Political Polarization is Solvable

it's too many people to shun. It's even too many people to cancel. So what do we do about this extreme polarization? How do we live alongside people who reject our system of government? How can we get back to healthier kinds of political disagreement? Here, it's solvable. We're going to take a deeper look at the problem of American polarization. As the fits the approach of the show. We're going to have a series of conversations focused on solutions and

making things better. Our question is what works to reduce extremism and division in terms of finding common ground and building bridges, in terms of redesigning social media, and in terms of political leadership Last week, we heard Ann Applebaum talk to Juan Manuel Santo's about the process of reconciliation with former guerrillas after Columbia's long, horrific civil war. Today, I'm going to talk with Anne herself. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian an expert on the former Soviet Bloc.

Anne has been looking at vulnerable democracies around the world, and she has some ideas about what has and hasn't worked in other countries. This will sound a little strange, but another really interesting example of a place that depolarized is actually Canada. So some solutions may be closer than we realize. I'm Anne Applebaum. I'm one of the hosts of the Solvable podcast. I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic, and I believe that political polarization is solvable. Hi Anne,

Hi Jacob. It's clear that we are in unprecedented territory here in the United States, and I wanted to kind of start the conversation just by asking you to be as precise as possible in naming this phenomenon and possibly comparing it to other places. Do you call it a breakdown to democracy? Do you call it polarization? What are we living through right now. Polarization is clearly, you know, a good word to use, but other words have been used in the past, division, breaking up of political unity,

leading towards civil war. I think the more interesting question is what to call the group of people who were at the Capitol and genre the sixth and those in the country who support them, because this is not the same thing as the Republican Party, it's not the same thing as conservatives. This is, in fact not a conservative group. It's a radical group. And it's also very clear to understand what they were doing there. They were not Republicans

attacking Democrats. They were actually attacking Congress itself, the institution. They were trying to prevent Congress from recognizing and naming the next president. This was actually an anti institutional, anti systemic group, which is not something we're accustomed to in American history, at least not since the Civil War. But it is something that you can see in other times

and places. You can see it, for example, in Northern Ireland, where there was during the era of the Troubles, there was a group of people who lived in Northern Ireland who didn't accept the legitimate government of Northern Ireland and became terrorists or supporters of terror because they wanted to

overthrow it. You can look at a country like Columbia where you see an insurgency that fought for fifty years, living in the jungle and living off kidnapping and drug dealing because they didn't accept the legitimacy of the government. And although those are more extreme versions than what we have, that's really what we're talking about. And so then the question is whether it's the best word to use, insurgency

or insurrectionist. Some people have had an argument about whether to say fascist, and of course there are ways in which this group resembles fascism of the nineteen thirties. I don't think that's a useful term because it conjures up all kinds of other things, and you know, we're not talking about mass murder or anything like that, and I feel it's a distracting term. And the term I settled on in a couple of things I've written recently is

actually seditionists. So these are people who are seditionists. They don't accept the you know, the legitimacy of the state, of the government, of the institutions, and they would like to overthrow them. So then the question is how the

rest of us deal with that. Even in that and I agree that's a that's a useful term here, and I think seditionists rather than secessionists, because these people are not trying to start their own country or break away into too a different political body as in the Confederacy

during the Civil War. But even that term, seditionists can include everyone from the fairly large section of the population that will, in response to Paul, say they think the election was stolen, a much smaller segment of the population that would support violence, a smaller proportion than that that would be violent. And then maybe even within that, you know this very strange fantasy land of the of the QAnon people, which is more like, you know, ac cult

within the seditionists. Would you would you describe it that way in terms of those kind of concentric circles. Yes, Although what interests me is one particular group, namely, I'm interested in the people who sympathized with the storming of the capital. In other words, you know, there is a group of people who think Trump probably won the election, or anyway somehow the election was unfair. But then there's a narrower group of people who actually think the system

