October 25, 2024 • 48 mins
Our guest Today is Dr. Jennifer McCoy, Ph.D. She is a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. We discussed Pernicious Polarization, what causes it, and how to combat it.
Overcoming Polarization Journal of Democracy, Volume 32, Number 1, January 2021, Johns Hopkins University Press
Peter Marty's quote is from “Playing to the Crowds” in The Christian Century that can be found at: https://www.
Craig has discussed the Abraham Lincoln statement in his op-ed, "Rescinding DACA: More than Just the Dreamers," Update, Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (Fall 2017): file:///Users/cmousin/
Immigrants' List Civic Action has produced a video, "We Are America" which corroborates some of the economic information regarding how immigrants have contributed to the United States which can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/
Lincoln's speech can be found in his “July 10, 1858, speech at Chicago.” The Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Including Inaugurals and Proclamations (Lincoln Centenary Association, NY: 1908).
Jennifer McCoy is professor of political science at Georgia State University and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was a senior core fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary in spring 2019. McCoy was chosen for the inaugural class of Distinguished University Professorships at Georgia State University in 2013. Specializing in international and comparative politics, Dr. McCoy's areas of expertise include democratic resilience, democratic erosion, and partisan polarization; crisis prevention and conflict resolution; democracy promotion and collective defense of democracy; election processes and international election observation; and Latin American Politics. McCoy’s research program on polarized politics aims to identify the causes, consequences for democracy, and solutions to polarized societies around the world, including the United States. She coined the term “pernicious polarization” to refer to the political polarization that divides societies into mutually distrustful “Us vs. Them” camps, and undermines the capacity of democracies to address critical policy problems.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
you
to the Lawful Assembly podcast.
My name is Cecil.
I'm joined by my good friend, Craig Moosin, lawyer, Reverend Craig today.
I'm very excited you introduced me to our guests today.
(00:22):
And I'd like to welcome Dr.
Jennifer McCoy.
She's a professor of political science at Georgia State University.
She's a specialist in democratization and polarization, mediation and conflict prevention,election processes and election observation and Latin American politics.
She authored or edited six books and a dozen articles.
(00:44):
She currently is working on a book on depolarizing politics.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We want to talk to you today, Dr.
About polarization.
So in a very, very broad sense to start the conversation, what is polarization?
Yeah.
Thanks.
And thank you for the invitation to be here.
(01:05):
Polarization is used commonly today in the media.
and even by academics in different ways.
And this is part of the problem with trying to study it and analyze it.
So we have to be careful to say which meaning are we using when we're talking about it.
So sometimes it just means how far apart is a society on the issues, public opinion on theissues or political parties on the issues.
(01:36):
I would call that more difference
or distance on issues, and that is not concerning.
That's fine.
You expect that in a democracy.
If a society gets divided into extremes, though, where most of the society is on eitherextreme with few people in the middle, that is the concerning part.
(02:00):
And we see that as part of what I'm calling pernicious polarization.
My concern is when polarization
gets extreme and becomes pernicious, which I mean negative and harmful damaging todemocracy.
So it has pernicious or negative consequences for democracy.
(02:21):
So when we have pernicious polarization, my definition of that is when a society becomesdivided into two mutually distrustful political camps.
So I'm focusing on political
polarization.
But two camps, they're antagonistic, they distrust each other.
(02:43):
And what happens is they begin to lose contact with each other, which just increasessuspicion and bias and prejudice, because they've lost contact.
Now they've kind of forgotten about all the shared things that they may have, the sharedvalues, the shared interests, the shared groups that they belong to.
(03:06):
And instead, they just
focus on these two political identities that they see as opposed to each other.
And those identities can include different issues, their opinion on issues, and it caninclude their social relationships and their social identities.
(03:27):
And so it may be that their religious identity, the religious organization they belong to,
the location where they live, especially if it's more rural or more urban, a racial or anethnic group, a career group, an income group, even education levels.
So what we have are our societies divided into these two mutually distrustful camps wherethey see each other as us versus them.
(03:56):
And we see that with immigrants as well.
They're the other.
Exactly.
Somehow they're different than us.
Exactly.
The way we get
to this state of pernicious polarization is we often see politicians using polarizingstrategies and polarizing rhetoric because they know they can win elections by scaring
(04:20):
people or drawing on anger or resentment, anxieties.
And so they will try to present themselves as the savior.
and against some enemy, which often is a mythical enemy, but they'll identify an enemy.
Immigrants is one common enemy identified now in 21st century politics, especially by whatwe would call maybe right-wing populist parties and leaders.
(04:52):
We see this in Europe.
We've seen it in Latin America and the United States.
Other enemies might be
maybe more from the left might be economic elites, Wall Street, other kinds of economicelites.
Sometimes the enemy might be a foreign actor.
know, China is to blame for everything.
Or in Europe, sometimes we see it's the European Union is kind of the enemy.
(05:16):
So we can have different enemies.
Usually it's the political class, the political establishment, government, you know, it'sjust responsible for all the ills of the society.
That's a common one as well.
I'm talking about the way in which people are polarized by politicians.
You said that, you know, they try to use anger and anxiety and those types of things totry to tune up the audience, tune them up a little bit to get them on their side, to get
(05:43):
them to dislike and distrust the other side.
Are there valid reasons why someone might feel anxiety or anger in some of thesesituations if they...
Are they picking on something that is actually there or are they creating it, I guess ismy question.
It can be both.
We've actually seen both, but usually it is exploiting some kind of cleavage or divide insociety or a grievance and anxiety about something, a grievance, a complaint about
(06:18):
something.
Usually the economy, know, loss of a good job, something like that.
So.
The politician might exploit the feelings coming out of that, whether it's anxiety,particularly during COVID, there was lots of anxiety that actually led to more conspiracy
beliefs.
(06:38):
And it can be resentment and the feeling that, you know, some groups are cutting in linein front of you.
And this might be where the immigrant blame comes from.
The immigrants are coming in, taking our resources, taking our jobs, where it might be,you know, affirmative action.
for racial discrimination from the past, or women being seen as being promoted just forquota, something like that.
(07:02):
So there may be an underlying grievance or even a divide in the society, but a politiciancan come in and kind of raise that to the top.
It may be what we would say is latent, a latent attitude that's kind of.
It's there, it's underneath, but it's not the top, it's not the foremost thing insomebody's mind at the moment.
(07:26):
So a politician can come in and make it salient.
So I think a great example is in Hungary, Viktor Orbán actually created an crisis ofimmigration and the people got scared.
It didn't actually exist, but he created it when Syrians were trying to come over.
(07:47):
the border of Hungary to pass through to get to Germany because it's part of the EU.
if you just get in and Hungary's on the border of the EU, if you just get in, you can goon.
But he created this perception of an invasion, a crisis to Hungary.
And so that builds on some, you know, underlying grievances, but or anxieties, but is isactually kind of creating this new enemy.
(08:16):
Is this pernicious polarization something new to the 21st century?
Like you said, some ways polarization is good for democracy.
We contest ideas and argue back and forth.
But I'm curious if something that you're finding in your research happening that'sdifferent about it now?
It has happened before.
we've seen it.
So for example, going way back before World War II in Europe, the growth of fascism inGermany and Italy.
(08:46):
Some people are identifying that as another form of using pernicious polarization.
In the United States, we've obviously been polarized before.
We had the Civil War after all.
And yes, there was a lot of, you know, insults back and forth then that we were alsohighly polarized in the 1960s.
(09:06):
The difference today is that it's really oriented around political identities.
In the 1960s, it wasn't.
It was more generational.
It was more kind of different groups of people with different visions about differentopinions about the Vietnam War, for example, or the women's movement.
(09:28):
But they didn't line up with the political parties because the political parties in the1960s in the United States were more heterogeneous.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans, for example, had
factions that were concerned about racial equality that were against civil rights andfactions that were in favor of civil rights and they could build coalitions across the
(09:51):
political parties to address those.
