In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview Dr. Jennifer McCoy (her Twitter), a specialist in political polarization, democracy creation and destruction, and mediation. She has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles, and has acted as mediator in 2002 in Venezuala after a failed coup again Hugo Chavez. Her latest work is Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy, co-edited with Murat Somer (2019).
I talk to Dr. McCoy about what she views as the psychological and emotional forces behind extreme political polarization, how the United States is similar or different from other countries that have unraveled due to extreme polarization, and what might be done to solve these issues.
Transcript of the interview is at bottom of this page.
Links to this episode:
Topics discussed include:
- What’s the best way to define political polarization in a way that doesn’t rely on ideological framing and that can cover any type of polarization?
- What makes problematic “pernicious” political polarization different from normal polarization?
- Psychological aspects of human nature that may make extreme polarization and conflict likely.
- What types of issues can be sources of extreme polarization and tribalism?
- How does the situation in the United States compare to other countries that have experienced intense polarization?
- The difficulty there can be in finding the true sources of conflict, because sometimes the people in the conflict may not really understand the fault lines.
- How polarizing, divisive political operators play a role in increasing division.
- What we all can do to try to tamp down polarization and prevent worst-case scenarios from occurring.
Related resources:
- McCoy et al piece Towards a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies
- Oct 2020 podcast interview with Dr. McCoy: What we can learn from other nations about pernicious polarization in the U.S.
- Video: McCoy presentation on polarization
- GSU podcast with McCoy about polarization
- 2017 Washington Post piece by McCoy on Democrat-Republican conflict
Interview transcript:
Zach Elwood:
Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast hosted by me, Zach Elwood. In this episode recorded October 7, 2020, I interviewed Dr. Jennifer McCoy. We talked about political polarization, how to define problematic polarization and distinguish it from normal polarization, how extreme polarization has played out in some nations, the negative effects that that can have on democracy, and some ideas for what we can all do to help prevent worst case scenarios. I’ll read a little bit from Dr. McCoy’s bio. Dr. McCoy is a distinguished university professor of political science at Georgia State University. She served as inaugural director of the Global Studies Institute at GSU and director of the Carter Center’s Americas Program, leading projects on democratic strengthening, mediation and dialogue and hemispheric cooperation. A specialist on democratization and polarization, mediation and conflict prevention, election processes and election observation, and Latin American politics, Dr. McCoy has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles. Dr. McCoy’s newest research project on polarized policies seeks to determine the causes, consequences, and solutions to polarized societies around the world, including Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, Hungary, Greece, Bangladesh, and the United States. You can find Dr. McCoy on Twitter @jlynnmccoy, that’s the letter J L Y N N McCoy. If you want to learn more about this podcast, you can see episode summaries and links at readingpokertells.video. Okay, here’s the interview. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Dr. McCoy.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Thanks, I’m happy to be here.
Zach Elwood:
Very honored to have you on, and I think your work is very important, and I think that more people should know about it, so very excited to talk about these ideas with you. So, let’s start out with in your work, you attempted to define problematic political polarization in a way that didn’t require talking about the specific sources of conflict or specific political ideologies. Can you talk a little bit about how you defined what you have termed pernicious polarization?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
What I’ve looked at and along with my collaborators, is the idea that instead of measuring the distance between people’s views on issues or values like ideological values, what we’re really looking at are cases when the society begins to divide into two camps, and when it’s oriented around political parties or partisan identities. So, the divisions can be over a number of different things. It might be over specific issues, but it’s often over identities or values that might have to do with national identity or religion, the role of a country in the world, whether people favor nationalism versus a more globalist viewpoint. It could be over geography like urban versus rural interests and ways of life, but the society divides into these camps and the political camps. It might be a coalition if it’s in a country with multiple parties. It often forms around being in favor or against other single political leader who is seen as the leader of a movement to push something new. But, a growing enmity occurs, an antipathy between the groups in suspicion, distress, dislike, and that’s what then begins to break down the ability of a society to come together to problem solve. Governments, legislators cannot come to decisions because they’re so divided. Even the society itself becomes divided within families, within communities, and we begin to see even parallel institutions or organizations like media organizations will be seen as either on this side or that side. Or in some countries, we even see competing universities, competing labor union groups, competing social groups, churches might be divided. So, it really becomes this difficult divide that what we term as tribalism, and it’s an us versus them idea that then has pernicious consequences for democracy.
Zach Elwood:
Yeah, in your work you talk about how each side starts to become more and more extreme, and there stops being, you know, there ceases being this middle ground of people that have cross cutting ties between them and people become categorized as either one group or the other. When I was reading that, I had the image of kind of a seesaw where each political party or each group of whatever story was on each side, and as one group started to move further out towards the end of the seesaw making their side heavier, it was like the other side had to keep moving further away to balance it, and it kind of was this process of, you know, a vicious cycle. Do you think that’s a good analogy for how these things occur with each side having to become more extreme?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Only in one way. They don’t necessarily become more extreme in their positions on issues because again, that’s this idea of a distance in the issues that people feel. But instead, what we see is much more of an identity, and so it’s clashing identities. So, what does happen though is the way the extremes take over within the groups though, is that the most vocal and activist partisans within a group usually have the most extreme views. So, what they do is if somebody tries to be a bridge builder or to look for a compromise or work together with somebody from the other side or some group from the other side, then the more extreme or more vocal, more radical views within the group calls those bridge builders sellouts or traitors, and so people become afraid. People who are more centrist or who are trying to just build bridges and create cross ties, become afraid because they can be bullied, they can be intimidated into simply being quiet. They can be bullied in social media or even from a leader’s mouth, the president’s mouth.
Zach Elwood:
Right, so it’s not so much that their views on topics become more extreme, it’s that the allegiance to the group maybe becomes more extreme.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, exactly and in fact, as their allegiance to the group becomes cemented, they may actually change their positions as the group or the leader of the group changes positions. So, a perfect example of that is the Republican Party under Donald Trump. The Republican Party used to be known for its free trade policies, and Donald Trump made it much more of a protectionist party and much more nationalistic. The party has followed along, and people have changed their views or gone along with that change in the position of the party. So, that can happen as well.