should be overthrown. And I say narrow, it's not that narrow. One poll that was done pretty soon after January sixth showed something like twenty percent I think it's twenty one percent of Americans said they supported that they supported the insurrection, even assuming that not all those people pay that much attention to politics, and some of them have probably since

then changed their minds. And so even if we say it's ten percent, you know, ten percent of the country, that's a very large number who don't think that our political institutions work, who don't see any point in cooperating with them, who presumably don't see much point in voting or in participating in normal politics, and they would support efforts to undermine them. That's not a problem that we've

had in recent history. So I guess the question you get to right away is take that twenty one percent or whatever it is. Where do we fight them, Where do we ignore them? How do we deal with them? So the lessons from countries that have had an experience like this, So countries again that have had an insurgency or a terrorist movement within their you know, within their borders, very often the things that you think will work like it, wouldn't it be so great if we all got together

and just debated it all out? Their number of charities in the US that actually there's a famous one called braver Angels that brings people together, you know, Blue and Red team people together in rooms and has them argue or right. I mean, most of that, while maybe it's you know, useful for a few people, is actually pointless because when you have people who see the world through such completely different lenses, you will not get them to

agree on politics and anything existential. If you get them in a room together, much more useful. And again this is counterintuitive and it's not a solution that lots of people like, at least when they first encounter it. Is it's much better to change the subject. In other words, get people to work together, to do projects together, and do things together that are constructive, but without talking about or discussing the very the existential issues that divide us.

And so when this has been done in towns in Northern Ireland, it means something like, you know, the town builds a community center, or they build a road, or they organize a theater festival and members from both communities participate and while they're participating, they're talking about the road or the community center, and they're not talking about who should be in charge of Ireland Northern Ireland, should it be Ireland or Great Britain. I can imagine, for example,

in the US, a way you could. I mean, for example, we need to have secure at state capitals. State capitals have been the site of some violent protests recently, So a useful thing to do would be to have a meeting where you've got members of the different communities from the far right and the far left and mainstream politics, and you've got them together and said, let's think about how we create safety at our around the Ohio State Capital.

They're not focused on the things they're protesting about. They're focusing on how they create security at the Ohio State Capital. And that doesn't mean they hate each other any less, but it does mean that the following day, when there are demonstrations there, they might not kill each other. You know, the goal is prevention of violence, and the goal is

living alongside one another even when we don't agree. But don't we need some sense that this was an extraordinary event and that the people who supported it need to be made accountable. For it and need to realize that what they did was not acceptable. I mean in South Africa, for example, you know, there was the Truth and Conciliation Commission, and in post communist societies, you know, there was certainly

a lot of delayed justice and denied justice. But you know, in many of the countries, as you've written about, you know, there was some sense of holding people accountable to just sort of go back to normal and kind of ignore it. I mean, I don't think you're saying that the people who participated in violence in the capital shouldn't be prosecuted or that we should drop all that. But it's certainly true that anybody who broke into the capital or committed

crimes at the capitol should be prosecuted. And I'm absolutely in favor of that, and I also very much hope that former president will be impeached. The trouble is that we are talking about a really large number of people. As I said, we might be talking about ten to

twenty percent of the country. You know, you always have in post communist and post dictatorship situations, you always have some kind of trade off or balance between the demands of justice and the demands of practical lady, you know what can you you know, how many people can you try from the old regime before you inflame the supporters of the old regime and cause a backlash. I mean, if you look at history, you can see how this

has been done well and badly in different places. I mean a famous example of where it was done really badly was in Iraq, where we conducted as the when the Americans were occupying a rock after the fall of Saddam Hussein, we conducted a program called de Bathification, which was all the members of the Saddam's Bath Party were you know, lost their jobs, were sent home, you know, we were held accountable for the regime, and the result was that many of them reformed, regrouped, and became the

terrorist insurgencies that fought American troops for years afterwards. Because we're talking about so many people, that's not a great model for us. I really understand. I mean, believe me, I understand the urge to want to shun people, to block them, to say you can't hold office, to to try and keep them out of public life. All I'm saying is that that's probably not going to work, and the and the evidence from other countries you know where

