>> John Haskell: Welcome to the
Library of Congress everybody. I'm John Haskell, director
of the Kluge Center here. For those of you who don't know,
the Kluge Center's mission is to support scholars doing
innovative and specialized work and to project scholarly work to a broader audience
in accessible ways. Today's event, polarization and
political discourse in the US, fits squarely into our effort to bring scholarly work
to a wider audience. The broad theme,
conversations on the future of democracy animates much of
what we do at the Kluge Center. In our view, ad the Library, no more important
conversations could be had. Today's panel discussion
will go about 45 minutes, with time for questions
afterwards from the audience. Let me point out that
American University Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies
is cosponsoring this event. It's part of an ongoing
relationship between American
University and the Library that we're very proud of
at the Library of congress. The director of the
center to the far right of the platform is David Barker,
and he's one of our panelist. David came to American
University two years ago from Cal State University
Sacramento where he directed the
Institute for Social Research. He studies political
psychology, voting behavior, political communication,
legislative behavior and social welfare policy. He's written three books
and dozens of articles. His most recent book published
by Oxford University Press, One Nation, Two Realities
came out last week. Congratulations, David. Lilliana Mason teaches
in the Government and Politics Department
at the University of Maryland College Park and is
the author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became
our Identity. That came out from
the university of Chicago Press just last year. She received her PhD
in political psychology from Stony Brook University and
a BA in politics from Princeton. Her research on partisan
identity, partisan bias, social sorting and American
social polarization has been published widely in
academic journals as well as being featured in major media
outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post,
NPR and many others. Let's turn to laying
the groundwork for our conversation
this afternoon. Let's be clear on what we're
actually talking about, because people throw
the term polarization out there all the time. And we want to get
some definitions. Aren't there different ways
to think about polarization? Let me start with you Lily. >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah. So, thank you, also,
for having me here. This is a very exciting event. Actually, the way that I
started my research was by sort of challenging the traditional
view of polarization, which until about ten years ago,
really was that we disagree. That Americans disagree
with each other. Democrats are very liberal
in their policy attitudes. Republicans are very
conservative in their policy attitudes. And that was sort of the operating definition
for quite some time. Then about ten years,
less than ten years ago, some new work started
coming out suggesting that polarization
could be separate from that issue-based type. And that is what
we call affective or identity-based polarization. Which doesn't actually require
us to disagree all that much. In fact, it relies, at
least my work relies on psychological theories
of intergroup conflict to explain why Democrats and Republicans might actually
just dislike each other for reasons that go beyond
their operational sort of instrumental disagreements. >> John Haskell: Okay. So you're making a distinction
between issue, polarization and affective polarization. Okay, and David. Why don't you provide
a [inaudible] to that, the kind of polarization
that you study, which is a little bit
different form my reading what you've written. >> David C. Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. Whoa, really loud. Softer. So, yeah, there are a
couple of other ways to think about polarization as well
that are not inconsistent with what Lily is talking about. But my focus has
been on two things. First of all, Factual
Polarization is the name of the book that John
mentioned a second ago. It talks about the
increasing degree to which Americans just don't
believe the same things, right. Like operate and completely
separate spheres of polarization and our movement toward what
some people have labeled a post-truth political era,
which we're not in yet but we might indeed
be moving there. The second thing is the
degree to which the two sides, regardless of the degree to
which they agree or disagree, or even really kind of
necessarily regardless of the degree to which they
like each other or not, are willing to work
together, right. The degree to which people
in Congress are willing to strike deals, negotiate,
bargain, make compromises in order to get stuff
done and the degree to which the mass public is
willing to support their efforts in doing so or refuse to
go along with that idea. So, you know, we've got
four different types of polarization here
that we could talk about, issue-based polarization,
affect-based polarization, factual polarization
and then sort of, I guess you might call it
legislative intransigence. So there you go. >> John Haskell: So
in your view, Lily, at least in the areas
you're more specialized in, although you may
have a view about any of them, where is it worst? >> Lilliana Mason: So basically
what I've been seeing in just, you know, even up to the most
recent public opinion data, most Americans are
actually still to this day what we could
call operationally liberal. So, their policy positions on average tend to
lean to the left. However, when you ask them about what ideological label
they'll apply to themselves, they'll call themselves
conservatives. So, there's actually a
lot of room in the middle for policy-based
ways for Democrats and Republicans to cooperate. It's just that these
identities are so powerful that they don't want
that cooperation. And so, because of,
you know, a whole host of identity-based reasons, which
we can get into in a minute, the incentives for Democrats
and Republicans to cooperate, even when there's a large amount
of agreement across the public, the voting public, the
incentives are just against any cooperation at all. And so the identity really seems
to be driving a lot of the ways that Democrats and Republicans
think about each other and think about themselves. >> John Haskell: So
the affect's worse than the issue is
what you're saying. >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah, yeah. >> John Haskell: What would
you say about that, David? >> David C. Barker: I would
agree with that entirely. So, while it has been the case
that we have seen some movement over the course of the
past 20 years with respect to issue-based polarization, especially more recently
on the left. Because what Lily mentioned
a second ago has been true for a long time in the sense that Americans are operationally
liberal but more likely to call themselves
conservatives, right. And then, but that's become
a little bit less right. So we have seen some movement
of people becoming more liberal and more willing to use the term
liberal than they used to be. And you see that in
a lot of Pew data. But tat movement that
I'm describing is dwarfed by what Lily's talking
about in terms of -- >> John Haskell: So
what exactly do you mean when you say operationally
liberal. Just to make sure people
get what you're saying, what you're trying
to say about that. >> David C. Barker: Yeah. So what I mean by that is that
if you ask people a series of say 20 different
policy preference type of questions, right. Do you think the government
should spend more or less or the same amount of
money on healthcare? Do you think they should spend
more or less the same amount of money to protect
the environment? Yada, yada, yada, you know,