Today, we're lining up the political identity, the political party we identify with in theUnited States with these other kinds of social identities and with a lot of our views on
issues.
They're lining up and that's
We don't have coalition building.
(10:11):
That's why Congress is so paralyzed.
It can't function because whenever representatives try to build a bridge and we have somegroups that try to be the bridge builders in Congress, but they often get shot down or
they get accused of being a traitor or they get primaried and they have a primaryopponent, maybe even backed by the party who's even more extreme.
(10:38):
and they get voted out of office.
And so this is what's different today about our polarization.
That is really interesting.
So the political parties will choose certain aspects of their own identity.
They'll say, our political party is the political party of say women's rights, let's say.
(10:59):
And the other side won't pick up any of those particular arguments or try to argue for.
women's rights in any way, and one side will do that.
So the things that we're set, we're bringing us or separating us in the 60s, aren't theretoday to sort of bring us together across these political parties.
Exactly, exactly.
We don't have those, the term in political science is cross-cutting ties so that we can goacross this dividing line of political parties, but go across on different issues.
(11:29):
We don't have that.
Now we have the dividing line only.
We don't have the shared,
Interest that crossover between the two in my parents generation.
Perhaps the Rockefeller Republicans or perhaps the southern Democrats might have yesprovided those kind of cross in ways that exactly the different parties that exactly
doesn't exist there are lot of causes of Polarization in the United States today, which wecould talk about a number of them But one of them is this two-party system that we have
(11:59):
it's become very rigid
this binary system and because of our election rules and the way we elect people, thatjust makes it even more rigid, more difficult for any other kind of political party to
break in.
And because we distrust each other so much, then we have an election where if you havetraditionally belonged to one of the political parties, but you just really don't like the
(12:28):
candidate at the moment.
But you say, well, but I'm hearing all these messages about how scary the other party is.
And I've never voted for that other party in my life.
So I, how could I do that?
So Republicans think they hear political messaging advertising that the Democrats arethese really scary communist socialist, and they're, you know, letting all the cities go
(12:53):
to, you know, go to pot with, with crime and everything else.
And
The Democrats are hearing about the Republicans as being, sometimes they might hearthey're racist or they're anti-women trying to keep women back in the 19th century.
So when people hear these messages, they think, well, I could never cross over because,and so even if I don't like my candidate, I can't vote for the other side, so I'm gonna
(13:22):
keep voting for my candidate.
That allows,
even unpopular candidates and action of issues, groups who believe a certain way tocapture our political parties.
And I would say that's really what's happened in the Republican Party today.
(13:45):
Primarily, Donald Trump has captured it, taken it over, changed it.
There are no, there's no space anymore for those.
or establishment, those more moderate Republicans, you have to go along with the Trumpvision or you're out.
The Democrats, I think, are still much more of a big tent umbrella.
(14:06):
They have different views, different kinds of groups, and they're still, you know,sometimes they struggle with coming up with a consensus position because of that, but they
still have more diversity, I would say.
To push back a little, are there things
that when we say those things are, that they're, that they're using these as points ofcontention, is there an underlying truth behind these points of contention?
(14:36):
And does it make it so that we can't actually talk about these points of contentionanymore because they're, they're, they're so polarizing and they make us all kind of a
little crazy.
It feels like in some ways we're saying these points of contention, let's say women'srights, for instance.
there are instances of women losing rights across this country.
We've seen it, you know, with a couple of Supreme court decisions and other things thatare happening.
(15:00):
So there is an underlying thing there, but if we talk about it in this sense, is that, isthat a bad thing for us to bring up because it's creating, as you say, this sort of
polarization between the parties?
This is a real problem because there are real things underneath.
There are real...
(15:21):
problems.
There are real grievances.
There's a real loss of rights.
But you just mentioned about women.
Women have lost rights that they have had for 50 years, particularly reproductive rightswith the DAPT decision.
There are other examples.
And the problem is, if we even talk about, let's say, democracy, Americans agree, a vastmajority of Americans agree, US democracy is threatened.
(15:49):
where they disagree is who and what is the threat to democracy on the women's issue.
Some women will say, you know, this is a huge loss of rights.
It's an invasion of women's privacy, women's autonomy, women's rights to control their ownlives, their own bodies.
But others may say, no, it's, you know, we've got to consider, you know, the life of thebaby or whatever that there are all these.
(16:17):
You know, safeguards put into the new laws to protect women, this kind of thing.
Perceptions can vary a lot.
And if the Democrats accuse the Republicans of being, or Donald Trump, of pursuingundemocratic or anti-democratic actions, for example, or focus on, say, January 6th as an
(16:43):
attempt to overturn a lawful, credible election.
There's a lot of fact underneath that.
There's a lot of truth to that claim.
But many people in the Republican Party will not view it that way.
Their perception is, and maybe they have heard the messaging over and over, particularlyfrom Donald Trump, who continues to talk about it, that the election was stolen.
(17:11):
And they believe that.
So they see the January 6 rioters as freedom fighters, you know, defending.
democracy.
And so they don't see the same underlying facts because the perceptions are different.
This is a real problem when we're trying to talk about it.
I often tell my students that the perception issue is very important in our nation, thatat the time of the American Revolution, the American white colonists were the most free
(17:39):
people in the world.
And when they say no taxation without representation,
They had so much freedom because it took so much time for the governor to send somethingback to parliament for five weeks across the ocean, have parliament take a few months to
decide or the king decide in five more weeks.
They've already passed that issue and moving on to something else.
And yet their perception was they weren't represented.
And that led to the spirit of 76.
(18:01):
But again, it was a perception thing in terms of actual freedom.
They probably were the free, they were more free than people living in England at thattime.
That's a very good point.
But that's a problem today.
Again, perception and trying to, how do we turn this ship around?
How do we have that conversation?
I noticed in much of your writing how much I teach a course in mediation negotiation atour Gray School of Diplomacy at DePaul and how many of some of your suggestions about how
(18:31):
we can separate the person from the problem, how we can try to look for our sharedinterests rather than our shared positions.
in thinking about, I've always been thinking mediation is that two parties in one smallmediation session, but your writing is getting me thinking, and I see you teach mediation
as well, that we have to find a way to do this on a national or regional scale.
(18:53):
That's exactly right.
This is why it's really hard to overcome this state of being.
Once we've reached this level of pernicious polarization, we do not have good examplesfrom history
of democracies that have reached this level and overcome it.
(19:13):
So what I'm trying to do is look in the book I'm writing is trying to look at historicalexamples of democracies who have tackled pieces of it.
But we have we have so many pieces that, and particularly in the United States, like my coauthor and I have identified four kind of fault lines of polarization that we see around
(19:34):
the world today.
The United States has all
four of them.
Okay, other countries may just have one.
So it becomes very complex when we're talking about doing this.
When we look at the individual level, it's been great, all of the bridge buildingexercises.
In the last eight years or so, there've been lots of civic organizations being created totry to bring people together and you know, have civic dinners have
(20:05):
different workshops, how do we communicate with other people across the divide?
And it does have all those principles you mentioned.
What I tell people first and foremost, be curious about the other person.
Be curious what underlies and ask them what experiences in your life brought you to thisposition that you have just told me about on some issue or on some candidate.
(20:30):
And try to be curious.
And when you start
getting curious and digging deeper, you will find that you do share certain values.
Perceptions is a real problem because of the psychology of human beings.
And once certain perceptions are set in place, it's very hard to overcome them.
So for example, we human beings want to look for information that confirms our priorbeliefs, not information that disputes it.
(21:03):
and tries to correct an factual information that we may have.
And so this problem of confirmation bias, we're biased toward looking and receiving theinformation that confirms our prior beliefs.
So we go to our silos, we go to our own sources of information, which unfortunately, orfortunately, I mean, different ways to look at it, we have very many sources of
(21:28):
information today.
We have a proliferation of sources of information.
And so we'll listen to the kinds of messengers that we trust and not to other messengersthat we don't trust or sources of information that we don't trust.
So this is one other problem.
