(gentle music) - I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Thank you everyone for
being here for this event. My name is Bradley Jackson, I'm a Senior Program Officer here at the Institute for Humane Studies. And we are very, very happy today to have with us Robert B. Talisse. Robert Talisse is W. Alton
Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, Tennessee. A native of New Jersey, Talisse earned his PhD in Philosophy at the City University of
New York Graduate School. His academic work focuses on democracy. More specifically, Talisse writes about how a democratic
political order can assist and complicate our efforts
to acquire knowledge, share ideas, understand what is of value, and address our disagreements. His research engages questions
about public discourse, popular political ignorance,
partisan polarization, and the ethics of citizenship. All of which are topics of
we will be discussing today. Talisse has lectured throughout the world. He is the author of over
100 scholarly articles and 12 books. Professor Talisse, thank you
for being here with us today. - Thanks for having me, Brad. I'm really excited to
be talking to you today. - So, we are here today to talk primarily about your newest book,
"Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side", which is out this year on
Oxford University Press. It's a very interesting book, I recommend folks check it out. And this book is a sequel
to year previous book, which was called "Overdoing Democracy". That book was published in 2019. Could you summarize that book for folks who may not have read it, and tell us a bit about
how the ideas in it led you to write this new
book "Sustaining Democracy"? - Sure. Thanks, Brad. Because the two books are connected, although they can be read independently. The 2019 book "Overdoing Democracy" makes the following argument. It says that there are
certain kinds of capacities that we need to cultivate within ourselves if we're to perform well
as democratic citizens. And those capacities are
smothered or dismantled when we allow politics to infiltrate every aspect of our lives together. The book then, the 2019 book
"Overdoing Democracy" I mean, marshals some pretty broad ranging empirical work that shows that in fact, in the United States, but not
only in the United States, markers of political
identity and partisanship have indeed infiltrated and saturated the whole of our social lives, such that our political affiliations in the United States in particular today really function more like lifestyles than they do like policy agendas or views about what
government should be doing. And what that means is
that the social spaces that we inhabit in our day-to-day lives, when we're buying groceries
or getting a cup of coffee are structured in ways, sometimes very subtle,
sometimes not so much. They're structured in ways that make it more and more likely that casual and unplanned
and social interactions will occur only between people
who are politically alike. And the argument of "Overdoing Democracy" is that when that level of saturation such that civic space is already sorted according to partisan identity, when we find ourselves in
that kind of environment certain of democratic capacities, atrophy, and fall away. If democracy is anything, it's the moral ideal of a
society of political equals, and it takes certain moral capacities to treat our fellow citizens as our equals because one of the upshots of our equality is that we'll disagree about politics. And so, when more and
more of our everyday lives surround us with people
who are politically much like ourselves, we lose the moral capacity to see, to regard those who are
unlike us politically as nonetheless our equals that is entitled to an
equal political say. So, that's the normative upshot, the prescription of "Overdoing Democracy" is that we need to reclaim our areas of social space for non-political cooperative activities. Now, if people wanna ask
me about that in the Q&A, I'm happy to talk about it, but giving talks about this, I know that people have a
hard time getting their mind around the idea of a non-political
cooperative activity. That's an activity where
we're not suppressing our political differences or trying to reach across the aisle, suppressing differences and
reaching across the aisle still make the activity
fundamentally about politics. I wanna say, "No, we need
to engage in activities that are cooperative, but the political
identities and affiliations of the other participants
are simply irrelevant, they're unknown to us, and they're not part of the activity." That we have a hard time imagining that I think is part of the problem, let me just say, I think that's what it
is to overdo democracy is to not be able to even conceive of a cooperative activity that's not structured around
our partisan identities. So, that's the "Overdoing Democracy" book. The "Sustaining Democracy"
book, the new book, emerges out of one kind of question. And it was a good question
that I frequently got when I would speak to audiences
of all different kinds about the "Overdoing Democracy" book, and the question runs like this. It says, "Okay, I'll grant
you democratic citizens need, non-political need space, need forums, need occasions for non-political
cooperative activity, you've convinced me." Then the questioner says, "But politics still needs to get done. How am I supposed to do politics when it seems to me that my political opponents
are fundamentally depraved, of bad political judgment, probably divested from democracy as such, uninterested in reciprocating. So, politics still has to happen, how are we supposed to do it?" "Sustaining Democracy" is an attempt to answer that question. And the subtitle is What
We Owe to the Other Side. It's a book about, well,
let me put it this way. "Sustaining Democracy"
