Lauren Hall on the Campbell Conversations (original) (raw)

Lauren Hall speaks on the theme and ideas behind her recent op-ed, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.”

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The aftermath of the November elections, at least in terms of political rhetoric, has sounded much like the last 12 years. Deep division and urgent claims about the evils intended by the other side. My guest today thinks we've had more than enough. Lauren Hall is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology and she's a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse. She's also recently penned an op-ed in Real Clear Politics titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.” Professor Hall, welcome to the program.

Lauren Hall: Great to be here, Grant, thank you.

GR: It's good to have you. So I want to just say at the outset, perhaps as a disclaimer of sorts to you and to our listeners that I think I've encountered much of what you are observing in your recent writing on this subject. So I might end up participating in the discussion more than I usually do, as well as asking the questions, but I'll try to discipline myself. But first, before I get to the questions about this recent issue that you've been writing about, I want to get and share with our listeners some background on where you're coming from. So you describe yourself as a radical moderate. So first of all, tell us what a radical moderate is for you.

LH: Yes, great question. I've been thinking about this a lot. My 2014 book was on, it's called, “Family and the Politics of Moderation.” So I've been thinking about what political moderation is for a long time. But when I was trying to think about how to explain this concept to broader audiences, what I realized is that moderation has a kind of serious marketing problem. It often sounds like bland compromise or just, you know, you kind of pick a point between two extremes, and that's moderation. And so when I was trying to think about what I was actually going for, it's not actually moderation just for the sake of moderation. Moderation is actually radical in the sense that it's a complete reframing of the political landscape that we're living in. So I think a lot of times we tend to place ourselves on political binaries, right versus left, Democrat versus Republican, but if you actually look at the political landscape, it's really complex, it's really variable. People occupy different parts of it at different times. There's an enormous amount of overlap. And so what I really want people to think about when they think about moderation is an exploding of these political binaries, and that's the radical part. We're rejecting the political binary altogether and trying to map a more accurate shared landscape.

GR: Well, and the way you describe that gets at exactly the question that I wanted to ask you as a follow-up, and maybe you've already answered it. And that's that, I think the media tends to see it in the way that you described what it isn't, what moderation isn't or the way that you don't see it. And I wondered, is that why it tends to get downplayed by the media? Because it's just like, oh, this is just splitting the difference, not thinking differently.

LH: Yes. Well, I think there's a couple of things going on, right? So the media responds to incentives and one of the primary incentives we have in in modern media, especially with the 24-hour news cycle, is clicks, right? Clicks and views. And moderate, thoughtful nuanced, complex positions don't get clicks, they don't get views, the more extreme positions do. The other thing that I think as political scientists, we're all aware of is the fact that when you can activate people's tribalism, when you can activate people's in-group outgroup instincts, you get more clicks, you animate people, right? You trigger the emotional parts of their brains. So it's not just that we have a marketing problem, but it's also the fact that it's really easy to shift people out of a nuanced, moderate mindset and into this tribal, partisan binary kind of mindset. So that's where I think the media, there's some really perverse incentives built into the structure of how we're thinking about news reporting. And by the way, I think there's some hopeful indicators. So I don't want to be too pessimistic, but right now, at least there's some real incentives toward extremism.

GR: And just also to cover a little bit about your background. You're also, in addition to the things I mentioned at the outset in my introduction, you're also a board member of something called the Prohuman Foundation. Now, I mean, my first thought was who could be against that? But tell us what that is and what it's about.

LH: Yeah, great, great question. So I'm on the board of advisors for the Prohuman Foundation, and it's a relatively new foundation, just about a year old. And one of the goals of that foundation is to try to sort of reinvigorate areas of connection between people. So one of their taglines is, you know, that everyone has unique identities but shared humanity. And so rather than getting fragmented with identity politics or trying to sort of whitewash or sort of, you know, melting pot people, we can live with kind of tension. It's not even tension, but the fact that every individual does have lots of unique identities that affect the way that they move around the world. But we also have enormous areas of shared humanity. And so a lot of the work that they're doing overlaps with my own work in terms of trying to reinvigorate public discourse, make it more nuanced, make it more clear how complex political and social issues are. One of the founders of that foundation is Daryl Davis, who's very famous as an incredible black musician for making friends with KKK members and actually converting KKK members away from extremism and white supremacy. And part of the way that he does that is by creating these pathways to showcase the shared connections that he has with them, and a lot of that's through music. But so anyway, he's a very inspirational figure in general, but he's one of the co-founders of that foundation.