you've had big insurgencies. I mean again Northern Ireland. You know, the British tried to you know, eliminate the the IRA for many years through harsh, tough police enforcement, through you know, fighting, through infiltration of the communities, and one of the main results was that the support and sympathy for the IRA

grew and grew and grew. And it really only wasn't until they changed tactics and they began talking, you know, in a different way about accommodating the not just the RA but the Catholic community more broadly in Northern Ireland that they began to get a sea change in terms of public attitudes. You know, this is too many people to wish away, it's too many people to shun. It's even too many people to cancel, you know, and prevent them all, you know, you have them all be fired.

I mean, it's simply not going to work. And so we need to begin looking at some other tactics, you know, in which we can somehow live together. How do you plan to handle this at a personal level, I mean I've had all these fantasies going on inside my head. I mean I was, you know, years ago once at a dinner party with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and I sort of said to myself, I'll never do that again. You know, if I'm ever in a room with them on a social occasion, I'll you know, I'll storm out.

You know I won't. I won't break bread with them. I've been thinking, you know, in the old days, like you, I would go on a lot of panel discussions and TV appearances where you're pitted, as in my case, the liberal opposite a conservative, and I've sort of said to myself, well, I'm not going to do that with people who rejected the election results because I feel like they're outside the boundary of acceptable democratic values. And you know, I won't.

I don't think those people deserve equal time. That's my emotional feeling. I hear, absolutely hear what you're saying. I think you're right that it's not going to be productive to those people more aggressively contribute to the polarization from the other side. But honestly, I'm not quite sure how to deal with it, because I'm so enraged by people who've taken that position, including a majority of the Republicans in Congress, that I don't know how I would handle

being around them. I mean, I think the way one deals with it personally depends on who you are and what I mean, what your role is. I mean, I think you, as a journalist, are well within your rights to say I won't be on a panel with someone who supported the insurrection or who didn't recognize who won the election, and I might well agree with you on that. Actually,

I certainly had a rule. At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in twenty fourteen, I kept getting put on television programs with spokesman for the Russian government who would deny that the invasion was happening even while it was happening. I mean, you could see it happen. And I finally drew a line through that. I said, I just you know, I'm not going to waste time talking to people who want to pretend that there's an alternate reality happening. And I think you know you're within

your rights to do that. I think the harder question for a lot of people, and I've been asked this a lot, and I have a you know it touches me personally, is what you do with old friends or relatives or parents or people who you're very close to who have bought into some piece of that alternate reality. In some cases, I've heard from people who have relatives who have started following the QAnon conspiracy. How do you

cope with that? And then we're in the realm of sort of a different piece of sociology and experience, and that's the realm of exit counseling. What is the advice for people you'd like to help get out of qan? On? Some of the advice there is an individual version of what I just said, in other words, change the subject,

find other things to talk about. And then some of the advice is try and help people to see the contrast between the reality all around them and the false reality, the alternative reality that they're seeing online, which is which is what the problem is in America, the version of events that they're reading on you know, whatever it is Newsmax or or Facebook or gab or the Discord channel, whatever whichever piece whichever social media they're seeing it on.

Try and present them constantly with alternatives and try also to help them see that there is a future for them in America run by Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress. Because many of these people have come to feel. And you can see this and hear it in some of the things that the Republican congressman said. You know, they've

come to feel that. You know, how disingenuous or real this is, you'll have to you know, it's very hard to know, but that Biden's president represents the end of a certain kind of America, the end of a way of life. It's something they can't reconcile themselves too. And so it's sort of our job, as their friends and their relatives, to show them how they can reconcile themselves, you know, in the way that Colombian insurgents need to be offered some path back to a legal existence in Columbia.

