “democracy” is and what is “undemocratic.” The ambiguity of these terms lend themselves to very different interpretations. The ambiguity of these terms makes it so that just about anything can be labeled as “undemocratic,” depending on how you define “democracy”.
So that’s why I wanted to talk to Elizabeth Doll, my guest. She’s someone who has been working on reducing toxic polarization for a while; she has volunteered with the organization Braver Angels for several years; since 2022 her title with them is Director of Braver Politics.
She is a Republican-leaning voter who voted for Trump in 2020 but not in 2024. She’s also someone who has expressed frustration with what she sees as often hypocritical behaviors from liberal and anti-Trump people: some people who claim to want to save and maintain democracy are, in her view, promoting undemocratic ideas; for example, efforts to get rid of the electoral college, or stack the Supreme Court, or attempts to unfairly smear conservative-associated stances and remove them from the public square, things like this.
So I wanted to ask her about her views: what specifically was bothering her? What specifically does she see as undemocratic on the Democrat/liberal side? What doesn’t bother her about Democrats? How do her views in these areas differ from other people’s views?
I think anyone who wants to reduce toxic polarization, and anyone who is concerned about democracy, however they define that, or anyone who just wants to be a more persuasive, effective activist: I think everyone should want to understand these different views of “democracy” and “undemocratic” and how people are using these terms. Without curiosity about these different views and interpretations, we’re at risk of always speaking past each other; of just yelling at each other “you’re undemocratic” “no you are” without really understanding why we’re misunderstanding each other.
Some people watching might be thinking, “Why are you focused on this intellectual, conflict resolution stuff: obviously Trump is doing harm to the country right now; obviously he himself is undemocratic; isn’t all this talk rather removed and distant from the problem?”
I’d say the reason you should care about this is that you should want to understand why smart and rational and compassionate Americans supported Trump and voted for him; you should want to understand what leads to his support. And what continues to lead to people not caring about the things you care about. Because in a polarized dynamic like ours, support for a specific leader is less about liking their qualities and ideas and much more about concerns and anger at the perceived threats and insults from the “other side.” To understand Trump’s appeal you must understand why people see their liberal opponents as behaving badly and unfairly, as being undemocratic in various ways; you should be curious to understand why people can come to see Democrats as the “bad guys.” You should be curious to know what bothers people; what bothers people like my guest.
It doesn’t matter if you agree with her points or not; it’s important to understand people’s perceptions and concerns and fears.
If your reaction is just “but Trump is clearly horrible; enough with the empathy for Trump supporters and their views; if you can’t see why Trump is horrible, you’re a lost cause,” then I would say you’re behaving in ways that are similar to Trump voters who take similar approaches; who believe “the time for understanding each other is past; we just need to fight them harder.” There’s always an excuse for giving up on understanding each other; for justifying not caring about our adversaries’ narratives and concerns; that desire to write them off, and say “fuck their views,” is how our conflict continues to grow worse. It is what leads to support for more polarizing, more extreme, more hostile leaders and activists. It is, in the end, self-defeating.
For anti-Trump people who are skeptical about this, you might like a recent op-ed I got in The Hill titled Can we lower toxic polarization while still opposing Trump? https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5158612-can-we-lower-toxic-polarization-while-still-opposing-trump/ You might like checking that out, or maybe you’d like to check out my book How Contempt Destroys Democracy, which goes into detail about these same ideas and attempts to overcome common objections to working on this problem.
It’s also important to recognize that we’ve become polarized around the word “democracy” (just as we’ve become polarized over a lot of words and phrases). This is for a few reasons: for one, Democrat-side messaging about “saving democracy” creates a natural Republican-side inclination to try to downplay and even mock such concerns; this results in a team-based instinct to make in my opinion rather childish arguments like, “well, actually we’re a republic, not a democracy,” even as clearly we are both a democracy and a republic; we are a democratic republic with a representative democracy. Some of our polarization over language has this flavor to it: people see their opponents using language and so we begin to be polarized over words and phrases; so much about conflict is self-reinforcing. Another likely factor in our polarization over the word “democracy” is the name of the Democratic Party; you can see this being a factor in the fact that some Republicans refer to it as the Democrat Party instead of the Democratic Party, as a way to insult them and say that they’re not really Democratic.
But still, even with our polarization over the word “democracy,” you’ll find many Republican, pro-Trump voters expressing support for democratic values in surveys and criticizing Democrats for being “undemocratic.” Political groups are never monoliths; they contain a spectrum of partisan hostility and different aspects of polarization; often, similar views and concerns on both sides will manifest with very different language.
This polarization happens for a lot of words and phrases. I previously interviewed Isaac Saul, the creator of Tangle News, about the role of journalism and news in either amplifying our divides, or reducing them. Related to this topic of language, Isaac has an interesting TED Talk titled 3 Ideas for Communicating Across the Political Divide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=543mYKKh1EE. In that talk, he explores how subtle word choices can inhibit productive dialogue about significant issues — and shows how small (but important) changes can help us all have better conversations with people who think differently than us. To anyone who cares about reducing divides, or just more effective communication or activism, language is key to all these things.
More about my guest, taken from the Braver Angels site: “Elizabeth Doll joined Braver Angels in March 2022 as the Director of Braver Politics after four years of volunteering with the organization and many years working in politics in the Pacific Northwest. She began political work as a teen, when, while interning on a Congressional campaign, she became passionate about improving her community through civic engagement. Since then, Elizabeth has consulted for and worked on many state and local campaigns.”
I have a Substack entry that I wrote based on this talk; it’s titled “Ambiguity in “democracy”-related language and the ease with which we can call disliked stances “undemocratic” https://defusingamericananger.substack.com/p/ambiguity-in-democracy-related-language It attempts to summarize my learnings and thoughts after talking to Elizabeth: I saw three different main ways that people were defining ‘democracy’, and those different ways led to different takes on what was “undemocratic.”
Okay here’s the talk with Elizabeth.
Hi Elizabeth. Thanks for joining me.
Elizabeth: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
So maybe we could, uh, start with what drew you to the work of wanting to work on reducing political toxicity and the polarization problem?
Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I was working in politics. I started doing that very early on. I was a teenager for my first congressional campaign, and I started to see people, even in local politics, breaking relationships with each other, um, whether they were in the same party and just disagreed over tactics, but nonetheless saw each other as political enemies or whether they were in opposing parties.
And it was families no longer talking to each other, friends no longer talking to each other. Um, I started to get really concerned being in more of a rural community that we wouldn’t be able to meet each other’s needs if anything happened, because we wouldn’t know each other. We wouldn’t know what each other’s needs were if people weren’t talking to each other.