GR: Interesting. So you have been experiencing something politically, again, going back to your editorial and Real Clear Politics, from your colleagues and your liberal friends that I have to say, and I said at the outset, it sounds very familiar to me. But it's a demonization not just of Donald Trump, but more importantly, the slightly more than half of the country's voters who voted for him over Kamala Harris. Tell me a bit about that experience as you've experienced it.

LH: So a lot of it was what social media, watching friends of mine argue that they have relatives that they'll just never see again or they didn't realize that friends were white supremacists or fascists or Nazis. And I remember thinking to myself, well, this is actually crazy. I mean, it's like we often have this, and I just know this from being in an academic environment where people are generally there's a liberal slant. We talk a lot about misinformation and the kinds of myths that, you know, for example, climate deniers have. But then I was watching all these well-educated liberal people accuse 50 plus percent of the American population of being fascists. And it was just, you know, we have our own myths that I think we need to confront. And the broader point of that op-ed was this actually does deep damage to the people that we want to protect. So if you believe strongly that Trump is a danger to civil society and to liberal democracy, there's a lot of people who are going to be vulnerable under that regime. You need as many friends as you can possibly get. You need to build coalitions and you need to be able to reach across the aisle to people who you may not have as much in common with as you might want. But we don't get to choose the people that we that we share our country with. We have to work with the people that we have. And there are lots of complicated reasons that people voted for Trump, and very few of them were outright fascism.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Rochester Institute of Technology Political Science Professor Lauren Hall. So there's a particular aspect of all this I want to plumb a little bit that has really struck me in, not only recent months, but recent years. And it's a more of a feature of political polarization and it and it afflicts both sides of the aisle in my experience. But it's the assumption that what is motivating people on the other side of the political divide are the worst goals and values imaginable. For example, that people voting for Trump, we already talked about this, people voting for Trump are primarily motivated by bigotry or a desire to control women or a desire to harm vulnerable populations. Or the people who voted for Harris are motivated by a desire to, in the extreme in the abortion case take innocent life or elevate certain minorities over majorities or they want to confiscate everybody's gun. Just curious to hear your reflections about that, about jumping to those motivations.

LH: Yeah. So I'm not a social psychologist, but I do, from what I understand, right, there's a thing called one of the cognitive biases that's very common as the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency of people to attribute good faith motives to themselves and bad faith motives to other people, right? So the guy who cuts you off in traffic, right, he's a jerk. But when you accidentally cut someone off, it's because you were distracted because your child is sick, right, so you have all sorts of reasons for things, whereas other people have bad reasons for things. And, you know, I think this is a really common part of human life. But I think we see that perfectly when it comes to how people vote, right? When people think about their own voting decisions, right, they think about them in terms of their own complex, four-dimensional political landscape, right? All of the things that they care about and some of them may say, well, you know, I'm a single issue voter usually, but in this particular election, right? So people introduce complexity and nuance into their own voting decisions. But when it comes to other people, we very quickly reduce them to a single one-dimensional point, right? A one-dimensional motive. So either it's bigotry or it's something else, right? And, you know, conservatives and Trump voters do this to liberal voters as well.

LH: This is not a, this is a two-way street, absolutely. But I think that when we look at the liberal reaction to the Trump win, I think we see the fundamental attribution error in really clear, really clear relief. And it's a serious problem because it prevents us from finding those common connections that make civil discourse possible and in fact, that make political communities possible.

GR: And just as a follow-up to that, I'll give you a specific experience I had, I'm curious to get your reaction to it. But a few years back, I was at a small group dinner with a, and I won't mention the person's name but they were very prominent award-winning historian from the academy. And she, in the course of this dinner, casually referred to all the racists who had voted for Trump. And I gently said, you know, certainly all Trump's voters are not racists, right? And then she just said, well, I'm over that. And the certainty of her statement shocked me. So what do you or what do we say to someone like that? Because they've got the imprimatur of the academy behind them. They've been, you know, given these awards, but they're just saying this stuff.

LH: Well, I mean, there's a little bit of irony, right? Which is that a lot of us as humanists, as social scientists. Some of us trace our, I’m a political theorist, so, you know, we sort of trace our ancestry back to Socrates, right? And the Socratic sort of humility, which is that you only know that you know nothing, that was supposed to be the foundation for philosophic and political exploration, right? This idea that you don't know what you don't know. And so that's why you have to ask questions. That's the platonic, the Socratic method. So it's deeply ironic that we now have this kind of certainty that a lot of higher educational institutions and workers, the Professoriate, I think being a great example of this, we've replaced that humility with hubris. We think we understand why other people are doing what we do. There's a great book that just came out, “We Have Never Been Woke” by Musa al-Gharbi. And one of the things that he argues in that book is that knowledge workers have become, that is in fact, the new gulf in America. And knowledge workers fundamentally misunderstand how other people live. They misunderstand their motivations, they misunderstand how their lives actually play out. And that leads to a lot of really, it leads to obviously miscommunication and bad polling, as we've seen in all of these elections. But it also leads to making really awful generalizations about why other people are behaving the way that they're behaving.