tries to make the case that citizens still have adequate moral reasons to extend even to their political enemies the kind of regard that's
appropriate among political equals even when one is inclined to see one's political opponents as fundamentally mistaken, in the wrong, on the side of injustice, and of overall culpably
bad political judgment. - Thank you and thank you
also for mentioning the Q&A. It occurs to me I had
neglected to describe how the Q&A function will
work to our audience, and so let me do that briefly. Those of you who would
like to ask a question of Professor Talisse can do so by clicking the Q&A icon at
the bottom of your screen and typing in your question, and we will be selecting
audience questions for the last 15 minutes of
the event, so thank you. Next question for Professor Talisse, one of the core ideas driving your book is that each of us as citizens
of a liberal democracy and regardless of our
personal partisan affiliations faces what you call
the Democrats' dilemma. What is this dilemma? And why in your view is it a necessary feature
of democratic citizenship? - Good, another good question. So, let's start with the idea that democracy is a kind of moral ideal or
what I would prefer to call a moral aspiration. You know, we think of
democracy in all kinds of terms that are largely
institutional or practical. We think that democracy
is a kind of society where office holders are
selected by means of an election, and the full adult
population gets one vote and the majority rules, or there's some other decision rule that elects people who play a role that is circumscribed in a constitution, and then they come up for reelection. And so, we think about democracy in these mainly institutional terms. And that makes good sense because those are the institutions that we're most in touch
with in a democracy. But it's really difficult it seems to me to make sense of why elections, and voting, and campaigning, and debating, and canvasing. It's really hard to make
sense of why these practices and institutions are so central to our thinking of democracy, unless we see them as the
institutional upshots, the institutional manifestations of a deeper moral ideal. And again, as I said a moment ago, it seems to me that the
moral ideal of democracy is the ideal of a self-governing society of political equals. Now, that's not to say that I think that in calling it an aspiration I mean to suggest that a
society counts as democratic and so far as its
institutions and practices manifest the aspiration
for that kind of society. So, you know, real
societies are gonna fall, yeah, actually existing
societies are gonna fall short. Again, this is a point we could
talk more about if you want, but the ideal of a society of self-governing equals I think comes with a moral directive. In fact, two moral directives that fall to us in our roles as citizens in a society of self-governing equals. On the one hand, if we are
citizens of such a society or a society that aspires
to be a democracy, you know, the government
is our responsibility, it's on us, right? We have a responsibility for what our government does. And in fact, it's not uncommon for us to even say that what our government does is it does in our name, right? So, we think that there's
a sort of broad range of civic duties and responsibilities that sort of fall out of this idea that we ultimately are the government in some perhaps mysterious but some sense, we are the government in a democracy. So, our responsibility to, or I'm sorry, responsibility
for the political order that we are a part of, you know, means that we
have a responsibility to be informed, to behave as to participate in the activities of citizenship, to vote, to join coalitions perhaps, to donate money in certain ways. Maybe we would even
say that responsibility for certain kinds of civic service, you know, jury duty, in some democracies even
mandatory military service. You know, these things
fall out of the requirement to take responsibility
for the political world that we are in part the author of. Now, one of the additional upshots of that kind of responsibility is that we're not merely
called upon to vote, and to participate, and to be active in the role of citizen, we're also called upon
to perform those duties in a certain civic-minded way. So, part of what it is
to take responsibility for the political world
that I'm part the author of is also to adopt a certain mindset when I'm acting strictly in
the office of the citizen. And just to put it simply, part of taking responsibility for the political world around me is accepting the obligation to attempt to we the sliver
of political power I have in a way that is designed
to further justice as best as I can understand it. So, this is why we think that, you know, people who are uninformed voters are criticizable, right? People who vote only on
the basis of their own, you know, narrow interests
are criticizable. Well, we say, "Well, no,
the duty is not merely just to go cast a vote, it's to cast a vote after a
certain kind of reflection about the common good and not just the individual good. So, that's one very
broad kind of obligation that falls to us as democratic citizens. We need to take responsibility for the political order that
we're partly the authors of. But there's another, you know, if you want a
dilemma, you need two things. So, there's another moral obligation that falls to us in our office of democratic citizenship, and that is the
responsibility to one another. So, I just drew a distinction, right? Got responsibility for
the political order, now I wanna say, but we're
also responsible to one another because in a democracy we're not merely equals with
respect to how the government, and its officials, and its laws, and its institutions view us, we're one another's equal, right? Not only am I not merely a
subject of the government, right? I'm also not your,