I am the type of person that once I noticed a problem, um, then I have to figure out if there’s anything that I can do about it. And if there is something that I can do about it, then I try to do those things. Um, so it was sort of a natural next step for me to start thinking about what I had seen. What was that called?
Oh, it’s called polarization. Okay. Well, can I do something about it? And I spent a lot of, not a lot, but I spent a few years noodling what, if anything I could do about it, and eventually ended up organizing dinners between Republican and Democratic women. Um. And a friend of someone who attended one of those dinners invited me to this thing in the town next to mine called a red blue workshop that was put on by what was then better Angels.
I had my first ever experience said, oh my gosh, this is, this is what I was trying to invent and there’s already national infrastructure. I’ll be a spoke in this wheel and promptly plugged myself in. Um, that was spring of 2018, we’re now in 2025. So it’s been a fair few years that I have been thinking almost single-mindedly about the problem of political polarization and how to mitigate it.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. You’ve been in this early on, relatively speaking for the polarization work. Yeah. Um, so would you care to share, uh, because we’ll be talking about, uh, Trump and, uh, reactions to him. Would you care to. Talk about your, um, your support of Trump and how that’s changed over the years and, and maybe some of your, your voting preferences.
Elizabeth: Yeah. So I am very much an ideological conservative. Um, in 2016, I took the Ben Shapiro attack. I was very much never Trump, um, by which I didn’t necessarily mean never, ever in any election. I just meant never Trump for the 2016 election. Um, but nonetheless, my concern was that Trump was not actually conservative.
And moreover, I wasn’t entirely certain that he would even be more conservative than Hillary Clinton. And so I did not vote for him. I voted for Evan McMullen, who was a write-in candidate. Um, yeah, he was a write-in candidate from Utah. Uh, he, I. Sort of went a little bit off what I think is the deep end after that, unfortunately.
And they came extremely single-mindedly anti-Trump. But at the time, he seemed like a particularly excellent candidate in the tradition, in the long tradition of ideological conservatives. Before, um, in 2020, I ate my humble pie. Uh, Trump in fact had governed much more conservatively than Hillary Clinton would have, and he appointed two Supreme Court justices, um, who I really, really liked and stood by Brett Kavanaugh, even through the whole drama of sexual assault allegations.
And I think that probably any other president would’ve backed down and asked Brett Kavanaugh to step aside and nominated Amy Comey Barrett instead. Um. I’m glad that we ended up getting both a CB and Brett Kavanaugh, and I think in hindsight, none of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh held any water.
Um, I appreciated the term from 2016 to 2020. Uh, I thought it was pretty good. And then January 6th, 2021, I promptly regretted having voted for Trump in 2020. Um, I think that it in fact was a constitutional crisis that Mike Pence, rather than Donald Trump had to call in the National Guard in dc. I think that it is a constitutional crisis that Donald Trump asked Mike Pence to find a way to overturn the electors.
Those are not things that I want from any president at any time, from any party. And that was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back for me on Trump. And after, uh, a lot of the election denial stuff in 2020 also really frustrated me. Um, and I could not bring myself to vote for him in 2024. I feel really, really good about that choice.
Gotcha. Yeah. So that, yeah, that, that’s just a, um, I know I wanted to ask that. I know, I know when I have these talks that’s top of people’s minds, whether it should be or not is, you know, going through those kinds of things. Uh, so yes. Maybe, um, you know, the, the, the reason I wanted to have this talk is because.
You know, na, the nature of our divides is, is such that many people on both sides leaving a side who’s more correct or whose fears are more justified. We know that studies show that many people on both sides view the other side as behaving undemocratically and engaging in undemocratic and, and really unfair ways in various ways.
Uh, but I think, uh, you know, also the nature of our divide is that it can be really hard for people on both sides to understand the other side’s narratives. So, for example, I think there’s a lot of, uh, democrat leaning citizens who would have a hard time understanding that point of view on the right about, you know, that they would say, what, you know, what, what exactly, uh, they would wonder what exactly are people concerned about when, when they say, you know, democrats or, or, or liberals are behaving.
Undemocratically. So I’m curious, would you like to go through maybe some of the things that, maybe we could start with some of the, the things that are top of mind you that you see as top of mind on the Republican side for those things? And then maybe we can talk about your, your views a little bit after that.
But maybe you could talk about, you know, what’s top of mind on the pro-Trump, uh, slash Republican side for, uh, Democrats behaving undemocratically.
Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. So, top of mind for me right now in terms of Republicans behaving undemocratically is the deportations to El Salvador. Um, oh,
and, and sorry, you said Republicans, but I was thinking, um, I, I was actually asking about what Republicans view.
Democrats, oh, the Republican
Elizabeth: perspective on Democratic, on
Democrats. Yeah. And we can, we can get into the Republican side things, but I, yeah, sorry, I thought you were asking me to start
Elizabeth: with my opinions on Republicans and then move
on to the Democratic, sorry. Sorry. It’s hard to, it’s hard to throw in all these terms.
I know. It can get a little muddled. So, but
Elizabeth: too many different, uh, too many uppercase and lowercase, uh, uses of the word Republican and Democrats.
Yeah. Yeah. But my main focus was gonna be, yeah. What’s, what’s in republican’s minds when they’re, when they’re saying Democrats are, have been, uh, behaving un undemocratically.
Yeah,
Elizabeth: yeah. Usually top of mind for most Republicans are the, the SCOTUS reforms and the anti electoral college push. Um, both of those things are regularly talked about by leaders on the left. Um, whether it is Chuck Schumer or ProPublica, um, or Nancy Pelosi, um, or a OC, there is a consistent push, um, usually admittedly from the progressive left, um, more than the liberal left, but certainly still some comes from liberal, left congressional reps as well, uh, and senators to pack the Supreme Court to expand the Supreme Court to create a retirement status that would only impact Clarence Thomas’ ability to be an active participant on the Supreme Court.
Breathless reports sharing that conservative justices have really not violated any ethics rules. But doesn’t it feel like a con, a conflict of interest that conservative justices are friends with influential conservatives? No mention of the close relationships between progressive justices and the amicus briefs that come in.
No mention of the relationships between the progressive attorneys, uh, testifying, for example, uh, chase Sangio and his connection to, um, the Democrats on the court. It’s only a conflict of interest when it’s someone whose politics they don’t like. Um, they only want to pack the Supreme Court when they think the Supreme Court is deciding in a way that they disagree with.
They only want to expand the court. Be because they want to exchange the outcomes from the court.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: That’s politics. That is undermining a constitutional institution, an enumerated constitutional institution. One of the most important pieces of our federal government to ensure protection of individual rights and to protect us from an authoritarian president.
And they would like often when it rules in a way that is different than they would like to completely change it and to allow it to be altered for their political ends. And that is the exact opposite of the purpose of the Supreme Court. It is, while it is small D, democratic in the technical sense. I think that one big thing that is missed is when the American people think about democracy.