GR: So this is an instance of great minds think alike. But I am going to speak to him either next week on this program or the week after.

LH: Oh, wonderful.

GR: And the intention was that the two of you would be kind of a pair, it would be kind of a matched pair, a series, if you will. So you've done a great job of previewing that for me.

LH: (laughter) Wonderful.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Lauren Hall. She's a political scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who's recently published an op-ed piece titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies” and we've been discussing the issues that her essay raises. So more generally, you often hear that, from folks that push this more extreme view who are on the left, you often hear from them that, look, the existential threat to democracy that's posed by Donald Trump justifies all this hyperbolic language or language that might seem hyperbolic or over-the-top. And if it does seem too much that way, it just means that people aren't paying enough attention. Now, my own view, I think, sort of kindred to yours is that that kind of language makes the supposed problem worse rather than better, both strategically and tactically. But I wanted to get your sense to that as well. What are your thoughts about that kind of language that we often hear?

LH: Well, you know, I mean, I think it's one of these weird, again, sort of going back to this tribalism that polarization supports. When we start thinking in tribalistic terms about our side versus their side, I think we end up with ideological purity tests. We end up with this kind of existential, you know, the other side is an existential threat to our side. And so, first of all, I think it makes it really hard to identify when we're actually dealing with existential threats. And I think that is a tough line to draw a lot of times. I mean, certainly I watched January 6th and was deeply worried and felt that a line had been crossed in a serious way. I worry a lot about political norms because they're hard to build and very easy to tear down. So this isn't to say that I'm not concerned, I'm very concerned as a political scientist. But I do think that there are some real problems on the left with the way that they think, or at least what I hear from students and some faculty about civil discourse. And so sometimes I'll hear comments about, you know, civil discourse is just, you know, it's ignoring, right, evil or it's collaborating with evil.

GR: Right.

LH: I sometimes hear people talk about civil discourse as though it's tone policing, right, the idea that you would moderate your message to meet your audience, right, the basic elements of rhetoric or somehow not they don't function anymore because we live in this in this existentially threatening time. And again, I just think that we are, it's not that I'm not sympathetic to people who are operating in a place of fear and it's not that I don't share some of those fears. But the problem is whether your response is going to make things better or worse. And I think we have so much evidence that this kind of response makes things worse, right? How do you push people toward more and more kinds of extremism? Well, you do exactly what we're doing, right? Which is that we keep, we alienate them, we attribute horrible motives to them, we stop having conversations with them, we cut them out of various kinds of civil discourse, we segregate them off of different media platforms. So, you know, it seems clear to me that you might think that you are doing a good thing by censoring people on whatever, you know, social media platform you're on. But that actually feeds the problem. And so what I'm trying to think about as a political scientist is, is how do we move forward knowing that we have four years where we can either lose a lot more or find a way to protect what we have and sort of stay the course, if possible.

GR: Do you have maybe like one or two best suggestions or recommendations for moving forward in that regard?

LH: Well, and this is going to be, it's going to be unsatisfying to a lot of people. I wish we had top-down kinds of solutions, but a lot of the most promising work I'm seeing is happening from the bottom up. It's sort of grassroots, the bridging community. If you look at the, I'm a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center this year, and they do these wonderful the pluralist labs where you actually get people together who disagree in fundamental ways on hot-button issues. And it's about engaging people in curiosity, right, asking people curious questions about why they believe what they believe, as opposed to the way that we usually approach these kinds of civil debates, which is, or, civil society debates, which is to go in and say, this is what I believe and this is why it's right. And so what that automatically does is it puts the other person on the defensive, it puts you on the offensive and it makes you want to defend your position. And what we really want to do is actually ask people questions. We want to say, hey, why did you vote for Trump knowing his position on immigration, given the fact that you have Latino relatives? Like, what are you thinking about the world, right? And I think if we ask people questions, we get a lot more information. We also make it clear to them that the other side is not the enemy, that the other side is actually just a bunch of curious people wanting to know more about what they're thinking. So I think there's a bunch of examples of that. There's the Builders Movement is another, there's a great documentary on the Tennessee 11, was a group of people that they put together with very different political views, but they actually put them together to try to come up with some kind of common sense policy for Tennessee on gun violence. And so these are people who range from hard core Second Amendment right folks all the way to, you know, extreme sort of pacifists. But they were able to come together and talk about things because the structure of the conversation was non-adversarial. And then Solutions Journalism is another great format for really thinking about local-level solutions, they're nonpartisan. The goal is, hey, let's look around us at our local communities and let's look for problems that we can solve together. And what that does is it takes the identity of being a Republican or a Democrat out of the picture. And instead, your neighbors trying to solve this local problem together.