Zach Elwood:
It seems like such an organic process for a lot of these things that I was reading about in your work, where it seems beyond people’s control, it seems like this breakdown, this continual cycle. I’ve been thinking a lot about how there’s so many things that can go wrong in human group interaction, so many potential sources of conflict, and I’ve just started thinking that maybe these things are inevitable. It’s something built into human nature that eventually some large group reaches this kind of downward breakdown, this downward spiral. Do you think there’s something to that that humans are doomed in some sense to eventually reach these points or do you think it’s not inevitable?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
There’s a lot of biology and psychology involved in this. So, I think that you are definitely right to a degree. I like the work of people like Joshua Greene, he puts it in simple terms that we have adapted in evolutionary terms to overcome the me versus us problems. So, for self-interest, if every individual is pursuing their own self-interest, they can eventually deny doing their own self-interest as well as those around them. There’s a parable called the tragedy of the commons that talks about a number of shepherds who have sheep, and they’re grazing on a common pasture that they share. If one of them decides to go out and get a bunch more sheep and overloads the pasture, in the short term, that Shepherd will become wealthier, but in the long term, that shepherd is contributing to overgrazing and destroying the common pasture. So, everybody loses in the long term. So, we evolved as a group to cooperate as human beings. We evolved over millennia to cooperate and to have a comparative advantage. Those groups who cooperate could win in the war for resources and the conflict for resources and food, and that’s the me versus us problem. What happens psychologically in there is that we build this bonding with the us, with our group, with our in group, and we bond with them, we have loyalty toward them, we trust them, we like them, and we don’t know other groups. But, if we come into competition with them for some resources or food or water or anything else, we can become suspicious of them and, you know, eventually even go to war with them. So, the problem that we face as a human society now in the 21st century, is we have a lot of us groups which we can look at in terms of nation states of our countries at the national level, competing against other countries or we can go down even within the country, and you can find different groups within. And what we see is at these levels, us versus them. So, it’s no longer me versus us, it’s us versus them. So, how do we overcome that? Psychology tells us that intergroup conflict means that our in group loyalty and our perceptions of our in group are generally more positive. Perceptions of the out group are more negative, and we view our way of doing things as better than the others way of doing things, the other group, the other country, the other tribe, and that’s ethnocentrism. So, how do we ever overcome that? To cooperate to solve problems that we have within our, you know, and to form an entire nation state, a country like the United States or to cooperate to solve problems at the international level. Whether that’s global warming or access to clean water or peace. Well, we have created as human beings, institutions, and that’s the genius of human beings. That over time, over centuries, we have created institutions that allow us to cooperate, and we decide on certain rules that we’re going to all follow. But, that requires sacrificing something, being willing to trade off a sacrifice for my own individual freedom and liberty. I’m going to agree to follow certain rules, and you think about that even just for traffic rules so that we have orderly streets and driving around the streets. We’ve sacrificed our right to go as fast as we want in order to provide for my own safety and your safety. So, to get back to your question, it’s not inevitable that we have to come into conflict, that we have to degenerate into this tribalism, conflict among ourselves, we have the capacity, we’ve shown it over time to rise above that and to create these cooperative institutions. We just have to remember that and get back to it.
Zach Elwood:
Right, it almost seems like in order to fully realize the importance of stability and negotiation and institutions, it sometimes seems like there has to be a downward spiral to remind people like the outcome of not working with each other, and the chaos that results and violence that results is something we need to avoid. But, it seems like that’s something that people have to be reminded of, you know. If they forget the chaos that results from that, it seems like it has to come back to them.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes it does, it takes a crisis or it takes going down to reach the depths, the bottom that we think, “How bad can it get?” We often talk about how, you know, “What is the bottom? When we finally reach the bottom, we’re going to be ready to rebuild.” No, and then in a lot of times, well, the bottom just keeps going further and further down before. But, generally, a crisis situation or really reaching some kind of depth does give us the opportunity to reflect and say, “Wow, we have got to do something here,” and that’s when reform comes. So, you think about it. Watergate was a crisis moment for the American politic and political body and the reforms that came out of that. We can go back through time and see different moments of crisis after World War I, the League of Nations was formed. After World War II, the United Nations was formed to try to prevent that kind of general conflict in the future.
Zach Elwood:
Right, it seems like the chances of a single country or government being set up in such a perfect balanced way to escape worst case scenarios is very unlikely, but if countries or a country can survive long enough to fix things as it goes, then you have a chance of long term stability, but–
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. If you have to adapt, and that’s why we think of democracy as like marriage. It’s always a work in progress, and you have to pay attention to it. You can’t just take it for granted, you really have to pay attention to it, and you have to adapt to changes. So, when we have technological change, we’ve had tremendous technological change that gives us new opportunities, but it puts new stressors on our institutions, on our rules and the way we interact with each other. So, we have to adapt, and we have to create new understandings and new rules for the way we want to engage. The same thing with demographic change, so we have changes not only in the median age of any society can change over time, but also the makeup of the society, the composition, and the United States is really the first major established democracy to be facing a demographic change. We’re in the group, the racial group that used to be the dominant majority group for since the beginning establishment of the country. We now change and no longer be a majority, there will be no majority after 2040 or 2050. That is I think one of the issues that is causing our polarization today, is this demographic change that is coming and the fears and anxieties that that raises. So, all of these kinds of structural changes put new kinds of stressors, new kinds of anxieties, but also new opportunities. So, a society has to be able to adapt to these, and when we don’t, when we get rigid and stuck in our ways, that’s when we go into crisis.
Zach Elwood:
With all the countries that you’ve studied, if you had to compare the US to another one that you’ve studied, is there one that comes to mind as being kind of similar to our situation or do you see our situation is quite unique?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
We share pieces of what other countries have gone through, but what I think is common to all these cases is the dynamic of how this polarization builds on itself and the process of how it develops, and especially the psychological part of it. So, we can go back to the interwar years and the growth of Nazism in Germany, and you can see a lot of similarities there with other countries today such as Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela that I’ve been studying. You see what’s common there, even Brexit in the UK, the issue of Brexit and the way it divided that society, we have commonalities with all of those even though our country is very different and our wealth is different and our experience with democracy is different. But, the commonality is how as we divide into these camps as you were saying earlier, when you have cross cutting ties, particularly across political parties, when people can identify with each other in different ways and say, okay, for example, in the United States, “I’m an evangelical Christian, I’ve been belonging to the Democratic Party, and I have friends in the Republican Party. I had that– My religious identity crosses over the parties, that’s how it used to be in the past in the United States. Could be the same with the nationality, where did your parents come from? Could be the same with whether you lived in an urban or rural area of the country. So, we had many more cross cutting ties. Those for a number of reasons over the last 50 years, we have actually now sorted into two political parties that are more and more homogeneous with each other. So, the Republican Party is much more the religious particularly the religious right, the white, the older and the more rural party, and the Democrats are the more urban party, they’re more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and religion, but they have people who have sorted into those are the more urban dwelling peoples and minorities in the society have tended to join the Democrats. So, we’ve got this sorting going on there, and as we have done that, we’ve seen this in other countries. So, in Turkey, it was more of people who wanted to bring in more religious views into secular nature. So, it was a religion versus secular kind of division. In Venezuela, it was more of a class division, so we see different types of division. But, as the societies divide and their political identity conforms to their different social identities, that’s where we have erased those cross cutting ties, and people begin to associate only with people in their own partisan camp. Even socially, that’s who they affiliate with, and that’s what creates this whole psychological dynamic of the distressed and the dislike and eventually the feeling that the other camp is actually an existential threat to the nation, to the way of life, and therefore people are willing to support leaders actions that may actually degrade democracy or erode democracy because they fear so much the other group getting into power because they will threaten their way of life. That’s the dynamic that we’ve seen that is common across these cases. Then the third thing is going back to when I mentioned the interwar years and fascism, this tendency to use moralistic language which is us versus them and we us we are the good and the virtuous, them are usually evil in some way. So, we’re identifying who are the enemies, who are morally unrighteous and unjust, and so that we see in common as well.