They need to be brought back from the jungle and retrained and helped to get new jobs. And I'm not saying this is the same process, but there's some parallel process that we should use towards people who we know and who we're closed to, who are inside these cults. But I guess two thoughts about that. I mean, one, you know, you talked to one Manuel sentis the Nobel

Prize for President of Columbia for this program. You know, that is a very different situation in the sense that the rebels had been lost, the CentOS government was being magnanimous towards them in its victory, recognizing, as I think he said, that there was there was a trade off between peace and justice and saying, let's get peace, even if it's at the expense to some extent of immediate

justice for these people who have done terrible things. But you know, they weren't dealing with a majority of the opposition party. They were dealing with something more like a remnant cult. That's true in that sense, they were luckier, although we're not yet talking about this scale violence that the FARC. This is the Colombian rebels. I'm committed, and in Colombia, we're not talking about a illegal drug dealing, kidnapping insurgency. So that so that's also that also makes

the story a little bit different. What you're now asking is a slightly different problem, which is the problem of how we you know, what happens to the Republican Party. You know, and and here I think it's in our interests as outsiders to the party, as as you know, or former members of the party, as some people are some of my friends are, or even people who are

still nominally in the party. There the task is to win the battle for the heart and soul of the party and bring it back to you know, even if even if it's still you disagree with it, even if it's still um you don't agree with their policies on judges or abortion. We just want them to respect the Constitution and we want them to to respect the rules of rational discourse. And so it's therefore on all of

us to try to bring the party back there. And I think, for example, what does that mean for people who aren't in the party. It means praising, thanking, respecting, giving time to giving TV time to those Republicans who are willing to fight against the anti constitutional seditionists. And even though it's people you might not like, you might not you know, Liz Cheney might not be your cup of tea. You know, certainly McConnell is not many Democrats

cup of tea. But giving him space on, you know, in the media and letting him say praise Cheney and denounce you know, the QAnon members of Congress is really important. So I mean, this is really a battle that's best one inside that party. And actually this brings me to another. You know. Another lesson of countries like Northern Ireland and Columbia is that people like you and me may not be the best messengers for Republicans. I mean they may not. They're just not going to listen to us, you know,

in our view of the world. So who are the best messengers? Then people inside their community, people like that are best positioned to bring the party back, you know, in the direction of respecting the Constitution and away from sedition and so. But that presumes an outcome and where the Republican Party overtime or sometimes sort of returns to relative normality, returns to reality, and sometimes parties are so

split over something fundamental that they break up. I mean, the Whig Party before Lincoln, you know, couldn't be contained pro slavery and anti slavery factions, you know, which gave

birth to the Republican Party in the first place. One argument on the other side would be the difference between Romney, Ben Sass, Lisa Murky, Liz Cheney even on the one hand, and you know, Kevin McCarthy as the leader of the party, but all the people who have taken these consistent votes on Trump's side, rejecting the legitimacy of the election, that that split is you can't bridge that divide, and that

the party has to split. Either the moderate people leave the Republican Party and form some new party, or they capture the party, in which case the Trump people are probably going to leave the party themselves. That would not be a bad outcome, if I may say so. I mean, I mean, and that I believe is the outcome that a lot of constitutional Republicans are hoping for. I mean, look, if we lived in a political system that had slightly different rules, we would have more than one party, more

than two parties. Sorry, then the Republican Party would have already split and we would have a far right party and we would have a center right party, which is what lots of European countries have. Because of the nature of our voting system, it's much more difficult in the United States. But but yeah, one outcome well be that the party splits and one side of the other wins, and our role as outsiders is to help the constitutional

Republicans win. Where do you see depolarization taking place, even on a very small scale. Where do you see this culture war divide, our fundamental political divide being bridged in the sense of people working together on local issues or things they still have shared interest in supporting. So in the United States, my sense is that that does take place at the local and city level quite a lot.

