From Brexit to the 2020 election, the United States and the United Kingdom seem more divided than ever as media, political polarization, and other factors combine to form what Mitchell Smith describes as "the Great Perceptual Divide."
Smith joined Democracy Works to explore what this divide is, how it's impacting politics on both sides of the Atlantic, and other countries might offer a model for moving beyond it.
He is director of the School of International Affairs at Penn State and professor of international affairs. His book, "The Great Perceptual Divide: Identity and Democracy in the U.S. and Britain," is available now.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem,
Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week we are talking with our Penn State colleague Mitchell Smith, who is the director of the School of International affairs at Penn State and professor of international affairs. He has a new book out called *The Great Perceptual Divide: Identity and Democracy in the U.S. and Britain* A lot of what Mitchell writes about will be familiar to you if you've been listening to this show for a while. Issues about political divides and and polarization and the ramifications of that in the U.S. but think bringing in the U.K. angle is unique. So we'll spend some time talking about that. But you know, this idea of identity really is core to Mitchell's argument. It's in the title of his book, and I thought that would be a good place to start. Just you know, refreshing our memories about the role that identity plays in some of these issues that we're seeing with regard to political divides and and everything that comes with them.
Chris Beem
Yeah, I speaking of reminding us, I actually wrote a book about neuroscience and politics. Oh gosh, a long time ago, and and so all this book is really kind of bringing it back. He's absolutely right. Mitchell is absolutely right that that identity is central to our to our individual politics and how we understand the world. It all kind of fits together, and our sense of identity, who we are, what matters to us, what we value, what we think is good and true-all of these things are fundamental to how we get through the day and how we understand ourselves.
Chris Beem
And anything that our brains perceive to go against that, to undermine it, is understood by our brains to be a threat, and you know this. This threat is perceived even before we're consciously aware of what we're hearing. So we come up with a reason to make this threat go away, and when we do that again unconsciously, our brain releases chemicals to make us feel better. So this is the power of identity in our politics, and why it makes it so hard for us to transcend identity when we're talking about politics, because it's just so deep, and it's you know it's not it's not exclusive to any one party, it's not exclusive to any one country. It is human, and all we can do is just learn how to recognize it and mitigate it. So that's my what was that like? My TED talk on on political identity.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, and and Chris, I I agree with you about the kind of central role that identity plays, and and kind of the the way in which our brains protect ourselves from kind of new information and changing environments that that we perceive to be threatening, and it's one of the things that that I think is so powerful about the main point of Mitchell's book, which is that as we're receiving more information, new information that could potentially challenge our viewpoints rather than shifting our perspective. What we're doing is using that new information to justify our positions, right? To harden our positions and justify them in different ways. And I found that super impactful because I think a lot of the narrative recently has been that people are ignoring information, right, or are not able to take in new things, and Mitchell's pretty convincing in in both the book and in his interview that people are taking in new information. Right, they're hearing new inputs.
Cyanne Loyle
They're just using that information rather than to shift their perspective to double down on and kind of rejustify and harden their positions. And you know, I think we've seen this during COVID. We've seen this, yeah. I mean, during during the recent january 6 insurrection and other times in in U.S. political history as well as in Brexit. So I'm looking forward to hearing Mitchell tell us more about it. And just a reminder that that Brexit is the referendum in the United Kingdom about whether or not to remain within the European Union, or to leave the European Union, and ultimately the referendum comes down in favor of the United Kingdom removing itself from the European Union, both economically and socially.
Chris Beem
And the other thing I think is worth mentioning is that the phrase that oriented the Brexit, the pro Brexit campaign, was take back control, and think about that in terms of identity and what it was at stake in the minds of so many of the people who voted for leaving.
Cyanne Loyle
And while this is a comparative case, one of the things that I find so interesting, to your point, Chris, about the the timing of Brexit is how. Interwoven, a lot of these politics and strategies are so. I mean, this is not just the UK and the US. This is politics in Hungary. This is politics in other parts of Europe. They're not happening in a vacuum, right? So politicians are learning techniques from other politicians. People, citizens of these countries, are watching the news in other countries, and so while we tend to focus on a lot of these questions from a U.S. lens, U.S. politics and our view of the world here in the United States is intimately interlinked with what's going on in the rest of the world. And I think that Mitchell's book is a really useful way to put that into perspective and conversation.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and we we do spend a lot of time talking about media and social media and differences in both the types of outlets as well as policy decisions that the the UK has made that the US has not. So yes, lots to dig into here. So let's go ahead and get to the interview. Here is my conversation with Mitchell Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
Mitchell Smith, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.
Mitchell Smith
Thankyou so much for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
So excited to talk with you about your new book, The Great Perceptual Divide. It covers a lot of things we've been talking about on the show really since the beginning. But I think a new spin that you bring with your experience in international politics and comparative politics and global affairs. So let's just dive in. What is the great perceptual divide?
Mitchell Smith
Yes, great. Thank you so much. So where I'd start is to point out that the great perceptual divide, and the reason why I call it the great perceptual divide is that I'm talking about something that is goes way beyond the traditional partisanship that you know we've seen in the United States, and that in fact is a component of all healthy democracies. We all know that deep partisanship partisanship has deepened in the United States over the past few decades, but I think that with some recent developments, and I'll elaborate on those shortly, that divide has become something that is actually different from the past. And let me explain how, when we look at the ways in which people are separated, we find that the depth of difference in perceptions does not respond to changes in objective reality. And this is, you know, this is how I started the book. I started by observing what was going on in in Britain over Brexit and the way in which perceptions actually grew further apart as more information came to bear on what was happening there, and then it happened in the United States with the COVID pandemic.
Mitchell Smith
It happened with january 6, 2021. It happened with the the 2020 presidential election, and what we saw is that as more information came to bear, perceptions actually grew further apart, and that was, I think, a somewhat new development. If we go back to the financial crisis of 2008 nine, what we find that is actually there are always partisan divides over estimates of the economy. Those who are of the party of the president in office tend to see the economy is much stronger than those who are of the opposition party. That's a pretty consistent finding. And what started to happen with the events that I've talked about, from Brexit in the UK to the COVID pandemic to the 2020 presidential election to the events of January 620 21 is that developments that were observable did not bring people closer together but they drove them further apart so interpretations of reality just diverged sharply and that's the great perceptual divide
Jenna Spinelle
I'm reminded of some research from Chris Bail, who I believe is at either Duke or UNC. He studies social media, and he what they found was that if you show people information to to try to offer a different perspective, it actually reinforces what they already believe or makes those beliefs stronger. So this sounds like it falls right in line with that, but I wonder: does a country have to be a democracy, or is there something about democracies that make them particularly susceptible to this this type of divide? I know you only look at at two countries, but you you mentioned some others tangentially. I'm thinking about you know in an authoritarian context where maybe the information is more controlled by the government or things like that. Yeah, I just wonder if if there is something unique about democracies that make them ripe for this perceptual divide.
Mitchell Smith
Well, interestingly, I think that in some sense it should be the opposite. That is, in society. Is where information is controlled and their authoritarian systems. And I do talk a bit in the book about Hungary. Of course, fortunately, from a democracy perspective, things have changed in Hungary since the book, since I completed the book. I talk a little bit about Turkey, and there are absolutely those divides in those countries. But what I think is the case is that number one, in democratic societies, it is a bit more surprising because there is a free flow of information, and again, that's where I started the book with the observation that, and this was really driven by my study of Brexit, that as more information came out about the way things were developing, and one would expect that there'd be some coalescence of views, not complete overlap. Partisanship is going to be present, and again, that's a healthy thing in a democratic society. But in fact, as more information came out, what began to happen is that people's assessments and explanations for their positions began to shift more than the positions themselves, and so I think that's a more surprising thing that's happening in democratic society than an authoritarian society. And then secondly, the concern in my book is really about explaining the impact of this great perceptual divide on democratic systems. So my concern is really with democracy and the fate of democracy.
Jenna Spinelle
So yeah, so let's let's dive into what's been happening in in the UK? Remind us briefly what Brexit was and how you saw the perceptual divide develop there.