They’re not just thinking about the technical small d democratic sense of a massive people voting, majority vote only for things. Instead, they’re thinking about the American system that is outlined in the Constitution. That’s what most people mean when they say democracy. And I find there’s a bit of a Martin Bailey on the left sometimes, particularly in the quote unquote pro-democratic groups, um, where they pretend that they’re talking about the mot of our system of government built, uh, established on the Constitution and supported by the founders, and then they switched to the Bailey in specific policy arguments of small D democracy.
And one voice equal. One person equals one vote in every circumstance, and majority rule is the best thing that we could have. Mm-hmm. I find that to be incredibly deceptive. I find that to be incredibly undermining toward our institutions, incredibly undermining of the constitution, and really not much different than the anti-democratic actions of the rioters on January 6th.
They both wanted to overturn constitutional provisions, but one of them wants to overturn a constitutional provision to help progressives and the other wanted to overturn a constitutional provision to help Trump.
Yeah. The um, I mean, I do often in my book, diffusing American Anger, I talked about the different.
Interpretations of democratic or democracy. You know, there’s all, as you’re, as you’re getting at, there’s, there’s different ways people can use that, which I think gets at the fundamental way we can be arguing at. You know, people can be arguing at, uh, different angles on those things and completely be missing, you know, uh, understanding what their opponents are talking about.
Because yeah, there’s this, what you’re referring to as small D democracy is this idea that, you know, the, the, the conceptual idea that we should hear, or from many people, and many people should be involved, or, you know, that many people should be respected, many groups should be respected. All the, these kinds of more conceptual ideas.
But then there’s, you know, the idea that people are using democracy to refer to these specific rules that we have that, you know, are in the Constitution. So there, there’s these different ways people are, are, are coming at the, the argument depending on, and, and I see a lot of team based thinking in it, right?
It’s like. Because you can justify, depending on how you parse that language, you can kind of justify any kind of team-based thing you want to justify, depending on how you interpret. You know, like, oh, if you think Republicans are doing something unfair, you can label that as undemocratic. Right? Pretty much no matter what it is and kind of, you know, vice versa for any, for, for any team based thing.
So I think the, yeah, the, the ambiguity in the language there, which I think gets into a lot of ambiguity for a lot of these contentious issues about the language we use because people can be using so many different terms in, in so many ways. But I’m curious if you have anything to add on that, that ambiguity in that of the, of the democracy language?
Elizabeth: Just that I find it incredibly frustrating as a conservative when I talk to progressives about the. Anti who are panicking about the anti-democratic actions on the right, and I asked them, well, do you support the electoral College? Like, well, no, we think that there should be this national popular Vote compact.
Okay, well, the National Popular Vote Compact is an end run around the Constitution. It is an attempt to avoid the necessity of a constitutional amendment for an enumerated constitutional process. You are also undermining the Constitution. Explain to me why you are so concerned about the anti-democratic actions on the right and you haven’t even noticed your own support for anti-constitutional actions.
Because most, even most progressives are not thinking about the conflict between having a. Republic with democratic leanings or a constitutional republic, um, whatever word you wanna use for that. Um, versus having a direct democracy. And it’s difficult because on one hand, yes, I am absolutely advocating for the support and continued, um, continued existence and strength of undemocratic institutions.
But undemocratic institutions are the point in our constitution. It’s why Benjamin Franklin said, a republic, if you can keep it, this is the way that our government was intended to be. And if you say that anti-democratic actions are those that are trying to tear down the system of constitutional governance that we have, I have questions.
When you are only upset about the right and not at all upset about things happening on the left, it drives me up a wall when I hear people advocate to get rid of the electoral college via a state compact that is quite literally trying to avoid the legal mandate of a constitutional amendment and try to undermine the Second Amendment and try to undermine the First Amendment, the freedom of speech.
But they’re concerned about my side of the aisle being anti-democratic. Like, let’s, let’s talk.
Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, I think there’s a couple, yeah, a couple things in there that I think about where it’s like, regardless of whether you like it or not, it, it always perplexes me when people talk about it as if it’s something that, you know, we should easily get rid of or, or can, can easily get rid of.
Because whether you like the electoral college or not. It is part of the system of American, you know, government. It’s, it was embedded in the system. So yeah, the, the idea and, and then the other thing that strikes me is, you know, the getting back to the team-based interpretations, because I think we know that if the shoe was on the other foot, we’d see many people making the opposite arguments.
Right. A lot of, a lot of the arguments that we make on these things is depending on like how, you know, power, basically, like who, who has, who has the power. So if the shoe was on the other foot, you’d see, you know, Republicans arguing for the popular vote and you’d see Democrats arguing, um, um, the, yeah, for, for the electoral college.
Um, but yeah, I, I, I think, you know, and, and the, I I think it gets, the thing that bugs me about liberal side arguments on that is not understanding, you know, what’s bothering you and other people in terms of. Tr trying to act like these things should, or could easily be gotten rid of and, and not, not really, uh, grappling with the fact that these are, you know, part of the system of government, whether you like it or not.
And, and you have to take that seriously and, and, and think about that seriously, and not just try to, like you’re saying, create an end run around it. Right. Uh, and then, yeah, B is acting as if any of these things are obvious ’cause like, getting to the effective affective of polarization, of treating people with contempt to disagree.
You know, I see a lot of that too, where it’s like, you know, acting as if you’re an idiot for, uh, thinking the electoral college is a good thing or, or, you know, these kinds of things. Um, getting to that, the contempt that people will treat. People who, who disagree with them. That that’s, that’s another thing I, I see in that area.
Elizabeth: Yeah. I’m gonna push back just for a second here. On the notion that if the shoe were on the other foot, you would see the same behavior from Republicans opposing the anti-democratic institutions. Um, I think that that hasn’t been true for a long time, but you are starting to see that now in the political realignment.
Um, I think that the Democratic Party for a lot of decades at this point, basically, I think since, uh, William F. Buckley kicked the birchers out of the Republican party, um, you have seen the Democratic party increasingly become a grievance constituency that is more reactive than ideological in any way.
And the Republican party was deeply ideological in. Almost all of its senses, more than a grievance constituency, I would argue even really until 2016. I would argue that you started to see some of that in 2010. Um, really with the Tea Party movement, even though I was a part of that movement and a lot of really wonderful people joined the party and are ideologically conservative as a result of the Tea Party movement.
Um, I think that there was also a lot of grievance built into some of the people who joined, um, the, the Tea Party movement, the, the uprising, uh, the populist movement,
and now I think it’s much more fully fleshed out. The Republican party’s transition into a grievance party that mirrors the Democrats. Um, but I think for many, many decades you had a party that, um, for example, the whole Federalist Society, um, was built in response to the Progressive Burger Court. And it wasn’t built on an idea that the Republican Party would have its own expansive definition.
