Lilliana Mason || How Politics Became Our Identity

It's great to have Liliana Mason on the podcast. Mason is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park, an author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity with the University of Chicago Press. She received her pH d in political psychology from Stonybrook

University and her BA in politics from Princeton University. Her research on partisan identity, Parsan bias, social an American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio. Doctor Mason, what an honor it is? To chat with

you today. Thank you so much for having me. When you were writing this book, did you ever imagine just how relevant it would be to June thirteenth, twenty twenty. Yeah. So I actually started writing this book in two thousand and nine because it was my dissertation, and so I kind of came up with the idea of this when we were sort of still in the Hope change, early Obama time, and we still had plenty of you know,

clearly partisan animosity. But I and I was trying to explain that, but I didn't I certainly didn't know how bad it would get in the future. Yeah, are you talk in the book? I thought it was really interesting you talked about hope leaders and fear leaders. I hadn't seen that distinction in the literature. That's a real distinction that people have noted throughout the course of human leadership.

I mean, not really. This is more thinking about the emotion, work on a sort of emotions and behavior, and then thinking about sort of how leaders can manipulate the emotions of the electorate in order to sort of get the outcome that they want. And you know, Obama is a great example of someone who's leading with hope and enthusiasm, whereas Trump is a better example of someone who leads with more sort of anger anxiety than those types of emotions.

You know, it's interesting your book really talks about these different perspectives and just trying to understand where different people are coming from. And you made a statement like, well, things are so bad, you know, I imagine there's Trump supporters listening to this podcast that don't see it as bad. They see the other side as bad, And I'm just wondering, how can we get out of this quagmire where we talk to each other? Yeah. I used to make a joke when I would go give talks about the book.

You know, people would say, how do we get out of this? And I would I would joke, you know, if aliens were doing Earth, then maybe we would all come together as you know, human beings, and we would have this superordinate identity at least as Americans right to the defeat this outside clearly outside force that have common

common goal. But uh, you know, I think the closest that you can come to that actually happening in reality is sort of COVID, right, Yeah, And what we've seen is that the way we have responded to it has been to poeticize it, and that makes it very difficult to even react or make make, you know, productive changes, And that actually is a great demonstration of how I

think really dangerous polarization can be. If every thing is politicized, then the point of every decision is for your party to win, not for people to you know, everyone in the country to do well and survive. Yeah, yeah, this is a do we ever? Can you ever think I can try to think of any point that I've been alive where the predominant focus I've saw in politics was on common wealthlifting common humanity. I mean, that should be the goal, but I can't remember it ever existing. Can you?

I think the closest that we've come to that was actually criticized this is in nineteen fifty, the American Political Science Association editors wrote a letter for their annual meeting, which they always do, but in nineteen fifty, the letter said, we need the parties to be more distinguishable. They're too

close to each other. Voters don't have clearer information because the two parties basically look the same, and so there's you know, we need more polarization to give voters a better cueue about which side they should vote for it. They just have there's no there's no difference right now.

And it wasn't that that both parties were sort of working for the common good, but actually they were so similar to each other at that point in time that there wasn't a lot of information for voters about which party was best for them, and kind of either one would have been fine, particularly for white voters at that period of time. That's interesting, Yeah, that wasn't in my lifetime or yours. Well, what a time. What a time?

And you make some important distinctions I think might help people frame various issues today and see it in a lot clearer. One interesting distinction you make is between social polarization and policy polarization. Was there there was a time when they were more aligned? Is that right than we see today? So really, what it is is that as political sort of as political scientists, we have thought about

polarization as a divide between policy preferences. And so, for instance, when people measure polarization within Congress, they look at how everyone voted on various bills and see, you know, how far are Republicans from Democrats on average in each of these bills? That they vote for. So the assumption has always been that the that the way to measure polarization is to look at issue preferences and policy preferences. The problem is that a lot of a lot of Americans

have very conflicting issue in policy preferences. The average American is generally to the left of center in their policy preferences across a range of issues. But also, you know, more Americans call themselves conservatives than call themselves liberals. So there's a lot of confusion in terms of what Americans understand about ideology and policy and what the government does.

And so the you know, as I was starting this project, what I was thinking was, you know, we know things about inner group conflicts that can predict outcomes where groups really hate each other, and that has nothing to do with what a government does. It has nothing to do with the you know, with the policy preferences of the

people in the groups. A lot of the time, it's just very basic you know, human human psychology reasons for having inner group conflict, and that that hadn't really been applied to political party at that point, with like one exception, and and so this that to me, it was hard to make the argument right, Because political scientists don't want to think that democracy is a bunch of people making kind of team oriented just like lashing out type choices

in their votes. They want to think that that that voters are are thoughtful and rational and making, you know, the choice that is the best for the most people. That's what democracy, democracy is supposed to be. But it really turns out it's not. It's not that way, And so you can set if you separate these two concepts, it becomes a lot easier to understand with what's going