Now, when we look at then how does a whole society overcome this?
(21:50):
Because these bridge building exercises, you know, it's between individuals.
How do we get up to the level of the whole society?
This is difficult.
And here what
we're focusing on is particularly the political level of political parties, electedpoliticians, even media leaders, social influencers, the people who are, you know, and
(22:16):
others, even economic elites who are making decisions, but particularly in governments.
What is, what can we do to change the dysfunction that we see because of polarization?
at the level of government.
So citizens are actually not as divided on their opinions on issues as the politicalparties are in Washington or even in our state capitals.
(22:49):
It's important to change at the citizen level, but we can't only do that.
We have to change at the national level or the, you know, the political dynamic of thewhole system.
of the country, the national level and the state level.
And there are certain ways that we can do that, but it basically involves changingincentives for political leaders.
(23:13):
I mentioned before the United States has this rigid two party system that comes from ourelectoral system.
We're very unique among the world of democracies.
The United States is unique in its actual system that goes back to our constitution.
So we're the only ones that have an electoral college.
So we have our indirect election for president.
(23:34):
Those white English colonists that thought they weren't free created a system thatprotected their own rights without giving them to the others.
Exactly.
Sorry to interrupt, but it just...
Exactly.
So we have a Senate that's extremely strong compared to the upper chambers in othercountries.
(23:54):
Our Senate has a lot of power.
Our Senate is also very disproportionate in its representation.
So every state, no matter if it's the size of Delaware or the size of Texas, you know, hastwo senators, which also, of course, contributes to the electoral college, to an imbalance
in the electoral college.
So it's not one person, one vote in either one of those institutions.
(24:18):
Where we do have one person, one vote is in our election to our House of Representativesin Washington and
to most state legislatures, but we do it in a way that only about four other democraciesdo, and they happen to all be former British colonies.
(24:39):
So the UK still does this.
India, Canada, Australia, and the United States are basically the ones that do this.
And they have what's called a plurality system.
But basically it's a single member district.
So a bunch of little districts drawn all over the country in our state.
(25:00):
We just elect one representative per district.
Most democracy, and what that means is it's a winner take off.
Only one person can win.
So even if it's a 51-49 % split in the vote, the 49 percenters don't have anyrepresentation.
Most democracies have proportional representation, which is
(25:23):
based on the share of actual votes that each party gets.
What that does is it allows more fair representation and it tends to lead to morepolitical parties, more choice, and it also can tend to lead to more coalition building.
(25:46):
And so those countries
that use this system, which are most of the democracies around the world.
They also tend to be less polarized.
So one way to change incentives is to move us from our winner take all system, which leadspoliticians to want to double down on their base and get their base.
(26:13):
And so they're going to just focus on only those people, only those voters.
and we can become more more extreme in trying to do that.
And instead, if you're in this other system, you want to cast your net more broadly.
You have a larger net to try to get the votes.
(26:33):
And so you're going to be more moderate and probably more civil in your campaigning.
So that's one.
So changing our system of representation.
But another thing to do is
When we think about our identity issues and Craig, you mentioned immigration is one of thethings and we talked about, I talked about women's rights, but identity issues are very
(27:01):
polarizing.
And we, we think about because people feel like they may be losing status if some othergroup is coming up demanding their rights, which in a democracy.
You know, every group can demand their rights groups that have historically beensubordinated or discriminated against, you know, in a strong democracy want to demand
(27:24):
equal rights.
Those who were more dominant then may feel that they're losing some of their status,either their economic resources or their social status, their social esteem, their power.
So how can we overcome that?
How can we move toward greater inclusion?
(27:45):
more equal rights, greater recognition of all the groups, especially in a country as bigand diverse and multicultural as the United States.
I want to give an example in Canada.
Canada developed a multicultural policy in the 1970s to actually provide tools fororganization and for participation and preservation of different cultural heritages.
(28:14):
And what they did with this multicultural policy was actually became kind of a part ofnational identity so that Canadians were proud that they were a diverse country.
And Canada is getting incredibly diverse.
By 2040, they're expected to have 40 % of their population to come from immigrants, whichI was very surprised about, learning about.
(28:38):
But what they've done then is to...
provide these tools and to make it a point of national pride rather than a scary thingthat they're getting more diverse and having different immigrants.
And research on Canada has shown that immigrants are more readily accepted by thepopulation that's already there when they show gratitude for being there, for being
(29:04):
welcomed into a country, and willingness to reciprocate.
So willingness to contribute economically, willingness to defend the country if needed,even militarily.
So if they show reciprocity and loyalty to the country, then they're accepted.
And I think we can learn a lot from the experience of Canada.
(29:26):
Doesn't mean it's perfect there, but you know, there's a lot to learn.
So we have some other examples of ways we can move toward this sense that we can be in awin-win situation instead of a win-lose.
situation.
It's interesting.
We've mentioned before that Abraham Lincoln spoke against the anti-immigrant folks in theKnow Nothing Party in 1858.
(29:50):
And one of the things he said, you just remind me, that there were more immigrants thanthere were people that could trace their roots back to the founders of our nation.
And he celebrated that they were often coming here as much for that spirit of all arecreated equal and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
He called it the electric cord of democracy that brought us and celebrated that and triedto.
(30:15):
But you're mentioning Canada going in 1940, having more than half the population beingforeign born.
We've been there.
And one of the things I was going to ask, can shared values in part be historical?
Have we forgotten that our grandparents and great grandparents faced
(30:36):
discrimination as immigrants coming to this country?
Yeah, no, this is another solution.
That's a great thing to bring up, Craig, because the national story can be a unifyingthread.
Right now in the United States, we're divided on our national story.
We're divided on what to teach in our history to our children.
(30:58):
We're polarized around this.
But a national story can be if we can come up with a national narrative
That is a point of pride that unites people.
It did used to be the idea that we're a melting pot, right?
I mean, it was kind of two things melting pot, American dream, American dream.
Anybody, you know, even an immigrant could grow up, raise themselves up by theirbootstraps and become president of the United States or CEO of the big biggest company.
(31:27):
So that had been a pretty much a uniting story.
The problem was.
When we were doing this, it didn't really include everybody.
so blacks were excluded a lot from that story throughout most of the history of the UnitedStates.
And many immigrants were actually excluded from that story.
(31:49):
And I think it's really interesting the way we've dealt with this, the intersection ofrace and immigration and looking at both Canada and the United States, because both have
received a lot of immigration and
In the United States, of course, we had early immigrants from Europe and Southern Europewho were racialized and considered darker skin and not equal to the earlier whites, the
(32:20):
more Anglo-Saxon immigrants from Northern Europe.
Over time, those Southern Europeans became whiter in the perception.
their own perception and the perception of others.
They became identified as white and someone else took their place on the bottom rung.
(32:45):
Other immigrants from other countries that looked more different even Asia, darker LatinAmerica, even East European.
But also black immigrants coming from the
the southern United States to the north in the great migration throughout most of the 20thcentury, the great migration and as southern blacks moved up during the Jim Crow era to
(33:17):
the cities of the north, they became the lowest rung on the totem pole and even resentedby those immigrants who had just come very recently themselves, especially from southern
Europe.
And so it's very interesting that, you know, we continue to, as human beings, seem to wanta hierarchy and someone to be lower than us.
(33:42):
And in Canada, they actually had the same kind of change so that the wider immigrantsbecame, you know, it's easier to blend in just physically.
And they actually called the newer immigrants in the seventies and eighties, particularlyfrom Asia and Canada.
visible minorities.
(34:02):
They officially call them visible minorities, which I was very surprised to learn about.
But they made these policies, these multicultural policies to also try to help thempreserve their own cultural heritage while integrating with the country.
it worth it, as I talk about immigration, to try to remind us of that amnesia that we'veforgotten about our ancestors?
(34:29):
I just read a story from Peter Marty this week who's the editor and publisher of ChristianCentury.
He was critiquing this Republican nominees for president and vice president with thisunsupported myth about what's happening in Springfield, Ohio with the Haitians.