That hasn’t happened until now with the advent of common good, so-called common good constitutionalism. Instead, it was built on the idea that we would have an, the most historically accurate interpretation of the Constitution that was possible, that we would treat the Constitution as a dead letter that could be known according to original public meaning at the time, rather than a living constitution that fit our will.
And so I do wanna, I do wanna push back on that conception just a little bit that, um, I. It has always been a team-based sport. Oh yeah. Definitely not. Definitely not. ’cause I think it is much, definitely not always.
Yeah. It’s become more team based is what I mean. You know, and especially in the past, you know, 10 years.
But even like, you know, with all the, the partisan hostility ramping up over the last, you know, 15, 20, that’s what I was mainly referring to is I, I, you probably agree with me that we see more people on both sides regardless of, you know, who we think is more wrong or right, or more right. I, I, I think you’d probably agree that we see more people filtering things through, you know, justifying things through a team-based lens of like, okay, if my side, you know, if it helps my side, I, I’ll be more okay with it.
But yeah, 100%. I feel like that’s absolutely, that’s definitely gotten worse in the, you know, as time has gone on. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, um. So, do you want to Yeah, that. Okay. So we talked about the, yeah, the electoral college, the SCOTUS reforms, uh, what other big things on your mind there? Uh, well, one thing I did want to preface it with is I think there’s two when it comes to things that bother, uh, bother Republicans or, or bother anyone really about the undemocratic actions, you could kind of group them into the ways that, uh, people treat their opponents.
You know, for example, Democrats reaching for ultra pessimistic views of Republicans and what motivates them. You know, that that’s a whole class of how we speak and treat about our opponents, which can be viewed as undemocratic and insulting, you know, be treating people as if their concerns are not, uh, relevant or, or not rational.
Right? That, that, that, that’s a whole class of things you could fit into that large category apart from, you know, the thing. Actual behaviors like, um, you know, trying to restrict Trump from, uh, being on the ballot, like actual, uh, actions that are taking. So, so I, it might be helpful to think about it in terms of the, the kind of insulting, uh, views or framings of opponents versus the actions.
But, um, I don’t know if you want to talk about other, other things that are top of mind for, um, undemocratic actions though, for, for you.
Elizabeth: Yeah. So, um, you told me you wanted to hear it all, so you see I have a lot of bullet points on my list. Sure, sure.
Yeah, go ahead.
Elizabeth: So I can, to, to talk about what you were mentioning.
Um, the racial resentment scale is something that has frustrated me more. As I have become someone engaged in depolarization and really, uh, dived into the peer reviewed academic literature around political polarization. Um, when I was a, but a young Republican conservative, uh, I was always hearing people call Republicans racist, and I just sort of thought this was a stereotype.
I didn’t know it was based in anything. I had never seen racism. Um, it wasn’t until, uh, I I, and I’d heard myths about like the southern strategy and oh, Republicans appealed to racist southern Democrats, um, to win the south. Well, the south didn’t actually fully flip to Republicans until the aughts. So if they had a southern strategy to win racists as a.
That as that being the primary point of a campaign like that was a pretty sign significant failure. Um, and it didn’t start in the places that were, that you would most expect, um, to have, uh, to have serious problems with racism. Um, instead it was sort of a, a, a mobility change and it was upwardly mobile, um, middle class people who started to trend positively toward the Republican economic view.
Um, and Democrats held the South for a very, very, very long time, um, and continue to hold major cities in the south. Um, continually like has not been interrupted by Republicans since. Um, the recon since reconstruction. So that, that was something that I grew up sort of hearing, like, okay, well this is one motivation, but then I started diving into academic literature and polarization and the racial resentment scale is everywhere, and it seems to underlie almost every major studies conclusion that Republicans are racist.
That this is how Republicans have come to be popular. This is why we’re so polarized. One of the bullet points in almost every academic piece about polarization, um, on the right, says the right is more polarized than the left because they appeal to racial resentment.
I’m going to read you Main, and that was the main, uh, thesis basically, and Ezra Klein’s book, which is super popular.
The Why we’re Polarized book, it plays a role in, in so many of the. Liberal leaning, um, conceptions of, you know, what polarization in America is about. Yeah.
Elizabeth: I argue that the racial resentment scale is truly begging the question on whether you believe in a conservative frame on human nature or a more liberal frame on human nature.
That is, that human nature is more self-interested or human nature is basically good. And other interested. So I’m going to read the statements on the racial resentment scale. Irish, Italian and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black should do the same without any special favors.
Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough. If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as white.
Then sometimes they add to further statements in a later expanded version. I think this expanded in the 1970s, I wanna say 76, but I might be off by a year or two. Um, government officials usually pay less attention to a request or complaint from a black person than from a white person. And most blacks who receive money from welfare programs could get along without it if they tried.
I would argue that those first four questions especially, but even the last two also, really it’s just asking the question, do you believe that government is helpful to improving people’s circumstances? Mm-hmm. And if you are a Republican, if you’re a conservative ideologically, and you do not believe that government actually helps people improve their circumstances, and that giving people special favors makes them worse off instead of better off, of course you believe that blacks should do the same without any special favors.
If you believe in equal rights, in equal treatment under the law, of course you believe that blacks should do the same without any special favors. Generations of slavery and dis discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. You’re in the 1970s, you’re being asked about slavery, especially as we get further into the data.
If you’re in the 2010s and you’re being asked if you think that slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class, um, you’re just being asked about how to what degree you believe systemic racism plays a role in individual outcomes.
And that’s not a question of whether you believe that one group of people is less capable than another group of people based on their ethnicity. It’s a question about. Whether you believe the role of government or society has substantially impacted and continues to substantially impact the ability of certain racial groups to get ahead you, that that changes with politics and it’s not about it.
It’s not about a belief in, in, um, one race’s superiority over another race. It’s about a different conception of individual versus collective guilt about whether government help is effective or hurtful About how much, um, an individual’s. View of themselves as a victim versus empowered can change individual outcomes and about your beliefs about individual outcomes.
It, it’s just a really, really horrific scale to measure whether or not someone is racist. Yeah. You’re basically just asking whether or not someone agrees with conservative ideology and calling it racism.
Mm-hmm. And I’ll throw in, you know, and, and for people listening to this, I’ll include in the entry for this episode on my [email protected].
I’ll include resources related to this because Yeah, I’ve done in, in my book, diffusing American Anger, I have a long section about this, exactly what you’re talking about. And you know, there’s academics who examine this, like Musa Garby, I don’t dunno if you read his paper Race in the Race for the White House.