on in America. Well, it's not a surprise to me as someone who's studied narcissism and self esteem and what happens when our ego is threatened in some way or identity and an identity's ego so to speak, is threatened. It seems like everyone's threatening everyone's identity ego right now. Yeah, I mean, well this goes back even just to you know, the minimal group paradigm experiments of social identity theory from

tajbel in the nineteen seventy all that stuff. Yeah, I mean it's, first of all, it's extremely reproducible, and it's also really it demonstrates a very simple idea, which is basically that even in the weakest group identity, right, someone just told you that you're in a group and you don't know any of other group members and you're never

going to meet them. Even in that scenario, people still prove if they have to allocate money to people, people still privilege their own group's victory over the greater good scenario, even in that week week identity. So we should expect it to continue to happen as identities grow stronger and stronger.

But that is a real challenge for democracy. If everyone who feels a social attachment to a party prefers partisan victory, even at a loss to their own party, you know, overall, but if they're you know, they they get less, but they get more than the other side. If they prefer that to the sort of overall greater good of the nation, that's not going to work out for democracy. That's there's not the nation. Yeah, yeah, there's some real threats to

democracy right now. There's there's no way of sugarcoating that, right No. I maybe would have sugar coated it like seven years ago, but I feel like there's just no way chagcooting that right now. I think we were sugarcoating it seven years. I think I was even sugarcoating it in the conclusion, the concluding chapter of my book, you know, trying to find a way for there to be a happy ending where everything's okay, and it's just it doesn't

seem to be fixable. I think my only optimism right now is the is sort of the the reckoning with racial justice that we're having at this point, This, to me, is the only possible path forward for democracy to function. The only possible way is for us as a nation to sort of rip off the band aid of you know, this legacy of white supremacy. Because what's happened the parties have become divided along the lines of does racism exist?

And that is sort of the new sort of deepest cleavage between the parties is does systemic racism exist in America? And has it been in existing, you know, forever? And effectively our parties have divided on this idea. So if we don't have sort of hash out this question, it's going to be hard for us to cooperate or really

talk honestly through any other problem. I agree, and this is something I found really elucidating in your book is talking about how different petical parties have become more socially homogeneous in these different clusters that we now see together where you have like multiple identities cluster together, which give

power to an identity, you know, to particular identity. If you have you know, three four different religion, race, gender, and you see these things all cluster together under party lines, you can have a very powerful force for good or bad on both sides. But can you tell me actually

how we're seeing that social homogeny right now? So the data basically show for a long time we've been seeing the Republican Party becoming sort of more white and more evangelical, in particular recently in recent years, I would say, not even like before Trump increasingly becoming rural, whereas Democrats are more urban, and then suburban people are in the middle somewhere. The and place based identity can be a real, actual

strong identity if it's if it's being threatened. The gender gap is increasing, so women tend to be Democrats more than men, and and then Democrats are this this really large coalition of non white, non evangelical sort of everyone else right where it's the people people who live in really diverse areas. That's where the Democrats tend to be

and so the as those. So really what we have is, you know, kind of this both a rural urban divide, we have an education based increasingly in education based divide. In twenty sixteen was the very first time that class was not a dividing factor between the parties, like they were equally equally working class versus middle class. And that's partially because we used to have education and income are obviously correlated, but we used to have both of those

pointing in the same direction. We're more highly educated people and more wealthy people were Republican, and twenty sixteen that changed so that more highly educated people were Democrats and more highly income people were still Republicans. So the total effect of class is sort of canceled out in twenty sixteen, and we don't know if that's just going to stay there or if it's going to like cross so that

we end up with these different sort of different coalitions. Now, look, that's really interesting, Like I really I kind of want to zoom in on that a second, because you're seeing almost like correct me if I'm just talking absolute nonsense, but it almost seems like we're seeing on the Trump party lines a lot of low income white people feeling aggrieved. And on the Democrat lines, you have a lot of African Americans, low income, maybe same income line, but African

American identity, African American, you know, feeling aggrieved. So, yes, you're right, it doesn't seem like it's it's strictly about the class or the economics, but it does feel more and more racial. Yeah, I'm not talking nonsense, right, No,

not at all. Okay, Yeah, I mean this is the age old problem of American you know, especially black white relations in American history and society is that, you know, poor white people have always been incentivized to discriminate against poor black people so that they don't all gather together and rise up against the wealthy. Right, Like, it's well why don't they get together? And there's more power in working together than divided. Right. Well, So the so this

actually goes back to the status thing that we're talking about. Right, if you want, your people are willing to sacrifice as long as their group is better than the other group. Right. And so the scenario what WB device calls it the wages of whiteness, where where essentially poor white workers were given social status instead of a wage, instead of instead of actual money, so that they had they felt themselves

to be morally in biologically superior, like entitled, entitled. Yeah, but even in like reality, like they were actually like given better you know, schools, and they were given better access to you know, grocery stores and neighborhoods and and so the the even if they're making the same amount of money, they have this social status that particularly if they're not making a lot of money, they're very desperate

to defend. Right, If you lose that status, then you lose everything, and that's the only thing making you feel like you're you know, not at the bottom of the latter in society. And so that that divide. As long as as long as we have poor white people feeling that they have this status advantage over poor black people, then there will not ever be a cooperation between them

to improve everyone's economic outcomes. Such a shame. It feels like they should bond more with each other, like you all have a lot in common, Like couldn't we have a leader that kind of inspires them all to you know, kind of see each other and each other that's possible. It certainly, right leaders certainly can divide people. So it could be possible that we could have a leader that

found a way to kind of cross that barrier. The problem is, but I really think the problem is deeply psychological though, because we value that's why you're on the psychology contact. We value our status more than we value money, and because it's such a coarse part of our self esteem and that we are ready to defend at all costs. You you can't live a life without feeling that you have some esteem right in some way in your life.

And so people are you know, there's a lot there's a there's a book called Dying of Whiteness that measured health outcomes for white people in areas where you know, largely that were led by you know, sort of Republican, very you know, very conservative, you know, small government type of leaders and lots of those types of voters, and they were losing years off of their lives because of the decisions they were making, largely because they don't want

black people to get those things. Right, if you give people, if you give everyone healthcare, then black people get health care just as much as white people get health care. And then where's that status they don't have any more, then they're not different from the black people. To me, why that sounds a bit illogical is that black people are people. The thing is like, we're all people, and you have people who who are white, and it's like, yeah,

I want to help other poor white people. I want to help them, but I don't want to help black poor people. But you're all people and you're all poor. So it just it kind of bogs in my mind that way of thinking. We kind of made a deal to decide that black people were not people as soon as Slavy yell, that's what it is, right, And so you you had to have a whole lot of motivated reasoning and work, psychological work that people had to do to convince themselves that black people were not people for

hundreds of years. And it hasn't been hundreds of years since since death and so you know, it was four hundred years of slavery. We haven't even approached half that time since sand of slavery, and certainly not some sand of Jim Crow. So so we spent a lot of time, you know, really embedding the idea that black people were not people in the minds of white Americans and it's that takes time to change. And it's also just a very simple cue, right, Like it's it's not hard to tell.

It's not like a Catholic and a Protestant, you know, hating each other on site because the maybe there are some visual cues in the way people people look, but in general, the ways, you know, the sort of that type of religious divide is different than a black white divide,

which is very visible. And in fact, the political scientist Michael Tesler has written a lot about this, how the Obama presidency is was sort of the impetus for a lot the sort of remaining for white Democrats to leave the Democratic Party just because they weren't paying attention to politics. They weren't you know, watching politics on TV, they weren't reading about politics. But the simple cue of you know, what the president looked like told them that they didn't

belong in that party. And so it was nothing Obama said or did. It was just the simple fact of his face being on the front of the newspaper that they walked by it on my way to work. That's that's literally it like the color of a skin. Yeah, it's very easy to see. And so for people who otherwise are not paying attention to anything. It's a very It's the simplest maybe except for gender. It's the simplest

cue maybe more than gender. Actually. You know, when I was reading your book, you talked about George Washington's frightful deputism, and I was just so taken back by if he was alive today, he would say he would be frightful. Don't you think I think you'd be furious? Yeah? Yeah, can you can you explain our listeners could just remind

them what the what frightful? Uh? In Washington's farewell address, he specifically warned Americans not to foreign political parties that they grew very attached to, because if they did that, then first of all, they wouldn't care about America as a whole anymore. It provides an opportunity for foreign interests, he specifically said, for foreign interests to divide us against

each other. It provides an opportunity for people who want to meddle with the success of American democracy to have a very natural, you know, place to try to start dividing Americans and damaging American democracy. And the the specifically weren't against this and saying that, you know, if we have these partisan identities that you know, it will take on a life of its own, it will become frightful. And and then the following election they created two parties, and

then and then the rest is history. The Constitution didn't plan for parties. They assumed that the that the largest fights that we would be having would be between big states and small states. That's the way the Constitution was built, to make sure that we could balance between big states and small states. And it just didn't think about parties at all. And so a lot of our problems assumed

that rational people would make the best choice. The reason we have the electoral College, for instance, is that the founders didn't trust the electorate to make the best choices. Some you know, there may be a demagogue who comes along sometime and and you know, convinces go to support him, even if it doesn't mean he's not the necessarily the best candidate for America. And in that case, the electoral College was supposed to change the will of America. That

was the reason that they're there. They're supposed to overturn the popular vote, the entire purpose of it. And so, but what they didn't see coming was that partisanship would make it so that no one is going to change their vote in the electoral college, even if they think the candidate is a bad candidate, because they need that victory. Were people in Washington's day in politics were they? Were

they more thoughtful and reasonable and cordial? What was different? Well, the first thing to note is that in that period of time, it was only white land owning men who are allowed to vote. Okay, so in that sense, yes, right, yeah, So the people that were most worried about making bad choices were white land owning men who maybe were uneducated or unsophisticated in some way, and that's who's that's who's vote. The electoral college were overturned, so that in the to

begin with, that was a very small electorate. And then you know, I think during Washington's time there were there were a lot of Enlightenment ideas, right, they were trying to create a new type of government, and so there was a there were you know, sort of lofty ideals being thrown around, but by people who own slaves and and understood that you know, all are not created equal as long as you think of you know, black human

beings as not human beings. So so there was a you know, there's there's a deep paradox at the core of American democracy that we've never really dealt with. But I but you know, I think that they had these They had good they had lofty ideas. They just they didn't really live them out. And I'm not sure anyone really has fully lived them out since then. You talk now about how there's a lot of emotion driven action. Why are we so emotional and why do emotions matter?

Praiser theory first, So that basically says, if you're feeling threatened and you know the source of your threat, you know where the threat is coming from, then you feel angry, and anger is an approach emotion, so we should expect you to then go into action. If you feel threatened and you don't know where the threat is coming from, you don't understand the source of your threat, that will lead to anxiety, and anxiety is is a withdrawal emotion.

Is so instead of approaching, you move away and think about what to do. And so the idea is that anger should drive people into action and anxiety should actually pull them back from action. So one really easy way for a leader, for instance, to make people angry rather than anxious, is to say, hey, I know you're all feeling really threatened and sort of uncertain in these in these crazy times, I'm going to tell you who to blame,

whether it's true or not. And as soon as I tell you who to blame, then you can become angry, and then you can go participate in politics and become and take action. And to some degree, that's what Trump

did with the kind of Trump base. He took a bunch of people who are feeling just sort of illities with the way society was going, with the way they felt they were being treated by the you know, kind of like liberal elites, with you know, the liberalization of our sort of moral society, and also bad economic times and you know, economic challenges and the following out of rural America or all of these things are mixed together

created a sense of something's not right. I think a lot of people didn't know what to where to place that that of discomfort and threat. And so to have a leader come along and say it's the immigrants. You should be building a wall to stop them from coming in, and then you'll feel better, and so now you know who to attack, you know, who's the bad guy? It's the immigrants. So then everyone feels instead of anxious and uncertain,

they feel very certain and ready to go. And it's and he mobilized people who weren't previously voting by kind of converting these these sort of uncertain people into very certain, very angry, and very motivated people. I think probably the you know, the the major question is what's going to happen this next election now that people have seen the truth, and that I think America will really be tested in

a big way with this next election. It's yeah, so this is the this is the This is a very first of all, very uncertain question answer to the question. And also it is a very risky time I think that we have. It's a time that there's an opportunity for a lot of really big changes, but we don't

know which way those changes are going to go. So the actually the project that I'm working on now with Nathan Calmo at lsu is A is a second book on sort of what part isn't how far can partisan ship go to not just make people dislike each other, but you know, even dehumanize and all the way up to you know, approve of violence against people on the

other side and people in the other party. So we're looking we're also looking at what happens when an election is delegitimized, when the outcome of an election is not considered legitimate by large portions of people. And so far, what we've found is that there's sort of you know this sort of there like five to fifteen percent of Americans. And we've done like seven eight surveys at this point

measuring these same things. Generally five or fifteen percent of partisans who are willing to advocate for political violence against the other party, including against regular people in the electorate, not just party leaders. And that number kind of stays in that general realm. Now, if you think about you know what is let's say, ten percent of partisans in America, we have millions and millions and millions of those people. But the main thing that we found is that they

they can be brought down from that attitude. So elite rhetoric really really matters. So whatever leaders are saying, they can make people approve of violence less by saying something pacifying, and they can make people feel more approving of violence

by saying something approving of violence. So something to pay a lot of attention to right now is what are our political leaders saying in terms of encouraging violence, encouraging the types of action that that might that might be you know, extremely damaging down the road and turned after the election, I thought it was really interesting how you talked about activism. You have a quote you say, activism may have increased over the last few decades, but this

is not necessarily a responsible, outcome based participation. Do you have any crisms of current activism efforts? No, I mean, I think it's more of an overall. In political science as a field, we tend to think about political action as a completely one hundred percent normative good because we assume that people are acting rationally, and so the more people that are participating in politics, the better the electric represents the whole country, and so we have a better

and stronger democracy. So we have more people voting, that's more buy in, that's more representation. That's just good, purely good for the American public. But like I said before with the anger issue, sometimes people participate in politics not because they've really fought through policy preferences and what they want the government to do, but instead because somebody just told them who to blame for all their problems, and

so they just get up and run. And in that scenario, that's not normatively good participation, right, that's not necessarily representing a well reasoned policy agenda for the future of the federal government. It's instead it's really sort of just wild participation. There's a it's very hard, you know, you can't just like draw simple lines to distinguish between those two things. But but I was I really wanted to make the

point that it's possible to have activism that isn't normatively good. Yeah, it's a sort of you know, that's a disputed claim, but that's my I wonder if this relates at all to another point you made, which I thought was wonderful because it's just not pointed out that often. And that's that just because you have an in group doesn't mean you have to hate your outgroup. You know, there can be there can be healthy activism in a sense you

have great pride for your in group. You want to fight for rights for your in group, but that's what you're fighting for, not specifically to eradicate an outgroup. So that somehow seems related to maybe different types of activism efforts. Yeah, I think, and that was a really important sort of part of the theory that was advanced by Marilyn Brewer in the late nineties early two thousands, which is that in group, love is one part of an identity and

is another part, and they don't always go together. The sort of the first instinct of social identity is to affiliate and to feel close to the people in your group and to hope that they are better than the other people, right, but not necessarily to hate the other people. And the hatred comes when there is either a conflict over resources between the groups or if there has already

become a complete lack of trust between the groups. Because then in that scenario, and this I think really is reflected in the COVID response, you know, everyone says like, let's have this superordinate threat, and then everyone you know, like a threat to all of America, and then Democrats and Republicans will work together well, But if Democrats and Republicans don't trust one another, they don't they don't trust each other to address the threat in the right way,

and they are fearful that the other side will will address the threat in the wrong way and actually harm them and so in that scenario with a lack of trust, a superordinate threat can actually make to make the innergroup conflict worse. Well that's what we've seen. I mean, it's yeah, I know, but like this is what we see in terms of responses to the you know, to the sort of the virus recommendations, Doctor Mason. Why are humans so horrible to each other? So I don't think we're horrible.

I know, I'm kind of being cheeky because I'm a humanistic psychologist. I'm ultimately optimistic about humanity. We're kind of a young species still, and and you know, it actually makes a lot of sense for us to form bonds with other people and to and to create boundaries around where that group ends and another group begins. Right, the only way for us to have society is to understand, you know, who you are as a part of that society, and who is who is like you in that society.

And if you think back to sort of you know, like evolutionary psychology, you know, in the like village days, there are you know, real boundaries between between groups of people, geographical boundaries between groups of people, and it was it's important to know that you have loyalty to your group, and you're willing to and you're willing to defend your group.

And that's that. You know, families are like that, and and any any you know, group of people that share something that they want to either want to maintain or that they feel as being threatened, they will behave that way. And that can be an honorable thing. Or you can use it to destroy people, and you can use it to intentionally, as George Washington warrant, you can use it to intentionally turn people against each other, to harm an entire nation. And I think, you know, we see that

in election meddling. For an election meddling, it doesn't take a whole lot to make Americans hate each other by you know, by putting some bots out there. We already hate each other. So you just have to poke at that and and and so it it's can it's a tool for good and for evil. And some people are you know, on an international level, would prefer that we don't exist, and we feel it, and that makes us

behave really badly towards each other as American. But you know, there's a point I just want to return to, which is the crux of your entire book, and and and I think it's encapsulated by this quote. American partisans can grow increasingly socially distant from one another, even if their policy disagreement are not profound. This gets it the you know, let's zoom in on on basically, this is the crux

of your work. So isn't isn't there something a glimmer of hope in that will if we actually started shifting our focus to the things that we agree on, we may realize, Wow, there's actually more here than than than meets the eye. If we immediately start to hate someone, I'm not as optimistic about that one, because I actually, you know, so I'm going beyond the book. I replicated this with the twenty sixteen election data, and still the

average American is slightly to the left. If you average you know, the issue positions across like six really contentious issues. If you look at you know, how well Americans put their issues on like you know, so if Democrats are on the liberal side of an issue or Republicans are on the conservative side of an issue, how correct are

people you know at holding the right issue positions? Generally, neither Democrats or Republicans are very good at at sort of holding the correct issue positions for their party or even just being on the right side of the of the middle. And so the twenty sixteen electorate was one that actually there was plenty of room for people to collaborate on. It was there's so much overlap in what

Americans actually think. And you know, America's not Twitter, right, like the average American who is asked questions about what they want government to do is or what they think society should do. There's there's a huge amount of room for compromise in policy alone. But then you ask those same people how they felt, so asking Republicans how they felt about Democrats and vice versa, they hate each other. Even in the same survey, the same people in the

same survey, they really hate the other political party. The people in the other political party, well, the other political party, and they also really love their own. Wow. So even in a single you know, set of respondents that has tons of issue based overlap, they still really don't like the people on the other side. And that's you know, the policy agreement won't work until the until the social divide is addressed. I think it's just too rational. Well, doctors,

I'm going to keep trying to get it here. You do mention in the psychological literature some things we know that might help with intergroup reconciliation. Let's for the remainder of this podcast just briefly touch on some of these things. So maybe we have some people listening in a position of policy or can make a change and they can adopt some of these principles. So one is contact theory.

You say, while exposure to opposing political ideas and individuals can moderate intolerance and polarization, this exposure is growing far less frequent. How can we increased exposure across party lines? For one of the original studies on this was during the Korean War, the United States Armed forces were desegregated, but it was done so battalion by battalion in almost random order. It was just wherever they needed more troops,

they would desegregate that battalion. So it was sort of like a natural experiment, and sociologists interviewed all of these soldiers in both the desegregated and the still segregated battalions, and what they found was that the white soldiers in the regated battalions were much more racially tolerant than the white soldiers in the still segregated battalions. So that was a that was a great example of you know, it's

just contact, but it's it's not only contact. It's contact in a scenario in which they are in the two groups are not competing over resources, they're they're not even competing over hierarchy because those you know, the military hierarchy assignments are relatively strict, and so they just are what they are. And also they're all working towards a common goal Nichols as you talk about, right, which really only

work if you have those other two things. So so the you know, one of the sort of like moonshot ideas that I think about is like a national service program where we intentionally move people to other parts of the country they wouldn't otherwise go and expose them to people, you know, like do mandatory gap year after high school and and move kids into a place where they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to these people, and you know, and then that would give it would give some sort of

either tuition benefit or you know, it would become an honor. So you put on your CV or your resume and it'd be easier to get hired and then freshman year

in college. Ideally you could have some kind of like required debrief course where every freshman goes into the debrief and talks about what happened over the last year and how these sort of social relationships work, so that they can understand exactly what happened to them and be more aware, kind of more mindful about the way they think about other people and the way they judge other people in general. That I think would be the most ideal way to

educate sort of the next generation of Americans. You know, you're seeing some hopeful snapshots of protests on the news where you see like the police and the protesters doing the boogie dance together. You know, you see these these flickers of moments. I don't know what positive that is going to be, but they warm my heart when I see such things, you know, or you see you know,

just people who they're supposed to hate it. You know, they're told they're supposed to hate each other, and that they just put it down for a second and decide we're just not going to hate each other for a second, you know, Like I just I see these glimmers. Yeah, I mean, honestly, the thing one of the things that gives me the most hope is that is the is the diversity of the protesters. I've noticed that too. Yeah, it's you know, people compare this in nineteen sixty eight

all the time. It's very different from nineteen sixty eight because these protests are very, very diverse. And this Spike Lee said when he was interviewed recently. Yeah, he's like, it's amazing the difference. It's huge. And honestly, what it's bringing up is not just police reform, but a call for Americans, white Americans in particular, to understand that black Americans have been living under a different type of state

than white Americans have been living under. And what we've seen recently in recent even just recent decade that's sorry, recent years before the protester starting in you know, twenty fifteen, is that white Democrats have been have been becoming a lot more aware of systemic racism, systemic racism over the sort of Trump presidency where I mean, and it's massive, it's something like you know, people who agree that the government needs to do more to help blacks in American society.

That goes from forty something percent of white Democrats to eighty something percent of white Democrats by twenty nineteen. So there's really big changes happening among white Democrats, in particular about awareness of what's happening to Black Americans in our society.

And you know the fact that we're seeing Confederate statues come down now, right, that's not about police, that's about saying the Civil War never really ended, or at least the Confederacy was never fully defeated because all of these laws were put in place to truly hold back Black Americans. And I really, I really do think that part of the reason we can say this now is that there is an this is never have before. There's an entire

political party that believes that systemic racism exists. The Democratic Party, like the white people and everybody else in the Democratic Party basically believe that systemic racism exists. And we have never had an entire political party that believes that before. We've always had sort of white supremacists scattered through both the Republican and Democratic parties, and there wasn't a big difference, and that's part of the reason they could get along

and like it compromises. Right in the nineteen eighties, Democrats and Republicans could make compromises because they all agreed that like, okay, we'll do this, but only for white people. And so this sort of suppression of the knowledge of systemic racism allowed a lot of cooperation in Congress. But that doesn't help, that doesn't help us as a you know, in the

society as a whole. And so I really think that large part of this is that because the parties have changed socially, the sort of the social demographic makeup of the parties has changed so much in recent decades that is allowing a lot more political power than has ever been applied to the idea that systemic racism exists, it's

bad and it should be ended. It would be really nice if everyone could get a you know, rally around facts and not just ideologies, and and that we agreed, you know this, we agree this is a factually a problem. We don't agree that there's a problem. That we could somehow come towards some sort of agreement some of these things. But because there's there's widely different opinions on the extent of the systemic racism, and I don't think, you know,

there's a definitive answer. I just read a really fascinating article by some and I really respect John mcwarter, who is an African American, I believe conservative talking about just saying they're really isn't good data that the police force is racist. There's a real there's a problem. But we could all rally around the problem of police corrupt regardless