Brad, not your superior, you're not my lackey, I'm not your overlord, right? That means that in a democratic society we owe to one another a
certain kind of regard as we dispatch our civic duty, right? That is in a democracy even when you lose at the polls or your side loses at the
polls, you remain an equal, you're still entitled
to go on criticizing, objecting, questioning. And I, as a citizen, have a defeasible, or it's a responsibility
within certain boundaries that we could talk about. I have a responsibility
to hear, to listen, to give you a hearing, to figure out, right, what you're of perspective, and priorities, and values are. So, that responsibility to one another calls us to, as I was just saying, show a certain kind of
civic regard for one another as we're thinking about how to exercise our political power at the polls or in other contexts. And that means that again
I've gotta consult with you because we're co-authors
of a political order. And so, that consultation might involve, as
deliberative Democrats think, I might have to listen to your reasons, or try to engage, or
disagree, or argue with you. It might just mean something
a little bit less demanding where I just try to find out, you know, why you have the
political views that you have, or I might not have to
exchange anything with you, but it's still pretty demanding even if it's less demanding
than the need to deliberate. Now, here's the dilemma, so those are the two
sort of moral directives of democratic citizenship, right? Take responsibility for
the political order, but you are also
responsibility to acknowledging and respecting the equality
of your fellow citizens. One of the upshots of
our political equality is that we get to make up
our own minds about politics, what that means is that we're
gonna disagree about politics. Political questions are complicated, there are lots of
different kinds of factors that go into thinking well about politics, and so it's to be expected
that under conditions of equality, even conditions
that come close to equality, there's gonna be pretty
significant political disagreement. When the political questions strike us as particularly important,
or urgent, or high stakes, that is when the chips
are down politically, the people who are my political opponents have to look to me as not merely mistaken, but wrong. And by that I mean in the wrong, not just on the other
side of the question, but on the side of injustice, right? That is a lot when the chips are down, our political disagreements are about, you know, big, important
values like justice. And so, if the responsibility for the political order obligates me to seek justice, the responsibility to my fellow citizens obligates me to give a
voice to other citizens, even when they advocate for views that strike me as
inconsistent with justice or positively unjust. There's the dilemma, right? That is in taking the effort
to hear the other side, it feels like I've conceded
something to the other side, I've capitulate something, right? Or I've in some way capitulated to them. Why give voice to injustice? Why platform political error? Why bother consulting with people
whose political views strike you as wrong? Now, that's one sort
of face of the dilemma. It's that I'm supposed
to be pursuing justice, but pursuing justice
doesn't seem compatible with giving a hearing to the unjust. Think about it though from
the interpersonal perspective, you know, you want an
effective voice in a democracy, you have to be a member of a choir, right? You gotta join a coalition. And again, when the chips are down and the stakes are high,
things seem urgent. The effort, the attempt, the endeavor of giving voice to the other side often strikes our allies as a signal of our own
halfheartedness or inauthenticity. In the book, I tell a
little story about this, where somebody tells me, (laughs) "If you think there is
another side to this question, maybe you're on it," right? And again, if you wanna pursue justice, you wanna seek justice, you gotta keep your coalition together. So, the interest in giving
voice to the other side seems to dilute or weaken our coalitions, which again, works against
that first obligation, so that's the dilemma. Now, I just wanna suggest
a last point on this that's endemic to democracy. I don't think that this is a difficulty or a challenge to democracy that emerges, as so many do, from people
on not doing what they should or falling short. This is a challenge internal to democracy, it emerges out of sincere and largely successful efforts to take the responsibilities
of citizenship seriously. That means that we don't cure
democracy of this problem, we can only look for ways to manage it. That's one point. Last, one last thing though, it's not only a dilemma for some particularly
politically affiliated person. It's not the Democrats' dilemma in the sense of the people who affiliate with the Democratic Party dilemma, it's a dilemma for
democratic citizens as such, and it's a moral dilemma. That's the actually
final thing, it's moral. You've got two responsibilities. When the chips are down,
they seem to cancel two different modes of action. One says, "Forget about the other side, work with your allies and
try to get the right result," that's the taking responsibility for. Being responsible two
says, "Well, wait a minute, work with your allies, sure, but you've got a responsibility
to hear the side, to consult with them, to
engage with them in some way." Those two pull apart, it seems to me. And I don't think that,
as I've just described it, I think that that's a
pretty familiar conflict within democratic citizens. And I'm hoping that people
who are tuned into us right now are saying, "I know
what he's talking about." - Thank you. So, your book has a lot to say, as we can see, about the ethics
of political disagreements. Disagreement is necessary and
even good on your accounts, perhaps unsurprising since you're a professional philosopher.
