California Supreme Court Justice & CASBS board chair Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar moderates a conversation with former CASBS fellows Christian Davenport and Rachel Kleinfeld, on the topic what polarization is, why it exists, and why it persists.
Social Science for a World in Crisis
CASBS director Margaret Levi, co-editor of the Annual Review of Political Science, recently curated discussions with Christian Davenport and Rachel Kleinfeld that explore findings in articles they published in the Review.
The Long-Term Consequences of Street Clashes
"Privilege Violence", or How Governments Use Violence to Maintain Inequality
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Are today's contentious politics and conflicts natural features of polities, Or are they expressions of problems that must be addressed in order to preserve democracy? Today on Human Centered, we're bringing you another episode from the CASBS webcast series Social Science for a World in Crisis, which broadcast on July 9th, 2020. This episode of the series is titled Polarization and Contentious Politics in the Age of COVID and features panelist Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, and CASBS Fellow in 2008-09, and Rachel Kleinfeld, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a CASBS Fellow in 2015-16. Moderating the discussion will be Mariano Florentino Cuéllar, Justice of the California Supreme Court and Chair of the CASBS Board of Directors. The three engage in a discussion of what polarization is, why it exists, and why it persists. To learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series, you can check out the links in this episode's notes. You'll find event summaries, videos, participant bios, and articles authored by the panelists. Now join Human Centered as we listen to Polarization and Contentious Politics in the Age of COVID Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining us this Thursday afternoon, July 9th.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: I'm Tino Cuéllar, and as some of you know, my day job is to resolve disputes, or at least to write about them, as a Justice of the Supreme Court of California. But I'm also honored to chair the Board of Directors of this fine center. This is the third episode of our webcast series on Social Science for a World in Crisis. Because the world is in crisis. And there's more great stuff to come. What we're doing today is possible in part because of our co-sponsors. We have support from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace— thank you— and from Annual Reviews, which has published the work of both of our panelists. So if there were a god of politics, which probably for some of you is a contradiction in terms, she would be Jana's face, because politics is about peace but also war, It's about unanimous opinions, but also dissents, as I find out not infrequently in my day job. It's about harmony, but also hunger for change. Our topic today explores these two faces by analyzing polarization and contentious politics in an age of COVID That we're dealing with contentious politics in some form is a fact of life since we've had politics, so it's no surprise to this audience that we're still dealing with it today. But it's also no surprise that contention and polarization seem especially pronounced just now. Difficult even to narrate what to make of it to our kids. So, um, we're reaping what we've sown over decades of bitter divisions in the U.S. We're dealing with 3 million COVID-19 infections, almost 130,000 dead. But you can also see what we mean by conflict and contention in viral YouTube videos of interpersonal conflict against the backdrop of racial divides. You can see it in leaders actively stoking cultural conflict. You can see it in deteriorating geopolitical relationships. To spur reflection on all of these interrelated topics, I'm joined by two people whose work I've much admired over the years. You can read their very extended bios, and if I recited them in detail, it would take up probably 25% of our time today or more. So I'm just going to give you a very condensed Silicon Valley-style introduction so we can jump right into discussion. Christian Davenport is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, and he was a CASBS fellow, I'm very happy to say, in 2008 and 2009. He's also, to my surprise, the creator of a graphic novel and has an academic home not only in Michigan but in Scandinavia. Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And she was at CASBS, and I was very happy to spend a good bit of time with her when she was in 2015-2016. I've known Rachel for longer than I can remember, and she's a force of nature. She has many qualities, including, and I quote here, being an aficionado of fierce, unforgiving landscapes from Afghanistan to Morocco. I'm happy to point out we have plenty of those landscapes here in California as well. So Christian and Rachel are each going to provide some opening remarks, then we'll engage in about 25 minutes to half hour, maybe 35 minutes of interactive discussion, give or take, blending in some audience questions and some questions from me along the way. Those who registered are able to submit questions by email and on the registration form, and now during the event you can also submit questions using Zoom's question and answer feature. We likely won't get to all of your questions, but be assured that panelists will read them after the event if we're not able to get to all of them. So with that, welcome again everybody, and let's turn to Christian.
Speaker C: Thanks, thank you very much, Tina. Um, I was, um, very much interested in participating in this type of event for a variety of different reasons, and I think, um, part of that dealt with what people think of when they think of polarization and kind of like what they focus in on. Unfortunately, I think much of this literature is somewhat fragmented, right? So politicians and political scientists focus on political polarization, economists focus on material or economic polarization, sociologists social fragmentation polarization. And so I wanted to talk about kind of the multidimensionality of it and I how the different parts feed into the various subcomponents and how in order for us to address polarization, we actually need to address all of them simultaneously in the fullest sense. In part, it's because these polarizations, we need to think of kind of an actual polarization and an acknowledged polarization. And that acknowledged one occasionally finds its way into some kind of mobilization or a form of contention of sorts. As people are trying to address exactly what's going on and try to fix it. Which then leads us to polarization management, which is partly what I'm going to talk about and introduce in many respects, because when the contention reveals itself, the powers that be will attempt to channel that, and those that are not really interested in channeling will perhaps be devastated, eliminated, or removed from the situation. And thus polarization could feed into contention, but contention could feed back into polarization because of how it's managed.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Great. Thank you. With that frame, I can already think of a couple of different directions in which to take the conversation. Rachel, the floor is yours.