That Republicans and Democrats are often capable of working together, as I say, whatever it is fixing the potholes or fixing the roads. But in fact I often have the sense that politics in the US, even state politics, which can be quite nasty, but certainly city level, municipal, local politics, is a lot better and a lot healthier, and a

lot more functional than national politics. And precisely because national politics has become you know, it's a realm where people perform and express their identities, where they choose sides in the culture war. When we're talking about pollution in the local river, you can get cooperation. Yeah, what what country you talked about? Northern Ireland is a place where you know you've seen this taking place. What country do you think has been the most effective at depolarizing or reducing

fundamental sectional or cultural tensions. This will sound a little strange, but another really interesting example of a place that depolarized is actually Canada. As you have all forgotten, there used to be a Quebec separates and it had a violent element, and it was very angry, and there was a part of Quebec that was very embittered. This is the French speaking partists that wanted to secede from the rest of Canada.

And what the Canadians did to solve that problem, it took a decade, was they literally divided it up into littler issues. They created lots and lots of committees to discuss them, the language issue, you know, the residence issue, the history issue. They created about three dozen think tanks dedicated to justice problem, sent lots of academics to write books about it. They involved everybody in the discussion of every detail, and I'm telling you, everyone got so bored

of it. It became the most tedious subject, and everyone knew the ins and out so well that the thing diffused itself. It became boring. Once it wasn't my identity as a French Canadian versus your identity as an English Canadian. And once it was about what language do we speak in elementary school and what percentage of signs have to be in which language. Once it was at the needy, gritty level of policy level, it became much less interesting and people were much less angry about it, and a

lot of problems turned out to be solvable. It's a really interesting comparison because the Kabaqua were poorer than the average Canadians. They you know, they felt culturally oppressed, and it was a nationalistic movement and you know, while not directly comparable to Trumpism in certain respects, it was a similar sector of society making demands against what they thought as an elite that was oppressing them in cultural terms. Yeah,

it's a that's a good comparison. And there's alsoays, you know, an urban rural split, which is a little bit what we have in America too. Although you have to be very careful with these stereotypes. There was a very very good survey done that looked very closely at the nearly two hundred people who are at the Capitol who have been arrested, and therefore we have their identify you know, we know who they are and they have and it turns out that many of them are not the stereotype

of the Trumper who you think they are. They were not necessarily from red states. They were often from blue states where they felt themselves to be embattled minorities. They were often middle class. Quite a lot of them run small companies and small businesses, interestingly, small businesses badly affected by the pandemic. In some cases they were middle aged.

They were middle class. They certainly had enough money to travel to Washington's, stay in hotels, and show up at the capital, so they were not It is wrong to think of this group as as the poorest Americans. I mean, they most certainly are not. Absolutely Now, one thing that is obviously different from the circumstances we were just talking about in Colombia and Quebec and even Northern Ireland is

the role media in particularly social media. I don't think in any of those situations you had the equivalent of the kind of partisan media driving the distinction for sort of fun and profit the way Fox News does, or obviously Facebook at the scale it is now as a way for people to isolate themselves in their own viewpoint and kind of create, you know, self sustaining cults impervious to information from the outside. What. I know you've thought

a lot about this. What do you think the way is of coping with the media impact in the other direction promoting polarization so, first of all, the phenomenon of very partisan media was not unknown, and in the societies we've been discussing, that's a familiar one. But you're right that the phenomenon of social media and actually the Internet more broadly, because it's really not just Facebook, it's a

broader phenomenon, is a new one. And what's different about it is that it really does allow people to live in alternate realities. I mean, you can live online, you can get all of you know, your sense of who you are online, your identity. You can become very popular and be liked online by people you don't even know in real life. And you can get all kinds of sense of pleasure, connection and approval you know online that

you can't get in the real world. And so it has a that is a very important and very it does play very toxic and complicated role. I am very um you know, I believe very deeply in um in both in the possibility and the necessity of social media regulation. I am actually writing about it right now. It's a

big project. Though I would like to stress that this is the real question is not about content, and you know who's going to decide, you know, whether the president gets to have a Twitter feed or not, and you know, or who's going to regulate what content Facebook puts up? The real questions are much deeper, you know, is there a way to regulate the algorithms that decide who sees what and that that enable make it possible for people