Mitchell Smith
So, without going to excessive detail about about Brexit, it ultimately you know I I think that outside observers and people in the United States think that this was driven by the overbearing European Union, and in fact, that had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. There were very little to do. It was actually driven by interparty competition and the the threat to the conservative party that was in power from a rising movement on the right, and they wanted to address that. That led to the referendum. The referendum was, you know, people were very divided between leavers and remainers, and here's where my interest in writing this book started. What I began to observe is that the conservatives promised that, and supporters of Brexit promised that things would unfold in a particular way, which was that the British government would largely be in control of the negotiations. It turned out that it was very obvious that that was not the case. That for all sorts of reasons, structurally, legally, they were on their back heels, and they struggled to even find their footing and define a national position on Brexit for a very long time. And as that happened, instead of people revising their views about how well Britain was doing in the negotiations and whether this would be good for Britain. The positions just solidified and diverged even more sharply, and this is where I began to think of the great perceptual divide concept. That as more information comes to bear on a situation that is developing, what we see is that as opposed to people revising their positions, they revise their their rationales for their positions, but the positions themselves don't change; they harden. I think psychologists would not be shocked by that finding, but it's very interesting to observe it happening in reality. And of course, you know, to this day, that divide persists, and it is very clear in any objective sense. And I'll admit that I, you know, as someone who studies the European Union, I did not think Brexit from the start was was going to be a good thing for Britain. It's turned out that it's been very harmful economically and very divisive politically. And yet there are still people who who argue that the reason why these outcomes have happened is that Brexit has been sabotaged by you know actors in the EU, but also in the UK. The civil service, something we've heard a lot about in the United States, the deep state.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So where where is this coming from? Where is this information coming from in the UK context? Because thinking about you know the the media systems between the US and the UK are also somewhat different. You know the presence of of the BBC, and at least from the outside looking in, it seems that there's not as ripe an environment for two different information ecosystems to spread. But it seems like that that has happened.
Mitchell Smith
Yes, I I think that the United States is really, you know, the the haven for this powerful disinformation enterprise doesn't mean it's all coming from the United States, but a lot of it is driven by the U.S. media environment. I think it's operating in the U.K. as well. There's a lot of research on Brexit itself that there was suggesting there was outside interference toward the end of the referendum campaign that may have changed the outcome in 2016. There's no way to know for certain, but you know it was a relatively close outcome, and just change at the margins could have made a difference. And then you saw a very strict division in the media. For example, the Telegraph. A traditionally conservative but respected newspaper coming down very strongly on the side of a hard Brexit, and then you actually saw the government, and this was this was a relatively new departure. The government of Boris Johnson, who was one of the leading purveyors of the Brexit movement, led an attack on the BBC and sought to undermine its legitimacy, you know, essentially labeling it along with civil servants part of the deep state. So again, some of the emulating some of the things that were going on in the United States,
Jenna Spinelle
And it it does seem that this that Brexit set off a much more unstable period in British government. You know, I'm thinking back to the 80s and the 90s. The you know prime ministers were fairly stable, and then since Brexit, there's been what four, five at least since then. So, do you do you see a cause and effect there?
Mitchell Smith
Yeah, yes. So, absolutely, yes. Brexit did contribute to a period of instability, which, of course, we are very much still in. It's too early to say whether there's some movement away from that, but for example, the Boris Johnson government that led Britain to the the apex of success, at least temporary success of the Brexit movement, 2019 elected in a in a landslide electoral victory on the platform of getting Brexit done. So there's a lot of support for that. It happened, but there are a lot of promises about then using the resources freed up from that departure to invest in British society. And there are two fundamental problems with that. At least two fundamental problems. One is that the Conservative Party, during its period in power going back to the early 2000 teens had in fact underinvested in you know in all sorts of social services in Britain. So the social services were fraying.
Mitchell Smith
Economic inequality was deepening. A lot of people were suffering from that. I mean, a lot of that fed into support for Brexit. And there's of course a parallel in the United States that I think people who were economically displaced and so felt socially displaced were were looking for someone to champion their cause, and then so that that's the the first issue is the underinvestment, and the second is there were no resources freed by leaving the European Union. In fact, quite the opposite, that there are a lot of European Union resources available to the to Britain and also earned through trade with the European Union that were lost. Essentially, a lot of economic activity that was lost, treasury revenue that was lost, and Britain had to spend more money on things like you know hiring people for the National Health Service, who left to return to Europe because there were many people working in the National Health Service who were from European Union member countries, and then all the customs and border control investments that Britain had to make. So all of that took resources away from those investments, and so that has contributed to the political instability. And you know, for example, why the the government of Kier Starmer that came in as a response to the failings of the Conservative Party under Johnson and his successors, why Starmer failed so rapidly? Because there's a desperate need in Britain for someone to address the societal challenges, and there was not a sense that he was doing that effectively.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and you know, you mentioned customs and border control. Made me think about immigration. I think is a key part of both the the story of the the U.S. and the U.K. You know who who belongs in a place. Who you know, there's this idea. This is my country, right? I mean, of course, in Britain, right? People can't actually say that their ancestors go back to whatever how far they go. Whereas that's different in America because we are we are a country of of immigrants. Nevertheless, the the ideology behind it seems to to be the same.