Rachel Kleinfeld: Well, thank you. Thank you, Tino. It's a huge pleasure and honor to be with you and with Christian, two of my heroes. And Christian beat me to the punch of creating a graphic novel. I had the same idea and then found out it had already been done. So often happens. Anyway, I work on struggling democracies, corrupt, violent, divided, deteriorating, and so when my work comes to your corner of the world, it's a bad thing. And my work has come to the United States. I used to work only abroad, and for the last 5 or 6 years it's been both. And I work in the policy sphere, so I'm enabled to look at the world from a more political perspective and less within academic silos, and there's a plus and a minus to that. But when I think about polarization, I think of it in two ways. It's largely been seen previously by— with Stanford academics and in a lot of the political science literature based on how politicians vote. There are some really famous data sets that get used to determine whether we're polarized based on how far apart politicians are voting. Those of us who have worked in politics knows that by the time something comes up for a vote, most of the work has already been done. A huge amount is happening under that iceberg, and I don't find it a particularly useful way of judging whether something is polarized. It also is looking at a very specific slice of polarization, how politicians vote on actual policy, is policy polarization. That's, do you think differently than me about actual ideas? The kind of polarization that concerns me in democracies I work on, and now including the United States, is called affective polarization. And I'm drawing on a number of scholars' work here. This is very different. This is not about, do you have a different set of ideas about how government should work? Do you have a different set of ideas about the role of local versus national federalism? This is really about, a set of identities, where the other is seen as fundamentally destructive to your way of life, to your nation, to who you are. That kind of polarization is extremely dangerous because it is not necessarily about policy. In fact, policy is held much more lightly than identity and much more easy to change. This kind of polarization is also a kind that is driven by entrepreneurial politicians. So, politicians see an opening to create a niche for themselves politically by pulling on affective polarization, by making you more aware of your tribe, your group, your personhood and identity, and more antagonistic toward others. This can be about race, this can be about ethnicity, this can also be about whether you wear a mask or not. It can be, in other words, about a fundamental fissure in your community that goes back to the origin of your nation-state, or it cannot be. And this is one of the really hard things I think for us to grasp, is just how easy it is psychologically for people to divide themselves into groups and start to hate. The psychological literature is pretty strong on this. I like to go to Dr. Seuss because I have a 2-year-old. The Sneetches and the Stars on Mars. You know, people make fun of Dr. Seuss, but Theodore Geisel is an Oxford graduate. He was ABD, left Oxford, And he also was a propagandist during World War II, and he knew exactly what he was doing, and he was correct. This kind of political driver to create a wedge with affective polarization is really dangerous. It's getting blamed on a lot of things. We can talk about the role of social media or political structures or what have you, but I think one thing that seems to be happening, and this is based on my colleague's research at at Carnegie is that it can happen extremely quickly, especially if there's a fissure, an underlying fissure. You can go from not particularly polarized to extremely polarized in a very short period of time if it serves political gain. In the US, we're also facing a particularly dangerous form of polarization, and I'll stop after this, although I have a ton of things I would love to say. Actually, I'll make two more points and then I'll stop. First, the US is particularly dangerous in our affective polarization because our identities line up. If you have cross-cutting identities, if your partisan identity and your gender identity cause you to be on different sides of an issue, if where you live geographically causes some cognitive dissonance with your partisan identity, that is good. That actually creates ways to bridge polarization. If they all line up so that the fact that I drink I drink hard kombucha when I've had a hard day, tells you everything you need to know about where I live, who I am, how I vote. That's an identity lineup. And that's what we're having in America right now. Race, religion, whether you're religious, partisanship, geography, they're all lining up along the same line. That's a particularly dangerous form of affective polarization because it creates a very easy fissure. And the effects are huge. And I will end it here. They're huge on politics because they create gridlock. Gridlock creates frustration. Frustration at the political system creates a desire to get around democratic politics and move beyond the filibuster, to get rid of norms and guardrails that held us on. They're also very— have huge effects on society. We know that partisans now are more likely to decry the fact that their offspring would marry someone of the other partisan persuasion than someone of the other race. That's great for racial politics. It's not so good for partisan politics. Geographic sorting, where you live, has become huge businesses in Turkey. People don't want to do business with those across the partisan divide. That has a lot to do with your GDP over time. So, I'll stop there, but just say this is a problem I think is growing. It's particularly bad in the US, and it has political and social dimensions.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Thank you, Christian, and thank you, Rachel. I will point out that in the first 10 minutes, we've managed to mentioned not only polarization management but also Dr. Seuss, kombucha, and graphic novels, so we're doing pretty well. I want to maybe make one observation about both of your sets of remarks and then ask a related question. The observation is about how both of you in different ways alluded to the impact of emotions in politics, feelings, affect, visceral reactions, and as, uh, as a card-carrying political scientist, but also a member of a branch that is designed partly to channel and modulate emotions, I will just point out that it's actually striking to me how to this day we have real struggles in our own theories of social life and institutions to sort of assign a normative role to emotions, even descriptively, like we struggle— like Rachel, your point about Affective polarization highlights that we're still discovering how processes that are partly automatic kick in at certain points and create a very different kind of polarization than the sort of thing that V.O. Key was writing about in the 1950s. But, but normatively, here's the point that then transitions into a question. It is hard for me to think of a single issue that I worked on when I was in the executive branch or in politics or a single issue that I've studied as a scholar that involves large-scale social change— so new food safety laws, sentencing reform, police reform, changes in immigration, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, civil rights movement, and on down the list— that doesn't have a powerful affective, emotional, visceral component, that doesn't involve some setting of us against them to some degree. Now obviously it still involves building coalitions and finding ways to build bridges, but I want you to maybe mention an example or two, if you could, that can help us tease apart the bad affective conflict from the good. I mean, even using the word good is a little too simplistic, but from the kind of affective conflict that we should not fear so much, that we should understand is a part of our politics that if we don't embrace at least we should recognize and tolerate to some degree?
Speaker C: The first thing that comes to mind for myself is— not everyone is going to like this one, of course, but as we concern ourselves with affect and who's going to be impacted emotionally, what direction, I think back to— I'm really trying to grapple with the period of the kind of antitrust sentiment that we had in the early 1900s. We had a bunch of individuals that had been suffering economically. That was their survival. And in that space, they became aware of and unable to accept that these trusts existed within their society that were milking them and destroying their very livelihoods. And the emotions behind that were incredibly powerful. And so much so that, I mean, the stuff that you see coming out of the antitrust sentiment of the period, it's like, we are not going to accept these kind of companies in our midst. And that led to political and legal and kind of social changes with regards to what was going on. And so that was clearly the wealthy were not pleased by this. Clearly, the robber barons or whatever you refer to them as, they were not emotionally happy about this moment either. But again, emotions were involved. But they couldn't stop or they could not stem the kind of like mobilization that was taking place within the population. So I think that is a moment that impacted tremendous numbers of individuals and that emotional energy got channeled into some incredible policies. But I go there in part because I see the current period as being so antithetical to a lot of this antitrust sentiment. There's parts of it that are kind of there, but it's not as visceral. It's not as powerful as it was, I think, in the early 1900s. And I speculate and wonder about that. I think of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and he talks about the general literacy that existed within the United States at a certain time period in the beginning, where everyone was reading an almanac or something, a newsletter, because their lives depended upon it. And the information-action ratio in that kind of content were directly related to things that they did in their lives, whereas right now we have so much information, we have so many things that are coming at us that we can't— the emotions get dissipated in all of the ways that it's communicated and diffused and so forth. And so that for me was a positive awareness that took place regarding what the kind of material conditions were of the society, very emotional as people were just like, just losing their livelihoods and trying to figure out what to do. And that got channeled into politics and social movements and religious institutions and so forth. So I view that one as a very positive one, but I don't think that many people that are doing incredibly well now would think positively back to that moment or think that emotions were channeled in the correct direction.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: So. Thank you. Rachel?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Fascinating. I would love to just, uh, continue listening, but I suppose I have to talk. Um, so part of what I study is social change in democracies and how it comes about. And as Christian's been saying, social movements play a huge role in social change in democracies, generally speaking, especially broad-based social movements that cut across the usual identities, usual suspects. What motivates people to get involved in a in a broad-based social movement. They could be minimally involved. It could be a beautiful day and they're happy to go to a protest if they're 20-some years old and want to meet a girl. But if you want to get a little deeper, it takes more. And as a mother of two who works full-time, I'm now very aware of just how much it takes to get involved in politics. I mean, Aristotle might say this is the highest order, and some people might want to be involved for power, but if you're a regular person and you need to be involved in a social movement, What causes you to spend the 2 hours you have free in the evening, and you didn't have 2 hours if you were part of the Triangle Shirtwaist Movement in the 1900s, or, you know, it's new that you might have 2 hours, you might have had zero time before. What allows you to take that precious bit of time to sleep or eat or read and put it into political action? And I think only emotion does that. The only thing that can drive you onto the street is a deep fear, anger, excitement at the possibility of change. It needs to be a deep emotional driver because nothing rational, nothing from the head is going to tell you that your extra voice added to a lot of voices is actually going to be the tipping point voice. It just doesn't make sense. So yes, emotion I think drives politics and then we justify it later. You know, it's very Humean, reason is slave to the emotions. I think the two points I'd like to make here, one is what emotion are you allowing drive your movement? I have a friend who's a Latino professor of borderlands study at Texas, and he was feeling recently that a number of his students were coming to him with PhD projects that were really based in anger, for obvious reasons. There's a lot of people studying the borderlands who are pretty angry right now about what's going on. And what he said is, "You're going to spend 7 or 8 years of your life on this topic. Do you want to spend 7 or 8 years consumed by anger, or do you want to find a way to frame this out of love?" And I thought it was a really beautiful way to think about how to take your social action and reframe, not to get rid of the emotion, but to realize that if anger is the only emotion behind your activity, it's going to eat you before it makes change. Social movements typically of the kind we're talking about, these major social movements, take 50 years. And, you know, World Bank has done studies on that. It's in my research. And if it's going to be 50 years, you better find some love in there. And the last thing I'll say just quickly is emotions can also take you away from what's doable and practical. So if you look at how abolitionists treated Lincoln, he was not a favorite of the abolitionists. He was too pragmatic. And so you also need to think about how to temper emotion at certain points in your social movement.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: These are terrific points. I'm going to take two questions and just turn them into comments because they fit his comments here, and then I'll ask you a further query that ties together some of what you've said before we go into some more questions from the public. So Michelle— Micheline Rama points out that there's a question about empathy too, and, you know, we might think of empathy as an emotion or not, but I would just observe that in what both of you say, it just strikes me as important to recognize the power that empathy can have in political strategy, the extent to which people who are trying to build movements, create coalitions, anticipate what conflict is going to do, might benefit instrumentally and not just normatively from being able to see the world from other perspectives. And Margaret Levy points out something that really resonates with what you were just saying now, Rachel, about How emotion, of course, is an incredibly broad category, and we might have very different reactions to fear, uh, versus maybe the pleasure of agency. So there's a further conversation we can have about how to disentangle these things in politics. So I could ask you so much about methodology and about the nuances of causal effects and about comparative perspectives, but because you bring all of that and then some to the table, plus a very practical awareness of the world. I want to ask you a more blunt question that goes like this: if you were to describe, to think about where the United States specifically finds itself today in comparative perspective, how would you complete the following sentence? I am particularly troubled by blank, comma, but at least the United States still has blank.
Speaker C: I think my— I'm troubled by America's lack of awareness of exactly how much the marketplace of ideas has been depleted. But I am— I'm forgetting your language. The second blank for me is Americans naively but gratefully have hope.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: And let me just follow up on the depleted marketplace of ideas. Just say a little bit more about what you think is missing in the discourse right now.
Speaker C: So what I find, what I find interesting is if you look at the Black Youth Project 100 or a bunch of the kind of Black Lives Matter movement organizations, people keep acting like it's a single thing. That's frustrating in and of itself, but it's many organizations. And they have many different kind of claims-making understandings of kind of like what's going on, different diagnoses, different distinct prognoses. I'm finding them all relatively light, for lack of a better word, with regards to their depth of analysis of exactly how you perturb capitalism, how you perturb the coercion and force that is used by the state, and the relationship between those two. Which then really leads back to, if you go back over historically and you're thinking in the kind of like early 1900s or 1800s, we had— think of, you had the anarchists, you had anarcho-syndicalists, you had syndicalists, you had a variety of different understandings of how the world could function, and they systematically get picked off. Now, Lipset has got this dismissive book arguing that kind of capitalism, democracy wins out because they were the best ideas. The smallest chapter in that book, I'm forgetting the title, is on repression. The fact that the capitalists and the Democrats systematically eliminated every other idea that was out there. And so now we end up in a situation where we're trying to figure out how to deal with the problems of global capitalism, and we don't really have any kind of like answers that have been passed down, in part because we purged the marketplace and eliminated them in the academy and eliminated them in society, and now we're trying to grapple with how best to kind of like revisit— I mean, what Marx's book on alienation is kind of how the socialist movement got started. And when was that? When did he write that? I mean, when did he have that idea? Capitalism has changed so much now. Who was that new theorist? And so now I find us in this space where we're not even sure where to start. But we're Americans, so we're constantly starting. And many of these things are in libraries. They have not been destroyed. They're just not easy to find. But, you know, AK Press still exists. So, you know, hope springs.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Rachel?
Rachel Kleinfeld: I don't remember your phrasing, Tino, but—
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: I'm particularly troubled by blank, comma, but at least the United States still has blank.
Rachel Kleinfeld: So, I'm particularly troubled by our two-party duopoly in which one party doesn't think they can win majority elections. Overseas, that is an extremely dangerous position. And I think it's extremely dangerous here because if you have a two-party duopoly in which one party doesn't think they can win, they are going to resort to other means. But at least the U.S. still has a majority of voters of both political persuasions who are willing to try to break that two-party duopoly through things like ranked-choice voting. Through policies that they come together on, on everything from abortion, gun control, really hot-button issues. You actually get major groups from both parties.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: This is great. If you were advising a new scholar just entering the field, and like you, somebody you're mentoring who wants to be deeply scholarly but also have the practical impact that you can have briefing policymakers thinking about real-world problems. What would you advise that person to work on?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Um, I'll take this one first because I actually end up in this position a lot. Um, and I'll be honest, I would tell them not to join academe. Um, I think it is extraordinarily hard right now to be in academia and advise policymakers because political science, my the discipline of which I am closest, has moved so far out of the field in which it is asking questions that are useful to policymakers because it needs sets of data to answer its questions that are not the data that policymakers are looking for. Now I will answer your question because I find that a very sad reality. I think that there's plenty of good work that could be done. I think the big thing that we have to grapple with right now is how we— or one of the many big things— is how we break our current polarized, politically polarized, affectively polarized moment within a populist era. Almost all the research on polarization looks for solutions, the kinds of things that policymakers are looking for, from elites who have popularity within an in-group. This is mostly psychological literature, and what it tells us is if you're trying to break a polarized discourse, particularly one that leads to violence, which is the sort of stuff I study, you get the people with high status within the in-group to devalue violent comments, to reduce dehumanization, to do the kind of thing that McCain did when Obama and he were having the debate and a birther question came, and McCain had this very generous answer saying, "No, no," and took away the microphone from the lady. I'm sure everyone's seen this video clip and said, No, no, no, my opponent, and I disagree, but he's a good American. And, you know, that kind of commentary is what we know, or we believe from our current scholarship, helps reduce polarization. And there's other things like that. What we have no idea how to deal with is in a world of populism in which elites become discredited if they step outside the in-group, how do you get anyone who steps outside the in-group to to take down the temperature to stay within the in-group. So here I'm looking at people like David French, the evangelical writer who became a never-Trumper and lost his position at the National Review, or the movement with the letter right now at Harper's, where as you step from your side into a more moderate discourse, you get kicked out. We actually don't know how to reduce polarization in that world, and I think that's the world we're in.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Christian?