to live in alternate realities? You know? Can we imagine different kinds of social media, you know, sort of public service social media, a BBC of social media that could at least offer some people alternatives so that there are ways to connect with people whose rules are transparent and open in the way that we would like democratic debate to be prints and open and are not where the Facebook engineers aren't experimenting on us all the time to find out which algorithm keeps us on the site longer

or makes us like the site longer. Creating an Internet that reflects democratic values and the values of that prioritize rational conversation and civic debate and civic virtues is a really big and important long term project for the United States and actually for all democracies. And it's my contention that it is the thing that we could work on together with other democracies because the same debate is happening

in other countries. I mean, it's happening in England. It's happening, and the European Union, which actually has some regulation on the books now that will come into effect in the next couple of years, which will begin to do some real regulation of social media along these precise lines. Once we're past the immediate emergency of the pandemic and the economic collapse. I really hope that Congress can find some bandwidth to focus on this, because it's the technology can

be solved. There are ways in which we could do this regulation. There are teams of their academics who are thinking about it, their proposals to be made. But what there hasn't been until now has been the real will to do it. I mean it's almost like, you know, the eighteen nineties and the monopolists were in charge of the railroads and the banks and the oil companies, and everybody you know sat around and said, well, that's too bad. It's really a pity that there are all these monopolies.

But there's really just nothing we can do about it, because that's just you know, that's just reality. And that wasn't true. I mean, it was possible to reform the monopolies, and it was possible to create anti trust law, and it was possible to make capitalism more civilized. You know that in that era. And it is possible to change

the rules of the Internet. I mean, the Internet has changed over time and evolved because of decisions that people have made, both in the government and outside the government. And we can change it again. I mean, there are you know, it's our internet. You know, our rules and our laws and our regulations can shape it. I do hope that our political leaders come to see that quickly.

And my favorite last question is always what individuals our listeners can do, and particularly around this question of your idea of finding common ground not on the big questions, but on some smaller, local type issues with people they might strongly disagree with. What are ways to pursue that, I think for people who are maybe have a little more equanimity that I do at this stage, or you know, maybe I will in six months, But you know, what are some ways to get involved in things that you

think will have that kind of soothing effect. So look for organizations that have mixed membership, charities or local NGOs, local municipal organizations that you can work with where you'll be in contact with people who have different ideas from you, or who have a different political orientation from you. I mean, it's always a useful thing to do. And of course, even as I'm advising this, I realize how hard that

can be depending on what community you live in. People that you know or people who are whose orientation is different from you seek ways to communicate with them. And by the way, people who are caught up in the QAnon cult think very hard about how to help them get out of it, because that's a that's a that's a much more dangerous and insidious version in a version of this problem. Generally speaking, finding ways yourself personally to engage with people on the other side of the political

spectrum is you know, can only be useful. It sounds like good advice to me. And thanks for the conversation today, Thanks Jacob. That was the historian and journalist Anne Applebaumb she's also, as you know, a co host of this show. I hope that conversation sets the table as it were for the weeks ahead, as Anna and I continue to explore aspects of the problem with other guests. Today, we briefly touched on the role of social media and all this.

Solvable will continue next week with an in depth conversation with the man who invented the term filter bubble, tech entrepreneur and social activist, Eli Pariser. We'll discuss how social media platforms are contributing to our political and cultural rifts. We'll also explore ways to rethink the digital worlds we participate in. One idea Pariser suggests is for digital designers to think more like successful urban planners. I hope you'll

join us for that conversation. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research in booking by Lisa don Our managing producer is Katherine Girardot, and our executive producer of Pushkin is Mia Lobel. Special thanks this week to Heather Fain, John Schnarros, Carley mcgliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Emily Rothstak, Maya Koenig, and Kadisha Holland. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review us really helps to get the word out. You can find Pushkin podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisberg.