Political Polarization and the Future of Democracy

Transcript

[Sandro Galea] Welcome to Ideas Matter, a podcast hosted by WashU. I’m Sandro Galea, vice provost of interdisciplinary initiatives and dean of the School of Public Health at WashU. In 2016, 47% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats said they viewed members of the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans. In 2022, these numbers had risen to 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats. There are many things one could point to which illustrate the deep polarization of this moment.
But the fact that growing numbers of Americans view their fellow citizens as fundamentally immoral captures, as well as anything, the depth and persistence of polarization. The challenge of polarization is by now a familiar one. We have been talking about it in the U.S. for at least 20 years, if not longer. Yet none of this has done much, it seems, to get us where so many on the left and right wish to go, to a less polarized country where, as Lincoln said, we are not enemies, but friends.
How can we address the challenge of polarization, the threat it poses to the future of democracy? What would a less polarized culture and politics look like? Are we too far gone as a country, or is it still possible to change course, to heal the divides that have long been with us? Here to help answer these questions is today’s guest. Professor Lilliana Mason is the SNF Agora Institute Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She’s the author of Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity.
Her most recent book, co-authored with Nathan Kalmoe, is Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. I am delighted to be speaking with her today. Professor Mason, welcome.

[Lilliana Mason] Thank you so much for having me.

[Sandro Galea] So let’s start a bit with you, about your background. So how did you come to be doing the work you’re doing?

[Lilliana Mason] That’s a really big question. So I’ve been interested political science. I was a political science major as an undergrad and then I actually took five years off in between undergraduate and graduate school and realized what I was really interested in was how Americans are thinking about politics. There were just many things that happened where I was puzzled and wondering, what is everyone thinking? How do these forces influence people’s opinions? And so I decided to study political psychology and went to grad school for studying political psychology. I went to Stony Brook, which is a sort of unique program that focuses very much on the psychology side of it. And so I took classes called like cognition and decision-making and groups and started really thinking about the role of identity and emotion and the things that we think of as non-rational or non-logical, the role of those things in affecting our political decision making.

[Sandro Galea] So your book, terrific book, called Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity. Well, let’s get to the answer. How did politics become our identity?

[Lilliana Mason] Yeah, so to some degree politics is always rooted in identity. You know, we are making decisions collectively as a nation, but we want the people that we think of as us to be doing well, and depending on the political environment, the people we think of as them could either be people outside of our country who we feel like are threatening the country or they could be people inside of our country who we think of as competing with us for power and control over not only politics and legislation, but culture and the way that we treat each other and who belongs. And so that degree, everything, in my mind, everything is identity. But what’s happened over the last many decades is that in the U.S, we’ve seen a process that I call social sorting, which is that a lot of identities that are not explicitly political, like our religious identities, our racial identities, even our sense of geographic identity, right, being in a rural place, and people really can identify with being a person who lives in a rural area or somebody who’s more sort of cosmopolitan urban. And so those identities actually over the last many decades started to move into alignment with our partisan identities. So instead of going to the voting booth and just thinking about which party we want to win, or how we’ll feel if our party wins or loses, we’re also thinking about the fate of all these other identities that have now become psychologically linked with our party status in our minds. So when we win or lose, it’s not just our party winning or losing, it’s potentially also our religious group winning or losing, our racial group winning or losing.
And those things kind of take up more of the, what I think of as like self-esteem real estate that we have about ourselves, right? The status of our groups is connected to our own sense of status. And so when a lot of our groups are winning or losing at the same time, it has a much bigger effect on our sense of self. And to the extent that it takes up a lot more of our sense of self, that can become really existential. The stakes can feel really existential if it feels like every part of me is winning or losing in this very particular election.

[Sandro Galea] So I suppose that leads well into my next question, which is it’s not just about polarization, right? It’s also about how deep the polarization is. As I mentioned earlier in the stat I started with at the beginning, many Americans now view their political opposites not just as wrong, but immoral. I mean, immoral is a much steeper castigation than simply saying someone’s wrong. So how did that happen? How did it become so deep? How did it cut so close to the bone?

[Lilliana Mason] I think there’s two different ways of thinking about polarization. And one is people really disagreeing about the policies that the other side is endorsing. That can exist, and it does exist right now. But if those policies have to do with for example, a tax policy or something, then it’s not as personal and it’s not as identity-based as it is when polarization is more, we call it affective polarization, affective meaning feeling based. And so in affective polarization, what is happening is that our feelings about the other side are becoming more and more negative and our feelings for our own side are either staying the same or becoming more positive. And in that type of polarization, it almost ceases to matter how much we agree or disagree with the other side in terms of policy, because we think of them as so outside of us and so different from us that we can no longer want to compromise or work together or collaborate with the people in the other party.
And so it’s almost a different degree. It’s a different kind of thing, where instead of having real debates about the role of government in our lives and the way that we think government should be structured and even the size of government, we’re thinking instead about if those people win, my side is going to be destroyed. And that type of feeling, first of all, allows us to sort of think of the other side as immoral, evil, a threat to the country. But also the fact that we’re so sorted in terms of all of these different identities means that it’s harder for us to come across an opposing partisan in our normal life. So if our religious identities have sorted by party, then, you know, whereas in the 1950s, you came across Democrats and Republicans in your religious services. Those people no longer exist. We don’t have as many people who are meeting other partisans in church or at the grocery store or in their communities because we’re also geographically sorted. So what’s been happening is that we’ve become socially really distant from each other, meaning that a lot of us don’t know very many people who are on the other side. And that just makes it a lot easier for us to dehumanize and vilify the people that we disagree with.

[Sandro Galea] Sometimes when we talk about matters like this, I worry that we have overwhelming recency bias, like we know it’s polarized now, but the U.S has also been polarized before. So is there anything different about the time we’re in? Like how does it compare to divided eras in the past?

[Lilliana Mason] Yeah, we’ve had eras of deep social division, certainly in the past. And I would say the most recent one is probably the 1960s. In the 1960s there was, you know, a huge amount of social division. Not coincidentally, it was also a time when we were having major debates about civil rights. We passed the 1964 1965 Civil Rights Act in Congress.
We were also having a lot of debates about the role of women. We were having debates about equality. And so it was a time of great social upheaval, but the parties were not taking opposite sides on that divide. And so it wasn’t organized by our political system. And in that sense, it’s not, I wouldn’t say that it’s like safer. I mean, the 1960s saw huge numbers of political violence, assassinations, right? It wasn’t like a peaceful time, but because the two parties didn’t take opposite sides on those questions, we weren’t going into the voting booth thinking about those questions. And when the outcome of the election occurred, it didn’t feel as existential for us as citizens. The last time before that, that we were really deeply divided, you can argue is the Civil War, when again, we were having questions about equality and racial equality.
And so the types of divides that we see when the two parties are on two different sides of that kind of deep social divide, that, I think, is the thing that makes it especially explosive. It makes it something that when we are thinking about, for example, the transfer of power, that transfer of power becomes very emotionally laden and starts to feel like, if we lose power right now, we will never get it back. Because the thing that we’re looking for is a different kind of country, not a different set of policies for this government. And so when we’re thinking about the way that polarization or social divides are different right now, it’s that when we’re in the voting booth, we’re thinking about those divides, and then our entire government is structured around those divides right? Congress is structured around which party’s in the majority, and the party in the majority gets to be in the leadership of all the committees, and everything that’s happening in government. Those types of things become involved in those social upheavals when the parties are taking two different sides.

[Sandro Galea] So you started off by talking about identity and how identity has gotten mixed up and is a driver of these divides. So you mentioned culture, religion, geography, other factors. Do you think there is any one factor that is overriding at the moment, or is it a mix of all of these? And let me ask an ancillary question. Is there any driver, perhaps identity-linked or not, that is not discussed enough, that is behind the scenes pushing polarization?