Speaker C: It's interesting, right? So a couple of times I've been offered some stuff to like go be a dean or think of something like that for a public policy school, and part of my response is I'm not in the business of trying to advise elites. I'm in the business of trying to advise citizens. So if someone's willing to reorient exactly who they're speaking to, then I think that's fine. I mean, if we have a population that believes— 40% of the population in the United States believes that the sun revolves around the Earth, we have some work to do. And so I'm like, that group can be fooled by a great many things, in part because they're just not there yet. So I believe that we need to orient our work towards advising citizens, and that's one of the reasons why I went to the graphic novel. I go to anything that I think will assist in trying to kind of better facilitate that endeavor. I believe that is in the academy, and for a variety of different reasons. In part because of biographical availability and the fact that the youth are already embedded within these institutions, it's easier to get to them and to transform them. The key is you need to have a bunch of units that are similarly kind of connected to think of, like, what I'm calling integral social justice, because we need all these different fields concurrently to come together to kind of move things to then even if they're not going into the academy, they're still better informed about kind of what they're doing as they kind of progress further. Related to that, it's kind of like, um, I kind of try to turn my students towards studying topics that have been around for quite some time and have not been addressed properly. So they're not necessarily the ones that are the most trendy, they're not the ones that are the most easy to measure, they're not the ones that are doable or possible in many respects. Kind of back to the conversation before about what the art of the possible— this kind of— I think that is too narrowing. I think that is problem in many respects. So I push them because we actually have the kind of careers where they can actually have that dream. And if you're doing— my whole thing is, if— and similar to what Rachel was saying before, if you're doing that which you love, that you happen to get paid for it or not is fine. I'm like, I'd be doing this anyway. I'd be doing it in high school, I'd be doing it here, I'd be doing it in a consulting firm, and so it's the same kind of topic. So I think if someone is advised in that manner, then I think they can get there, but I think we need to look towards the thing that is deepest, the thing that is kind of like recurrent, but not necessarily that which has been addressed. For example, I've been trying to push people to get back to Galtung's structural violence. It's highly problematic, conceptual in many ways, but boy, it's at the root of a bunch of different things. And after we stop overtly killing people and moving to other insidious ways of trying to manipulate them, like U.S. Department of Agriculture and Pigford versus Veneman, they systematically were identifying all this racism that existed within USDA that systematically gutted all Black farmers, or at least the majority of them. And so the Klansman goes to work for USDA, and destroys the Black community that way. And so it's easy to pay attention to the lynching. It's easy to pay attention to the kind of overt manifestation of violence. That structural violence thing is a little bit harder. It's like, oh, can I really do that? Is that something that we can look at? And I'm just like, well, you know, what are governments supposed to do? They're not supposed to systematically kill off their populations. And thus, yes, that becomes one of the things that we can study. So I think it's partly us kind of perturbing what we think plays out political science is, or sociology or economics and so forth, but it's also about facilitating and creating the space within which people feel comfortable making those types of pushes.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: I have more questions for you based on what you've just said, both of you, but I want to remind our audience that you can ask questions too. Just use the Q&A feature on Zoom and we will do our best to get your questions in. I am struck by how both of you have a deep appreciation for a kind of historical moment that the US finds itself in right now, but you also bring a comparative perspective. So part of me wants to suggest that we go a little bit more global and reflect together maybe on how much of what is happening in the US really is deeply rooted in American history, of which there are many themes, including race, including Manifest Destiny, including the particular political economy of the US, including institutions that work well and not so well. And how much of it really is more of a global phenomenon reflecting an increasing awareness among billions that they're part of a shared human experience that is highly unequal. And this is a shared experience that is increasingly networked and interconnected, where news and information spreads like wildfire, where new technologies polarize, and where economic models and economic debates increasingly seem almost impossible to cabin into one particular country. So that's one direction which we can go, which I think we should go in. But if— I'm also compelled to point out that if this were cable news, which it isn't, I would be pointing out that there's a bit of a subtle difference of perspective in what you've offered around academia. And I think that's a good thing. In fact, I feel like a not competent moderator if I don't at least to some degree highlight some slight different strands and perspective. Rachel, it feels to me like you are embracing the reality that sometimes people in think tanks or in academic positions should be focusing on elites and should be trying to provide insight and research to some extent, not exclusively, that will inform the worldview of people who have access to the levers of power. And Christian, I hear you saying, that's not who I am, and Implicit in that, I think, is a sense that you hope that many people in academia, maybe in think tanks, will not have the policymaker-focused perspective and will be focused more on history or maybe on an inchoate public that may not be ready to make use of certain ideas that you are providing, but perhaps will be at some point.
Speaker C: I believe we need both. It's— I wrote this piece once called Researching While Black, which basically talked about my work in Rwanda, India, Northern Ireland, and how I didn't really kind of identify or understand my own kind of positionality and how I was being viewed in the field. But effectively, if I was in these locations, or as I travel around the world, if there's someone that's got a problem with their government, they're more than willing to talk to me. And part of that is they know, or they believe, that I as an African American definitely have problems with my government. So they're ready to go there, and that facilitates a conversation that I wasn't quite clear about before. And then I realized exactly what that positionality offered me in terms of who I could get meetings with, who would be willing to talk to me. And quite frankly, if someone was part of some Oxford or Cambridge elite and they were kind of like rolling with other elites that they wanted to talk to, they didn't want to talk to the African American, even if I was coming from the prestigious institution. But if someone was like part of a protest movement or some rebel organization, they would want to talk to the African American. And so I noticed that. So part of that is my acknowledging that the types of information that I can get access to, the types of problems that I'm dealing with, affords me within the academy a certain kind of like ability to tap certain types of information. And I'm like, okay, well, why am I not embracing this? I mean, I did the policy thing, right? I'm— I had an affiliation with the Political Instability Task Force. I dealt with some CIA people. I dealt with different kind of like government agencies, and okay, I didn't particularly care for it, frankly. And so I was more likely to go and interact with people that were struggling in the street or trying to figure out the mutual aid organizations that we have now, that are— people are trying to kind of like engage and deal with those particular issues. And I'm kind of like, there's plenty of people that I think are focusing on public policy as it relates to the leadership of the institutions that guide many parts of the country. But the academy could also reach in this other direction as well and facilitate. So I'm just like, I think there's plenty of space for both of us to be doing that thing. And God forbid we actually coordinate across.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Yeah. Rachel?