GR: So, two things strike me there as observations. One, with the second example that you used as we kind of get practice a little bit at the local level and then maybe we can scale that up. And the other one about asking questions, you've kind to gone back to the roots that you already mentioned with Socrates because that's exactly what Socrates did, was simply ask questions of people.

LH: Yup.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is the political scientist Lauren Hall. So I have this one question about, and you write about this in your op-ed, that the fact that when you look at the specific views that people have on policies, you do see a lot of overlap, whether you're looking at immigration or you're looking at LGBTQ rights or other kinds of issues that are normally seen as very divisive and very conflictual. And so we're more centrist than we'd like to think if we want to think about it in terms of centrist, but there's more overlap. But it seems to me, though, that that's still separate from the fact that in terms of behavior and the way that we see the other side, once there is a line of division down, either along party lines or along some other issue, that we're still quite polarized, that we still have this tendency to demonize once the parties take different stands on it. So how do you get at that? How do you actually leverage the fact that, beyond perhaps what you've already suggested as some remedies, that we might have overlap on the specific content of things, but that still doesn't influence the fact that I'm always going to vote for Democrats or I'm always going to vote for Republicans or I'm going to see Democrats as the enemy.

LH: Well, so at some point and this is where I think my, I try to see both points at the same time. I'm a localist, I tend to focus on grassroots kind of bottom-up solutions. But I think we also have to talk about the structures of our electoral system, as well as some of the incentives that that electoral system as well as the media landscape create. There was a great podcast interview with, I'll have to remember the podcast’s name, but it was with Yuval Levin. I think it's pluralism conversations actually with the Mercatus Center. But he actually made a really important point, which was a lot of people talk about ranked-choice voting in general elections. And he actually said, we don't need that, right? What we actually need are, in a sense, stronger parties, which people often think of as an odd thing when it comes to polarization, but stronger parties actually allow the party to filter out extreme positions. And if you had ranked choice voting at the primary level…

GR: Right.

LH: You actually could filter out a lot of these extremist candidates. It would undo this this cycle that we have now, particularly in the Republican Party, because they have fewer super delegates, they have they have less party control over their candidates. If you had ranked choice voting at the primary level, it introduces nuance, right? It allows people's actual preferences to emerge and then the party has a better sense of what their electorate actually stands for. If you look at a lot of the people who are becoming serious players, and this is absolutely if you, I mean, if you look at what happened in the 2016 election, why Trump got the nomination in the first place, that was not what the GOP wanted. That was not the direction they wanted to go. So I think there's two things that we have to think about as political scientists. We can think about the structural questions, we can think about what kinds of incentives build stronger and more reliable and more accurate electoral outputs, right? How are we actually reflecting what the electorate cares about? Because right now we're not. Our candidates are more extreme than the average American and they're more divisive than the average American wants. So we're in this weird space where our elections are not representing the desires of the people.

GR: Yeah. I think you've really hit on something important with the idea of rank choice being more important at the primary stage than the general election stage. Well, we've got about a minute and a half left, so I'm going to put you in a tough spot here. But I want to try to squeeze two questions in if we can. So sort of like a lightning round. First one is, I just had my last class with my Introductory American Politics students and they don't like this stuff either, they made that very clear to me. And one of the things I said to them was, and I should have said, ask questions, like you said earlier, but I said, you know, model the change that you want to see, which is a cliché, but it's got some wisdom to it. Any other thing that you would say to young people? Really quickly, like in 20 seconds or so.

LH: Yeah, I would just say ask questions, be curious. When you find yourself afraid, stop for a second, back off and get curious. Especially when it's about someone in your family or someone in your community.

GR: Then the last one, again, equally quick on an answer if we could. Any political figures out there now who you think are modeling a better way that come to mind?

LH: Iunfortunately can't think of anyone right off the top of my head, which is depressing. But I will name a couple of organizations that I think are doing amazing work. Amanda Ripley is a journalist, her work, Good Conflict (High Conflict) is incredible, there's tool kits on there. And if you're interested in pluralist labs in the classroom, you can actually find a pluralist lab tool kit on the Mercatus website. So there's a couple of places that I think you can try out ideas.

GR: Okay, that's great, that's super helpful for everybody listening. That was Lauren Hall and again, her recent op-ed and Real Clear Politics is titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.” Lauren, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. It's been fascinating and a really important topic.

LH: Thank you so much, Grant, it was great to see you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.