[Lilliana Mason] So I don’t necessarily think that there’s one thing more than anything else. I think the one way I would pull it all together is to say we’re having a political debate about social equality. And one thing that’s happened in the U S that I think of is good is that we’ve made remarkable strides towards social equality in the last few decades. I mean, truly, in a historical lens, very rapid progress towards social equality. My own mother couldn’t get a credit card without a man’s permission until she was 28 years old, right? And now I’m sitting here talking to you as a full professor at Johns Hopkins. The Black Lives Matter protests were the most racially diverse and extensive protests for racial justice this country’s ever seen.
Same-sex marriage is only 10 years old, 11 years old, in terms of its legality in the country as a whole. We’ve just made a ton of progress and all of those struggles and all of that progress have become a central part of the divide between the parties. And so the question is, when we hear, make America great again, a lot of what we’re hearing is, take us back to a time when the traditional social hierarchy was intact, and we knew who was in charge when we walked into a room and we knew who got the benefit of the doubt and who got the full protections of America, full protections and rights and dignity of American citizenship, and who was treated like a full citizen. And therefore, you know who got to be bosses and the CEOs and the professors and all the people who are in charge of everything. All of that stuff was very predictable in the 1950s and now there’s just a huge amount, there’s a lot more, for lack of a better term, diversity in the places that are forming what we think of as the direction of our country. So I don’t think it’s necessarily one divide on its own. I think we’re having a massive backlash against a lot progress towards a more kind of multiracial pluralistic democracy.
But the thing that I think I neglected in Uncivil Agreement, knowingly, because I just didn’t know how to measure it or assess it, is the role of media and the way that we’ve had media voices stoking these grievances. It’s not that it necessarily came out of nowhere and was this natural thing that bubbled up in response to social progress, right? Backlash is not inevitable when you have social progress, but instead what we saw was a lot of, really entrepreneurs taking these social changes and building a sense of grievance and vulnerability and victimhood in the people who felt like they were losing the status that they had sort of previously believed they were owed. The messaging itself is something we don’t look as much into, but it’s been since the 1980s, I’m not talking about social media. I mean like AM talk radio in the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh. AM radio is listened to in rural areas.
It’s listened to by people who are doing usually manual labor jobs. It’s played in a pickup truck. A lot of old pickup trucks in the 1980s only had AM radio. I worked in a manual labor job in the summers when I was in high school. And so we now see this rural-urban divide, right? Which I don’t think is coincidental in that the media that people were consuming in rural versus urban areas were different. The messages that people are hearing on AM talk radio are not only Rush Limbaugh, but also really fire and brimstone preachers and evangelical preachers and people who were really stoking these divides and the growing equality that they were seeing. I don’t think it’s necessarily like these divides just immediately created this huge rift. I think that there was help nudging those divides into territory of something that we should be angry about.

[Sandro Galea] So I appreciate your pointing this out. A couple of things you said, which I’m going to underscore. Number one is that you said backlash is not inevitable with social progress, which I think is a, astute observation because sometimes I feel like in the public narrative there’s almost a sense of, ‘well, this was inevitable because we had progress and now we have to have a backlash.’ And the second point is you’re linking that explicitly to this, what you called entrepreneurs, to actors who used media that was at their disposal to presumably advance commercial interests fundamentally, and perhaps also commercial with ideological tincture, let’s call it that. So let’s now move to modern media. So let’s talk about social media, internet, and also in the past two years, the rise of AI. So lead us through your thoughts about the role that has played, is playing, and perhaps will play in this realm of polarization.

[Lilliana Mason] So the thing that social media and honestly, just the internet,right, in the 1980s, we had talk radio. In 1996, Fox News appeared and that became extremely prevalent in, if you go to any place where you have to wait for something in a small town in a rural area in America, Fox News is usually on the television. So Fox News became something that was sort of left on in people’s homes and became part of their environment and was intentionally, you know, Murdoch’s project was intentionally spreading what he called a more conservative view of American politics, but ultimately was very much rooted in sort of fear and dismissal of people who traditionally had been marginalized whether that’s women or people of color or non-straight people or whatever.
So that project was an ideological project. And then around the same time we had the internet showing up, early days of the internet, maybe the next decade. And what the internet does, even without social media, is it creates places for everyone to find people who are like them. So a lot of people grew up with a crazy guy in their town who would put up flyers on the telephone poles and be like, you know, say crazy stuff, but you kind of just ignore that guy and you walk past him. But when we have the internet, that guy can find friends who agree with him all over the globe and can start to feel really empowered start to feel maybe the things he’s saying are true. And that’s true for crazy things. It’s also true for socially undesirable things like bigotry. So the internet made it possible for everybody, no matter what their ideas were, tofind people with congenial ideas.
And then social media made that even easier, and it gave us rewards and punishments. So you say something that is perhaps bigoted, depending on which platform you’re on, you get either responses or likes. And we know that that sort of social engagement on social media platforms provides actual dopamine hits. Like it actually creates pleasure for us. That’s why we can’t stop scrolling when we’re looking at our news feeds on whatever social media app we’re using. And what social media did was create a place where not only can we all find each other, but we’re rewarded for engaging with each other. And the best way to engage with each other, it turns out, or the best way to create engagement with you is to make people angry. We know things about, in terms of social psychology of emotion, we know that there are certain emotions that we think of as approach emotions, so meaning that they get you doing stuff and active and out of your chair. Anger is one of those emotions.
Enthusiasm is another one, and that’s something that you can use for mobilization. I think Obama tried to use that as a political mobilizer to, I think, success at the time. But anger is a very easy one. So what social media did was create algorithms that maximized involvement, and for humans, that means anger. So we had these messages for decades coming through telling us who to resent and why to feel aggrieved. And then the internet got us connected to all the people that agreed with us. And then social media rewarded us for that type of behavior. So it sort of is this machine that kind of built on itself and became more and more specialized into connecting us to way more people we ever would have been connected to, and making us angry at them.

[Sandro Galea] And AI and the future?

[Lilliana Mason] I don’t know. I mean we’ve gotten to this point pretty well without AI at all. I think we were really worried, and I think we still should be worried about fake images, right? So like things that never happened being presented as if they happened. But we have been easy to convince that that untrue things are true without AI.

[Sandro Galea] without needing fake images.

[Lilliana Mason] Yeah. I mean, we’ve had leaders lie to us constantly, and like the people who like those leaders believe them, even if it’s an outrageous lie. We don’t actually need that much evidence to believe a lie. I think AI might change the way we think about evidence. Ironically, I think that the biggest danger of AI is that, because it can create more convincing false stories, it can further degrade what we think of as common truth. And this is another thing that social media and the internet has done, which is to fracture the authority of media. So fracture who is allowed to talk and when and who they’re allowed to talk to. And what that means is that when we have, you know, so many more voices that we consider to be authorities, that are authorities to different audiences, those people don’t have the same degree of standards, for example, that like news outlets have. So the New York Times has to prove, with like three different people, that that story they’re telling is true. Somebody on the internet doesn’t have to do any of that. And certainly somebody who’s, you know, running a channel or a podcast or whatever, like, the requirements for an individual actor, influential actor, on social media are just that they get engagement. It doesn’t matter whether they’re telling the truth or not. And that does damage our sense of common narrative and common truth.
I think we saw this during Covid, which was really disturbing for a lot of scholars, that, like the truth ceased to exist, even when scientifically it did exist, and the consequences were literally the mortality of the people believing or not believing in that truth. What AI may do is sort of finally, like, you can’t even believe your eyes, right? Like, you know, we were hearing all these lies, some of us, you know, we like to believe lies that that are consistent with what we want to be true. But we could see a video and say, like, okay, that actually happened, right? I believe that that happened because I saw the video. Yeah, what AI is going to do is damage that. So the baseline for knowing something really happened is going to become even more illusory and difficult to identify.