Rachel Kleinfeld: I'm precisely where Christian is on pretty much all of those measures. And I think it's not just your positionality with race, it's also with class. And we notice here in Santa Fe, where I live, quite frequently my I look like what I am, I'm a scholar from a Jewish family in Fairbanks, Alaska, that's weird, but I talk a certain way, and my husband's a sculptor and he comes out wearing welding gear, the people who will talk to him are completely different than the people who will talk to me, and the things they'll say are completely different. It's not a field experiment, but I think it's the same, and it's a reality that you have to be extremely aware of your positionality in doing research. And in terms of who to talk to, I mean, if you look at how social change happens. It's a very multidimensional reality. Political elites have to make decisions, so do policy elites. Political elites and policy elites are not the same people at all. They're two very different groups of elites, as Tino knows, knows well. There are citizens with greater voice. Political donors are citizens with greater voice. Individuals who are pundits or what have you, they're citizens with lesser voice, but more energy and who can get out. So there's different ways and different roles to play, and if you look at how social change happens, you need these parts to, if not coordinate, at least work together in a useful manner and at least not work oppositionally. And so you need a lot of different people pushing in similar directions, or if they're pushing in slightly different directions, that can actually be useful too. You can set a pole and You know, it can be helpful to policy elites to have academia setting a pole pretty radically so that we can get the change that we see as possible within the policy world, whereas if that pole was set closer to the center, it actually might be more difficult to get any change. So even if you're not coordinated, it can be helpful. But I think keeping in mind the complexity of social change and also the backlash, I think Often when people think about social change, they think of it as unidirectional or kind of on a roll at least. That's not at all how social change tends to work, especially in democracies. What you tend to get is a movement forward followed fairly quickly by a backlash against, and then ideally you have another movement forward. Different people can push those different parts, different groups of people can push those different parts, but if you dismantle your organized citizenry you can't do much against a backlash. That's probably the biggest bulwark against the backlash, and so it's a really important part of the change.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: This is terrific. So much for my effort to engender conflict. So we have some great questions from our audience. I will mention two of them, and they go in slightly different directions, but they might actually intersect in interesting ways, and you can pick up either one of them. Mauricio from Mexico wants me to expand the "I am troubled by blank, but at least they have blank" format to encompass some other country of your choosing. So if you take up the invitation from Mauricio, you would mention a country and then mention what you're troubled by and at least what gives you hope about that country. And then Georgina Hernandez has a question about social and citizen organizations that are doing the sort of work that you consider meaningful around contention and conflicts and are part of the solution.
Speaker C: Okay, um, I'll bite. Um, and my— this comment refers to India. Um, I'm incredibly troubled by caste discrimination, but I am, I am positive in terms of my evaluation of what is possible there because of the kind of vibrancy of Indian civil society, this capacity to absorb. Now, this is One of the reasons why caste discrimination has lasted so long as well, because any— I mean, Buddha's challenge was incorporated. They made him a Hindu god. I mean, so the society is phenomenal in its ability to kind of absorb and take in, but there's a certain vibrancy to it that I think still, despite several thousand years' worth of dealing with this practice, folks are still fighting it in a tremendous number of ways. From everyday resistance type stuff to overt manifestations of kind of rebellion to more Jim Scott-like, just kind of like picking up and moving to another location. So I think, yeah, that would be my answer to that one.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Terrific. Rachel?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Let me take the second one since Christian took the first and since I'm not able to think very clearly right now about it. There are a number of fabulous groups and it sort of depends on which problem you're picking. If you're looking at the problem of conflict and trying to get a sense of where are places to push both elites and people on the ground, I don't think you can do better than the International Crisis Group and, what's it called, I'm sure you know, Kristian, the anti-corruption journalists group. Um, yeah, come to me. There's an amazing group of journalists that have united against corruption which I will come up with very quickly. There's also groups like Frontline Defenders, which are doing an incredible job keeping people safe who are the human rights activists and so on who are being targeted by these authoritarian regimes.
Speaker C: My favorite is Human Rights Data Analysis Group, HRDAG. I'm a big fan.
Rachel Kleinfeld: There you go. And then last, I'll say Peace Direct. A very, very good peace group that's doing just excellent work in promoting, promoting peace globally.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Great, great. So we've got more questions that bring us back to the United States. Let me start with one that is about— it really picks up where both of you were going at different points in our discussion involving just whether polarization has become so severe that large segments of the population just basically have nothing meaningful to accomplish through dialogue, debate, compromise, or at least maybe if they could accomplish something, this does not seem really possible anymore, just given how staggering the differences are. And I guess, you know, it seems to me this question really gets a little bit at how much you think conflict is sort of rooted in material reality versus to some extent constructed by political advocacy and action and framing? And where does that go in the US?
Speaker C: Tino's conception of— I wish it was more based in the material, and I wish it was less flexible with regards to the construction. Because the construction part, you see it happening already. Nobody wants to be going through— a detailed evaluation of 400 years worth of oppression. No one's up for that. No one really wants to hear it. They're going to have this little subcontracting, there might be some committee that starts to kind of do some stuff, but no one wants to have a detailed conversation. People want to resolve things like now, and that is dangerous because you need to put in the work to understand exactly what went down, and exactly what is possible, and exactly what might work to actually have the impacts that people want. And so that element, I mean, Rachel gave it, you know, social change takes time. Actual social change takes time. There's a lot of research and discussions and internalizations, and all these things need to take place. And I think this is one of the things that scares me about the conversation about reparations. It's almost like, if you remember Big Tobacco, they were just like, OK, all these suits. Let's just pay $1 billion, and then we're done with this conversation. We're never coming back. And so I'm afraid that America is going to be like, OK, Yes, let's give Black people some money. Let's just write a check and then let's be done with this. But that's not how social change is going to happen. So I think the book Compassion Fatigue comes to mind. Folks, they're moved by a topic, and then they're going to look for an answer. And if that answer is not simple, they're going to have a problem with it, and then they're going to move on to another topic. And unfortunately, I think we have kind of like way too many examples of that, but the the current difficulties we're seeing, African American violence being part of it. I mean, there's this other part about the economy's going, who doesn't have really jobs and what's happening with labor. And it depends on which, how are you gonna nest these and pull these together, which relates back to which ideological orientation you're going to have, which is also kind of, I think, an issue.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: I thank Ronald Andrews for that question. I also wanna note, Christian, you remind, those of us who are ensconced in the legal system, that we often think of courts as a place where people go for redressive grievances, and in the process, something that others may have wanted to sweep under the rug gets an airing and a conversation. But you point out that sometimes the mechanisms through which the law operates can also lead to the cutting off of a conversation.
Speaker C: I remember Lani Guinier made this comment once where they, um, from your domain, um, that there would be a dissenting opinion that basically is a signal to civil society about what they subsequently could mobilize around. So I think there is something to be said about the intricate nature of which these different venues of adjudication or grievance raising can be reinforcing to one another.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Rachel?
Rachel Kleinfeld: Um, I'm sorry that we're agreeing so much, Tino. I feel like you could have us arm wrestle if we weren't socially distanced, you know. I would lose, and there would be some some conflict. So first, the group I was trying to think of, OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and I point to that just because in most parts of the world, corruption plays a role in a lot of grievances with government, and it's an incredibly important organization. On this issue, I think similar to— I have my good days and bad days, I would say. I think that the US has an incredibly important window that has just opened. If you look at the mobilization of social opinion, I've never seen anything like that in my lifetime. I mean, I've seen a lot of social change in my lifetime. The gay rights movement has happened basically in my lifetime, largely in my lifetime. We've gone from Matthew Shepard to Pete Buttigieg. The movement for local food and kind of rights for animals and all of that is a sea change from the Wonder Bread diet of my youth. And so, you know, there's just a whole series of major social changes that have occurred, and I'm 44 years old, so that's nearly 50 years. This particular issue is very deep, and it's going to take a lot of time, and a window's just opened up where for the first time social movement, social mobilization, minds have changed more quickly than anything I've seen. If you look at survey polling from 2015 versus from June of this year, the number of whites who finally are thinking about structural racism or systemic racism, at least not structural but systemic within the police system and the criminal justice system, it's a huge move. And it's not solely on one side of the aisle, more on one side but not solely. That's a gigantic window. But like Christian, I'm a little worried that it's gonna be squandered. I work with some on police reform abroad. That's one small slice of this. Police are embedded in a political system. Police become brutal because a political system allows them to become brutal or incentivizes them to become brutal. You have to unpack that. Police function with courts and with prison systems. You never reform one without the other in another country because it just doesn't work. So you're talking about a systemic type of change. And also the people who are over-policed are also under-policed. This is not a popular view right now, but what you generally see in other countries is that marginalized groups that are on the receiving end of police brutality are also receiving the least justice in their lives. They're the most victimized and they're also the least able to go to courts. They have the least access to justice. And so they're looking to resolve their grievances in other ways. Sometimes that's through self-help, as we say abroad, or vigilantism. Sometimes it's through organized criminal groups that offer themselves to resolve disputes. None of this is pretty. We have the same problems in a lot of our inner cities when you get brutal justice and so on. So unpacking all that is not a quick fix, and it's, it's not necessarily about pointing fingers, although some of that might be necessary, as dealing with the reality of a society that had long been dominated by one racial group and now needs to create a multiracial society and resolve that on a political level. That is a hard task to do, and it can't happen against the institutions you're trying to change. And I'll end here because it's probably the least popular point, and I should end before I dig a deeper hole. But when you look at police reform abroad, police can slow walk anything. It's them that you're changing. And they will, and they do. It's a very strong institutional culture, whether you're talking about Guatemala or Nigeria or what have you. And so if you're going to change organizations with deep and strong organizational cultures, a lot of secrecy and a lot of legal protection, you have to have them on board. How do you get them on board? That's a question that activists need to ask themselves, and it's not an easy question when you're also looking at videos of these same the groups committing murder, but you have to.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: In a way, Rachel, it feels like we've come full circle because at the very outset we were all identifying the reality that contention and conflict are almost inherent part of our politics, and the question is what you make of that. And you're sort of emphasizing that on any number of issues that are extraordinarily current and important to America, certainly policing reform being one of them, we ought to be quite intentional. This is at least the way I would frame your comment in a way that is meant not to lose the intellectual honesty of it, but also to frame the diplomacy around it. Quite intentional about how much conflict versus coalition building we are trying to instantiate and how sensitive we might not be to the people who are being served, but also the key actors that are going to have to take take some ownership of this if it's going to last. Christian, you have something you want to follow up on?
Speaker C: Before you transition, part of the framing here is problematic for me. I'm thinking Hannah Arendt, right? So it's kind of like those that use aggression, coercion, and force, it's not out of strength. It doesn't lead to conversations about militarization. It's out of weakness. It's out of fear. And we're not having a conversation about the weakness of the policing institutions or the political authority that have to rely upon these types of activities. It's this conversation of like, why are they so mean? Why are they using the weapons that we're giving them? It's like, you know, we're not talking about the weakness of— why is this the only way that they feel that social order is possible? And so it's kind of like—
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: That's terrific.
Rachel Kleinfeld: I just wanted to do a two-finger on that, because Christian's exactly right. If you look at the last time we did major police police reform was in the '70s. And Hans Toch, who was a, I guess, a sociologist doing that research, did a huge number of interviews. And what he found was that the police most likely to use force were the ones who are scared and afraid to admit that they were scared. And that doesn't strike me as surprising at all. We're policing a heavily armed society, and a lot of police encounters are with individuals who they don't know how to deal with. We don't train our police very well for protests, we don't train them very well for mental health encounters, we— there's all sorts of issues, even domestic violence encounters, which are some of the most deadly, we don't train our police particularly well for. And so you send people who are heavily armed, not well trained, and scared to show— scared to show fear onto the street, and what do you expect? There's a very high suicide rate among the police right now.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: This discussion of policing underscores another theme throughout our conversation, which has been about the moment in history we're at and how that shapes almost everything about what we're talking about and what feels like it's possible, but also the very, very long history and the extent to which in some ways Christian could easily point out, you could, Rachel, how some of these conflicts about policing and the role in labor conflict, for example, And the sort of weird dialectic of strength and weakness that you're both alluding to has been with us for well over 100 years. But it's a perfect transition to what will have to be our last question since we could go on for hours, but we're not going to. And this comes from Daniel Stidt, and he wants to know what you have observed in the last 4 months in politics, if anything, that is, or in politics or government in the US, that has surprised you? And if there has been a surprise, does it make you feel more or less hope for the future?
Rachel Kleinfeld: I'm constantly surprised. And Daniel, lovely to have that question as our last one. I think I've been surprised in good and bad ways. I've been somewhat surprised at just how much the Republican Party has been willing to take in terms of changes to their own values. That's been a sad and negative surprise. Surprise. I've been positively surprised by how much the American people have been willing to change their minds about things, whether it's the BLM movement or coronavirus, masking versus non-masking, and back to— it's non-masking to masking and back to the beginning, but there's been a lot of mental change there. And some of that I've found very hopeful. I think the most hopeful thing I've found is my discussions with people who you also know who are deeply conservative and just how much we can agree on the importance of our democratic institutions and the guardrails and norms and just how much agreement regular people can find from Stanford's Larry Diamond's work on his sort of major democracy initiative, bringing 100-some people in a room and seeing if there can be agreement. I think there's this well of desire to connect that a lot of forces and a lot of structures are pulling apart, but it's there and we have to move behind the affective polarization back to the issues polarization where there's a lot more room for movement. And finding a way to move us from one to the other, I think, is something that we all need to be thinking about how best to do to get us on a more positive trajectory.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Christian.
Speaker C: So I think I've been most surprised at the blatant efforts from the president to court security force institutions and to raise them up in any way, shape, or possible, where he's overturning prosecution attempts at individual officers and just taking any moment to celebrate them while at the same time allowing them to get targeted by Russians and so forth. And so that discussion and kind of like the distancing that normally takes place between a democratic leader and the security forces, both those that are used abroad, presumably, and those that are used domestically, that I found to be quite something. The positive side is I found it odd to have defund and abolish the police discussed, in part because I generally associate it with some incredibly left-oriented position that is advocated by very few individuals. And so I'm not quite sure how it got from that isolated location to be front and center, but I'm somewhat— I don't understand why it's not— why, why the pitch wouldn't have been reprioritization. Let's think of a reprioritization of of what we would like to fund and what we'd like to support. And I get the marketing sense. Defund the police is very catchy. But we're asking for, or I think what we have the opportunity for, what I'm hopeful about, is we can have a reprioritization about what we'd like to support within this country. And among the various categories that could be supported, I'd like to see that opened up and think we have a space for opening it up. But it's unfortunate that we haven't really had that before, which I think is rather interesting. It's like of these 10 things that are on the discretion of the kind of leadership to actually fund, what should our priorities be? And how much money do you think we're actually spending on them? I've never seen anybody ask that question, but I think most people would be surprised about exactly where money is spent and how solidly that's been consistent over administrations. And so I kind of snuck back in a negative thing, but sorry, okay.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: What I want to express appreciation the most for, for all your thoughtful perspectives and insights, is how both of you kind of represent a view that I would describe as being honest about the complexity of the moment in the world, about the importance of putting this moment in geopolitical context and comparative context and historical context. But that complexity for the two of you is not paralyzing. It doesn't stop you from speaking quite clearly about what you observe, about what gaps exist in our knowledge and our understanding, in the work of our institutions, in our appreciation of their vulnerability or their strength. So I am delighted that you joined us. I hope and expect that our audience has found this as illuminating as I have. I want to thank again Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Annual Reviews for helping us do this. And I want to remind anybody who's taking the time to watch us that we're not even close to done with our series. Next week we're going to be opening registration for the fourth episode, which will take place Tuesday, July 21st at 2:00 PM Pacific time. The broad theme will be how the past informs the present as context for efforts to demand improvement of civil and human rights for African Americans in the US. We're going to have, uh, really interesting folks participating. Brenda Stevenson from UCLA, Doug McAdam, former CASBS director and Stanford sociologist, and founding director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Center, Claiborne Carson. And Zab Briggs, my good friend who is formerly with the Ford Foundation and soon to join the CASBS board, will be moderating. Until then, please go to the CASBS website, find out more stuff. We're going to post the names of the organizations that we talked about so you can learn more about them. And stay safe. And thank you again, Christian and Rachel, for some terrific thoughtful comments. To be continued.
Rachel Kleinfeld: Thank you.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Bye.
Speaker C: Thank you very much.
Rachel Kleinfeld: Take care.
Narrator: That was Christian Davenport, Rachel Kleinfeld, and Mariano Florentino Cuéllar discussing polarization and contentious politics in the age of COVID As we said earlier, you can always learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by exploring the links in the episode's notes. You'll find event summaries, videos, participant bios, and articles authored by the panelists. We've got a lot more CASBS Live events coming to our podcast feed, and of course, always more original interviews with CASBS scholars conducted by host John Markoff. You don't want to miss these, so be sure to subscribe and spread the word. And if you're working from home like most of us these days, take a few seconds to rate and review us on the podcast platform of your choice. We'd love to hear your feedback. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and Human Centered, thanks for listening.