He does a great examination, which. In this paper about the bias in these areas from, you know, liberal academics who basically are, you know, describing conservative views as racist, basically exactly what you’re saying. And I think that his paper is one of the more important ones for understanding how liberals and, you know, slash Democrats have contributed to toxicity.
I think that’s very important for people to understand and to understand how upsetting that is for conservatives to constantly be told they’re racist, right? Like that is a very, that is a very upsetting thing. And, and to understand the American divides, you have to be willing to understand why that’s so upsetting and how that can be viewed as an ultimate kind of undemocratic smear campaign, right?
Like. Uh, so yeah, just to say there’s, there, there’s many things to, to say there, and I think it’s very important to understand that aspect of our divides. Yeah.
Elizabeth: And also incredibly frustrating to me now is that it has opened the Overton window incredibly wide to allow actual races to sneak into society, um, and to sneak into acceptability because it’s not just Republicans that stopped considering racist to be a serious smear.
Normal average Americans recognized that people were being smeared as racist who weren’t, especially in 2020. Um, it became totally unavoidable. Even the term white supremacist lost its power, lost its meaning, and now there are no superlatives left from which to expel. With which to expel people who have actually horrendous condemnable views on race.
It’s the boy who haven’t,
boy who cried wolf kind of effect written it is 100%.
Elizabeth: Yeah. The boy Who Cried Wolf
For, for, for lots of things, for authoritarian, for fascist, for undemocratic, all the, all these kinds of labels. It’s like, I mean, it, it feel, yeah, it feels like so many of these things have been weakened, which I think helps explain, explain, you know, how, how, how these things unfold in conflict, where everyone just gets burnt out.
When you see so many labels like that thrown around and then, then, then it’s becomes increasingly hard to distinguish what’s going on and what actually is the bad things versus what’s being overstated. Right. It, it, it just creates this extremely confusing environment where, you know, I, I, I read the paper and I constantly have to do my own work to determine is this, is this a really bad thing or is it a standard thing that’s being blown out of proportion?
Right. So, yeah.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And frankly, most people aren’t doing that. Most people are not. You and I, when someone is called a white supremacist, going to check, is this person actually a white supremacist or is this person being accused of white supremacy because they violated a progressive taboo?
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: Mm-hmm.
And you either get one side or the other, you get cancellation without cause, or you get acceptance without warrant. And neither of those is a good situation to be in. You want your words to have power, you want to be able to say that someone is very bad and have people take you seriously. You want to be able to say, this person’s views are abhorrent to a polite society.
And have people say, yes, that means something. ’cause right now we’re in a world, I’ve been called white supremacist twice. Once by a ginger in a workshop because, uh, we didn’t, we, I wanted to stick to the schedule allotted for a particular exercise within the workshop. I’ve been called a white supremacist because I advocated for a group of parents to be allowed to reinstitute a policy that was in the public school in my district until 2020 that required the school district to notify parents when the school was going to be discussing a controversial issue.
Yep. I think, uh, neither
Elizabeth: one of those things are white supremacy.
I, I, I’ve been called all sorts of names doing this work, um, myself. Yeah. Um, so I, and I think some people listening to this might think like, oh, what do, what do these kinds of. Negative, you know, pessimistic views even, even if they are bad.
What does this have to do with undemocratic things? You know, people who, liberal people who are thinking about things they view as undemocratic on the right, or from Trump. But I think it’s very important to understand how all of these things are related, right? Like ultra pessimistic treatment of our opponents can be viewed as, uh, as undemocratic, as unfair, which can in turn, lead to not caring about, you know, things that might be bad on your own side.
So just to say like, yeah, all, all these things are related in the sense that
Elizabeth: the other side is doing their worst, so why wouldn’t we do our worst?
Right, exactly. Yeah. And it’s like, why should we care when you guys didn’t care about how we were treated, et cetera, et cetera. So I, I, I think it’s very important to understand that’s how, that that’s just how things get worse in a conflict.
In in general. Yeah.
Elizabeth: And further, like the, the abuse of extreme terms is. Directly related because you have terms like antisemitism, terms like authoritarianism terms like fascism that mean something in a technical sense. And that should be scary to people. That should be a red flag or a flashing neon sign, let’s say.
You should be afraid and you should check yourself, and you should be cautious about what you do from here. And those words no longer have meaning because they were used to describe things that they weren’t, they were used to describe normal process. That was a normal policy. It was just in disagreement with progressive monoliths.
Mm-hmm. I’m sorry, progressive shibboleth.
Mm. I was
Elizabeth: thinking monolithic thought and shibboleth at the same time. And what came out was not the right thing.
No, no. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I would get that confused too. Um. So, yeah. Okay. Uh, do you want to, I know you had some other bullet points. Do you want to hit a few more?
Uh, if we don’t get to all of them, uh, I can always add in into the, uh,
Elizabeth: uh, yeah. How much time do we have? Actually, I just, I should have asked.
Well, I usually, yeah, we should have established that, but usually I aim for about an hour or so. Maybe we could just hit a few, like spend a few sentences on your remaining ones.
Um, and, and maybe you can go in order of ones that jump out as the most, uh, upsetting.
Elizabeth: Uh, yeah. So let’s say the obsession with Christian nationalism, without an acknowledgement, the progressives are actually more politically active than conservative Christian, politically conservative Christians, or that many self-described Christian nationalists and evangelicals, according to data from Ryan Burge aren’t even regular church attendees.
Um, lots of leftwing authoritarianism exists. Uh, nonetheless, until very recently, academics refused largely to even acknowledge that leftwing authoritarianism was a thing, because authoritarianism is right wing government to its extreme on the political scale, and so you just can’t have left-wing authoritarianism.
There’s no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism.
Right, right. Which, and both of those things you just mentioned, you know, the ultra pessimistic things about Christian nationalism, which I also write about in, in my books about, um, you know, the overstatement of that in the, in the worst case, filtering for that and, and the, um, yeah, the, the liberal, uh, side, uh, so-called liberal, so-called, um, you know, authoritarianism.
I, both of those things are related to the, to the racism thing we just talked about where it’s these, these are all things related to like ultra pessimistic framings of, you know, worst case framings of. What’s driving the other side and, and deducement about like what these surveys mean, you know, taking the worst case framings of what these surveys mean and all these kinds of things.
So, uh, yeah. Carry on.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Um, just incredibly frustrating. This was especially frustrating during 2020 when I had state and federal government telling me whether I had to wear a mask and what circumstances I had to wear a mask, how many people I could have inside my own house at any one time, even though all of those people agreed of their own volition to come hang out together and understood the risk of covid, nope, the government needed to make those decisions for us.