of your race. You know, there's a lot of white people killed by a police and there's not so some reasonable people and I would not say John mcwater is racist, you know, just for presenting a different viewpoint. You know, how do we listen to different viewpoints and try to try to agree on facts. So I think it's really important for us to keep in mind the difference between a person being racist and a society disadvantaging systematically disadvantaging

a group of people. Right, It's not that one person is racist, it's that, you know, we had redlining so that black families were not allowed into neighborhoods, and we had neighborhood organizations that didn't allow black families to buy houses in those neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods were the ones with the good schools. And this was happening not even you know, fifty years ago. So this is happening to

my my dad's generation. And so this is you know, I think that the idea is not that we're pointing

fingers at people and saying you're a racist. If that racism has existed in American society since the very beginning, and we've been on this sort of constant journey to try to eliminate it in the system, not even just an individual people's minds, but just to change the you know, redlining became illegal in the sixties, so there, you know, racial discriminations technically illegal starting in nineteen sixty four, but that was nineteen sixty four, that was not very long ago.

And then there are plenty of people in charge who are still upholding that old system of systemic racism. So it's you know, I think it's a really important it's a really important thing for people to separate the idea of like being called racist and understanding our society and the institutions upon which we live, right, and I do.

I do think there is one one bit of hope is that we've also seen white Republicans becoming slightly more aware of systemic racism and also holding fewer negative stereotypes of black Americans. So it's so Republicans are also becoming more aware of this. It's just that the gap between white Democrats and white Republicans is still very large, but

the but the changes are happening in both parties. So there is a general move toward understanding sort of the discrimination that black Americans face on a day to day basis, and and the idea that you know, we shouldn't hold these these negative stereotypes that you know, there are not There are not stereotype based differences between white and black Americans. So interesting, you see my point in how people really are not agreeing right now on even the extent of

the various aspects of American cyrus are systemically racist. Even people might say that the racism does exist and acknowledge that, but there seems to be quite quite wild disagreement, you know, even within the Democratic Party. You know, I see lots of arguments on Twitter, even though within the Democrat you know, some people will say, how dare you even question that it's pervasive? You know, and they and then they immediately

start hating each other without even discussing it. It's a very threatening thing to admit, right if you're a white person who's been living in a society that has been benefiting you and harming other people at your expert you know, you've been been benefited by at the expense of this other group of people. That's a hard that's a hard thing to take on as just well, John mcwater is black, the guy who wrote that. Yeah, I mean, but it

is a whole philosophy and the difference. I think historians generally agree, right, like the historians of American history agree that that of American political history agree that that we have had a systemically racist system since the founding. The question is right, Obviously, it was systemically racist when people

were enslaved, uh. And then and once they were no longer enslaved, we had eight years of reconstruction in which there were a lot of black community really successful in driving black communities that were built, and then they were literally murdered by white supremacists. Then we bombed them, you know, like the white society destroyed those communities as soon as

they were successful. And then and then that led to an era of Jim Crow in which white people and black people weren't allowed to use the same water fountains, and that was only made illegal in nineteen sixty four, and black people were really only allowed to vote in nineteen sixty five. So you know, think about the age of your parents in that year. We're not very far

away from them. And it takes you know, if we have four hundred years of slavery, it's going to take a lot more time than fifty years to undo that much psychological training. Right, It's not a question of you know, do I think this is true? Do I do I?

You know, like what is my experience of it? The question is actually just historically, what has happened, what have been the would have been the priorities of a government, would have been the priorities of our institutions, and like how people can treated and that brands are pretty clear on that. What I always try to do, I really appreciate your perspective. What I always try to do in the Psychology podcast is always constantly trying to think of alternative,

like what would someone else say to what you're saying. So, yeah, that's why I'm trying to push you a little bit, because I mean, some people, you know, make arguments that twenty twenty, you know, we've really come a long way even in thirty forty years and that we focus so much on how we haven't come that we very rarely talk about how far we have actually come. And some

people might make that point. No, that's true, and we have come a remarkably far away, right, I mean, just just that, like we said that the demographics of the demonstrators that we've been seeing in all of these cities, right, we've clearly come a long way. But we also are still taking down Confederate monuments, so you know, and you know, know those weren't there right after the Civil War because

the Confederacy was rebellion against the country. There were the enemy, and so you know, they were against the Union, so they were actually the bad guys. And those those those statues went up during Jim Crow to put black people in those communities back in their place and to remind them that the people who made the decisions about where statues went and what the statues were believe in the Confederacy.