abortion, gay rights, foreign, I could go down the list, right. On almost everything, a majority of the American public is what
we would term liberal, right. But a much smaller percentage
of the public has be willing to label themselves that way. >> John Haskell: So,
you know, when you think about polarization,
you're thinking well, people are divided, whether
it's just in their mind or whether there's a, you
know, substantive issue. The fact is there's this
division that has developed. There seems to be an agreement,
and it's based on part of the identification, right, because that's what
you're both saying, right. >> David C. Barker: Well, I think it's more
complicated than that. Yeah. >> John Haskell: And
so, but in any case, how did we get here then? Why is it, you know,
there are plenty of us in the audience remember
that where every conversation about politics didn't raise
the question of polarization. Now every conversation does. So, Lily, how do we, explain
to us sort o the progression of why this is the way it
is now compared to say, whatever timeframe, 20, 30, 40
years ago, whatever you want. >> Liliana Mason: So I tend to
start an abbreviated history of this in 1964 before
with the Civil Rights Act. After which the Democratic
party really split. And so, large portions of previously self-identified
Democrats were sort of turned off of the
Democratic party. However, party ideas are
very strong type of identity. And so, you know, during that time there were not
very many Republicans in the South, right. Most Southerners, most White
Southerners were Democrats. So it really basically
took a generation for disaffected white
Southerners to move out of the Democratic party. And then their children could
identify as Republicans. So during those years, the 70s,
80s and 90s, there are a lot of sort of confusing cues coming
from the parties themselves, the voters, there
were, you know, conservative Southerner
Democratic lawmakers in Congress that were being elected
to Congress for decades. And then in the 1980s and 1990s, we started seeing the Christian
right become politically activated and aligned
with the Republican party. So, in the story that I
tell, having, you know, first having much more
clear racial cues attached to the parties and then very
clear religious cues attached to the parties, we ended up
with, and then of course, we had the advent
of partisan news and the internet,
which we'll get to. But so the cues about
who belongs with which party
became very, very clear. And so the, all of these very
powerful identities, like race and religion, became
attached to the parties, which means that
those identities which were already pretty
strong got stronger, because with every election,
it's not just your party that loses but it's also your
racial or your religious group that loses, or wins, either way,
our reactions to those types of competitions become larger
and the stakes feel bigger. So it's really this
sort of gradual movement of all these other identities
that have been central to American life lining
up along partisan lines. >> John Haskell:
You know, sort of, one thing what you
said raised my mind. I remember reading a
New York Times article when Sherry Boehlert
who was a congressman from upstate New York where
Lily's from, and he was sort of a fairly liberal
republican actually. And there were others,
at least in the, so it's not just a
Democratic story. The article said
when Boehlert lost, liberal Republicans were
an endangered species. Now they're extinct, you know. So there's also a story on
that side of it too, right. So it wasn't just
Democrats having the issue. It was also the Republicans. David, you were going
to say something. >> David C. Barker: Well
it's sort of related to that. I wanted to take a
step back and talk about a little bit the reason
why the Republicans started, or why I should why
evangelical Christians in particular started aligning
with the Republican party. And so this is a story, and
it sounds sort of provocative or even like a paradox. But our polarized times
are a product, in part, of the steady decline of
religious institutions and the United States. And sort of like the general
trend toward secularization. So that's true for a
few different reasons. I mean first of all, if you
go back to the, you know, 50s and 60s and before that,
right, there was this sort of common and ground
kind of vanilla and white main line
Protestant civil religion in the United States,
to which, you know, most Americans generally adhered
and provided a common ground that sort of helped to facilitate the
bridging of differences. As that declined,
right, and indeed as sort of the culture became more
secular, what happened was, you know, traditional Christians
felt threatened, right. And they felt like that they
thought their identity was being threatened, and they
started to push back, right. And they, because one of
the things that went along with secularization was the
sexual revolution, right. So we had the ERA and
Roe v. Wade and Griswold versus Connecticut and
lots of other things that were disturbing and
offensive and threatening to a big chunk of society. And then you had an
opportunistic Republican party that was going to welcome those
people into the fold in 1980, and hence, ever since then,
you've seen this trend continue. A couple of other ways
that sort of the decline of organized religion
has contributed is that it also contributes to
an overall declining sense of social capital that
we all have, right. Religious institutions used to
provide community for people and a place for people to come
together and know each other and care about each and
know each other's kids. And they may have
political differences, but they have these
common bonds, right. And so as that source
of those bonds declined, along with other things, that's
contributed to our sorting and our vitriol toward
each other. A final thing that I'll
mention on this, and if you want to hear more on this, there's a
lot of good stuff by Emily Ekins out of Cato and Ross Douthat
from the New York Times who, and I haven't personally
studied this, but I find this to be a relatively compelling
argument based on the data that they talk about is that
even the Republican party now, right, is going through
this process of secularization, right. So there are fewer
religiously-oriented Republicans now than there were
say ten years ago or during the Bush years. And when, you know, if a lot
of us in this room, right, who maybe didn't like the
religious right, we are going to really dislike the
post-religious right, because when religion
loses its stronghold over conservative
politics, it opens the door for something much, much darker. And that's what we're
seeing right now. >> John Haskell: So yeah,
you opened a can of worms about the media, right. Do you want to speak to that? I mean, it's interesting
that this conversation about how we got here, neither
of you has laid the blame at the doorstep of the media,
which a lot of people will do. You've said, well, there's
actually much more fundamental changes, foundational
changes, in the nature of American politics
and society, which you both described. Where does the media fit in? Is it overrated in terms
of how it should be blamed? Either one of you
want to start off. >> David C. Barker: Well, I
just talked for a long time, so. >> Lilliana Mason: So the way
that I think about the rise of both social media and
partisan news is that, you know, we have these social
changes occurring, but those were not
necessarily all that visible at any given point in time. And so, really, what Americans
need, because we don't, you know, on average,
Americans don't tend to pay very much
attention to politics. We don't, you know, maybe the
people sitting in this room do. But on average, right, most
Americans don't have the time. And we don't expect them to
read every bill and figure out what exactly they want
their legislator to do. And so we tend to, you know,
use mental shortcuts in order to make our political decisions. And one of those shortcuts is a,
you know, which party is people like me, and which party
is people not like me? So, having racial
and religious sorting into parties was one really
easy way for people to figure out which party was like them. But it doesn't happen
in a vacuum. They have to have a place to
go to see where the people like them are and sort of see
the message that says hey, people like us are on this side, and people like that
are on that side. And what social media
did, at least in my view, is to make that message so
easy to receive, so much easier to receive, than it
had been before that. And partisan news
did the same thing. It made these cues, these
mental shortcuts very, very easy to find. Whereas before, you had
to actually pay attention, read a newspaper, you know,
watch the news at night. Now, it's much easier to find
out which side is your side and which side is the bad guys. >> John Haskell: David. >> David C. Barker: Yeah so, 20 years ago I wrote a
book on partisan media. At the time, it was just in its
infancy and sort, I'll go ahead and say like predicted that
we would find ourselves in a horribly polarized time
20 years into the future, so I'll take some
credit for that. But I was very happy. Yeah, yeah, all of this has
been great for my career. As has Trump, by the way,
I'll go ahead and mention. But so partisan media is not
irrelevant to this story. I do want to emphasize that I
think it is a marginal player and that the blame that
gets laid at the feet of partisan media, and especially social
media, is a bit overblown. I think that the larger culprits
are these things that both Lily and I have been talking about. But partisan media, especially,
does have a role to play. And going back to talk radio
in the 90s and then Fox, which was deliberately,
you know, you know, Rupert Murdoch went to
Roger Ailes and said, yeah, that thing that I'm hearing on
AM radio, that Limbaugh thing, we want to turn that
into a TV, right. If you can replicate Limbaugh on
TV, we can make a lot of money. And indeed, they have made
a lot of money, right. And so, and what happens,
right, when people, at least back in the day, right. I mean everybody knows
what Fox News is now. Everybody knows what MSNBC is, and everybody knows what
talk radio is, etcetera. But, you know, in the early
days of partisan media, it was possible to, not necessarily happen upon
Sean Hannity by accident, right. But you could sort
of like think well, you know, I don't like taxes. He doesn't like taxes, right. So I kind of like him. And then over time, you didn't
know necessarily how you felt about lots of other stuff. Right. You didn't necessarily
know how you felt about Medicare for all or the green new deal
or the immigration, you know, the marauding caravan
of people or, you know, Roe v. Wade or what have you. But over time, you came to learn
how you were supposed to think about all of those things. So it provided just
another cue, right, to go along with what
Lily is talking about. And so, you know, my evidence,
both in that book 20 years ago and the one right now, indicates that partisan media
definitely have a role to play. But I will say that to our
surprise, we actually have not yet been able to find a
lot of significant evidence for social media, right. There is a logic to it, right. I think we all understand,
especially as it relates to the algorithms, right, that
it figures out what we like, and it gives us more of that. And like, you know, the
[inaudible] bait and all that. But so far, both in terms
of my own work and in terms of all the other work that
I've seen by other people, it actually suggests that
the so-called echo chambers of social media are
a bit overblown and that we're actually more
inclined, believe it or not, to encounter points of
view from the other side through social media than we are
through other types of media. >> John Haskell: So
switching gears a little bit, we'll get into a fun topic of
who's more to blame, Democrats or Republicans, for
the polarization. And I bring that up not just to
be, you know, to be incendiary, but a lot of very important
people have said hey, it's because of the
Republican party. And yet, I, you know, of
course I've read things that these two folks have
written and talked to them both. And it's nowhere near
that simple, right, David. Or Lily, why don't you start? >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah, I
mean, so, there's so many ways to think about it, right. So there's the elite level
where we're looking, you know, you can look at Congress
and see polarization of our elected officials
over time, which is extreme. And in fact, it did,
the right moved further to the right before the left
moved further to the left. So that was a leading polarizer. But also, if you look on
average, so I've asked a bunch of questions of American
voters about things like would you be
willing to live next door to an outgroup partisan? Would you be willing
to be friends with an outgroup partisan? Would you be willing to
marry an outgroup partisan? People don't want to marry
outgroup partisans in general. But -- >> David C. Barker: Or have
their daughter marry one. >> Lilliana Mason: Or
have their child, right, or have one marry
into the family. That's also not what they want. But so on that level,
actually, Democrats and Republicans are
relatively similar in their dislike
of the other side. And Democrats are actually
increasingly slightly more desirous of co-partisan
neighbors. At the same time, you
know, there is an asymmetry between the parties socially. So Republicans are a
very socially homogenous, compared to Democrats,
socially homogenous party. So the way that I explain it is that if you pick two random
Republicans, Republican voters out of population, the chance
they'll be the same race and religion is quite high. If you pick two Democratic
voters out of the population, the chance that they're
the same race and religion is actually
very low. And so sort of psychological
processes by which we understand who is and who is them and
how we build our boundaries around us, those are
much more functional in the Republican party because
the boundaries are so visible and easy to understand. So, yeah, in some
cases, Democrats, you know, like Democrats best. And in other cases,
Republicans are sort of better policing
the boundaries of who belongs and who doesn't. >> John Haskell:
This is to suggest that Democrats may be
moving in the direction of perhaps being
even less tolerant than the Republicans,
which is -- >> David C. Barker: So again,
there's a few different ways to think about this just
to kind of piggyback on what Lily was saying. So, to go ahead and plug another
book, so I wrote another book in 2012 that chronicled
the difference between the, you know, red American, blue
America, in terms of the degree to which the public wants
their elected officials to sort of make deals and go
along with the other side versus wants them to stand firm. And Republicans were
far more likely to sort of demand intransigence, right. And then we saw that parlaying
up into Congress itself, which we also studied
that showed, as Lily mentioned a second ago,
that the right actually was, you know, has polarized much
more than the left in Congress in terms of the extremity
of the positions they take and their unwillingness
to reach across the aisle. Having said that, in
the recent work right, on the factual stuff, we
found some really interesting and complicated results. And so on some high profile
issues that tend to get talked about a lot in the media, right,
like climate change and sort of like the prevalence
of racism in society or maybe the origins
of sexuality. Republicans seem more
misinformed, right. The Democrats have the
quote/unquote science on their side when it
comes to those things. However, our evidence indicates
that's just a coincidence. That's a byproduct of
the fact that they just, that happens to be true, right. Because when we actually look
at people's factual perceptions of the truth on a host like a
dozen different types of issues about which the science is
much less clear than the three that I just mentioned, we
see that liberals are just as inclined as conservatives to project their values
onto their beliefs. And furthermore, going back
to this affective stuff, we randomly, we showed people
factualize Twitter accounts of some guy named Bob Stratford, which was like the
most white bread name that we could come
up with, right. And so in Bob's -- >> John Haskell: Bob
Barker's pretty white bread. >> David C. Barker: Yeah,
well I thought about that. Actually, I had somebody in
one of these audience things where I was showing the images,
they asked me if the image of Bob Stratford was
me, and I was offended. But anyway, so we show Bob
making these factual claims on Twitter, right. And sandwiched him between some
other stuff like his fandom of the Beatles and the fact
that he likes pancakes. And so in one of the things he
just says something like, hey, you know, I can't believe
that all these, you know, people still don't believe
in global warming, right. And on the other one he
says like, oh you know, the evidence actually suggests that there hasn't been
any significant warming for 15 years, and
this is all overblown. Blah. Relatively
innocuous statements, right. We found that liberals,
in particular, right, when they saw an image of Bob basically denying climate
science, subsequent to that, they said that they
would be unwilling to eat a sandwich with him. They would be unwilling
to work with him. They would be unwilling
to share space with him. And this had been applied to
seven, we dd this experiment over and over again, with
six different issues. And we found the same
thing over and over again. Which is the liberals
hate conservatives more than conservatives hate
liberals when it come to the specific stuff about
them supposedly getting the facts wrong. And we thought that
was striking. So one more final thing though,
and then I'll stop talking. Which is that, sort of
complicates it further. I mentioned before that I also
study, you know, compromise and the propensity
to compromise. When it comes to that, though,
there is still a tendency for the right be
more intransigence. >> Lilliana Mason: I would also
just add the, in addition to all of this, the sort of on a basic
human level, the inclination to want our side to be the
best and to win is universal and distributed, you
know, completely equally across the entire population, whether you're a
Republican or Democrat. And similarly, our ability
to engage in, you know, motivated reasoning and see what
we want to see in the world, that type of biased perception of the world is also
just a universal thing. And it, you know, there's
no partisanship behind who is biased about the
way they see the world. Just, it's central to
who we are as people. >> David C. Barker: And if I
could say one, and we're sort of getting you off here. >> John Haskell: No,
no, no, that's -- >> David C. Barker: But I
have one more thing to say on that too which is another
provocative statement that's motivated reasoning, this
natural human tendency toward it that Lily describes actually
worsens with greater, with higher levels
of education, right. And so back to the
first question that started all this off
which is how we got here. One of the reasons we are more
polarized now than we used to be is because we're more
educated now than we used to be. Right. And that as we become
a more educated society, what happens is, again,
this is a paradox, right, is that we actually become
better counter arguers, right. Become better able to
filter through all the noise and find the thing that seems
to comport with what we believe and like filter out the
stuff that doesn't and sort of like reaffirm,
reaffirm, reaffirm. And that is another thing
that we observe in our book. >> John Haskell: Yeah. So, I think we accept in a courtroom the
adversarial process, I think, generally speaking, that the
defense attorney is stretching the facts as far as
she can go to try to, you know, get her person off. Meanwhile, the prosecutor,
you know, he can't lie, but he can stretch, and
so you're building a case. And at some levels, politics is
supposed to be like that too, right, because we have conflicts
inevitable in a country where, you know, is there any
expectation that the person who represents Western Nebraska
would have anything in common with the person who
represents East LA, or somewhere in Brooklyn? No. So you're going
to have conflict. So what I'm getting to in
a very roundabout way is, what does polarization
then matter. It's almost like an expectation that people would come
on different sides. Why should we worry about this? >> Lilliana Mason: So, I
mean I guess I would think about this question as the other
way you could ask it is what does someone in rural Nebraska
have in common or not have in common with someone
in rural Vermont, right? Because they are very
different voters. Even though they probably have
relatively similar interests. And so, I think what we're
seeing is that the, and this is, you know, something other
political scientists have found is that one thing that
polarization does is it sort of, it nationalizes our
politics so that when we have localized politics
we can make choices that are in the interests
of our local areas. And we expect our
representatives to do that. Once our politics are extremely
polarized in these Democratic and Republican identities
become really powerful, we start expected our
elected officials not to worry about our own little district
in, you know, in rural Nebraska, but instead, to think about,
you know, what's in the interest of the National Republican
Party. Or what's in the interests of
the National Democratic Party. And once we begin to do
that, individual interests go by the wayside in lieu
of this really sort of just brutal fight
over who gets to win. And the way that I explain it
in my book is to say, you know, when we talk about,
you know, when we think about social identity
being central to all this, what we're really
saying is who is winning. And we think about who gets to
win, Democrats or Republicans, who gets to win even
legislation. And so when we say who
wins legislation, right, who wins government, the answer
should not be one political party or the other. The answer should be as many
people as possible, right. Like as many Americans as
possible, the greater good comes out of everything that we do. And instead, we focus a lot
more as citizens who are willing to sacrifice a lot of our own
good in order to feel that sense of victory, almost like
we're watching a sports game. And then, you know, when
you watch the Super Bowl, you just go home
afterwards and you don't call up your favorite player and
ask him to please do the thing that you wanted him
to do, right. You just let him go. Because he gave you the
win, and you feel great. So it's, you know, the more
that we sort of nationalize and sportify politics,
it becomes easier for elected officials
to be less accountable and to be less representative
of their constituents. >> John Haskell: So it's UNC
against Duke is what we're -- >> David C. Barker:
Something like that. Which is what I think we'll
see in a couple of weeks. So to back up for a
second and just to go back to your initial point
about like, you know, maybe in some respects,
polarization isn't so bad. What Lily knows and
some of the other folks in the room may even
remember, you know, a while back the American
Political Science Association actually bemoaned
the fact, right, that there was not enough
partisan polarization in politics, and it
was a big thing, right. Back in the 50s and 60s, people
were worried about the fact that there, you know, there's
not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats
and the Republicans. And again, like the
ideas that this was bad for democracy because,
as Lily pointed out, which can't expect most voters
to really pay that close of attention to everything. So partisanship provides a
really useful cue, right. So if the parties can provide
coherent policy platforms that are distinct
from each other, then that simplifies the process
for voters and makes it easier for voters to figure out
which one of them matches up their interests and their
values and like, you know, democracy can function
effectively. And that's true, right. And so we would expect,
you know, some degree of partisan
polarization which has obviously
happened, the sorting, right, is a democratically
useful thing. Another thing I'll say is that I
don't think Lily has come right out and said this so far, but
sort of in between the lines of what she's been
talking about, is that part of the reason that we have
polarized is a natural byproduct of increasing diversity,
right, in our country, right. And a lot of the people in this
room I would imagine probably agree that that's
something to be celebrated and something that is good. And so as we have
seen more diversity, we have seen more
polarization because we're in a transition period, right. And that maybe we're
going to come out of it on the other side, right. But it's a natural
byproduct of that. And that's something
that, again, most of us think
is a good thing. As to why we should care about
the downside right now, again, in the same way that, well
I'm not sure anymore, right, we used to all believe
in markets. We don't all believe
in markets anymore. But in the same way
that we like the idea of a well-functioning
marketplace where competition
can happen, right, and because of that
competition, right, sort of like the best prices
lower and products improve and everything is
better off, right. But that marketplace can
get perverted, right, by monopolies and
stuff like that. Well, it's the same way
in democracy, right, which people sometimes describe
as a marketplace of ideas, right, where everybody's
supposed to be able to come in, and the different points
of view compete and then through that competitive
process, the best ideas rise to the top. But if people are unwilling
to sort of like think of that common good, if they
just think of it in terms of a team sport, then that
marketplace of ideas turns into a flea market
of ideas, right. And that's basically
where we are right now. >> Lilliana Mason: If I could
just underscore what David was saying about sort
of the, you know, maybe this is a good
process, a healthy process. In fact, the fact
that we have so much, so much of this sorting is
really racial, based, you know, based in this increasing
diversity and in, you know, the fact that we're addressing
a legacy of, you know, white supremacy and
institutionalized racism that we really haven't as a nation really dealt
with completely ever. And so if it, if you imagine the
reckoning in American politics with a legacy of
institutionalized racism for hundreds of years,
I would imagine that the reckoning would feel
very chaotic and difficult, and there would be conflict,
and there would be backlash. And we would be disagreeing
and yelling a lot. And so it would probably
feel like this, right. If we were to have a, you know, a reckoning with a racial
history of American politics, it's possible that
that's just what this is. That it feels bad because it's
going to be hard to do that. And we don't know yet
whether we get to come out on the other side or
whether we let the backlash, you know, lash back. But it is possible that that's
what we're sitting in right now. >> John Haskell: Yeah,
and the racial reckoning in the mid-1960s involved
riots at levels that, you know, for many of the younger people
here, unless they go back and look at newsreels, they
wouldn't even conceive of. >> Lilliana Mason: Now
the really important thing about that is part of the reason
there were riots was there wasn't a party that was
standing on the side. There was no institutionalized
way for people to ask the government
to do this for them. >> John Haskell: Right,
and people weren't allowed to vote in large numbers. >> Lilliana Mason: Right. >> John Haskell: So, what you
raise, Lily, and David as well, a lot of the truly great
thought leaders intellectuals in the United States do raise
in the major media, you know, the specter of civil war. They use that language. Is that overblown? >> David C. Barker: Probably. I mean, for some of the reasons
that we just alluded to, right. I mean you just mentioned
the fact that the strife in American politics is
more partisan now, right. So that's what we've been
talking about here today is that we've got more partisan
polarizations than anytime, you know, around
since the Civil War. But in terms of like
general political strife, it's actually somewhat more
subdued than it was in the 60s and the 70s where people
were, you know, bombing places and there was, again,
like major violence on a fairly regular basis. And it's what Lilly said, right. We now have more political
channels through which to express those
forms of protest. And so, for that reason, right, the partisan polarization
actually might be the thing that keeps us from
shooting each other. >> John Haskell: And
I'm glad you said that, because I came prepared with
a quote from Time Magazine. You know, and it's stuff that
gets all the attention or things like the crackups at the
'68 Democratic convention in Chicago. And there were hijackings by radical groups
back in those days. But this, again, is from a
recent article in Time Magazine. In the 1970s, bombing attacks
were growing by the day. They had begun as
crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails
college radicals hurled through ROTC buildings. The first actual bombing
campaign, the work of a group of New York radicals led by a militant named Sam
Melville featured attacks on a dozen buildings around
Manhattan between August and November of '69
when Melville and most of his friends were arrested. The Weather Underground's
attacks began three months later. By 1971, protests bombings
had spread across the country. In a single 18-month
period during '71 and '72, the FBI counted 2,500 bombings on American soil,
almost five a day. So that's different than
what we're seeing now. >> Lilliana Mason: Absolutely. >> John Haskell:
You know, obviously. >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah. I mean, so I think, and
this is directly related to David's book. You know, the only place that
gives me pause or concern is that part of the reason
we're not in a situation like the 60s is we have this,
you know, political, electoral, legitimate place to
have these conversations and to have these arguments. We can vote for what we
want the government to do about these social divides. And the party that we
vote for, you know, is effectively taking
sides at this point. So, that funnels or
channels all of this energy into a place that is democratic. The times when I get
worried about it, and I've started measuring
attitudes towards political violence among the American
electorate, we've just, you know, we just
started collecting data. So there's some slightly
disturbing levels of people who are willing to accept
violence, but not very high. And we haven't looked
at it over time, so it might not be
any different. But the thing that concerns
me is that when that channel, that legitimate channel,
through elections, becomes questioned, right. So when the legitimacy of
an election is challenged, that's the type of situation
in which we lose that sort of, you know, release valve. And in fact, people who study
civil war in other countries, you know, talk about multiple
ways that you can sort of predict a civil
war might happen. And one of them is racial and ethnic polarization
along political lines. So, we have that. But the other two are
economic catastrophe and adverse regime change. And so as our, if our
elections begin to be seen as illegitimate based
on factual, you know, disagreements, that reduces
the legitimacy of the election. It possibly makes regime change
seem adverse to more people. And also, you know, it's
important to remember that we're in a very healthy
economy right now. And if that were to
change, there's no guarantee that we would still see, people
are comfortable generally. Not everyone, but in comparison
to, you know, prior times, a lot of people are
pretty comfortable. So if that changes
on a broad level, and people are no longer ready
to just sit in their chair and enjoy their things that
they got for very cheap, they may not feel
quite so peaceful. >> John Haskell: David. >> David C. Barker: Yeah, that's
what I was going to say too. Again in 1971, '72,
we were in the throes of the most unpopular
war in American history. And we were also in, you know, a pretty horrific
recessionary period. Right now, right,
we're in, you know, these are the salad days, right. I mean it seems like it. But this is in a relative
peace and prosperity, and we still hate
each other this much. So like imagine if
we were in the midst of the Vietnam War and, you
know, stagflation right now. We might actually
see more violence, and that might especially
be true if we have one more
electoral cycle in which the popular vote does
not match the electoral college. Right. That could be the channel
through which at least one side of the spectrum decides
okay, I'm done. It's time to take
to the streets. >> John Haskell: So
in terms of, you know, and you started a conversation,
where is it going forward in terms of generally
speaking people recognize, certainly as represented in the
presidential nomination process, Republicans move to the right,
and that's happened in Congress. And there's some
sort of a capture, by maybe even now a more
nationalist right wing of the party. Are the Democrats
headed in that direction? It's probably too early to tell,
but you're political scientists, and science is about, you
know, prediction in part. Are they headed in
the same direction? >> David C. Barker: We all
had a little trouble doing that in 2016. >> John Haskell: You said
you were right 20 years ago, you know, by Fox News. But, you know, is that
where it's headed, and what's the impact of
that if it were to be that? >> Lilliana Mason: So my
sense of it is I'm much less, I'm much less worried perhaps
than maybe David will be about the sort of, you
know, leftist revolution. Largely because, you know,
the nationalists sort of edge to what's happening on
the right is something that we've actually had
before in this country and has blossomed before. So it's something realistic. And there are people who
are, you know, ready to, ready and willing
to bring it back. Whereas the sort
of socialist edge of the Democratic party has
never really taken hold here, and it's unclear whether
anyone is even advocating for, you know, the government
to take over everything. And it seems like no one is
actually really advocating for socialism. So, in my view of it,
I'm much more concerned about the sort of, you know, white supremacist nationalist
backlash that we're also seeing in Europe and we're seeing
in other Western democracies that seems to be the
more ascended movement across the globe than a
leftward sort of movement. We're not really seeing
that anywhere else, and we're not seeing it
very strongly here yet. >> David C. Barker:
Yeah, so, I wouldn't say that I'm concerned normatively,
right, about the move to the left within
the Democratic party. I think that it's really
interesting, right. It's something that,
as Lily mentioned, we've never seen before
in American politics and the rapidity with
which the mainstream of the Democratic party has come to resemble Bernie
Sanders is striking, right. For anybody, you know, over
40-year-olds like the idea that we could be talking
like and not laughing, right, about some of the stuff
that is main, you know, part of the mainstream
Democratic party platform now, is really, really striking. And again, maybe
it's exciting, right. Maybe it's, you know, the
next step and something that we should all
be championing. I don't know. But it is really,
really interesting. I will say that I think
that that is ultimately where we're going, right. But I think that it's
going to sort of dip. I think that in terms of
this particular cycle, the media fascination with AOC
and, you know, the Bernie Bros and sort of like the
general march let within the Democratic party
doesn't quite match the data when you actually look at
most democratic party voters. Most of them are still
pretty moderate, right. Socialism is still unpopular. Most of them still say that
they, you know, want somebody, you know, who looks
more like Joe Biden, right, than maybe AOC. And so, particularly given
the fact that we are in times of economic prosperity, right, the need for a complete
structural overhaul of our economy is going
to be less appealing. And B, particularly in this
era of Trump, an era in which, again on surveys, voters
say over and over and over and over again, the
thing that they want out of their nominee more than anything else is
somebody who can beat Trump. I think that that
disinclines the party from ultimately nominating
one of the leftists in 2016. >> Lilliana Mason: Elizabeth
Warren herself called herself a capitalist. >> David C. Barker: Right. >> Lilliana Mason:
Right, so even -- >> David C. Barker: Exactly. >> Lilliana Mason:
So self-definition. >> John Haskell: Well,
let's take a few questions from the audience before
we move to the reception. This gentleman right
here is first. >> Well, thank you for very
thoughtful conversation. Recently, you've heard
Robert Kagan talk about authoritarianism
and liberalism. Seems very similar to the
arguments I'm hearing today without tossing the
labels aside. And all three of
you are academics. I'd be interested in
your point of view on that article and the thesis. >> John Haskell: And just
so I can, and that's one of the most interesting things
I've read in a long time. The article is, I think
the title is Strong Men is in the title. Robert Kagan, it's
spelled K-A-G-A-N. It's in the Washington Post. I encourage you all to read it. And I'll let you guys comment. >> David C. Barker: I haven't
seen the actual article, but I mean I can comment on
the role of authoritarianism in American politics
if you'd like. Like what is the actual,
the specific article, what is the point
of the argument. >> That liberalism is declining,
and authority is rising. >> John Haskell: So what it
is, it's a transnational. >> David C. Barker:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> John Haskell:
It's a transnational, transnational strong
man authoritarian thing that's happening. >> David C. Barker: I'm going to
think that's undeniable, right. I mean you see that across
the globe from Latin America to Turkey to Europe, right. You know, to Brexit to
here, fueled in many places by a few different things. But you know, immigration,
right, and refugees and migration. So traditional populations and countries are
sensing this upheaval. They're feeling their
cultures being threatened as I said before, right. That sort of threat, that
perceived threat can be racial. It can be religious. It can be a number
of different things. But when people do feel
that threat, they push back. And a lot of, it
turns out that a lot, maybe most humans have
an authoritarian streak in their heads that
gets triggered when they perceive themselves
to be under a threat, right. So we're talking about
all these populations that are perceiving their
cultures to be under a threat, and they're pushing back, right,
and they're looking for somebody to be the savior, right. And again, we've seen
that in a variety of different places
across the globe. >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah, the
way that, I think about it from a more psychological
perspective on sort of the individual level. One thing that we know about
the ways that people react to threat is, I like to call it
like imagine you're, you know, all alone on a savannah and
you hear a lion roar, right. You don't know where the
lion roar is coming from, but you're alone. So you're probably
going to hide. You're going to feel anxious and
afraid and you're going to hide. But if you've got a huge band
of people all around you, and you've got a leader
who's pointing to the lion, then you're going
to go attack, right. You're going to go defend
yourself and attack. And it's almost like by pointing
fingers correctly or not, you know, at a scapegoat
group which often is refugees or immigrants, these right wing
leaders can actually take a population of people who's
feeling very anxious and afraid and uncertain as to why things
are feeling wrong and turn that anxiety into anger
and get them to move. And that ability is really
only available to people who are willing to point
to, even if they're pointing to a tree trunk and saying
that's the lion, right. Everyone's going to go
attack the tree trunk. But at least they're going
to feel good about it, right. And so, you know, it's a
really great, easy, great, it's a really easy tool
for right wing leaders to actually use to get people
on their side and moving. >> David C. Barker: Just
like the Jews [inaudible]. >> Lilliana Mason: Right. >> John Haskell: Do
we have any questions? Anybody else? There's one right over
there in the center. >> David C. Barker: An
American University PhD student. >> Yes, I'm one of
Professor Barker's students. How are you? So I was -- >> John Haskell: Don't ask
too hard of a question. >> David C. Barker:
This will be for Lily. >> So I wanted to get back
to this in terms of kind of framing it as
winning and losing. I keep thinking about
this quote I think I read in the New York Times
in response to some of Trump's policies. Like he's not hurting the people
he's supposed to be hurting. And one of the things I really
appreciated in your book, Professor Mason, was this
idea that even when we agree and we can all win on something,
the idea of the other side of the win is unthinkable. So we'd rather all lose as long
as the other side loses more. So, I guess I just
wanted to ask, like how have we
got to this point? Is it we become more
aware of the stakes of winning and losing? Are the stakes higher? Or is there, I don't know, is there some other dynamic
that's making us succeed in terms. >> David C. Barker: Lily. >> John Haskell: You're going
to [inaudible] his dissertation. >> David C. Barker:
Outside reading. >> Lilliana Mason: So
what you're referring to these old psychological
experiments in the 70s where people were just
told they had an identity, and then they were asked
basically, you know, you could allocate money. Either everybody in
the experiment gets $5 or your group gets four but
the other group gets three. And which condition
would you prefer? It's a group you've
never heard of. You're never going to meet any
of the other members of it. And over and over again,
people chose this win condition over this greater
good condition. So even with meaningless group
that has almost no effect on anyone's life, the
human condition is to say, I want those guys to
be worse off than I am. And I'm willing to sacrifice
my own good for that. So that's our baseline. That's like the lowest level
of group identification. And then, once, so this is
why social sorting, I think, is so dangerous is because
what we do is we start piling extremely meaningful identities
on top of that base instinct. And as those identities
are, you know, as more and more identities become piled
on top of our partisanship, that need for victory
becomes deeper and deeper. And the sense of loss that we
feel every single election, if we lose, is devastating. It's even more devastating. And so we end up
with this, you know, we have this very basic
sort of primal human need to sacrifice even, you
know, in order to win. And then apply that to an
increasingly large portion of our sort of self-esteem and who we think we
are in the world. That is a sort of a very
dangerous combination of human instincts I think. >> David C. Barker: Yeah
and a couple of other things to go along with that
that have contributed to making it worse, right. And so, one is just the
level of competitiveness between the parties, right. So again, if you use the
sports team metaphor, the team that you
root for, right. If you, let's say that you're, I don't know, a Browns'
fan, right. The Cleveland Browns
have not been competitors for 20 years, right. And so, in many cases,
they might be next year, but they haven't been, right. And so if you are
a fan of a team who like really doesn't have
that much chance of winning, you don't care that
much, right, frankly. You're sort of like eh, maybe I'll watch the
game, maybe I won't. It doesn't matter that much because I don't expect
that much. But when both sides,
right, are within a couple of percentage points
of each other, right, when they're balancing
with each electoral cycle, both at the congressional level
and the presidential level, you know that, you know, victory
hangs in the balance, right. And that makes you much more
emotionally engaged, right. And so that's where
we are right now. The other thing that contributes
to this, so this goes back to the media, but this one
isn't about partisan media. This is just about the general
media frame that is applied to politics where everything is
about winning and losing, right. And this is, you know, this
is not a Fox News story. This is a New York Times,
Washington Post, NBC, CNN, you name it, story, where
we read about and hear about and watch politics in this
country as a spectator sport. And not just during
elections, right. The whole shut down and all
that, that was framed completely in terms of like Trump losing,
Pelosi winning or whatever. And so when everything is framed
like that, surprise, surprise, right, we buy into it. >> John Haskell: Yeah, and
one of Lily's colleagues at the University of Maryland,
Francis Lee [phonetic] develops that point really well about
how the, beginning a little bit in the 80s but especially
in the 90s with the Gingrich
Republican revolution. The outcome of who
would have power in Congress is much
more up for grabs. And that changes a lot in terms
of the incentive structure. Did we have a question
on this side? There's a lady back
in the back, Mike. >> I have a very loud voice. Everybody can hear me. You mentioned identity politics. Did you look at other
[inaudible] besides race and religion, for example,
city, country, travel, charitable giving, CR
versus [inaudible]. Can you talk about that? >> David C. Barker:
That's a good question. >> Lilliana Mason: Yeah, so
the, there is an increasing body of work that finds that you can
predict people's partisanship with almost anything. Including the type
of car they drive, the grocery store they shop
at, the TV that they watch, the type of soda
that they drink, the type of beer
that they drink. There is a computer scientist
out of Stanford can predict within 95% correctness which party an individual
neighborhood will vote for by counting the
number of Priuses versus pickup trucks parked on
the street using Google Earth. So, it's amazing. So, yes, there is, and I
think this is really important actually is that
this is a cultural, this is an increasingly
cultural difference. >> David C. Barker: I don't
think, let me just add to that, I don't think sort of along
with the Prius versus pickups, I could have the details