But that’s not left-wing authoritarianism, apparently just incredibly frustrating. As someone conservative, all I want is an acknowledgement that there was in fact, and continues to be broad. Um, broad desire for left-wing authoritarianism, whether it’s over the economy, whether it’s over people’s lives in an emergency, what is considered to be an emergency situation, whether the government construes something as an emergency or not, and what they use that emergency to do.
You know, kind of going all the way back to 2012, hurricane Katrina, um, I’m sorry, 2005, hurricane Katrina. Um, where you have the, the government confiscating people’s firearms, personal firearms that they are using for self-defense in a lawless situation because it’s allegedly an emergency. This, this sort of stuff is left-wing authoritarianism, but it is not acknowledged as such.
And it’s incredibly frustrating to only ever hear about authoritarianism on the right and have it be completely ignored on the left. And not just ignored, but actively treated as though people who say it exists are making it up a gaslighting of conservatives who complain about it.
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: Uh,
I think that’s, um, yeah, I think I, I, I think it’s especially angering to people, the, the feeling that they’re being gaslit, like that people aren’t taking their concerns seriously.
Because I think it’d be one thing if we had these disagreements and people talked about them, right. And, and, and, and talked about them in good faith. But I think the, getting to the whole toxic conflict thing, it’s especially angering to people on, looks like I lost you both sides of a lot of these contentious issues when they feel like the other side is just now listening to what they’re.
Are and, and, and denigrating them and treating them like, you know, like there’s no, like, there’s nothing to see there basically. Right. I can’t hear you anymore. That’s, that’s what really takes it to this level of like, it’s, the
Elizabeth: recording is being saved locally,
then they’re not even gonna like, acknowledge my frustrations and my concerns and fears and such.
Right.
Elizabeth: I hope it’ll come back.
Oh, did we freeze up? Oh, I think we froze up.
Oh, are you back, Elizabeth? There we
Elizabeth: go.
Oh yeah, it, it froze. It froze up. I don’t know where it froze up for you, but, um,
Elizabeth: uh, almost as soon as you started responding, it told me that you were experiencing connectivity issues. Gotcha. And it was being saved locally.
I think it got yours. Um, your response. So, yeah.
Actually I, I think I’ll just leave off mine ’cause I was just elaborating on your point. So, um, okay. Well maybe we can, um, yeah, do you want to pivot, um, back to your, uh. Some of your, more of your bullet points about undemocratic, uh, views, concerns?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Um, I had it open, but
lemme know if you want me to drop another link in.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I’ll get it in a second. For some reason it disappeared on me. Do do. Okay. I have back open. Um,
I want to, before we close, um,
oh, what about, uh, oh, what about the, uh, effort to remove Trump from the, the ballot? Would you think of that or what it, what were your, what were your takes on that?
Elizabeth: I was mildly annoyed by it. Honestly, I was a lot less frustrated with it than a lot of my republican friends were.
Hmm.
Elizabeth: Um, because it went through the correct channels.
Hmm.
Elizabeth: Um, people sued, it went to court, the courts followed the law, um, and correct determinations were made in a place of law that was really in question. Um, as far as how this actually works, is it self-executing? Is it up to state governments? Is it up to the federal government?
Is it, um, something that local counties can decide? How is this enforced? Is it, can we actually stop people from voting For someone like lots and lots of. Actually interesting constitutional questions there. Um, which is why I think you saw, like even the Colorado court that is, um, very blue, completely split over what the right way forward was.
And so, so long as we’re actually following the process, um, through the courts, I have no problem with challenging law. Mm-hmm. Um, what I have a problem with is ignoring law that exists in the first place. Hmm. Um, and or openly and flagrantly violating it. Um, and not even challenging it, just waiting for someone to enforce it against you.
Um, if you think the law is bad, sue to change the law. And so it, because it went through the process, it honestly, it didn’t, it didn’t bother me as much as it bothered other, um, Republicans.
Um, I often hear on the right, the, um, they’ll say things about the Democrat Democratic party, you know, not, um, calling them undemocratic because they, you know, didn’t hold a primary for Harris.
And, uh, covered up, you know, biden’s decline. Basically painting the Democratic party is not really listening to the, the will of the people and such. I, I don’t know if you wanna talk about that, that, that, that kind of stuff. I’m a bit, I don’t really, uh, understand it. Some of it seems like just. Objecting to some pretty standard things about how political parties operate, but I, I, I wonder if you wanna talk a little bit about that view.
Elizabeth: I mean, that’s also basically my stance, um, because I have been very involved in party politics for, uh, half of my life at this point. Um, I, I think it’s ironic that the Democratic party is too small, our Republican, to solve its internal problems. It has too much locus of control, um, at the top and, um, too much king making, um, not enough small democracy.
And meanwhile, the Republican party is too small de democratic to solve its internal schisms and become more representative of the American public. Um, I think that parties though, get to set their own rules, so I don’t think it is a bad thing per se. Um, that Democrats have made their party non-representative of the American people.
Just like, I don’t think it’s a bad thing per se, that the Republican party has made its own rules. Um, and they are non-representative of the American people’s views. Um, but I do think that both have resulted in bad outcomes, um, particularly for the Democrats in the 2024 election cycle because they prioritized people giving people power who have extraordinarily atypical political views.
Um, that’s gonna hurt your outcomes. But I do think also parties are motivated by winning elections. And so if you lose enough elections, eventually you change the way that you do things. Um, and I think that’s sort of the reckoning that you see Democrats are going through now. I think they didn’t do this previously when Trump won.
Because, uh, he didn’t win the popular vote, and so it was really easy for them to just say like, oh, he didn’t actually win Americans. Right. He just won the electoral college and rural people and it’s different. Um, but when he, they treated it like
an anomaly when they shouldn’t have, basically. Yeah.
Elizabeth: Yes.
And now that you won the national popular vote, even though it was really narrow, it’s forced them to actually reckon with their non-representative views.
Yeah. That’s interesting to hear you, uh, talk about the party, uh, you know, the, the criticisms of the Democratic party or parties in general, because I often hear people, you know, denigrating the Democratic Party, or I hear people really angry at parties in general.
And at some level it just seems to me like you’re, to me, it feels like you’re angry at the wrong things because at some level you’re gonna have parties and the American system of government kind of pre-select the system, just kind of like. For better or for worse seems, seems to have, uh, systematically produced this two party outcome.
And so at some level, you’re gonna have parties doing party things. So a lot of the anger I I see around that is, is kind of like th you know, these are just parties doing party things. Like we can, we can, we can get angry at them and feel like they’re doing things wrong, but the end of the day it’s gonna be imperfect.
No matter how you slice it. It’s gonna be jostling for power in various ways, you know? So I, I feel like some of the things I see there are just kind of like not focused on, because I see in the polarization space, sometimes I’ll see people say like, the entire problem is this two party thing. And I’m like, is that really the problem?