(Robert laughing) But you also place limits on what you call good faith
political disagreements by distinguishing between
again what you call reasonable and unreasonable political views. So, how might we determine whether a political point of
view is reasonable or not? And what effect does that
have on how this view should be treated in the public
sphere within a democracy? - Great, this is the real, I don't know, it used to be a hundred
thousand dollar question, now, what is it? A billion dollar question? And this is the real question, right? So, let me start off, you know, at the highest
altitude as it were, right? So, the proposal in "Sustaining Democracy" is not that no view that flourishes or that survives thrives
in a democratic society is beyond the pale, right? I wanna say oh yeah,
there are certain views that flourish or prevail,
or well, not prevail, there are certain views
that citizens adopt and can adopt in a democratic society that are fundamentally out of tune with the democratic aspiration. There are authoritarians, and authoritarian tyrannical views that find a home among
democratic citizens. And the claim is not that you need to listen to
the local fascist, right? Or that you need to
extend, give a platform to the person making the case for tyranny. However, I wanna suggest and I argue in the book that the problem of what to do about proponents of
fundamentally anti-democratic beyond the pale views, the problem of what to do with them, how to engage with them, how to manage them is a different problem from the problem that I'm
trying to put my finger on. We often think that that's the problem, or we often think that, you know, the problem of what
what to do with the other side is really the problem of what to do with the anti-democrats around us. That's often how a
certain kind of conflict within democracy occurs to us. We come to see, "Well, wait a minute. There are people who
really aren't on board with the democratic aspiration, but yet they have a political
voice in a democracy, what are we supposed to do with them?" I just wanna say first shot, that's a different question
from the one I'm asking. And if you wanna see why
that's a different question, let's just consider, you know, you and I might vote
for the same person, right? In every election, whoever it might be, it might yet be the case that you and I have two very different
views about taxation, immigration, and criminal justice reform. Now, within a particular
political environment, we might be allies, right? Given how candidates are
and what our options are. But that doesn't mean
that we don't disagree about justice, right? So, you know, I'm just stipulating, I'm just making stuff up here, right? You know, like I don't think that there should be any
restrictions on immigration, right? I got a libertarian view about
at least about immigration, maybe only about immigration, but I don't think there should be any, I think I'm an open borders guy, let's just stipulate that. And you're just somebody who thinks that there should be a much
simpler path to citizenship, I'm just stipulating again, right? Now-
- I'd rather be on your side, but that's fine.