Zach Elwood:
Do you feel like it’s hard sometimes to understand the true source of a conflict? For example, there can be many ways to parse and examine a conflict and many ways to view it, do you have a sense of how that can be difficult to tease out? For example, if a group might have some racial or cultural feelings of persecution when they’re the majority group, they might not be willing to admit that or there might be other reasons these groups hide their true feelings or maybe they don’t even understand the true sources of feelings, do you have anything to say about how it can be difficult to find the fault lines?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
It certainly can be. One of the things we’ve seen is that polarizing political leaders or entrepreneurs, somebody who wants to be a political leader can identify an issue and make it a divisive issue in a country, and they can almost create, almost engineer a divide that may not match what could be the underlying cleavages or social divisions in the society. So, what we may have is something that comes out as the rhetorical division, maybe different than what’s really underlying the division. So, there was a whole debate as we saw like populist leaders emerging in Europe, and as people were watching Donald Trump emerge in the United States that were saying, “Oh, the rise of populism, these people are getting elected because people worry about losing their jobs. It’s an economic anxiety.” Other people were saying, “No, it’s a cultural anxiety. What they’re really worried about is losing their dominant place or their way of life in their society, and it has to do with underlying racial resentment and this demographic change and this kind of thing. So, you know, there have been debates to try and understand why people would vote for a particular party or a particular leader, and they may say different things. Then we also look at the messages that the political leaders are giving. So, yes, it is often difficult to say because people may not even recognize themselves, what it is that’s really underlying their decisions to vote for somebody or to favor them and to engage in this conflict with another group.
Zach Elwood:
In Venezuela, you acted as a mediator there, did it take you a while to feel like you understood where the psychological and emotional fault lines were or did your opinions of that change over time, and did that make you think about things differently than maybe an average Venezuelan citizen thought about the conflict?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
I spent a lot of time listening to both sides, and I could see they’re really suffering, so you know, so completely differently. This is part of what happens is we have these two virtual realities, and people just when you get into this tribal kind of intergroup conflict, you see things in a distorted way. There’s a few kind of psychological things happening there. One is that we tend to stereotype the outside group, and we also generalize, and we assume they’re all the same, and we exaggerate what we think about that group or even who’s in that group. So, for example in the United States, you can see that Democrats think that Republicans are much richer than the party is and republicans think that the Democratic Party is predominantly black or African American and neither of those are correct. In Venezuela, what I really saw was that there was a conflict over power, but it was really over the distribution of the society’s wealth and resources and how equitable was that. So, when Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, he was supported by people who had felt marginalized, invisible, ignored by the previous political elite, and he promised that he would bring– So, they were the left out, he promised that he would bring them along. Those who opposed him or who had previously been in power, felt that the people who supported him were manipulated, they were misled or they were just uninformed or uneducated. They just couldn’t believe that they would follow somebody like that, and they didn’t recognize that not only did Chavez promise these people and the way he got his supporters was to promise to more equitably distribute actually the oil wealth of the country, but he also was giving them an identity, a representation that they felt they hadn’t had before. They felt like he was one of them, he actually came from a more humble background, and he his skin was a little bit darker than previous leaders. So, they felt there was an identity component to it as well as a material benefit component. That just was not recognized by the other side. So, you see this real distortion of views that makes it even more difficult to overcome these divides.
Zach Elwood:
Speaking about one side saying the other group is all the same and then that really feels to have amped up so much in the past few years. I see so much of liberals speaking in ways that act as if all Trump supporters are equivalent to the worst most hateful Trump supporter and obviously, conservatives often use similar language to describe liberals. It really feels like that has ramped up, and I’m curious if you see the role of language in this, there’s kind of this natural progression of with the language being used, it makes the other side feel persecuted which heightens their feelings of persecution, rage, which amplifies their use of language etc. I’m curious if you see being careful with language, which is something I try to do and try to encourage other people to do in focusing your anger, where it really belongs at the leaders or the people you’re criticizing. Specifically or not, like everyone in that group, I’m curious if you see that as a key part of what we can all help do to fight polarization.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Definitely, words matter, and particularly words of people who are in positions of power. So, political leaders in particular, but also other kinds of social influencers. That’s why whenever people say, “Don’t look at what they do and don’t look what they say, just look at what they do.” I said, “No, it matters what they say, it matters tremendously.” Another example from Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, one of the things he did, a detrimental thing that he did was begin to identify enemies publicly, and he started by attacking the media. In that sense, this is a pattern that we’ve seen from these polarizing populist leaders, and President Trump follows this pattern very, very carefully. Chavez started by identifying the media as the enemy of the people, and he would actually invite and he would actually call out names, and he was inviting tacitly his most ardent supporters to actually not only harass, but at times physically attack those individuals who he has identified as enemies, and that is very dangerous. So, a leader doesn’t have to say go out and round them up or attack them violently. But, the ardent supporter will read into those words, that they are enemies and its okay, and I’m being loyal to my leader by going out and rounding up or hurting these other people. So words, words have actual physical consequences in that sense, but they also contribute to this real sense of us versus them and creating these moral divides between us. The political polarization is really pushed by polarizing leaders by politicians who choose polarization as a strategy to win elections and then to keep power after they’ve gotten there. So, it is actually a strategy. It’s not just a state in a society, it’s actually a strategy. So, politicians have choices on what they’re going to do, they don’t have to use this demonizing insulting rhetoric, and we as citizens don’t have to use this demonizing insulting rhetoric because all that’s going to do is push people further away from us. When we feel insulted, when we feel looked down upon, then our resentment grows and we’re going to be much less willing to reach out or to even try to understand your point of view or to reduce our suspicion of you.