I don’t think it’s the problem. I think the problem is all this contempt we have for each other, right? Like, uh, yeah,
Elizabeth: I think it’s the contempt. I think it’s a lack of trust. But also I do think that, um, one of the problems with parties is not that we don’t have enough of them, I think we actually have. A lot of factions within the United States, um, depending on how you slice and dice between four and five major factions in the American public, uh, among voters.
But most of those are not actively engaged in the parties. And the entire idea of the party structure is that people would be actively engaged in selecting candidates through the parties. So I think when people are angry at the parties, they think of them as like evil machines that are trying to subvert the will of the people rather than people run organizations who have particular desired ideological or reactionary outcomes.
Um, and because only those few people are involved, you end up with bad political outcomes. We have the power to change this. All you have to do is get involved in the local party. It’s genuinely not that difficult to change the balance of power at the county level. Um, it happens very regularly. Um, but it is a thankless, tiring, obnoxious job and people will be terrible to you.
And so nobody wants to do it. It’s much easier to point fingers than it is to get your hands dirty.
Yeah. And, and, and the, the anger I see some people express the extreme anger. I see some people express it like parties or it, it strikes me as simplistic and, and similar to other extreme angers, people express about like, it’s all the rich people’s fault, or it’s all, you know, Republican’s fault, or it’s all Democrat’s fault.
It’s like there’s all these simplistic framings of like casting blame and it’s like we, this is a very complex system and like, you know, you. I, I think that’s what strikes me about some of these things. Whenever, whenever I see somebody extremely angry and kind of burn it all down, I feel like they’re just approaching the thing from like looking for a scapegoat for, you know, the dysfunction they see.
And it’s hard to easily find clean scapegoats, I feel like, in such a complex system. ’cause everything’s related, right?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I’m sorry. I know it’s already a love node too. And so we’re Oh, I’m okay going over
if you are. Uh, you know, I just, I mainly, for your sake, I didn’t want to draw out too far, but if you want to go through a few more points, feel free.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I’m okay. I don’t have anything more on my calendar until this afternoon, so, um, okay. I’ve got, I’ve got some time, um, but there are a couple of things in particular that I want to highlight here. Sure. Um, I don’t know if you wanna get into talking about, um. How people feel about the current administration at all.
Um, but kind of on the same track that we were going. Um, I can wanna talk about it, a specific experience that I had at Western Washington University because, uh, I finally found the video up. And I think it’s really emblematic of, uh, the anti-constitutional left. So people tell me like, oh, well, sometimes I’ll hear people say, who are the leaders that are pushing this?
Um, I don’t, I don’t see who you mean, like who’s saying that this is a good idea. And to my thinking, like it’s not, it’s not even all political leaders, it’s a, it’s a movement, right? It’s a cultural,
it can be dispersed culturally. It doesn’t, doesn’t necessarily require a. I think that’s the important to understand too, is like some of the things that bother people, it doesn’t, it doesn’t require like major leaders expressing it.
It can be like culturally dispersed, right?
Elizabeth: Yeah. So it’s, uh, it’s a couple of months ago a guy presenting to 60 local Bainbridge Islanders who are fairly influential people, um, about why the national popular vote compact is a good thing and they can, they should support it. It’s, uh, I was at Western Washington University, um, at a seminar on sustaining democracy last year in October.
Uh, and one of the two keynotes, uh, said, quote unquote, uh, quote, I’m advocating that we should repeat the process that we got our current constitution by and say let’s ignore the current constitution. Um, in response to me pushing him on. Whether he was concerned about a tyranny of the majority, if we moved into more of a small D, democratic government.
Um, he said, I don’t see any way to construct any meaningful aspect of the people that inserts states into that, and that the sovereignty of states doesn’t really fit into a democratic conception of government. The states after the first 13 are an arbitrary construction. Construction of Congress states don’t really have a place in democracy, in my opinion.
And yes, I think we should subvert undemocratic institutions and improve them or replace those with democratic institutions. This is a guy who is a professor at University of Wisconsin Madison, who is flown to Washington State, to Western Washington University, who is regularly instructing students. In different places around the country about how democracy should best function.
And he is telling them, he is teaching them in a dispersed way, not as a political leader, not as a guy with a super big name. That actually, yeah, the Constitution is bad. The US Senate is bad. Even states really don’t make any sense, and we should just have a direct democracy where the majority rule and it’s better for majority rule than minority rule because those are really the only two options that he sees.
Mm-hmm. Like
Elizabeth: that.
That
Elizabeth: is what I am concerned about.
Right, right. Yeah. It’s not
Elizabeth: just Chuck Schumer complaining about the Supreme Court in a press conference. It’s also. Every political science professor across the country telling their students that our American Republic is bad.
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: The way that the Constitution has established our government is wrong and undemocratic, and they should undermine it and destroy it and replace it with something else.
Mm-hmm. Explain to me how that is different than the people at the Capitol on January 6th,
which gets into understanding, you know, Republicans, uh, Republican side, uh, anger at academia and colleges and such, which is sometimes you, that’s what bugged me about Ezra Klein’s bookie. He literally in, in, in his wide, we’re polarized book.
He devoted like a single page and basically scoffed at people being upset about, you know, things that were happening in colleges. But I think it’s very important for liberals to understand colleges represent something like they represent, you know. What, what republicans would see is indoctrination into these views that they oppose.
Right. And like, if tho if tho if those are being, those ideas are being passed to people who will play a significant role in the country’s future. You can, it, it should be easy to understand, even if you disagree with it, why, what bugs Republicans about, that kind of thing. Right. Like, because it’s a very influential thing.
Even if it’s not right now, you know that many leaders doing it, it’s like it also represents what future people will think and do and all these things, right?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Right. Um, it was amazing to me. I believe it was in 2023, but it might’ve been just last year, I think it was 2023, finding an article about Tufts College that was trying a radical new experiment, which was having a class that taught conservatism
at elite colleges in the country. I. People should learn how to understand literally the other half of the country. Mm-hmm. And instead, it’s a radical experiment to explain how the other side of the country thinks.
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: That is a wild thing to say. Mm-hmm. That is a wild thing to have happening in the country.
Mm-hmm. And that’s something that is just that, yes, this is what Republicans are upset about. It is, it is the way that progressive ideology has migrated into every single aspect of culture. And it is only in government, mostly because of the Federalist society and the pro-life movement that Republicans have built power in every other place.
Democrats are in control. Right. And that is what you’re seeing pushed back against, particularly in 20, starting in 2020, you’ve got a whole bunch of the old labor left people, the, your Bernie Sanders to Trump voters who were incredibly frustrated with identity politics, who didn’t normally vote, but if they did vote, they can, they voted Democrat.