- Yeah, yeah, right? Let's just then imagine
somebody who's just like you now we disagree about justice, even though within a political
environment, such as ours, we might be political allies. And so, I'm just saying look, under certain kinds of conditions when it comes time to
talk about immigration, and we're not talking
right with the people who want bigger walls and detention camps and all those kinds of things, right? We're not talking to those guys, it's you and me talking about what our immigration policy should be, should there be one at all? That's also a disagreement about justice, where I have to think
that if you get your way, the world is still a lot
less just than it should be. You have to think if I get my
way, if my policy prevails, you know, the world has
gotten a lot less just, right? So, I don't, I think
that we have a tendency to think of political
disagreements as bounded, or as always structured
around partisan disputes, where we see the opposing partisan side as almost uniformly committed to only the most extreme version on the other sides, in
the other side's camp. And then we start thinking about the problem of political disagreement just being the disagreement
of why engage with people who are Nazis? It's like forget about
the Nazis for a second, it's an important problem,
it's a different problem. The problem here is how do
you manage disagreements about justice with people who look to you like they're your allies. But in fact, they're allies
only for this contingent reason about the overall shape of
the political environment. So, that was a longer way of saying the problem is that however you draw the boundaries between what's inbounds
and what's beyond the pale in a democratic society, however you make that demarcation between acceptable disagreement
among democratic citizens and disagreements between
among democratic views and the kinds of anti-democratic views that can inhabit a democratic society, where do you draw that line? There's still going to
be a broad range of views that will be on the
democratic side of that line, which from any point within
that part of the spectrum it's going to appear that some of others within
that part of the spectrum are incompatible with justice. How do you deal with them? That's the issue. And I happen to think
that our standard mode of addressing these kinds
of problems like well, let's think about what we ought to say about the local fascists and
how we ought to deal with them, and then that'll help me
figure out what to do with, you know, my family members
who vote for the guys who are friends with the local fascists, and the office holders who
don't strongly enough condemn the people who are on the side, right? That kind of like start with
the people on the outside and then figure out from there how to deal with the people
who are connected to them in particular ways. That's the more common way of
thinking about these issues. I think it goes in the wrong direction. Wanna say, "Look, I just wanna think about like how do I find a way to meet my responsibility to Brad once I realize that Brad's got a view about criminal justice reform that falls far short of what
I think justice demands?" He's only for pretty modest
criminal justice reforms, you know, I'm almost a
prison abolitionist, right? So, we still have a real
serious disagreement, but now I wanna figure out what do I owe to Brad in this case? And I think that's a way
sort of helping us figure out what the problem of the local
authoritarian or fascist is. So, that's how that goes. Now, last point 'cause you asked like how do we make this distinction? It's very, very difficult. It is the billion dollar question for normative political theory
and political philosophy. And what I say in the book is like look, it depends a lot, right, on what people actually say, you know, we could invent, you know, we can dream
up all kinds of views and say, "Oh, that's the guys who wanted to march in Skokie, you know, those are the
beyond the pale guys. Oh okay, maybe, right? The MAGAs, they're the
beyond the pale types. Yeah maybe, I don't know, right? But all I wanna say is this, insofar as there is a principled answer, a reasonable view, and a
reasonable proponent of a view. A reasonable view is a view
that is a permissible view, a view that does not disqualify or sully one standing
as a democratic citizen is a view that is consistent with a legibly democratic interpretation of the idea of
self-government among equals. Now, there are a range of interpretations of what that ideal means,
and what it comes to, and what it institutionally
has to look like. It's a good exercise and political theory to go figure out like
what are the dozen ways in which this ideal has been understood? And I'm just gonna say yeah, it's a technical term, right? I'm not crediting anybody when I say that their view is reasonable. I'm not saying that they're smart or that they've reasoned well, I'm just saying a reasonable view is a view that's compatible
with one of those interpretations of the democratic ideal. A view that is unreasonable is
a view that is not compatible with one of the
interpretations of that ideal. I do then say what to do with an unreasonable person
or an unreasonable doctrine is a difficult and
different kind of question from the question I'm interested in, which is disagreement about justice among people who all
satisfy a pretty minimal, but I think morally important
condition for reasonableness because there are still going
to be serious disagreements about justice among reasonable people and reasonable doctrines. Now, that's a lot less nitty gritty and detailed than I
think people would want. I think people tend to want
like I want the litmus test that's going to show me
who's beyond the pale. And I don't think that there could be one. How's that? - Very good, thank you. So, related to these questions
that you've been discussing, you devote a chapter in
your book to polarization. And in that chapter, you distinguish between
political polarization, which most people are familiar with, polarization between Democrats