[Sandro Galea] We are going in more negative space. I’ll come back to positive in a second. Let’s talk about democracy for a second. Do you think democracies are more or less vulnerable to polarization? Is polarization a bug or a feature of American democracy? And hearing what you’re talking about and talking about polarization deepening, talk us through some of the consequences of polarization for democracy.

[Lilliana Mason] Right. So polarization, I think of it as something that only exists in a democracy. The ability for the citizenry to think about their own political power versus the political power of their fellow citizens and the ability to have a transfer of power on a regular basis. And the idea that we have deep divides that our politics are responsible for managing, that’s all part of pluralism. That’s all part of a pluralistic democracy. The extent to which of those divides are making us unable to have conversations with each other anymore is the degree of polarization. But in an autocracy, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to think about polarization in that the, you know, powerful actors, the people in charge, are going to be in charge no matter who believes what. And a lot of this angst and animosity comes about specifically because we are transferring power, and we know that it’s possible to gain power again. If we are losing power now, it’s possible to win again in the future, and that possibility keeps us engaged in politics and paying attention and angry and active in a way that we wouldn’t be if we knew that, you know, the tyrannical leader was always going to be the tyrannical leader and there’s nothing you can do about it, right? That creates apathy and withdrawal. Polarization is an element of a democracy. It always will be, right?
There’s always disagreements and discord. The point of democracy is actually to manage that. And so the question is, how well is our democracy managing the inherent polarization of our electorate? And I think that one thing that we’re seeing right now is that, like in the U.S in particular, when you have a two party system, it really facilitates polarization because the us is always us and the them is always them. We know who our political opponents are and they’re always the same people.
If you have a multi-party system and people have done studies of this in other places that have multi-party systems, if you have a multi-party system, you have ultimately some kind of coalitional politics, meaning that there are other parties that are sometimes us and there’s sometimes them, sometimes they’re in your coalition and sometimes they’re not in your coalition, and you can remember when they were part of your coalition. It happened relatively recently. And so it isn’t clear in a multi-party system who the them is when you’re talking about people outside of your party. It could be a bunch of different groups. It could be any of the other parties. And so what a two-party system does is it makes very, clear the us and the them, and it makes it feel very much like a zero-sum competition between those two sides. It’s unfortunate because in the U.S, we’re really institutionally stuck with a two-party system for a number of reasons we could talk about in a bit, but it’s really the two-sided nature of a political party system that I think facilitates the sort of worst elements of polarization.

[Sandro Galea] The notion that polarization is a feature of democracy and the challenge is making sure that that feature does not kill democracy is a really interesting idea and it captures well, it feels to me, the challenge that is so vivid at the moment, isn’t it?

[Lilliana Mason] In 1950, the American Political Science Association put out a letter to sort of the country saying, we need more polarization. They said, the people in this country don’t know the difference between the two parties. The title of the piece was Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. By responsible, what they meant was give people choices. They don’t know the difference between Democrats and Republicans. So be more different from each other. And that’s what they were calling for in 1950. They got it.

[Sandro Galea] I did not know that. Of course you and I both remember how when Ralph Nader launched a third party campaign, when George W. Bush against Al Gore, part of the premise of the campaign was that the two parties were indistinguishable. It was 25 years ago. It’s almost hard to imagine a time like that now.
Building a little bit on what you just said, so can polarization be good, perhaps even essential in the sense that a certain level of division could act as a creative tension that generates art, culture, and better policies? And if that’s the case, which I think I’m inferring from what you’re saying, how do we know when good polarization becomes bad?