They considered themselves generally Democrats, if they were pushed on it. Um, but then they felt like the Democrats turned on them. Um, and now they’re voting for Republicans. And now I’m lumped in with them, um, as a, as mega Republican or whatever. And it is unrecognizable to me as a traditional conservative.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, I think the, yeah, I think it’s important to understand too the cultural, the feeling that Republicans have of. Of being culturally dominated helps explain support for someone as aggressive and, and, um, you know, um, who, who, someone like Trump, who engages the way he does, I think feeling like we are the underdogs.
And I’ve written, I read about this in my book, uh, my books about polarization, where I think it’s very important to understand if you feel like you’re the underdog and you feel like academia and entertainment industry and news industry is all aligned against you and treats you like, you know, you’re, you’re some alien, uh, contemptuous group, then you can be more supportive of more aggressive approaches like somebody like Trump embodies, right?
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Uh,
Elizabeth: yeah, I don’t think it’s right. I think authoritarianism is bad from both sides of the aisle. Uh, it’s why I find myself more politically homeless at this moment in time than probably any other time in my entire life.
Right.
Elizabeth: Um. But that is how people feel,
right? It’s not, it helps explain why, why things happen.
And I think we more people should be curious why things happen the way they do and not just filter through the worst case interpretation of like, it’s happening this way because they are bad and they are malicious and they have the worst impulses. And, but that’s what, that’s what these, these conflict lead leads more of us to do is filter for those worst case interpretations as, as opposed to understanding like, oh, I do understand why they’re okay with this, or why they, you know, uh, why they vote for X, Y, Z, why they’re okay with X, Y, z.
You know, the, the curiosity, yeah, the curiosity is important, but so, so few people, you know, fewer and fewer, fewer people become curious. Right. Uh,
Elizabeth: uh, and I think this goes directly to the kind, the final thing that I want to touch on, if you’re okay with that, if you’ve still got a little time.
Sure. Yeah.
Elizabeth: Um, this end part that you mentioned, um, the.
Tendency to speak in ways that make things seem normal and less chaotic than they are. Um,
yeah, I can set that up a little bit. You know, I, I often see it, it, it’s something in the polarization space and bridge building space specifically, because I often feel like there can be a tendency to understand each other, which can kind of come across, or even actually be kind of like this feeling like we’re trying to normalize everything, or it’s like everybody’s, everything’s okay.
Let’s try to understand each other. But, you know, the, it, I think it is important to see, even while we’re trying to understand each other, to see that polarization, toxic conflict does distort and der the way we think, right? Like it leads to more team-based thinking. It leads to more authoritarian behaviors and people justifying things, bad things on their side.
So it’s kind of a tough line to thread when you’re talking about, I. Trying to resolve polarization, toxic conflict because it’s like you do want to understand each other while also seeing that toxic conflict has a way of making us behave in, in worse ways. Right. And, and both the, I think we can thread that line.
It’s like, ’cause, ’cause to resolve, it requires us to try to understand or understand each other more, even as our derangement leads us to instinctually be like, I don’t want to resolve this. They’re just bad. Right. But I think it’s kind of threading that needle is important to me. But yeah, go, go ahead and say if you want to say something about that.
Elizabeth: Yeah. So this is where I think I, uh, always find myself at an Alexander Sol Nitin quote. Um, and apologies if I completely butchered that last name. I. Um, I have only read the name. I am doing a homeschool thing and that I’ve never heard anyone else say his name.
Yeah, I don’t know it myself, but yeah.
Elizabeth: Uh, but he wrote in, uh, the Gulag Archipelago, um, which is about, uh, Soviet slaughter, basically.
Um, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart and even within hearts, overwhelmed by evil, one small bridge head of good is retained, and even in the best of all hearts, there remains an uprooted small corner of evil.
And he has another quote in the same book, if Only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
Who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: Um, more and more and more in an era where so many people are willing to exercise authoritarianism against people that they see as bad and evil. I see the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Um, people do really, really horrendous things.
Promote and advocate for incredibly bad things with the best of intentions. I have had people tell me that the Uyghur Muslims deserved their genocide because they wouldn’t give up their religion, which started with a conversation about how, you know, wouldn’t the world just be so much better if we all could understand each other?
And we didn’t have things that got in the way and polarized us like religion. This is motivated by good, motivated by the idea that it would really be nice if we could all get along. Yeah. And therefore the genocide of Uyghur Muslims is okay because, you know, they could have just given up their religion and that that would’ve then we would’ve all been able, then they would’ve all been able to get along.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, and I see those, I see these kinds of messages regularly in the polarization space. ’cause I see messages from the public and some people who will be like, why can’t we reduce these toxic divides? It’s all the fault of these evil people over here. You know, like, it’s like you’re behaving toxically, but you want to reduce, you know, its, it can be hard to understand that, but yeah, you’re, it is true.
People’s good intentions can lead them to reaching for very, um, bad ways of thinking. Yeah.
Elizabeth: Just, just over the weekend, I had a guy tell me straight up that he supported the Houthis. Why did he support the Houthis? Well, because he really believes that the Israelis are just out there murdering children, and the Houthis are trying to stop them from murdering children.
And whoever is fighting against the murder, the wanton murder of children, uh, they are doing something that is good. Again, the road to utter hell is paved with good intentions.
Yeah.
Elizabeth: People want to do things that they think are righteous, but the justification of self-righteousness leads to extremely dark places.
Mm-hmm. For all of the people that you can condemn as unrighteous. Mm-hmm. This is a lesson of Christianity. Um, I’m a Christian, so it always has resonated with me. Um, but it is also the libertarian message of self-transformation, of individualism, of individual accountability and of the belief that we are all self-interested that we are.
Not oriented toward just doing good things for other people, but that we are oriented toward doing things on our own self-interest. And we are oriented toward justifying those things as being good. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We have to transform ourselves. We cannot transform others for them. When we seek to transform others for them, it’s not really for them, it is for us.
Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth: It is for us to feel good about ourselves. It is for our own benefit to accomplish some good outcome. Mm-hmm. But that road leads to hell. Mm-hmm. That road leads to some really, really, really dark policy places where we do not wanna go as Americans. Mm-hmm. And I think the degree to which people have started to believe that.
We can just punish the evil people in society. And there are evil people, there are evil automatons that are trying to destroy the country. That is the darkest place and also a deeply inaccurate place for us to go.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm Mm.
Elizabeth: And it is an example of with the best of intentions doing extraordinarily horrendous things.
Yeah. Yeah. Well this has been great Elizabeth. Um, if people wanted to follow what you do, is there a place they can follow your work or
Elizabeth: they can, I have a substack. It is understanding politics.substack.com. Great. And also they can find me at Braver Angels, where I run the Braver Politics program.
Awesome.