and Republicans, et cetera. But also belief polarization, which is a concept that
may be newer to many folks. So, could you please explain
the difference between the two and also why you think belief polarization is related to finding a solution to the Democrats' dilemma
that you discussed earlier? - Sure, good, good, good. So, political polarization, you know, the word
polarization gets used a lot in political commentary, especially today. Political polarization is this sort of sociological phenomenon where you've got two political formations. Since we're in the US, we might as well just call them parties. And they retreat to
their ideological poles, their furthest point
apart and separate from the other side, which
vacates the middle ground. And when the middle ground is vacated, you know, it falls away. And so, political polarization
is what I think Joe Biden was lamenting in his
inaugural address, right? You know, we need unity, right? I'm not sure that we do need unity, but I think that what he was getting at is that we need a more fertile, you know, sort of middle ground where people can meet, right? Okay, maybe we do, maybe
he's right about that. And, you know, I'm not, you know, maybe we don't. I myself happen to think
that in a democracy we can be enemies, we don't need to bring people
together, we can be enemies. But that's a different kind of issue. But political polarization is the metric of that distance between the poles, right? It's a metric of the ideological divide between politically opposed formations, or groups, or parties, or units. When political polarization
is especially pronounced, all kinds of bad things happen, right? You know, there's log jams,
and frustrations, and stag, you know, it's a certain kind of paralysis and legislative stuff doesn't get done. And so, democracy can founder because of political
polarization, for sure. The book is not about
political polarization. The book is about this other phenomenon that's not a metric of the distance between two people or
two groups of people, it's a cognitive phenomenon,
it occurs inside our heads. Belief polarization is the phenomenon by which interactions
among like-minded people transforms them into more
extreme versions of themselves. And popularly, we think of this as the yes man phenomenon, right? Surround yourself with, you
start believing your own press, you know, you surround
yourself with people who tell you how great you are, and then you get an
inflated sense of yourself. And it turns out that
there's a really robust sort of psychological
and cognitive phenomenon that underlies that sort of
more colloquial understanding. People who are like-minded with respect to their political ideals,
their moral judgements, but also who are like-minded with respect to pretty banal matters of judgment like the comfort of a particular chair. You get a bunch of people
who think this chair is really comfortable, you get them talking together about the comfort of the chair. They all start elevating their assessment of its comfort, right? Or my favorite example is with the elevation of the
city of Denver, Colorado. Got a bunch of people who are agreed that Denver is notable for
its elevation above sea level. You ask them, "How high is it?" And they give their assessments, and you put them in a room
together to talk about Denver and how it's notable for this elevation. And they all emerge from that conversation thinking Denver is higher
than what they thought it was. Now, that's not even a evaluational assessment, right? That's just sort of a banal fact, right? Okay, so we're familiar
also with this phenomenon and when we hear in popular discourse talk about echo chambers, and silos, and these sorts of things. We hear louder and louder
echoes of our own voices, we start saying more extreme things, we start holding those more extreme views with greater degrees of confidence, we've become more entrenched in our own perspective. Now, all kinds of bad things happen in the wake of this phenomenon
of belief polarization. You know, not only do
we become more extreme, more confident, more
fervent, so on and so forth, but our more extreme selves
are also more insular. And what I mean by that
is that as we shift into our more extreme selves, we become more suspicious
of, distrusting of anybody who's not like-minded, right? We come to see anybody who's not part of our group as flawed, benignity, ignorant, untrustworthy, irresponsible, dangerous,
maybe even threatening in certain kinds of
cases this has shown up. So, as we become more extreme, we become more negatively
disposed to anybody who's not just like us, which means that we also
become more interested in policing the boundary between the in-group and the out-group. So, we look for more and more ways to be able to signal to one another whether we're in or out. And so, insular groups often
develop an internal idiom of modes of expression, modes of attire, gestures that signal to one another, you know, that they're on the inside often in ways that aren't
immediately legible or understandable by people
who are on the outside. By the way, if you've been to high school in the United States, this is all gonna sound
very familiar to you because it turns out adults
really just are high schoolers. It's just how cliques work. Once you become interested in the in-group and making yourself
distant from the out-group, you become interested in
figuring out secret handshakes, and code words, and other kinds of things that clearly mark to the in-group, among the in-group who
the in-group is, right? Okay, good. Now, that looks problematic from the point of view
of democracy already because it looks as if belief polarization makes it harder for us to treat our fellow citizens
who are on the out-group, in the out-group rather as our equals, we lose the of why they should be, why should we treat them as equals? Why should they be
entitled to an equal say? Look at how depraved they are. So, that's already a
problem for democracy. Here's the third feature
of belief polarization that I don't think has gotten as much play in the literature, in the political theory
literature about polarization, but it struck me as the thing that really needed some investigation. So, the "Sustaining
Democracy" book is a lot is largely about this
third piece of the puzzle. Our more insular selves,
perhaps unsurprisingly, our more insular selves
are also more conformist. Now, here's what I mean by that. As political groups, as like-minded political
coalitions become more extreme, more interested in being
distinct from the outside, they also become more in eternally alike, and their alikeness starts expanding. They don't merely start believing
the same things, they do. But as I was saying
about the need for cues and signals of allyship, like-minded groups also become more alike across a sort of broadening
range of behaviors, so they start pronouncing words alike. By the way, you can go
confirm this yourself, turn on TV tonight and listen if you can find somebody
talking about the country whose name is spelled I-R-A-N or the country whose name
is spelled of I-R-A-Q, just listen to how they
pronounce the name, Iran or Iran. That is a real reliable signal as to the partisan
identity of the speaker. Okay, and I don't even have to explain, you know, what side, you already know, right? You know how the partisan divides with that mode of
pronouncing certain words. Now, as our more extreme selves become more insular and
become more internally alike, just like a clique in high school, our more extreme selves are also more invested in being alike. That is our more extreme
selves are not only more alike, but are more conformist. We become more interested in preserving a likeness among our allies. And what that means is that
belief polarized groups start becoming deeply
interested in imposer detection. They become more and more focused on expelling inauthentic fakers, right, they become more
interested in punishing, right, people who don't live up to the expectations of the group. In fact, belief polarization is positively correlated
with another pretty robust group psychological tendency
called the black sheep effect. We tend to have more intensely negative and punitive dispositions
towards perceived posers than we do towards
outright enemies, right? The worst thing you can be in our moral economy is a faker, right, is an apostate, right? And so belief polarized groups
come to be really interested and almost singularly focused
on policing the membership. Now, one of the things that
happens in extreme cases like this is that the
groups like-mindedness becomes so focused on compliance with group expectations for membership, the actual ideal, or policy
proposal, or commitment that formed the coalition starts receding into the background. They're no longer interested in their environmental views now, now they're interested
in whether you're wearing the right clothes or whether you're buying
the right groceries. Now, last point on this. Conformist coalitions and alliances are less internally democratic. When you got a group that's
more and more focused on policing the membership for compliance with the group's expectations, you need centralized taste
makers for the group. You need somebody to be able to say, "We're wearing hats like
this now, not hats like that. We're driving cars like this
now, not cars like that. We're shopping like this now, we're not buying from that store. This store is boycotted, that store is where we're
doing our business now." You need somebody to send the signals through the membership of the group about what the expectations are. And so, belief polarized groups become less internally democratic. Now, here's the argument about the Democrats' dilemma. Remember, the Democrats' dilemma puts citizens in the following bind. I'm supposed to do what
I can to further justice, but I'm also supposed to give
the advocates of injustice a due hearing. Well, I'm just gonna stand up for justice and I'm gonna disregard the other side. Why give them a hearing? Why not just work with
allies to further justice? The belief polarization phenomenon shows that that strategy
is going to backfire, why? 'Cause when you dismiss the other side, the forces of belief polarization
don't just disappear, they turn you against your allies, right? They set into motion a
set of group dynamics that fixate the group
increasingly on, right, hierarchy, conformity, compliance. As groups shift in those ways, they start expelling members because they start factionalizing. As they start factionalizing, they start splintering, they shrink. Now, you see why it backfires, right? If you wanna have an
effective democratic voice, not only do you need to join a choir, you gotta hold it together, you gotta grow it if you can. What it takes to hold a
coalition together and grow it is not only real commitment on the part of the members, but also real commitment in light of an adequately broad
sense of permissible doctrinal disagreement among allies. Belief polarization shrinks our conception of what
permissible disagreements are. How's that? - Great, thank you. So, I want to turn us now
to audience questions. We have about 10 minutes remaining, we'll try to get through
as many of them as we can. Thank you all for submitting such fascinating and
interesting questions. I'd like to begin with this one. One audience member asks,
"When we talk about citizens in a democracy being dignified equals, multiple meanings of
equality may come to mind. For example, does equality in this context mean equality before the law or does it refer instead to non-domination by say strong political coalitions, certain kinds of market interactions, or even political correctness as a form of domination by elites? How do you understand
the meaning of equality when referring to citizens
as dignified equals?" - So, I think that equality, there are lots of different dimensions of equality. And I'm concerned in this book at least and I'm committed to a
very broad conception of social equality. I'm committed in this book