Zach Elwood:
Right, and that’s something I try to point out to Trump supporters, Trump supporter acquaintances. I have about how divisive Trump’s language is, and that’s not just his everyday language, but I’m on his mailing list, his email list. Literally every day, multiple emails a day, he’s demonizing the other side calling half of America not real Americans, etc. It’s just it’s very divisive, and it’s troubling to me that more conservatives don’t understand that, don’t see the danger in that because I feel like I understand Trump supporters pretty well, like I’ve devoted a lot of time to understanding their grievances and their emotional states about this. Some of them just act as if he’s a normal leader, as like what’s the big deal? I really feel like they believe that because in their opinion they can point to other things that bother them about other leaders, but I try to point out to them, “Look at the language that he’s using, look at how he’s dividing us every day.” And on the other side, I mean, people like not to call out people. Well, I guess I am calling out people, but what’s his name? Rick, Rick Wilson, is that his name? The GOP? Yeah, Rick Wilson, he has taken some heat rightfully for acting as if all Trump supporters are ignorant hicks, you know, and that is just horrible, unhelpful language. Even if you believe it, you’re supposed to be the mature person in the room, you’re supposed to be the leader, don’t use this language. I mean, criticizing the leaders and the people making, pulling the strings is one thing, but to group everyone into as if all these supporters have all the insight you do or have all the same opinions you do or should have the same insight you do is just so unhelpful. I see this kind of stuff every day from people I would think would know better, it’s like even if you believe that. For the greater good, let’s try to bring people together, but–
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
You know the group Braver Angels used to be called Better Angels, now it’s called Braver Angels that formed after the Trump election specifically to try to address this divide, to cross over the divide. They have all these workshops on how you can have respectful conversations, and they just talked about– Well, you respect the person, doesn’t mean you have to respect the ideas, you have to respect the person. So, there’s a difference between the ideas that they hold and the person themselves, and we have to recognize our common humanity. But, they have this one workshop on depolarizing within your own group and that is when you’re with your own group, and so let’s say you’re with a bunch of progressives that are just talking about how the world could these people, these idiots support Trump? The language is going that way. There’s specific ways that you can actually bring about this idea that you mentioned before which is, well, I was talking to my neighbor or my relatives the other day, who supports Trump, and they actually had this interesting point of view. Apparently, they don’t all believe this particular thing, and he tried to show that there’s heterogeneity among them, you know? So that we move away from our stereotypes and assume that they’re all the same. Then, of course, if you’re on the other side, you do the same thing. Looking at liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever you want to call them. That’s one way that we as individual citizens can begin to try to break down these rigid groups that we seem to have formed with such enmity, is to recognize the variation and to try to find again those common ties that we used to have. Whether that is as big as love for the nation and patriotism or sharing our hopes for our children or sharing our admiration for a sports team, you know? Try and go back and find those common ties is another way to try to break down these rigid groups.
Zach Elwood:
Right, and I feel getting into some lack of free will kind of what control do we really have? I mean, I fully believe that if I had the same biology and the same upbringing, same environment as another person, I would be that person. So, in that sense, from a sympathetic understanding point of view, it’s hard for me to judge anyone in the sense that they have such different backgrounds and such different pool of knowledge and a different experiences. It’s like you said, we can judge them and try to prevent them from doing things as much as we want. I don’t feel constrained in that aspect at all. I mean, I’m careful with my language, but I don’t feel like that constraints me from doing things or achieving goals. But, I think for many people, there’s just this lack of empathy for and kind of like cutting people off and saying, “Well, I can’t possibly see their point of view, and I’ve been disappointed in many liberals these days because I think they’re not trying to see what it is that is bothering Trump supporters. Obviously, there’s a class of Trump supporters that are very hateful, but there’s a large group of Trump supporters that live in a different bubble than you do, and they see the best of Trump for example and see the worst of liberals, and they’re fed that day after day and they also have friends and family who are more extreme in a similar way that many liberals don’t want to offend their more extreme liberal friends and family, they keep quiet. There’s all this range of dynamics that happens, and the thing that interests me about your work is describing this breakdown of sympathy really, of not seeing the human in the other side which is just a self-perpetuating cycle.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Exactly, and the problem with where we are today is that we’re in the middle of an election cycle, and the stakes seem extremely high. So, this is a really hard time to try to do that kind of breakdown that you’re talking about. Breaking down these stereotypes and biases because the stakes seems so high when we’re in this high level of pernicious polarization that we’re in. So, it’s all– It’s kind of all hands on deck to defeat the other side because we view it as such a threat that we have to do anything to defeat it, the existential threat. That’s when people are willing especially in the extremes to go to almost any length to defeat the other side. So, that’s the threat to democracy. But, then we have to ask ourselves, so what’s going to happen the day after or the week after or whenever we find out the results of this election which will take a while? But, what’s going to happen after, and we’ve got to think about that. Can we come back together after possibly a close election that, you know, one side or the other is going to feel betrayed by the other side. So, we’ve got to figure out how to come back together then. You know some of my solutions are also we’ve got to reduce the stakes of our elections. So, there’s a psychological stake, but it also has to do with our institutions. The way our country is set up, has particular idiosyncrasies that create this sense that the stakes are so high that whoever wins will take it all. So, we have this winner take all. This happens in a situation of high polarization, we have this zero sum game perception that anything that your side gains means a loss for me cause of the winner take all nature of our elections, this happens in many of the countries that we’ve looked at, and we can get into that if you want to but we can also keep going on the psychology.