So the Confederate, the fact that we still have those statues, to me, suggests that there's still something very deep that is that is we've all just sort of you know, we look past it and we'll walk past the statues, and white people don't have to worry about it. We just walk past it and don't worry. But it means something really really different, and that's sort of, you know,

kind of this crazy thing. NASCAR has prohibited the Confederate flag at NASCAR events, and like the U, I think as US Marines just made it no longer allowed for Marines to have a Confederate flag like sticker on their you know whatever, our equipment, and the flag of the Confederacy was a flag of of treason. You know. The the idea that we have a military group that that had for a while allowed as soldiers to have this flag that was based on, you know, treason against America

is really remarkable. So we've come a really long way. You're right, then, these these these protests and demonstrations I think are really great evidence of that. But at the same time, you know, if we still have if we're still flying the Confederate flag at sporting events, that's that's a really clear signal to a lot of people. Yeah, all right, well, I think this is the last hopeful thing we can do change it. We talked about contact there,

We talked about super ordinal U social norms. You say one way that outright partisan prejudice may be addressed is for the parties themselves to establish new norms for partisan behavior. Could you see a new leader coming to power, even our current leader somehow complete changing his whole style overnight. Definitely not the current leader. He's not well known for

controlling the language that he uses. But certainly I think leadership does matter the you know, even you know, going back to like our parents generation, right, like the use of derogatory racial slurs and our parents generation was much more widespread than it is today. And now we just find it completely socially acceptable to say horrible things about political partisans. On the other side, it's completely socially acceptable for us to you know, call liberals or democrats you know,

awful words, and the same thing for Republicans and conservatives. So, you know, that to me seems like a norm that could be challenged. It's it's certainly anti democratic, and the idea that we're just allowing people not allowing you know,

you can't control people say. But but the way that we change the use of like derogatory racial slurs is that we needed a norm that it's not okay to do that, and and so it's possible that this actually the way that we talk about each other as Democrats and Republicans can could shift if we wanted it, to write, if we wanted to create new norms around the way that we talk about each other politically, that could potentially

shift behavior. You know, have that type of language not be seen on you know, news or public media or any type of like popular popular media, because right now it's it's just it's so much more acceptable just to use these really awful words against Democrats and Republicans and it is about any other group at all, agreed, and people are it gets you more likes on Twitter among your fan base or your in group if you use such words well, and I mean so nineteen ninety four,

New Gingrich wrote what's called the Gopak Memo, which which let which was a list of words that you should use to This was for Republicans refreshment Republicans in the new nineteen ninety five Congress where they first took over Congress and the Republicans took over Congress for the first time in forty years, and he gave them a list of words that they should be using to talk about

Republicans and those were like patriotic, loyal family. And then words that should be used to talk about Democrats, and those were things like poison, cancer, evil, serpent, you know, just like really terrible, terrible language, and that that really Yeah, I think like in the Bible. Okay, Okay, I think

serpents are cool. Okay, but yeah, point so that I think that sort of did usher in a new era of like, oh, we're supposed to talk about people this way, right, Newt Ginger showed us that we could do that, So we're allowed to do this, We're allowed to say these these terrible things. As I was looking the book, I was like, is there any good news at all? And I found one thing and maybe let's just leave them on this. You talked about the importance of self affirmation.

People want to There's so much ego threat going on right now, and everyone wants to matter. I mean everyone. You see it. You see a desperate cry, you know, I saw you know this protest in England three people with white people Matter science, Like everyone wants to matter. You wrote, the good news is that cone it all two thousand and seven have found that simply reminding a person of their own self worth, a technique called self

affirmation can significantly reduce extremism and ideological closed mindedness. Do you think perhaps there's some way that we could all listen more to each other and affirm each other's basic worth and dignity as a human being. So that requires us to do that for ourselves first, Right, So the nice thing about I mean, the easy thing about self affirmation is that you can you do it on your own, right. It's just like, sit down and write about a time

when you felt proud of yourself for five minutes. Just do that, and you'll be a nicer person after you do that. The problem is that it's really hard for us to internalize these really positive ideas about it ourselves. And we're not going to be able to treat other people with kindness until we're you know, it's self affirmation, until we're treating ourselves with kindness and believing in our

own self worth. And that's a lot that can be a challenge that that it could be something that leadership could address, right. There could be you know, a source of you know, creating a source of pride, creating a source of healthy pride. Yeah, outside of the bounds of partisanship. And that's so that is a possible that is a possible path forward. If there's something we do as Americans that that makes us feel good about ourselves, then then we may be able to get out of this. We

need a really inspirational leader. I feel like I want to run for president in the United States. I know what my message would be of uniting that's all as a single species. Anyway, Look, you say quote, I maintained that an electorate that is emotionally engaged and politically activated on behalf of prejudice and misunderstanding is not electorate that produces positive outcomes. Look, thank you so much for coming

on the podcast today and offering your wonderful research. It's so timely right now, more so than you probably ever would have imagined or even hoped for. You know, you probably wish your work wasn't so timely. It's like being being an epidemiologist. I'm sure that's right. That's that's exactly right. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us today on the Psychology Podcast, and all the best with your or a new book as well. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

It was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the podcast on iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channel, as we're

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