simply to identifying democracy about political equality. And what I mean there is that access to democratic modes of holding government
institutions responsible of playing a role in shaping
the political policies of your government and also social conditions under which you can hold your fellow citizens accountable. So, I have to be quick here 'cause I wanna get other questions in. So, I think that what's really essential to political equality, at least in the part of the argument that I'm laying out in this book, is the ability, the more than merely formal ability, the real ability of citizens to retain their democratic
voice in the light or in the wake of electoral defeat. That's what I think is really essential, that even after the votes are counted and the policy is made, I still have an effective, critical voice, contestatory voice, in civic society that citizens around me recognize there are at least pro tanto obligation to engage with. So, I think the institutional stuff is write broader access
to the institutions, fewer restrictions, so on and
so forth in decision-making. But I think that the real core of political equality
that that's operative in this part of my views that
I'm laying out in this book is the idea that ex-post, ex-post access to channels
of effective contestation is what's most crucial. Just because you mentioned, I see in my view as part of my view as in line with Philip Pettit's
style non-domination view. - Thank you very much. So next, I would like
to go to this question. An audience member asks, "How can we change the mindset seemingly present across
the political spectrum that government is somehow other or more than an extension
of the human beings and human relations that actually constitute the governments?" - Sorry, could you just repeat that? Just I think I got it-
- Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah. - So, how to change the idea that government is somehow separate from the individual
citizens that's constituted? - Yeah, that's a good question. And, you know, I think
that there's a real, it's a real dangerous sign for a democracy when major parties, including our two major parties, but not only those two parties are regularly committed to the idea that government is something alien. And in fact, many will probably remember 'cause it was barely a year ago. You know, both major parties, both major candidates for
president in our last election had the same core political message. The other, we're saving
were saving America, and it's a battle for the
soul of an America, right? Both of them had the... Both candidates had the central message, if the other person gets elected, American democracy's done. Now, that is a signal of something very, very difficult. Now, my own answer to the question is and this is not an either or, I'm not saying at the
expense of participation in activities that are national level. I think that refocusing
some of our civic concern on more local levels, I think is our best
practical lever to pull for the kind of disengagement and even disenchant we might call it with democracy as such. - Next question relates to
philosophy of communitarianism. Questioner asks, "Some communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that achieving
consensus on moral issues in modern democratic
societies is merely futile. Even the idea of what constitutes quote-unquote reasonable disagreements seems to be contestable outside
a shared moral framework. But let's assume that a
shared moral framework can be achieved, if loss of political in were
the price of that achievement, under what circumstances would
that price be worth paying?" - Yeah, I'm not sure about
the last part of the question, right, I'm not sure
about how to think about the costs and what the price is. So, I'd have to do a
little thinking about that, so I thank you for that. I think that the MacIntyre line, which I'm pretty familiar with, is slightly more pessimistic than I think it should be. It seems to me that we are not yet living in a society where anyone except for self-professed anti-democrats, people who
don't believe in democracy, we're not yet in a society
where people are willing to say publicly as a kind of reason or consideration in politics, they're not willing to say things like who cares about equality? Who cares about anybody else? Nobody's really and this
is sort to what Jan Elster, you know, has called the
sort of civilizing force of publicity, right? You know, I don't know that
we are actually at a... I don't know that we're at a point that would make the kind of pessimism that MacIntyre directs at certain kinds of political
projects yet justified. Now having said that, you know, I feel the concern of the MacIntyre and the Michael Sandels about what's sometimes called the sort of procedural
Republic stuff, right? Where I'm saying look, it's a real thin, common,
moral commitment, right? It's the idea that we're trying together for a society of not of masters and lords, not of superiors and subordinates, we're trying for a society
of political equals. We've got some information
about how we can do that, what to do with people or what to do in the face of people who say, "I'm just not on board with the political equality thing." Again, I just think it's
a different question. I don't think that pessimism about whether the adequate
level of consensus on that as a broad moral aspiration. I don't think that we're yet in a position where it makes sense to be as pessimistic as I think the MacIntyre line requires us to be at the start. - Well, thank you so
much, Professor Talisse, for explaining your wonderful
and interesting book to us. Just to show it to folks one more time, "Sustaining Democracy" if you want to learn
more about these ideas. Thank you for being here today with us. I encourage you all to check out the Institute
for Humane Studies more on our website at theihs.org to see the programs that
we run for academics and to support their research. Thank you all for being here and I hope you join us again soon. - Thank you. (gentle music)