I had not read this before in my understanding of American immigration history, but thatwhen the Germans were coming in in the mid-19th century, they were being critiqued as
(34:56):
immigrants and not being American.
and we don't want them.
And he said an ugly rumor, I'll it actually, because I don't want to misstate it.
Quote, an ugly rumor surfaced about dogs disappearing when German butchers would arrive ina neighborhood.
An American songwriter, Septimus Winner, wrote that the rumor into his 1864 song, where,where has my little dog gone?
(35:24):
We sing that today as a children's nursery rhyme is kind of a funny story, but it wascommenting that these German butchers were turning dogs into baloney and liverwurst and
feeding to people.
is amazing to me.
Yes, I had never heard that story before.
ends his op-ed saying it's interesting that the Republican nominee for president'sgrandfather was German.
(35:47):
And he would then sit here and support this ugly, ugly story about the Haitians inSpringfield.
Would others understand that we have to get over that amnesia and kind of go back into ourpast and say, we've found a way to get people to become part of this great American
(36:08):
experiment.
Not without mistakes and not without the issues that you're raising that we're facingtoday, but trying to remind us that we need to find those ways of our shared history with
its negatives can make us better people today if we realize that.
Certainly going back and teaching history that is more inclusive is extremely important.
(36:32):
And looking at the warts as well as the achievements and acknowledging past mistakes,that's really important for any society to move forward to advance.
The problem is people will often, the people who are anxious today about immigration maysee it differently.
They may see it as
But it's a bigger threat today than it was back then.
(36:55):
Or have some perceptions that they've been told about what's so scary today about it.
And so I think it's really incumbent upon us to not only try to revise our narrative todayand our history teaching to be inclusive, as we said, and to remind about the past.
(37:18):
Even telling that story would be.
It is amazing.
We're just repeating history.
We're repeating conspiracy theories.
This has happened before about Germans, and now Germans are considered very uprightAmericans who belong here.
But it also is going to require positive stories about what do immigrants contributetoday?
(37:46):
And I go back to that Canadian research.
that's showing, what are they contributing that people trust when they see that immigrantsare making a contribution economically?
Seven trillion dollars to the economy.
We'll put that in the show notes and some other information about the benefits.
Cecil and I with Lawful Assembly keep trying to talk about the great inspiration theorythat we get inspired by immigrants that have contributed so much and continue to
(38:14):
contribute today to the benefits in our in our society.
That's one of our kind of themes.
Yes, and actually then that's it.
so many immigrants who are in high respected positions today, know, who are immigrants orwhose parents were immigrants from all over the world, definitely, or spouses, spouses of
(38:36):
candidates, for example.
So it's telling the positive stories.
We're going to have this problem, this psychological problem that I said aboutconfirmation bias, overcoming that confirmation bias, but it's really important.
And so it's incumbent upon media to do this.
It's incumbent upon academics, intellectuals, any kind of leader in society or anybodythat's got a voice, religious, faith leaders, cultural figures.
(39:14):
everybody podcast like this one is to try to get across these stories so that people canunderstand the contributions and you know and how hard immigrants are working or whatever
the problem is and that it can be a positive sum, a win-win situation.
(39:36):
It's not a win-lose.
How do we?
I want to just roll back really quickly to something you said earlier when you weretalking.
It really
interesting analysis of our current political system in this country with two separateparties, with the way in which we handle this is different from many other democracies all
(39:58):
across the world.
As you say, how do we change any of that?
They're the ones who make this decision.
So how can we as a people impress upon our leaders
to try to change a system that they are very deeply entrenched in and in many waysenriched by.
It seems like a vicious circle and a circle and egg thing.
(40:20):
How's it going to happen?
Because the ones in power don't want to change the way they got to power, obviously.
But I want to tell you, New Zealand and Australia, two of these former British coloniesthat had that same system, plurality system, made a change.
Australia earlier in the 20th century,
And New Zealand in the 1990s, when people and political parties, but just normal citizensgot fed up with the distortions that resulted from their elections and the
(40:53):
disproportionate representation.
And they made a change toward a more proportional system in each of those countries.
And so it is possible to do.
We are already making a change.
We see it in many communities around.
There are groups fighting for or, you know, trying to educate about and advocating forrank choice voting is one alternative method being used in cities, especially, and in some
(41:25):
states.
And it's going to be voted on again in November in a couple of states in Nevada, forexample.
That's one change.
And that's coming from, you know, from the people is really coming from below.
against the political parties.
But there's a great dissatisfaction even in Congress, among the people sitting inCongress, because for most of them, it's not fun.
(41:51):
It's not necessarily what they wanted to get out of going there.
It's hard for them to do their public service.
Some of them just want to platform, want to be on the news.
But most of them, I think, still want to have
So they're open to ideas and I've been on several task forces, groups in the United Statestrying to work for and make recommendations about changes to our electoral system ranging
(42:23):
from ranked choice voting to all the way to changing it more substantially to proportionalrepresentation that I was talking about.
the way we do it is first we put it on the agenda.
We start talking about it.
start educating people and that is happening.
Those are all these reforms are on the agenda and it's spreading more and more people arelearning about it.
(42:47):
And second, we try to start talking to the existing elected representatives that this isnot this.
This is not against you or it's not in favor of one party or another.
This this does not advantage one party or another.
This is going to be better for the whole system.
And we can do it starting at the local levels.
(43:07):
States can make their own changes.
Most of this does not require a constitutional amendment.
Moving away from a single member district to elect our members to the House ofRepresentatives does require Congress to repeal a law that they just passed in 1967
(43:29):
requiring single member districts.
They did that actually as a positive thing after the civil rights movement.
And there's a story behind that, but they actually had good intentions for that.
But now we've come up to where it's, you know, it's, it's gone, it's run its course.
We're now, it's now not helping us.
And so all they have to do is fill that law.
(43:50):
In this election, if the pollsters are correct in the one district in Nebraska that hasthe one vote that gives to the electoral college vote from their.
how they vote in their district, and I think there's one in Maine as well.
There are some pollsters that suggest that one vote may come down to make the differencein the election.
I have a good friend Dave in Omaha that they're so excited that both their national andtheir local elections, their Senate and their House elections in that district is
(44:20):
invigorating the population of that around Omaha to get involved.
And depending how it all works out, that may be a model to say,
more districts may say, want to have that kind of excitement.
We want to have kind of that impact.
So you may be in something happening.
Exactly.
And that is it's Nebraska and Maine that actually do divide their electoral college votesto be proportional to the vote within the state.
(44:46):
They're the only two other states can do that.
They can choose, you know, how to get their electors however they want.
So it's
That's not a constitutional amendment to change the way they divide up their electors.
Most states just move to a winner take all.
There was no reason to do that.
They did have reasons when they did it.
(45:08):
And a lot of it comes back again to the civil rights movement and the resistance toproviding civil rights in the United States in the South.
So a lot of these things do come back to that.
But that can happen.
States can decide that.
Right now and populations, know, grassroots groups can push that kind of change it.
(45:28):
You're absolutely right.
We don't think of Nebraska as one of the seven swing states that everybody talks about.
But that one electors we saw this week in the news when they refuse to change the systemand they're going to keep that system that their three electors can can be based on.
(45:50):
the proportion of votes for Democrats and Republicans that may decide the presidency ofthe United States and their Senate.
Yeah, their Senate race could decide the control of the Senate.
So they are going to have a lot of impact this year that they normally don't have.
I just want to encourage all of your listeners to try to be open, be curious, reach acrossthe divide and to be hopeful.
(46:20):
that we can make changes.
We got individual choice.
brought us to where we are today.
Individual decisions of many people.
We can get ourselves out of it.
We can resist those kinds of perniciously polarizing, demonizing political messages.
(46:41):
We can resist those candidates.
We can look for information and we can try to elect people and change our system to a waythat is going to get us out of this deep hole that we seem to be in today.
We just have to act and have some courage and hope.
(47:02):
Dr.
McCoy is wonderful that you came on today and taught us all about this.
I learned so much from you being here today.
We're gonna put links in the show notes to all the places that people can find you on theinternet.
I wanna thank you for coming on today.
I add my thanks.
You've added to our inspiration theory.
We have one more way to be inspired by your work, both here in this country and around theworld for.
(47:26):
for what you do for human rights and for us really flourishing as the democracy.
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
This podcast is not intended as legal advice.
If you'd like to email the show, you can send us a message at lawfulpod at gmail.com.
(47:48):
If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, you can go to lawfulpod.com.
Click on the microphone and leave us a voice message.
If you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes and Spotify or wherever you get yourpodcasts.
If you're interested in Cecil's other shows, you can check out Cognitive Dissonance andCitation Needed.
you
to the Lawful Assembly podcast.
My name is Cecil.
I'm joined by my good friend, Craig Moosin, lawyer, Reverend Craig today.
I'm very excited you introduced me to our guests today.
(00:22):
And I'd like to welcome Dr.
Jennifer McCoy.
She's a professor of political science at Georgia State University.
She's a specialist in democratization and polarization, mediation and conflict prevention,election processes and election observation and Latin American politics.
She authored or edited six books and a dozen articles.
(00:44):
She currently is working on a book on depolarizing politics.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We want to talk to you today, Dr.
About polarization.
So in a very, very broad sense to start the conversation, what is polarization?
Yeah.
Thanks.
And thank you for the invitation to be here.
(01:05):
Polarization is used commonly today in the media.
and even by academics in different ways.
And this is part of the problem with trying to study it and analyze it.
So we have to be careful to say which meaning are we using when we're talking about it.
So sometimes it just means how far apart is a society on the issues, public opinion on theissues or political parties on the issues.
(01:36):
I would call that more difference
or distance on issues, and that is not concerning.
That's fine.
You expect that in a democracy.
If a society gets divided into extremes, though, where most of the society is on eitherextreme with few people in the middle, that is the concerning part.
(02:00):
And we see that as part of what I'm calling pernicious polarization.
My concern is when polarization
gets extreme and becomes pernicious, which I mean negative and harmful damaging todemocracy.
So it has pernicious or negative consequences for democracy.
(02:21):
So when we have pernicious polarization, my definition of that is when a society becomesdivided into two mutually distrustful political camps.
So I'm focusing on political
polarization.
But two camps, they're antagonistic, they distrust each other.
(02:43):
And what happens is they begin to lose contact with each other, which just increasessuspicion and bias and prejudice, because they've lost contact.
Now they've kind of forgotten about all the shared things that they may have, the sharedvalues, the shared interests, the shared groups that they belong to.
(03:06):
And instead, they just
focus on these two political identities that they see as opposed to each other.
And those identities can include different issues, their opinion on issues, and it caninclude their social relationships and their social identities.
(03:27):
And so it may be that their religious identity, the religious organization they belong to,
the location where they live, especially if it's more rural or more urban, a racial or anethnic group, a career group, an income group, even education levels.
So what we have are our societies divided into these two mutually distrustful camps wherethey see each other as us versus them.
(03:56):
And we see that with immigrants as well.
They're the other.
Exactly.
Somehow they're different than us.
Exactly.
The way we get
to this state of pernicious polarization is we often see politicians using polarizingstrategies and polarizing rhetoric because they know they can win elections by scaring
(04:20):
people or drawing on anger or resentment, anxieties.
And so they will try to present themselves as the savior.
and against some enemy, which often is a mythical enemy, but they'll identify an enemy.
Immigrants is one common enemy identified now in 21st century politics, especially by whatwe would call maybe right-wing populist parties and leaders.
(04:52):
We see this in Europe.
We've seen it in Latin America and the United States.
Other enemies might be
maybe more from the left might be economic elites, Wall Street, other kinds of economicelites.
Sometimes the enemy might be a foreign actor.
know, China is to blame for everything.
Or in Europe, sometimes we see it's the European Union is kind of the enemy.
(05:16):
So we can have different enemies.
Usually it's the political class, the political establishment, government, you know, it'sjust responsible for all the ills of the society.
That's a common one as well.
I'm talking about the way in which people are polarized by politicians.
You said that, you know, they try to use anger and anxiety and those types of things totry to tune up the audience, tune them up a little bit to get them on their side, to get
(05:43):
them to dislike and distrust the other side.
Are there valid reasons why someone might feel anxiety or anger in some of thesesituations if they...
Are they picking on something that is actually there or are they creating it, I guess ismy question.
It can be both.
We've actually seen both, but usually it is exploiting some kind of cleavage or divide insociety or a grievance and anxiety about something, a grievance, a complaint about
(06:18):
something.
Usually the economy, know, loss of a good job, something like that.
So.
The politician might exploit the feelings coming out of that, whether it's anxiety,particularly during COVID, there was lots of anxiety that actually led to more conspiracy
beliefs.
(06:38):
And it can be resentment and the feeling that, you know, some groups are cutting in linein front of you.
And this might be where the immigrant blame comes from.
The immigrants are coming in, taking our resources, taking our jobs, where it might be,you know, affirmative action.
for racial discrimination from the past, or women being seen as being promoted just forquota, something like that.
(07:02):
So there may be an underlying grievance or even a divide in the society, but a politiciancan come in and kind of raise that to the top.
It may be what we would say is latent, a latent attitude that's kind of.
It's there, it's underneath, but it's not the top, it's not the foremost thing insomebody's mind at the moment.
(07:26):
So a politician can come in and make it salient.
So I think a great example is in Hungary, Viktor Orbán actually created an crisis ofimmigration and the people got scared.
It didn't actually exist, but he created it when Syrians were trying to come over.
(07:47):
the border of Hungary to pass through to get to Germany because it's part of the EU.
if you just get in and Hungary's on the border of the EU, if you just get in, you can goon.
But he created this perception of an invasion, a crisis to Hungary.
And so that builds on some, you know, underlying grievances, but or anxieties, but is isactually kind of creating this new enemy.
(08:16):
Is this pernicious polarization something new to the 21st century?
Like you said, some ways polarization is good for democracy.
We contest ideas and argue back and forth.
But I'm curious if something that you're finding in your research happening that'sdifferent about it now?
It has happened before.
we've seen it.
So for example, going way back before World War II in Europe, the growth of fascism inGermany and Italy.
(08:46):
Some people are identifying that as another form of using pernicious polarization.
In the United States, we've obviously been polarized before.
We had the Civil War after all.
And yes, there was a lot of, you know, insults back and forth then that we were alsohighly polarized in the 1960s.
(09:06):
The difference today is that it's really oriented around political identities.
In the 1960s, it wasn't.
It was more generational.
It was more kind of different groups of people with different visions about differentopinions about the Vietnam War, for example, or the women's movement.
(09:28):
But they didn't line up with the political parties because the political parties in the1960s in the United States were more heterogeneous.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans, for example, had
factions that were concerned about racial equality that were against civil rights andfactions that were in favor of civil rights and they could build coalitions across the
(09:51):
political parties to address those.
Today, we're lining up the political identity, the political party we identify with in theUnited States with these other kinds of social identities and with a lot of our views on
issues.
They're lining up and that's
We don't have coalition building.
(10:11):
That's why Congress is so paralyzed.
It can't function because whenever representatives try to build a bridge and we have somegroups that try to be the bridge builders in Congress, but they often get shot down or
they get accused of being a traitor or they get primaried and they have a primaryopponent, maybe even backed by the party who's even more extreme.
(10:38):
and they get voted out of office.
And so this is what's different today about our polarization.
That is really interesting.
So the political parties will choose certain aspects of their own identity.
They'll say, our political party is the political party of say women's rights, let's say.
(10:59):
And the other side won't pick up any of those particular arguments or try to argue for.
women's rights in any way, and one side will do that.
So the things that we're set, we're bringing us or separating us in the 60s, aren't theretoday to sort of bring us together across these political parties.
Exactly, exactly.
We don't have those, the term in political science is cross-cutting ties so that we can goacross this dividing line of political parties, but go across on different issues.
(11:29):
We don't have that.
Now we have the dividing line only.
We don't have the shared,
Interest that crossover between the two in my parents generation.
Perhaps the Rockefeller Republicans or perhaps the southern Democrats might have yesprovided those kind of cross in ways that exactly the different parties that exactly
doesn't exist there are lot of causes of Polarization in the United States today, which wecould talk about a number of them But one of them is this two-party system that we have
(11:59):
it's become very rigid
this binary system and because of our election rules and the way we elect people, thatjust makes it even more rigid, more difficult for any other kind of political party to
break in.
And because we distrust each other so much, then we have an election where if you havetraditionally belonged to one of the political parties, but you just really don't like the
(12:28):
candidate at the moment.
But you say, well, but I'm hearing all these messages about how scary the other party is.
And I've never voted for that other party in my life.
So I, how could I do that?
So Republicans think they hear political messaging advertising that the Democrats arethese really scary communist socialist, and they're, you know, letting all the cities go
(12:53):
to, you know, go to pot with, with crime and everything else.
And
The Democrats are hearing about the Republicans as being, sometimes they might hearthey're racist or they're anti-women trying to keep women back in the 19th century.
So when people hear these messages, they think, well, I could never cross over because,and so even if I don't like my candidate, I can't vote for the other side, so I'm gonna
(13:22):
keep voting for my candidate.
That allows,
even unpopular candidates and action of issues, groups who believe a certain way tocapture our political parties.
And I would say that's really what's happened in the Republican Party today.
(13:45):
Primarily, Donald Trump has captured it, taken it over, changed it.
There are no, there's no space anymore for those.
or establishment, those more moderate Republicans, you have to go along with the Trumpvision or you're out.
The Democrats, I think, are still much more of a big tent umbrella.
(14:06):
They have different views, different kinds of groups, and they're still, you know,sometimes they struggle with coming up with a consensus position because of that, but they
still have more diversity, I would say.
To push back a little, are there things
that when we say those things are, that they're, that they're using these as points ofcontention, is there an underlying truth behind these points of contention?
(14:36):
And does it make it so that we can't actually talk about these points of contentionanymore because they're, they're, they're so polarizing and they make us all kind of a
little crazy.
It feels like in some ways we're saying these points of contention, let's say women'srights, for instance.
there are instances of women losing rights across this country.
We've seen it, you know, with a couple of Supreme court decisions and other things thatare happening.
(15:00):
So there is an underlying thing there, but if we talk about it in this sense, is that, isthat a bad thing for us to bring up because it's creating, as you say, this sort of
polarization between the parties?
This is a real problem because there are real things underneath.
There are real...
(15:21):
problems.
There are real grievances.
There's a real loss of rights.
But you just mentioned about women.
Women have lost rights that they have had for 50 years, particularly reproductive rightswith the DAPT decision.
There are other examples.
And the problem is, if we even talk about, let's say, democracy, Americans agree, a vastmajority of Americans agree, US democracy is threatened.
(15:49):
where they disagree is who and what is the threat to democracy on the women's issue.
Some women will say, you know, this is a huge loss of rights.
It's an invasion of women's privacy, women's autonomy, women's rights to control their ownlives, their own bodies.
But others may say, no, it's, you know, we've got to consider, you know, the life of thebaby or whatever that there are all these.
(16:17):
You know, safeguards put into the new laws to protect women, this kind of thing.
Perceptions can vary a lot.
And if the Democrats accuse the Republicans of being, or Donald Trump, of pursuingundemocratic or anti-democratic actions, for example, or focus on, say, January 6th as an
(16:43):
attempt to overturn a lawful, credible election.
There's a lot of fact underneath that.
There's a lot of truth to that claim.
But many people in the Republican Party will not view it that way.
Their perception is, and maybe they have heard the messaging over and over, particularlyfrom Donald Trump, who continues to talk about it, that the election was stolen.
(17:11):
And they believe that.
So they see the January 6 rioters as freedom fighters, you know, defending.
democracy.
And so they don't see the same underlying facts because the perceptions are different.
This is a real problem when we're trying to talk about it.
I often tell my students that the perception issue is very important in our nation, thatat the time of the American Revolution, the American white colonists were the most free
(17:39):
people in the world.
And when they say no taxation without representation,
They had so much freedom because it took so much time for the governor to send somethingback to parliament for five weeks across the ocean, have parliament take a few months to
decide or the king decide in five more weeks.
They've already passed that issue and moving on to something else.
And yet their perception was they weren't represented.
And that led to the spirit of 76.
(18:01):
But again, it was a perception thing in terms of actual freedom.
They probably were the free, they were more free than people living in England at thattime.
That's a very good point.
But that's a problem today.
Again, perception and trying to, how do we turn this ship around?
How do we have that conversation?
I noticed in much of your writing how much I teach a course in mediation negotiation atour Gray School of Diplomacy at DePaul and how many of some of your suggestions about how
(18:31):
we can separate the person from the problem, how we can try to look for our sharedinterests rather than our shared positions.
in thinking about, I've always been thinking mediation is that two parties in one smallmediation session, but your writing is getting me thinking, and I see you teach mediation
as well, that we have to find a way to do this on a national or regional scale.
(18:53):
That's exactly right.
This is why it's really hard to overcome this state of being.
Once we've reached this level of pernicious polarization, we do not have good examplesfrom history
of democracies that have reached this level and overcome it.
(19:13):
So what I'm trying to do is look in the book I'm writing is trying to look at historicalexamples of democracies who have tackled pieces of it.
But we have we have so many pieces that, and particularly in the United States, like my coauthor and I have identified four kind of fault lines of polarization that we see around
(19:34):
the world today.
The United States has all
four of them.
Okay, other countries may just have one.
So it becomes very complex when we're talking about doing this.
When we look at the individual level, it's been great, all of the bridge buildingexercises.
In the last eight years or so, there've been lots of civic organizations being created totry to bring people together and you know, have civic dinners have
(20:05):
different workshops, how do we communicate with other people across the divide?
And it does have all those principles you mentioned.
What I tell people first and foremost, be curious about the other person.
Be curious what underlies and ask them what experiences in your life brought you to thisposition that you have just told me about on some issue or on some candidate.
(20:30):
And try to be curious.
And when you start
getting curious and digging deeper, you will find that you do share certain values.
Perceptions is a real problem because of the psychology of human beings.
And once certain perceptions are set in place, it's very hard to overcome them.
So for example, we human beings want to look for information that confirms our priorbeliefs, not information that disputes it.
(21:03):
and tries to correct an factual information that we may have.
And so this problem of confirmation bias, we're biased toward looking and receiving theinformation that confirms our prior beliefs.
So we go to our silos, we go to our own sources of information, which unfortunately, orfortunately, I mean, different ways to look at it, we have very many sources of
(21:28):
information today.
We have a proliferation of sources of information.
And so we'll listen to the kinds of messengers that we trust and not to other messengersthat we don't trust or sources of information that we don't trust.
So this is one other problem.
Now, when we look at then how does a whole society overcome this?
(21:50):
Because these bridge building exercises, you know, it's between individuals.
How do we get up to the level of the whole society?
This is difficult.
And here what
we're focusing on is particularly the political level of political parties, electedpoliticians, even media leaders, social influencers, the people who are, you know, and
(22:16):
others, even economic elites who are making decisions, but particularly in governments.
What is, what can we do to change the dysfunction that we see because of polarization?
at the level of government.
So citizens are actually not as divided on their opinions on issues as the politicalparties are in Washington or even in our state capitals.
(22:49):
It's important to change at the citizen level, but we can't only do that.
We have to change at the national level or the, you know, the political dynamic of thewhole system.
of the country, the national level and the state level.
And there are certain ways that we can do that, but it basically involves changingincentives for political leaders.
(23:13):
I mentioned before the United States has this rigid two party system that comes from ourelectoral system.
We're very unique among the world of democracies.
The United States is unique in its actual system that goes back to our constitution.
So we're the only ones that have an electoral college.
So we have our indirect election for president.
(23:34):
Those white English colonists that thought they weren't free created a system thatprotected their own rights without giving them to the others.
Exactly.
Sorry to interrupt, but it just...
Exactly.
So we have a Senate that's extremely strong compared to the upper chambers in othercountries.
(23:54):
Our Senate has a lot of power.
Our Senate is also very disproportionate in its representation.
So every state, no matter if it's the size of Delaware or the size of Texas, you know, hastwo senators, which also, of course, contributes to the electoral college, to an imbalance
in the electoral college.
So it's not one person, one vote in either one of those institutions.
(24:18):
Where we do have one person, one vote is in our election to our House of Representativesin Washington and
to most state legislatures, but we do it in a way that only about four other democraciesdo, and they happen to all be former British colonies.
(24:39):
So the UK still does this.
India, Canada, Australia, and the United States are basically the ones that do this.
And they have what's called a plurality system.
But basically it's a single member district.
So a bunch of little districts drawn all over the country in our state.
(25:00):
We just elect one representative per district.
Most democracy, and what that means is it's a winner take off.
Only one person can win.
So even if it's a 51-49 % split in the vote, the 49 percenters don't have anyrepresentation.
Most democracies have proportional representation, which is
(25:23):
based on the share of actual votes that each party gets.
What that does is it allows more fair representation and it tends to lead to morepolitical parties, more choice, and it also can tend to lead to more coalition building.
(25:46):
And so those countries
that use this system, which are most of the democracies around the world.
They also tend to be less polarized.
So one way to change incentives is to move us from our winner take all system, which leadspoliticians to want to double down on their base and get their base.
(26:13):
And so they're going to just focus on only those people, only those voters.
and we can become more more extreme in trying to do that.
And instead, if you're in this other system, you want to cast your net more broadly.
You have a larger net to try to get the votes.
(26:33):
And so you're going to be more moderate and probably more civil in your campaigning.
So that's one.
So changing our system of representation.
But another thing to do is
When we think about our identity issues and Craig, you mentioned immigration is one of thethings and we talked about, I talked about women's rights, but identity issues are very
(27:01):
polarizing.
And we, we think about because people feel like they may be losing status if some othergroup is coming up demanding their rights, which in a democracy.
You know, every group can demand their rights groups that have historically beensubordinated or discriminated against, you know, in a strong democracy want to demand
(27:24):
equal rights.
Those who were more dominant then may feel that they're losing some of their status,either their economic resources or their social status, their social esteem, their power.
So how can we overcome that?
How can we move toward greater inclusion?
(27:45):
more equal rights, greater recognition of all the groups, especially in a country as bigand diverse and multicultural as the United States.
I want to give an example in Canada.
Canada developed a multicultural policy in the 1970s to actually provide tools fororganization and for participation and preservation of different cultural heritages.
(28:14):
And what they did with this multicultural policy was actually became kind of a part ofnational identity so that Canadians were proud that they were a diverse country.
And Canada is getting incredibly diverse.
By 2040, they're expected to have 40 % of their population to come from immigrants, whichI was very surprised about, learning about.
(28:38):
But what they've done then is to...
provide these tools and to make it a point of national pride rather than a scary thingthat they're getting more diverse and having different immigrants.
And research on Canada has shown that immigrants are more readily accepted by thepopulation that's already there when they show gratitude for being there, for being
(29:04):
welcomed into a country, and willingness to reciprocate.
So willingness to contribute economically, willingness to defend the country if needed,even militarily.
So if they show reciprocity and loyalty to the country, then they're accepted.
And I think we can learn a lot from the experience of Canada.
(29:26):
Doesn't mean it's perfect there, but you know, there's a lot to learn.
So we have some other examples of ways we can move toward this sense that we can be in awin-win situation instead of a win-lose.
situation.
It's interesting.
We've mentioned before that Abraham Lincoln spoke against the anti-immigrant folks in theKnow Nothing Party in 1858.
(29:50):
And one of the things he said, you just remind me, that there were more immigrants thanthere were people that could trace their roots back to the founders of our nation.
And he celebrated that they were often coming here as much for that spirit of all arecreated equal and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
He called it the electric cord of democracy that brought us and celebrated that and triedto.
(30:15):
But you're mentioning Canada going in 1940, having more than half the population beingforeign born.
We've been there.
And one of the things I was going to ask, can shared values in part be historical?
Have we forgotten that our grandparents and great grandparents faced
(30:36):
discrimination as immigrants coming to this country?
Yeah, no, this is another solution.
That's a great thing to bring up, Craig, because the national story can be a unifyingthread.
Right now in the United States, we're divided on our national story.
We're divided on what to teach in our history to our children.
(30:58):
We're polarized around this.
But a national story can be if we can come up with a national narrative
That is a point of pride that unites people.
It did used to be the idea that we're a melting pot, right?
I mean, it was kind of two things melting pot, American dream, American dream.
Anybody, you know, even an immigrant could grow up, raise themselves up by theirbootstraps and become president of the United States or CEO of the big biggest company.
(31:27):
So that had been a pretty much a uniting story.
The problem was.
When we were doing this, it didn't really include everybody.
so blacks were excluded a lot from that story throughout most of the history of the UnitedStates.
And many immigrants were actually excluded from that story.
(31:49):
And I think it's really interesting the way we've dealt with this, the intersection ofrace and immigration and looking at both Canada and the United States, because both have
received a lot of immigration and
In the United States, of course, we had early immigrants from Europe and Southern Europewho were racialized and considered darker skin and not equal to the earlier whites, the
(32:20):
more Anglo-Saxon immigrants from Northern Europe.
Over time, those Southern Europeans became whiter in the perception.
their own perception and the perception of others.
They became identified as white and someone else took their place on the bottom rung.
(32:45):
Other immigrants from other countries that looked more different even Asia, darker LatinAmerica, even East European.
But also black immigrants coming from the
the southern United States to the north in the great migration throughout most of the 20thcentury, the great migration and as southern blacks moved up during the Jim Crow era to
(33:17):
the cities of the north, they became the lowest rung on the totem pole and even resentedby those immigrants who had just come very recently themselves, especially from southern
Europe.
And so it's very interesting that, you know, we continue to, as human beings, seem to wanta hierarchy and someone to be lower than us.
(33:42):
And in Canada, they actually had the same kind of change so that the wider immigrantsbecame, you know, it's easier to blend in just physically.
And they actually called the newer immigrants in the seventies and eighties, particularlyfrom Asia and Canada.
visible minorities.
(34:02):
They officially call them visible minorities, which I was very surprised to learn about.
But they made these policies, these multicultural policies to also try to help thempreserve their own cultural heritage while integrating with the country.
it worth it, as I talk about immigration, to try to remind us of that amnesia that we'veforgotten about our ancestors?
(34:29):
I just read a story from Peter Marty this week who's the editor and publisher of ChristianCentury.
He was critiquing this Republican nominees for president and vice president with thisunsupported myth about what's happening in Springfield, Ohio with the Haitians.
I had not read this before in my understanding of American immigration history, but thatwhen the Germans were coming in in the mid-19th century, they were being critiqued as
(34:56):
immigrants and not being American.
and we don't want them.
And he said an ugly rumor, I'll it actually, because I don't want to misstate it.
Quote, an ugly rumor surfaced about dogs disappearing when German butchers would arrive ina neighborhood.
An American songwriter, Septimus Winner, wrote that the rumor into his 1864 song, where,where has my little dog gone?
(35:24):
We sing that today as a children's nursery rhyme is kind of a funny story, but it wascommenting that these German butchers were turning dogs into baloney and liverwurst and
feeding to people.
is amazing to me.
Yes, I had never heard that story before.
ends his op-ed saying it's interesting that the Republican nominee for president'sgrandfather was German.
(35:47):
And he would then sit here and support this ugly, ugly story about the Haitians inSpringfield.
Would others understand that we have to get over that amnesia and kind of go back into ourpast and say, we've found a way to get people to become part of this great American
(36:08):
experiment.
Not without mistakes and not without the issues that you're raising that we're facingtoday, but trying to remind us that we need to find those ways of our shared history with
its negatives can make us better people today if we realize that.
Certainly going back and teaching history that is more inclusive is extremely important.
(36:32):
And looking at the warts as well as the achievements and acknowledging past mistakes,that's really important for any society to move forward to advance.
The problem is people will often, the people who are anxious today about immigration maysee it differently.
They may see it as
But it's a bigger threat today than it was back then.
(36:55):
Or have some perceptions that they've been told about what's so scary today about it.
And so I think it's really incumbent upon us to not only try to revise our narrative todayand our history teaching to be inclusive, as we said, and to remind about the past.
(37:18):
Even telling that story would be.
It is amazing.
We're just repeating history.
We're repeating conspiracy theories.
This has happened before about Germans, and now Germans are considered very uprightAmericans who belong here.
But it also is going to require positive stories about what do immigrants contributetoday?
(37:46):
And I go back to that Canadian research.
that's showing, what are they contributing that people trust when they see that immigrantsare making a contribution economically?
Seven trillion dollars to the economy.
We'll put that in the show notes and some other information about the benefits.
Cecil and I with Lawful Assembly keep trying to talk about the great inspiration theorythat we get inspired by immigrants that have contributed so much and continue to
(38:14):
contribute today to the benefits in our in our society.
That's one of our kind of themes.
Yes, and actually then that's it.
so many immigrants who are in high respected positions today, know, who are immigrants orwhose parents were immigrants from all over the world, definitely, or spouses, spouses of
(38:36):
candidates, for example.
So it's telling the positive stories.
We're going to have this problem, this psychological problem that I said aboutconfirmation bias, overcoming that confirmation bias, but it's really important.
And so it's incumbent upon media to do this.
It's incumbent upon academics, intellectuals, any kind of leader in society or anybodythat's got a voice, religious, faith leaders, cultural figures.
(39:14):
everybody podcast like this one is to try to get across these stories so that people canunderstand the contributions and you know and how hard immigrants are working or whatever
the problem is and that it can be a positive sum, a win-win situation.
(39:36):
It's not a win-lose.
How do we?
I want to just roll back really quickly to something you said earlier when you weretalking.
It really
interesting analysis of our current political system in this country with two separateparties, with the way in which we handle this is different from many other democracies all
(39:58):
across the world.
As you say, how do we change any of that?
They're the ones who make this decision.
So how can we as a people impress upon our leaders
to try to change a system that they are very deeply entrenched in and in many waysenriched by.
It seems like a vicious circle and a circle and egg thing.
(40:20):
How's it going to happen?
Because the ones in power don't want to change the way they got to power, obviously.
But I want to tell you, New Zealand and Australia, two of these former British coloniesthat had that same system, plurality system, made a change.
Australia earlier in the 20th century,
And New Zealand in the 1990s, when people and political parties, but just normal citizensgot fed up with the distortions that resulted from their elections and the
(40:53):
disproportionate representation.
And they made a change toward a more proportional system in each of those countries.
And so it is possible to do.
We are already making a change.
We see it in many communities around.
There are groups fighting for or, you know, trying to educate about and advocating forrank choice voting is one alternative method being used in cities, especially, and in some
(41:25):
states.
And it's going to be voted on again in November in a couple of states in Nevada, forexample.
That's one change.
And that's coming from, you know, from the people is really coming from below.
against the political parties.
But there's a great dissatisfaction even in Congress, among the people sitting inCongress, because for most of them, it's not fun.
(41:51):
It's not necessarily what they wanted to get out of going there.
It's hard for them to do their public service.
Some of them just want to platform, want to be on the news.
But most of them, I think, still want to have
So they're open to ideas and I've been on several task forces, groups in the United Statestrying to work for and make recommendations about changes to our electoral system ranging
(42:23):
from ranked choice voting to all the way to changing it more substantially to proportionalrepresentation that I was talking about.
the way we do it is first we put it on the agenda.
We start talking about it.
start educating people and that is happening.
Those are all these reforms are on the agenda and it's spreading more and more people arelearning about it.
(42:47):
And second, we try to start talking to the existing elected representatives that this isnot this.
This is not against you or it's not in favor of one party or another.
This this does not advantage one party or another.
This is going to be better for the whole system.
And we can do it starting at the local levels.
(43:07):
States can make their own changes.
Most of this does not require a constitutional amendment.
Moving away from a single member district to elect our members to the House ofRepresentatives does require Congress to repeal a law that they just passed in 1967
(43:29):
requiring single member districts.
They did that actually as a positive thing after the civil rights movement.
And there's a story behind that, but they actually had good intentions for that.
But now we've come up to where it's, you know, it's, it's gone, it's run its course.
We're now, it's now not helping us.
And so all they have to do is fill that law.
(43:50):
In this election, if the pollsters are correct in the one district in Nebraska that hasthe one vote that gives to the electoral college vote from their.
how they vote in their district, and I think there's one in Maine as well.
There are some pollsters that suggest that one vote may come down to make the differencein the election.
I have a good friend Dave in Omaha that they're so excited that both their national andtheir local elections, their Senate and their House elections in that district is
(44:20):
invigorating the population of that around Omaha to get involved.
And depending how it all works out, that may be a model to say,
more districts may say, want to have that kind of excitement.
We want to have kind of that impact.
So you may be in something happening.
Exactly.
And that is it's Nebraska and Maine that actually do divide their electoral college votesto be proportional to the vote within the state.
(44:46):
They're the only two other states can do that.
They can choose, you know, how to get their electors however they want.
So it's
That's not a constitutional amendment to change the way they divide up their electors.
Most states just move to a winner take all.
There was no reason to do that.
They did have reasons when they did it.
(45:08):
And a lot of it comes back again to the civil rights movement and the resistance toproviding civil rights in the United States in the South.
So a lot of these things do come back to that.
But that can happen.
States can decide that.
Right now and populations, know, grassroots groups can push that kind of change it.
(45:28):
You're absolutely right.
We don't think of Nebraska as one of the seven swing states that everybody talks about.
But that one electors we saw this week in the news when they refuse to change the systemand they're going to keep that system that their three electors can can be based on.
(45:50):
the proportion of votes for Democrats and Republicans that may decide the presidency ofthe United States and their Senate.
Yeah, their Senate race could decide the control of the Senate.
So they are going to have a lot of impact this year that they normally don't have.
I just want to encourage all of your listeners to try to be open, be curious, reach acrossthe divide and to be hopeful.
(46:20):
that we can make changes.
We got individual choice.
brought us to where we are today.
Individual decisions of many people.
We can get ourselves out of it.
We can resist those kinds of perniciously polarizing, demonizing political messages.
(46:41):
We can resist those candidates.
We can look for information and we can try to elect people and change our system to a waythat is going to get us out of this deep hole that we seem to be in today.
We just have to act and have some courage and hope.
(47:02):
Dr.
McCoy is wonderful that you came on today and taught us all about this.
I learned so much from you being here today.
We're gonna put links in the show notes to all the places that people can find you on theinternet.
I wanna thank you for coming on today.
I add my thanks.
You've added to our inspiration theory.
We have one more way to be inspired by your work, both here in this country and around theworld for.
(47:26):
for what you do for human rights and for us really flourishing as the democracy.
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
This podcast is not intended as legal advice.
If you'd like to email the show, you can send us a message at lawfulpod at gmail.com.
(47:48):
If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, you can go to lawfulpod.com.
Click on the microphone and leave us a voice message.
If you enjoy the show, please rate us on iTunes and Spotify or wherever you get yourpodcasts.
If you're interested in Cecil's other shows, you can check out Cognitive Dissonance andCitation Needed.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!