[Lilliana Mason] So I actually do agree. I think that polarization really can be good and there is an argument to be made that that the reason that we are so polarized right now is because we are having really important arguments. And so this sort of existential thing I was talking about before, so we had very low polarization, for example, when there were white supremacists in both parties, you know, this sorting process that I’m talking about really started after the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, because it became clear that the Democratic Party was the party of Civil Rights. That really angered white southern Democrats who felt very sort of wary and actually they hated the idea of being Republicans because in their mind, Republicans were the aggressors in the Civil War. They would never call themselves Republicans, but they were furious with the Democratic Party. So for them, it really took a generation for them to sort of, they maybe started calling themselves independents and then their kids could call themselves Republicans. The process was the process of social sorting and it happened along many lines. But the reason that there wasn’t as much polarization before that was that there were people who wanted to maintain Jim Crow racial policy in both the Republican and the Democratic Party, and so the parties weren’t fighting each other. They were fighting internally. And that was the period of time that the APSA people were saying, we need more difference between the parties, right? It was hard to know what the parties were disagreeing on because the main divides in the country were within the parties. Now, under an era of polarization, we have parties taking two different sides on a question of democratic pluralism and social equality.
Those types of divides make us fight harder and they make us angrier and they make us potentially pay more attention to politics. But there’s also this advantage, which is that the side of equality, the side of the people who have been traditionally marginalized have a party as opposed to in the 1950s when they didn’t have a party at all. Now, in a two party system, having one political party that that is fighting for the rights of people who have been treated as inferiors in the history of the country. That’s extremely powerful. And it actually provides the opportunity for real progress. It’s just that that type of divide is also so difficult to navigate and difficult to even talk about. We’re not very good at talking about our history as a country. We’re not very good at talking about our history of like, enslavement. We tend to avoid those conversations. And when we talk about racism and sexism, things get heated, right? Feelings get hurt, people get mad. These topics are tough to talk about, and people take things personally.
And they are personal, you know, for a lot of people. For members of these traditionally marginalized groups, it feels like, okay, so you actually don’t think I belong in this society the way that you get to belong in this society. In that sense, having one political party kind of take that position is a very empowering thing and allows a lot of progress to be made, and I think partly why we’ve seen so much progress made over the last many decades. The place where I think it goes too far is when we have a situation in which there is just such opposite visions of the country that we cannot move forward. Instead of compromise and sort of deciding which direction to walk, we are in a tug of war. You can’t compromise in a tug of war. You’re pulling in one direction or you’re pulling in the other direction. You’re not walking in the same direction. And that makes the basic principles of governing cease to function because the idea of compromise, the idea of, I want this, you want this, let’s find something somewhere in between, that becomes untenable. And that’s when the structures of government stop working, that’s when you start to see people turning to outside of the state levels of change, like violence and like massive disruption. And those are the types of things you see when people have lost faith in the system as a whole. And I think that’s sort of where we are right now.

[Sandro Galea] So taking a thread and trying to bring together some of the points that you’ve been making, it’s really, we should not be aspiring to remove polarization. We should be aspiring to manage it, to create a sustainable polarization that reflects healthy divides within a democracy, recognizing some of the limitations of having a democracy that is structurally currently stuck in a two-party system and recognizing those challenges. So if we’re aspiring to managing this polarization, what are some of the forces that could have such an effect of managing polarization in our politics and culture?