wrong on this, so, you know, don't hold me to it, but
I think this is right. >> John Haskell:
Which is the Democrat and which is the Republican? >> David C. Barker:
Ha ha, ha, ha, ha. I don't think that a single
electoral congressional district in the country went red in
2018 if it had a Whole Foods. >> Lilliana Mason: Right. Whole Foods versus Kroger. >> David C. Barker:
Whole Foods, yeah. >> Lilliana Mason: You can
predict the neighborhood. >> David C. Barker:
What's that like -- >> John Haskell: Cracker Barrel. >> David C. Barker:
Cracker Barrel, right. But yeah, so we'll
leave it at that. >> John Haskell:
Carrie, go ahead. >> Hi, this is a such
a great conversation. Thank you both for being here. So I just wanted to maybe push
a little more on the question from a couple cycles back
about and getting back to what you both had to say
about issue-based partisanship and affective-based
partisanship. So, and the relative ratio with which we're motivated
by one or the other. So I think one of the things that constantly puzzles me
is why the affective-based partisanship isn't more
eclipsed at this moment in time by the issue-based side of it. The fact that the majority of Americans are
operational liberals, I think, speaks to this. Now if the stakes were
low on these issues, I could understand more why
the affective side would trump, so to speak, the
issue-based side. But when you're talking
about things like healthcare, preserving protections for
preexisting conditions, ensuring that social, the
social safety net survives, include social security,
and the asymmetry between the two sides are so
extraordinary on those issues. Why that doesn't
elevate the relevance of important the
issue-base side more. >> John Haskell: That's
a great question, Carrie. That's a great question. >> David C. Barker: Do
you want me to start? >> Lilliana Mason:
You can start. >> David C. Barker: Okay. So, first of all, I agree
that it's a great question, and I won't pretend to like
completely be able to answer it. But I think that part of
the story does have to do with the degree of
sophistication within the electorate, right. And so if you, again, if you
look at surveys or whatever, if you narrow your
sample just to Americans who pay a reasonable amount of
attention to politics and sort of like know something about it, you actually do see quite a bit
more issue polarization along the lines of what you
would expect based on what you're saying. But the thing is, for very good
reasons, again, this is no sort of like knock on
the American people, but you know, people are busy. They got to get the kid to
Taekwondo deal with McDonald's. You're going to watch,
you know, Seinfeld reruns. There's a lot to do
in our lives, right, and so like most people just
aren't paying that close of attention to politics. So they don't necessarily
even know a lot of this stuff that you're saying, right. And so, but what they do know,
right, is that I'm white, and I'm male and a
Christian from the South. And so is that guy. And she's not, right. And like I'm with
that guy, right. >> Lilliana Mason: I would
also, yeah, I mean, so this, I think goes back to
the what's the matter with Kansas question, right. Like why are people voting
against their best interests? And the answer to that question,
and I think it has always been to find their interests, right. We assume that people's most
important interests are their health and their
financial security. But in fact, if you take someone
who is feeling like a loser, and the only way for that
person to feel individually good about themselves is to
hold onto a group identity that is ascendant and winning
and superior to other groups. That pulls them out of this
place that feels terrible. And so when you're in a place that psychologically makes
you feel bad about yourself, maybe your interest is
to just get out as fast as you possibly can
and not to think about these very
practical policy things. Instead to say, my status
is not okay right now. I want my status to be better. Either, it has been, my status
has been reduced in society, and I don't feel
comfortable with that. Or other people are
coming and taking over what I think
should be mine. And so, you know,
psychologically, logically, yes, those things really do matter. But psychologically, I think, there are really very serious
status threats that people feel, and they respond to them
almost implicitly, right. That response comes
first psychologically, and you have to think. >> John Haskell: So we're
have one more question, and then we're going
to go to a reception, to which you're all invited. Sir, you've been very patent. Thank you. >> Oh sure, thanks a lot. You mentioned that you have
a representative from East LA and you just can't expect that
person, that representative from East LA to have the
same kind of interests as somebody from, I think
you said Nebraska, right. >> John Haskell:
Western Nebraska. >> David C. Barker: It
was John who said this. >> John Haskell: I know the guy
who's a congressman out there. He's a very honorable man. [Inaudible]. >> So that raises a question is,
what if the federal government as a whole, an including the
judiciary, were less intrusive into what people were
doing in the states? In other words, let
California be California. Let Nebraska be Nebraska. And then, that might
reduce some of the threat that people are feeling
from the other side. Because if you want to be San
Francisco, you can go there, and you can live
like San Francisco or New Jersey or New York. But if you want to live
like Texas or Nebraska or Utah, you can go there. And that might lower
the temperature. >> John Haskell:
That's interesting. Do you think that would work? I mean, people, the two
parties' views about federalism which is what you're
talking about, sometimes shifted a little bit, and that's an interesting
question. >> David C. Barker: Right,
so this is speaking a bit to what Lily was
talking about before. It is definitely the case
that the more politics, and I don't want to speak
to like sort of whether or not the government is
intrusive or not or whatever. But it is definitely the case that as politics is more
nationalized, right, it also more polarized. And so, to the degree that
politics is more local, that people can sort of like get
involved with their neighbors around some, you know, issue
related to their community and try to work on
that together. They get to know
each other again. It's hard to hate people that
you sort of like see and talk to and work with on some issue. And that does lower
the temperature, right. But when everything is about
the big major culture wars between the red America
and blue America, that's when things
really intensify. And so, you know, as to
how this necessarily speaks to the advisability
of federalism, I'll leave that alone because,
you know, federalism has such a controversial history as
it relates to some of the things that we've been talking
about today. >> John Haskell:
Lily, last word. >> Lilliana Mason:
Yeah, I would just, in terms of this particular
question, you know, there's also an assumption
that mobility is possible for most people, and that's
generally not the case. It costs a lot of money to move. And so if you're living in
a place that you, you know, whose politics you don't
like, and you can't leave, then your incentive is to go
get involved in politics and try to change the way the state is. And if the majority of the
state doesn't, you know, reflect your priorities or even
your rights, then you know, that ends up saying
well, you know, if you live in Mississippi, then
you just agree that everything in Mississippi is
perfectly fine. And that sort of doesn't
necessarily reflect the way that we expect our citizens
to engage in politics. >> John Haskell: Thank you
both very much for coming to the Library to engage
in this conversation. [ Applause ]