Zach Elwood:
Well, I wanted to throw in one thing that was especially– Kind of changing topics here, especially surprising for me in your work. One of the videos I watched of yours where you explained how in your in the measurements that you did that liberals as a group, especially Bernie Sanders supporters were more populist than Trump supporters. Can you talk a bit about how that can be explained with the measurements that you used?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, so populism is this word that’s been thrown out a lot over the last several years in the media by people. So, people have different conceptions of what it is. The way that my co-authors and I use it and the scholars that we work with is a sense that populism is three things. So, a populist leader would have three characteristics. One is they always have an enemy or an establishment that they are against. So they are anti elite in some way or anti-establishment. So, they’re fighting against the elite, and they’re fighting for the people, so they’re pro people. But, the people is some usually ambiguous group of people that are the common people that they will represent. So, it might be something like what you referred to earlier, the real Americans. In Hungary, we saw that the real Hungarians. Only the people who had been there for generations, who speak Hungarian, who are Christian, those are the people those are the real people not the other groups like the Roman minority or others who have immigrated into Hungary for example. So, a populist will be pro people but for whoever they identify as the people, and then they say, “The people have voted for me, I am the unique representative of the people because the people know best and they’re the ones who can determine the common good, and we are against those elite or that establishment.” Might be Washington establishment, it could be Wall Street elites, it could be foreign enemies, and those are the evil ones. The people are the good ones. So, they also– The third characteristic is they put it in these terms, these moralistic terms, Manichean terms of good and evil. Okay, so as it turns out, when we looked at it. So, Trump uses a lot of populist rhetoric, and people have– Some of my colleagues have studied his speeches, but it’s only the speeches that are written for him that actually meet all three of those characteristics. So, it’s teleprompter Trump, but when Trump speaks off the cuff at his campaign rallies, he’s not so populist because he’s missing one thing. He misses the pro people. He will attack his enemies, but it’s more about himself. His language is all about I, “What will I do? I’m the best. I will save us.” It’s not about the people, the people who know the best, the people who are the virtuous people. So, he actually scores a little bit lower on the populism scale. Bernie Sanders scores fairly high on the populism scale, so that’s why his supporters for Bernie Sanders– And it’s much more of a class-based division for Bernie, it’s much more of an anti as I said, anti-Wall Street. So, it’s about income inequality. Trump’s is populism that we see more in Europe as well. It is more– It is anti-establishment of the parties of the political parties, but it’s also anti-foreign, anti-immigrant, so it’s exclusionary in the sense of only this one group of people are the real Americans and not this other group who are coming in to threaten us. Or not the China who’s the cause of our problems, China’s an enemy. So, there’s an exclusionary version of populism and those tend to be the ones that adopt the more anti-immigrant, more nationalist points of view that we see in Europe and in President Trump. Then there’s a more inclusionary type that tends to be more of the left wing economic populism like Hugo Chavez or Bernie Sanders that are saying, “Let’s bring people in who have been left out, particularly left out of the pie, and let’s redistribute wealth,” for example. So, those are kind of two versions of populism, and that’s what we were talking about in that article.
Zach Elwood:
It seemed like one key factor there was that conservatives were more the group of people who had a lot of money, so that that brought down the group’s level of you know, the amount of people in the group who classified things as good versus evil kind of thinking. Was I interpreting that accurately, too? Because it seemed like that was a factor.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yes, for sure. So, when you think about Trump supporters or Republicans more broadly, it definitely includes people who voted for him, but who don’t necessarily have those three points of view that we talked about, meaning populism. So, people who are voting more out of perhaps economic self-interest or their traditional ties to the Republican Party, but were not following these lines that Trump was talking about. So, they kind of diluted the populism within that group.
Zach Elwood:
Right, because there’s a group of conservatives, and I’m sure Democrats too who are not they’re not emotionally involved in these things. They’re sitting back and just voting for purely self-interest reasons for whatever reason so that, yeah, it’s a mixed bag of goals and any moments.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yes.
Zach Elwood:
So, I’m curious, it might be a tough question to answer or maybe one you don’t want to answer. But, I’m curious if you have a personal opinion on what the worst case versus best case scenario is for the US in the next few months or a few years? Are you very concerned or do you feel optimistic or?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Well, one of the ways to get over these kinds of divides also is crisis as I mentioned before. So, when the COVID pandemic first hit, I thought, “Well, this could be an opportunity, this is a crisis to bring the country together and to tackle it.” But, it didn’t turn out to be, and particularly, I think because President Trump polarized the issue. And so we are divided on it and perceptions. Even people’s perceptions of how much of a threat it is are divided, you know? And how to combat it are divided, so we’re polarized around that issue. So, that did not serve as a way to overcome it. Now my worst fear I think would be that this election will not have a clear result, and it will be chaotic and will end up in dragged out results because some states won’t have clear results. And there will be legal suits, lawsuits, and the nightmare scenario other people have written about would be we get to the date, then when the electoral college must decide December 16 and nobody wins because some states haven’t been able to determine their actual voting results, and then we have an electoral college that doesn’t function. So, then it either is going to go to the Congress to decide and the way the electoral college system works, Republicans have the advantage because it goes one vote per state delegation to the Congress, and right now Republicans have 26 votes and Democrats have 24. So, even though in the House of Representatives Democrats have the majority, it would be the Republicans deciding on the next president if we were to get that far to that scenario. That would generate huge resentment and a crisis of legitimacy I think for the next government. We can also have a crisis of legitimacy if Biden wins because President Trump has already laid the groundwork for saying basically, “If I don’t win these elections, that means there was fraud.” And that’s a very typical populist leader thing to say as well. I’ve seen that in other countries. So, he may claim fraud. He’s already talked about mailing ballots will be fraudulent, and so if the election is seen, you know, is resolved a few days later as mailing ballots come in and are counted, and it turns out it’s Biden after all, even if it started out as Trump. Then Trump may create a crisis of legitimacy for a Biden presidency by calling it illegitimate, and his supporters may follow him on that. So, we can have a crisis of legitimacy in either way, and that’s going to be very bad for the country. I think in the long term, things will change. The good thing is let’s say in the medium term, is that if we had a chaotic election and even given what we’ve been the divisions we’ve been living through these last 4 years, is that there will be definitely reform efforts, there will be pushes. I think there will be citizen pushes to make changes that we need in our institutions to try to prevent this from continuing to happen. Right now we have some institutions that actually favor the minority party, and that’s the Senate and the Electoral College. As it turns out, because they give a disproportionate representation to smaller rural states, that actually gives an advantage to the Republican Party. The Republican Party can govern as a minority party, and that’s part of what’s causing the divisions in our society. So, we could have a reform effort, and that would be good. Looking at this, if we can come together to decide on how we should organize and maybe update some of our constitutional rules dating back when the country was very different 200 years ago, that would be positive. Then the last thing that’s going to create a change in the long term is simply demographic change. Younger generations are going to come up, and they have very different views on things than the older generations. They’re going to be much more diverse generation, they’re perhaps a more tolerant generation and maybe not as anxious about the kinds of changes the technological changes and changes in race relations, gender relations, sexual orientation, kinds of things that have made the older generations more anxious. So, I think, yes, there is hope.
Zach Elwood:
One more question for you. Do you see the role of social media? Do you see that playing a big role? And I’m curious if you saw some effects of that in Venezuela. Obviously, it played a role in the Arab Spring protests and that movement. But, I’m curious if it played a role in Venezuela or elsewhere?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, I think, well, first the growth of cable television, I think first, and then the internet and then social media have all played a role. They’ve all played a role first by creating really a broad range of sources of information. We no longer have the common filter of the national broadcast television where everyone gets their same news. So, we don’t even have the same information, and certainly not the same interpretation of information. So, we can’t agree on facts. What I saw in Venezuela was even without social media, just within the television broadcasts, is that you could look at the state-owned television station under Hugo Chavez, and then the privately owned by the opposition television stations. You could watch the news on both and think you’re in two completely different countries, two virtual realities. Because the media became polarized and politicized, became controlled. It was intent on giving its own editorial message on both sides. With the growth of cable, of internet and then social media, we have so many sources of information, we have so many sources of people who are not professional journalists giving their opinion. We have so much opinion news that people have a hard time sorting out what is opinion, what is information, what is credible information, and what is accurate versus dis information, actual wrong information or manipulated information. And then add on top of that the social bubbles that social media creates, so that we tend to often get information through our social media and particularly young people, but getting it through their social media from their friends, and so you’re in a bubble, and just seeing the articles or the opinions that are shared by your like-minded people. As we participate only in like-minded groups, we can become even more extreme. So, Cass Sunstein has written about that group polarization where the group becomes more, what he calls polarized, that moves to an extreme because you don’t have alternative, diverse opinions being shared and debated. So, social media can contribute to that. Then the last thing and what we’ve seen causing real problems and violence and even genocide in countries around the world like Myanmar against the Rohingya or India especially on Facebook, but this can happen with WhatsApp, with Twitter, with whatever the social media is, is conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are shared, hate groups are formed, and this can actually create violence against different groups. So, yeah, social media is democratizing, it gives people more choice, it gives people more control, but it has a really dangerous aspect to it. Not only for democracy, but for actual physical safety of people of groups.
Zach Elwood:
Right, for all of these tools, they’re communication tools, and I think sometimes people act as if communication is inherently a good thing. But, communication is only as good as human nature, and these things emphasize the good and the bad of human nature. So, this has been Dr. Jennifer McCoy, thanks so much for coming on. Is there anything you want to mention about what you’re working on now or how people could contact you?
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, they can find me on Twitter @jlynnmccoy, and I am working now on how can we– What are the best strategies to combat polarizing leaders who are moving toward authoritarianism? So, I’m working on that, and I’m looking also looking at kind of what are antidotes to this polarization? What kinds of messaging might help bring people together, reassure people that they that they don’t have to be threatened from the other side? And what kind of institutional reforms? What kind of changes can we make to the way we do elections, how we elect our leaders so that people will feel like they’ll continue to have a stake in the game and won’t get so desperately afraid of losing power for some period of time through an election?
Zach Elwood:
That’s great. That’s very important work, and thank you for the work you do, and thanks for coming on.
Dr. Jennifer McCoy:
All right, thank you so much Zach, I enjoyed it.
Zach Elwood:
I’ve seen so many people lately speaking in all-encompassing terms that paint the other side as this strange horrible other, that is monolithic, that can’t be reasoned with, that’s even evil. This has been true for both conservatives and liberals. Now, obviously, there’s a big difference between political leader behavior and regular citizen behavior. The GOP specifically Trump’s team, often uses divisive, hateful language, painting all liberals as wanting to destroy the country and similar things. Democrat leaders on the whole do not do this and focus their speech primarily on Trump and GOP leaders and general concepts. So, there’s a big difference there that makes these not equivalent problems. Still, it’s been disheartening how many influential liberal people speak in all-encompassing inaccurate ways that I see as just adding to the hate on both sides and adding to our polarization. Because my audience is mainly liberal, I wanted to do my small part in trying to decrease the hatred of Trump supporters, and to try to get people to think about their polarizing language and how that helps bring about worst case scenarios.
I hope it’s obvious that I hate Trump and what he’s doing to this country, what he represents and what he indicates as a symptom of our broken social bonds. At the same time, I put Trump and the GOP leadership into a separate group than I do everyday citizens. One group deserves our anger a lot more than the other. I think most Trump supporters are like me, they’re trying to find truth in a modern landscape that has become very confusing, and they’re trying to do what’s right. And as much as I may disagree with them or even believe some are very flawed people or very uninformed people or very deceived people or just plain wrong, I also think it’s important to try to see their humanity, to see their point of view, and understand their concerns and take them seriously.
If you’re a conservative Trump supporter listening to this thinking, “Hey, this is very hurtful and unfair.” I want you to take a step back and recognize that you probably talk in similar ways about liberals. You think liberals are misguided, are ignorant or deceived. So, hopefully, you can recognize that it’s entirely normal to say such things about people you think are very wrong. It is not cause for getting upset. It’s just recognizing what’s true. We have big things we disagree on.
Getting back to the point about empathizing with Trump supporters, yes, it is hard work. It can be so hard to try to empathize with such an instinctually repellent way of seeing the world. Honestly, I hear Trump speak for a minute, and I hear how divisive and belligerent and probably ignorant he is. And I think, “How could anyone support this? How can anyone think this is normal? How can anyone think this is good leadership and be enthusiastic about this? What is wrong with these people?”
So, yes, I admit empathy in this case is hard, but I’d say it’s important to try. It’s important for a few reasons. Because if we can’t talk to a wide swath of our fellow citizens, if we can’t see where they’re coming from, then we’re in danger of the worst case nation destroying results from polarization that Dr. McCoy was talking about. Talking to people, having conversations is how a group resolves things. How things do not devolve into war. Refusing to see the other side’s perspective, ramps up tensions in an ongoing way. I’d say that also having empathy for the other point of view makes you yourself less angry, less anxious because you understand more and can see the factors at work, and you don’t feel like you’re living in a completely incoherent hellscape. It might be a bit more coherent and understandable hellscape, at the very least, populated with flawed humans like yourself, not alien life forms.
I think acting as if people’s concerns don’t matter or are beneath debate or incomprehensible, helps nothing. And it makes those people bitter, makes them double down, makes them understandably upset that their concerns are mocked. Being treated with scorn and disdain plays a key role in a group achieving a sustaining and entrenched group identity. So, the less we treat people with scorn, the fewer enemies and monsters we create.
Let’s look at one Trump supporter concern. Some Trump supporters have concerns that immigration both illegal and legal, hurts the American job market and lowers wages. I know a Trump supporter who brings that up as his main reason for thinking Trump as president is an okay thing. Now, obviously, we can debate how much this concern makes sense, but the point is that it’s an understandable concern. You can easily see why people might believe that bringing a lot of people into a country, especially people willing to work very cheaply, can lower wages. To act as if that is an undignified stupid or racist concern, doesn’t help the situation. You can see how that would make Trump supporters angry and make them feel wrongly morally judged.
To take another contributing Trump supporter belief, fears of cultural change. It’s pretty standard now for many liberals to label all Trump supporters as racist. But, just the fact that there are some Black and Hispanic Trump supporters amongst other minorities, should be enough for us to recognize that while there are of course, some virulent white supremacist Trump supporters, obviously not all Trump supporters are that way. The things you find obviously racist about Trump, many people just do not see. This is not to say that they are correct or not correct, that’s not my point. The point is that some people just do not see what you see for whatever reason. Your perceived insights about the situation are not their insights. But, fears of cultural change do seem to be a major factor for many Trump supporters, it is a thing. But, I’d say it’s not accurate to make the jump that all concerns about cultural change are hateful or racist in nature.
To take an extreme example, I think it’s safe to say that most Americans wouldn’t like to live in an area surrounded by extreme fundamentalist Muslims who view secular society as a moral abomination. In the same way that I think it’s safe to say that most liberals wouldn’t want to live in a region surrounded by enthusiastic Trump supporters or to be surrounded by extreme fundamentalist Christians. There’s nothing inherently racist or offensive about not wanting to live near certain people. It’s just having a preference for a certain way of life and maybe being afraid or at least uncomfortable with other ways of living. And I would defend all of this and say all of this is entirely human. We’re all culturist in some way or another. We all judge other groups of people. Judging people and preferring some things over others is part of being human, and obviously, we can debate the logic and paranoia of specific Trump supporters’ stances and fears, but my point is that such things are understandable in the same way that many human fears and anxieties and flaws are understandable.
In 1970, the percentage of the US population that was foreign born, that was born outside the United States, was 4.7%. In 2015, the foreign-born percentage had almost tripled to 13.4%. That’s a lot of cultural change, and when you add in our many liberal cultural changes, it’s possible for me to see how some people can feel like the world they were comfortable with is changing. Change can feel threatening. And even if I don’t share those concerns of theirs, it’s possible for me to put myself in their shoes enough to understand some of their existential angst as the world around them changes quickly in ways that are hard for them to understand and that might make them uncomfortable.
This is not at all getting onto the topic of how GOP, political elites and leaders attempt to harness and exaggerate these innate fears and anxieties. Right now we’re just focusing on how we might understand and empathize with individuals. Not whether we find their anxieties and concerns logical or coherent or if those feelings might be being purposefully manipulated or enhanced.
If you’re a liberal as an experiment in empathy, imagine that every immigrant that came to the United States was an extremely right wing evangelical Christian, and you knew that this large influx of immigrants was increasing the number of conservative voters and was causing the culture to become more conservative. Would you feel a little bit bothered by that? Might you even speak up about wanting to lower immigration? If you can, you might be able to understand how some Trump supporters feel and see how it’s possible to feel that way without bringing in ideas of racism.
I’ve spent a good amount of time in pro-Trump Facebook world. Many Trump supporters are perplexed and angered by being called racist. They simply don’t understand the accusation. One recent meme I saw from a Trump supporter showed two peanuts characters. One saying, “Racism is bad,” and the other responding, “So is being falsely accused of racism.” Many Trump supporters don’t view themselves as racist. They may have various cultural fears or may be angry at various liberal cultural aspects, whether based on religious points of view or entirely secular. To categorize all these varied concerns and beliefs as just racist and not worthy of discussion, understandably, causes a lot of resentment and anger on their part. I’d say it’s no different than Trump supporters lumping all liberals together and saying all liberals are violent anarchists who want to burn down the suburbs or that all liberals like killing babies. It’s not accurate and it’s not helpful and it increases polarization.
One way to see the America First kind of mentality and a more empathetic way, is to recognize that some of these people look around at how badly the US is doing with the homeless problem for example, and the loss of manufacturing jobs and our stagnant wages and think, “Why are we bringing in so many people and doing so much for other countries when we are struggling so much at home? Again, obviously, we could debate the logic of this in various ways, but my point is that it’s an understandable feeling, a feeling that we need to take care of us first.
I think liberals often frame this in entirely race or culture-centric way, but this is not fair. We should be careful assigning beliefs and connections where they are not clearly there. Also, we should remember that there are many Trump supporters who just think, “Hey, I’m conservative. I want conservative things to happen. I don’t like a lot of taxes. I don’t like abortion. I’m conservative, end of story.” I know a Russian American who told me, “Look Zach, it’s pretty simple. Russians vote Republican, that’s just how it is.” I personally know a Trump supporter who thinks that the enthusiastic Trump supporters, the kinds that go to rallies are to quote him “morons”. These people aren’t seeing the same concerns as you when it comes to how extreme Trump seems or how extreme some of his supporters seem. They don’t understand the concerns. Sometimes I’ve talked to Trump supporters and tried to explain how chaotic Trump’s administration has been, how he has hurt the country and government operations with his chaos and his influence and how he has divided us, how he has hurt relationships with our allies etc etc. Many of these people just do not see these things at all. Trump supporters have told me, “How can you be against Trump when he has done so much good and America is so respected now by other countries?” It’s hard to wrap your head around these beliefs, but that is what they believe based on the news bubble and peer environment they’re in.
Then finally, to really understand Trump’s support, a big part of it is recognizing that many of these people live in very different very distorted news bubbles. Many Trump supporters get most of their news from Facebook, which means getting news from a twisted hall of mirrors where the most sorted and extreme stuff gets shared amongst a group. I have a Trump supporter acquaintance who told me, “I get all my news from Facebook,” and I was kind of horrified by that before remembering that is how many people get a lot of their news these days including liberals. Many Trump supporters believe that the Clintons were very corrupt, that they did and continue to do all sorts of shady criminal activities. Some Trump supporters have been taught that everything about politics and government is bad, that everyone involved are crooks. In their defense, many liberals have their own extreme anti-establishment tendencies. Many Trump supporters believe all sorts of conspiracy theories, but in their defense, so do many liberals. All this is not to make false equivalencies about these different things because we can obviously debate which quote “side is worse in degree or impact to the world”. But, my point is that there are very human and understandable things behind a lot of these tendencies. We are all living in a very confusing world where truth is hard to find, where our environment has various aspects that serve to ramp up our hatred of the other group.
All the things I’ve said so far are to emphasize that: A. Trump supporters are a varied group not a monolithic one, and B. When you examine the factors at work and try to see their perspective, their beliefs become more understandable. As I was saying in the interview, I find the idea of free will very unlikely. I believe we’re all probably just the unfolding of physical processes like any other physical process. As amazing as existence and consciousness is, it’s hard to imagine where some special self-directed me comes into being that’s separate from everything that has come before me or everything around me. I believe that if I were born with someone else’s exact genetics and had their exact experiences, I would be that person. There but for the grace of God go I.
Hopefully, through all this you can see that I’m not making excuses for Trumpism or making excuses for racism or hate. I do recognize that there are racist, hateful Trump supporters. I personally know a white nationalist. He was the first person I knew to express enthusiasm about Trump entering the presidential race, and that was long before the mainstream took Trump seriously as a candidate. I actually wrote a piece examining the white nationalist emails and trying to understand his point of view. Which if you’re curious, you can find by going to my Medium account, searching for Zach Elwood Medium. So, I understood the connection between white supremacism and Trump pretty early on, and I also recognize that those sentiments were more common than many people thought. I’m in some horrible pro-Trump Facebook groups that are full of hate and just madness overall. So, all this is to say, trust me when I say that I’m quite aware of that side of the problem, and I’m not being naive.
If you ask Trump supporters as a group to explain the more belligerent and hateful people on their side, they would say that liberals also have belligerent hateful people on their side, and that this is no different. They’d say that this hateful segment of the liberal population is not nearly as focused on by the media whereas the worst people on the conservative side are focused on, and I’d actually agree with some of that. I regularly see hateful, unreasonable things from some well known liberal people with big audiences that if they were conservative saying similar things, there would be a lot of press devoted to their transgressions.
To take one example, one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever seen on Twitter was something that a black comedian Corey Holcomb tweeted about the 2016 Dallas, Texas case where a black man killed five cops and injured nine more. Holcomb said, “Yo racist ass American media, did y’all ever think we view this man as a revolutionary and not as a criminal,” end of quote. I’ve of course seen more disturbing posts from anonymous troll type accounts, but what made this especially disturbing is that this was a fairly well known comedian. He’s had three comedy specials, he has a radio show. This comment and other hateful comments of his past almost entirely without public comment or anger. But, you can easily imagine how if that were a conservative celebrity of some sort saying something similar that praised a mass killer, how much outrage we’d see and how much press that would get. Now this case is a bit more nuanced because this comedian mainly I think gets a pass due to being black I’d say and not due to being liberal. This guy’s actually quite conservative in some ways. For example, he’s prone to making hateful homophobic rants, but you get the idea. Many conservatives see people on the other side of the perceived divide mostly getting a pass for bad behavior while their group gets the most examination and villainization in the mainstream press and culture.
I think one problem we face with trying to establish more empathy and understanding is that it’s become a common liberal trope to say that someone’s intent doesn’t matter. That if you do something that can be classified as hurtful, your intent doesn’t matter and that you’re at fault. If you aren’t aware of this line of thinking, Google intent doesn’t matter, and you’ll see what I mean. But, obviously, intent matters. If you accidentally hit someone with your car, would you think it would be fair to be treated as if you purposely hit them? I don’t think you would. Legally and logically intent matters. So many things can be theoretically classified as hurtful or offensive, and so many indirect results of someone’s actions could be classified as harmful. To take one example, if you eat animal products, I can make the claim that you’re a supporter of killing and abusing animals, and I could present a strong case for why your intent doesn’t matter, that your actions make you morally deficient. This would probably bother you because that is not how you would frame things morally in your mind. It doesn’t feel good to be told that your moral perceptions of the world don’t matter. That because others have perceived you doing harm, that you are morally at fault. But, this simple concept that intent matters when trying to assign responsibility and moral judgment, is now seemingly not believed by many people.
But, assuming for now that you see that intent does matter for purposes of moral judgment, then you can acknowledge that because some Trump supporters do not see what you see and don’t see the same issues and don’t view themselves as racist, that perhaps it makes sense to not be as certain or righteous in judgments of them as a monolithic group. I think that certainty is the mistake here, certainty about others, certainty about what’s right or wrong. In my opinion, humans need for certainty is one of our fundamental human flaws. It’s very tempting to be certain, it’s tempting to search for good versus evil framings of things, it’s easier to write off an entire group as flawed and evil while it’s exhausting to try to see the nuance and complexities and all the factors that work on the people around us. Our need for comforting certainty and our disdain for nuance is how we get divisive, us versus them leaders like Donald Trump.
All the things I said, of course, apply to any conservatives listening to this. Do you believe that all liberals are the same as the worst, most judgmental, most unreasonable liberals? If you don’t like being lumped in with white supremacists just because you’re a Trump supporter, can you see how it’s wrong to act as if all liberals are as bad as the worst liberal? Are you able to at least imagine how someone can look at Trump and see the similarities he has with democracy destroying authoritarian leaders in other countries? Do you think you might be taking the easy way out by not attempting to understand the reasons and emotions behind your fellow citizens behaviors?
Again, trying to empathize with your political opponents doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. I’d say that at the very least whatever political goal you’re trying to achieve will be easier when you understand your political opponents better. And along the path of attempting that empathy and understanding, you may also lessen your own anxieties and fears and see things from a more global perspective, where everything is connected and related, and we are all part of a single system that has a life of its own.
I should circle back and emphasize that all this talk about empathy doesn’t mean I’m complacent. I’m pretty frequently overcome with anger and disgust at the fact that someone like Trump is our president. I sometimes say very hurtful and mean things to Trump supporters, and I even talk about Trump supporters as if they’re all one group when I’m especially angry. But, I try not to do this and try to be careful with my language. I try to remind myself of the things I’ve talked about here, Trump and his political enablers are not the same people as his supporters. His supporters are not all the same within that group. We should try to direct our anger and criticisms at the people we know are directly at fault. We should attempt to differentiate between the people who we believe are the deceivers and the people who have been deceived. We should be more careful and accurate with our language because language matters. Our word choices have effects.
Finally, I’d say if you’re a conservative and listening to this, I would hope you don’t find all this condescending, my seeming to take for granted that there’s something obviously wrong with Trump or flawed about Trump supporters. Because you of course, must also think similar things about liberals, you must think that liberals are flawed in various ways, that they’re being deceived and that they’re ignorant. So, I’d hope that when you hear things like this talk, you aren’t made bitter or angry because I’d be surprised if you weren’t framing things in similar ways.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me Zach Elwood, you can see episode summaries at readingpokertells.video. Thanks for listening.