[Lilliana Mason] So one thing that the political scientist Dan Hopkins has said is that one thing that’s happened with our polarization is it has become nationalized. Meaning we’re having fights about national politics at the local level. If you read a local paper and they’re talking about politics, they’re generally or a lot of the time, they’re talking about what’s happening in the White House or what’s happening in Congress.
And those are very difficult to navigate, whereas local and state level politics is a lot easier to find progress because, you know, if you have a pothole on your street, you don’t really care whether it’s a Democrat or Republican who’s in charge of fixing that pothole. You want it fixed. And the performance of the people in power really does determine whether you vote for them next time or not.
Things that bring communities together, like for example, local sports teams or the high school sports team, those things have not become segregated by party, right? Everyone in a town can identify with their high school sports team and they can go cheer for them. And so things that happen at the local level are still relatively manageable. One problem is that what we’ve seen is that local media has really been hollowed out. So the place where you would go to get your local politics is no longer available. Used to be that you can kind of get your local paper and figure out like who is fixing that pothole or who’s responsible for fixing that pothole and have they done it yet, and who can I call to get that fixed? That kind of thread tying local communities together has been disappearing and really is being replaced with nationalized media. So that when people think about politics, they’re just thinking about the White House and Congress in DC. So one way out of this is really to focus at the local level where it’s very clear when leadership is working and when leadership is not working and what the role of the government is and whether it’s performing its role well or not.
One thing I would say for trying to manage the type of polarization we’re dealing with, it’s democracy works the best when we can see the outcomes of what our government is doing and we can decide whether or not we like that and vote based on that, instead of voting based on, am I winning or losing, right? Accountability in government is easier at the local level. And at the national level, all we really care about, we don’t care about accountability. We care about whether I feel like I’m winning and whether the news talks about me winning or whether the news talks about me losing and I feel like I’m losing. That level of politics just doesn’t allow the type of accountability that we actually see in local government where things actually have to get done.

[Sandro Galea] My last question, what gives you hope in the moment?

[Lilliana Mason] I think, so there’s a few things. One, young people. I’m sure as you note, young people who are in college right now don’t remember a time before this type of politics. Even just, telling them about the example of the 2000 election, right? inconceivable to them that there was somebody saying there’s no difference between the parties. We invented the red states and blue states thing in 2000, just to like explain the map.and now it’s like an identity that we’ve created. And so there’s a good and a bad side to this, which is that the young people see this and they just don’t like it. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to behave this way. They don’t actually feel like the people in charge are responsible or acting like adults. They just see a lot of dysfunction. And so there’s one hope that like, young people are just sort of fed up with it and they don’t need to have this kind of argument anymore. I don’t know how they get out of it because the people in charge don’t want to get out of it right now. But there does seem to be a real discomfort with our politics as they stand among the younger generations. But the other thing is that one thing that we’ve actually seen that’s really, I think, damaged our political environment and our political discourse is this extreme erosion of political norms.
We learned through Trump, even through the first term, that a lot of the things that we think of as mandatory are actually just norms. And if you decide to ignore them, there’s no consequences. That includes things like just decorum in running for office, you know, in doing your job in Congress, basically like not calling people names when you’re at work in Congress. And so laws are enforced with law enforcement, but norms are really difficult to enforce if the people who are providing the examples for us, who are our leaders, are not obeying those norms. And in fact, if they disobey those norms and they have no punishment, then those norms are gone. That’s just, they’re just broken. But some norms are enforced with people and with community. I think one thing that we can all remember is that that we enforce norms that, you know as people embedded in the communities that we are embedded in, we have the choice to decide to say like this type of behavior is not the type of behavior that is going to be our norm you know we’re not going to behave this way. We’re not going to talk about encouraging violence. We’re not going to be calling people names. We’re not going to be engaging in this, you know, enemy type of rhetoric.
It feels like a lost cause because our leaders have ceased to follow these norms, but really in our local environments and in our communities, that’s up to us how we behave, and to the extent that we are leaders in whatever circle we’re a part of, we have a role to play in kind of reestablishing norms of decency and dignity and playing by the rules and telling the truth. And that’s something we all can do.

[Sandro Galea] I think ending on a note of, we all have a role to play in establishing norms of decency is a perfect place to end. I’m Sandro Galea. I have been talking with Professor Lilliana Mason about political polarization and the future of democracy. Thank you, Professor Mason, for joining us.

[Lilliana Mason]
Thanks so much for having me.

[Sandro Galea]
And thank you to all who have joined us for this Ideas Matter. I look forward to continuing the conversation.