Mitchell Smith
Yes, certainly in in the United States. I mean that is you know what I consider an element of the great perceptual divide, it's people. As I argue in the book, it's based on identities. Now, I don't say much about where those identities come from. That's a very complex question. That's outside the scope of the book, but it is true that you know the sense of who belongs to the political community, who should have rights, is part of the the identity divide that is operative, and it's also the case in the UK. And one of the things this goes back to your your prior question about the continuing division there over Brexit and other issues. Immigration was a big part of this, but then when Brexit happened, and you know there was a the claim that borders would be controlled. In fact, Britain had to invite many more people in from other parts of the world than the European Union in order to fill jobs in the National Health Service to attract international students to their universities because the economic impact was enormous, and so. Immigration inflows have actually increased since then, and again, you know, the the conservatives were punished for that in the 2024 election that brought Kier Stormer temporarily to power.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So, is does the the perceptual divide play out there? So, in the in the U S. I think you know the the argument is that you people, people on the right broadly don't want immigrants coming because they're afraid they're going to take jobs. Yet the immigrants take jobs that a lot of people who are American citizens would not want to take working on farm fields and and whatever. It sounds like there is perhaps a similar thing in the in the UK where you know people don't want immigrants coming but they also want to be able to see a doctor or you know all the other sort of government based services that they've come to depend on
Mitchell Smith
yeah it's often the case I mean this has been found in other societies too that places with municipalities with the few or towns with the fewest immigrants are some of the places where this anti-immigrant sentiment is felt most strongly. So this is why I consider it part of identity. It's a sense of who belongs to the, who should belong to the political community, and who does not have a right to belong. And I think those identities become firmly entrenched. And you know this is why arguments that, for example, well, immigrants actually make net contributions. They pay workers who come here that are not documented are still paying into Social Security, for example. The they tend to the statistics show they tend to commit crime at lower rates than than others. They tend to use fewer social services than other people, so in fact they make a net financial contribution to the the U.S. economy. But I think those rational arguments don't, and I don't mean to say that my point is not that people are irrational. It's that judgments are based on identity and driven by identity, and perceptions, the great perceptual divide are driven by identity, and that's why those arguments are not really going to make a lot of inroads in changing people's minds.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's almost like you can in a in the most dystopian form of this world, you could sit around and wonder what's next. You know, what what what aspect of our lives, if there are even you know many left that haven't been touched by this divide, like what's going to come next? But I I have to imagine as somebody studying this, you as these things happen, you're like, oh, there's another one. Oh, there's another one. Oh, there's another one. I mean, good for your book, but maybe not so much for the health of American democracy.
Mitchell Smith
Yes, and in addition to the health of democracy itself, here's what really this seriously worries me. That is, there are. I think everyone listening to this will agree there are serious policy challenges confronting the United States and the globe. You know, there's the climate crisis clearly. But think about the what's going on right now in the U.S. economy and the accumulation of debt. We have heard for a long time that the debt is a problem that we need to deal with, and I think we have now reached a point where the evidence is that yes, that is true, and we we do need to do this. What is missing is a debate about this. Where in Congress is there a serious debate about these policy issues? Instead, what we get are culture war arguments and you know hearings about things that to give an example and this is not about the debt but it's about public health the recent appearance of Tony Fauci before a congressional committee one could take whatever position one wants on whether Tony Fauci is a here a public health hero or a public health villain, but what is clear is that those hearings were not designed to address a vital issue, which is what are we going to do when the next pandemic hits, and there will be one. You know, we all know this. That was not part of this. This was just simply about vilifying him. We've seen the same thing with hearings on higher education that you know the entire purpose has been to embarrass higher education leaders to undermine the mission of of leading universities and to create a public mistrust of the university system and we've seen that reflected in data on how people view universities.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I would say public media as well. I remember the heads of NPR and PBS going through much the same kind of of treatment and having their funding cut as well. So that brings me. I'm going to put my democracy reform hat on here for a second. So you know, people in the democracy reform world often argue that the the American system is uniquely vulnerable to this kind of behavior that you were just describing because we are a two party system and if we had actually in fact more of a parliamentary style government like the UK has that it might not be quite so bad at least from a legislative or. Governing perspective. I don't know how much that would affect the media and the you know misinformation and all of that stuff. But it seems that parliamentary systems are are not foolproof or are are not immune to this type of thing either.
Mitchell Smith
But I so first of all, you know, the idea of that scope of structural reform in the United States is just something that seems extremely unlikely to happen. To put it mildly, that's not a reason to abandon, you know, attention to it. But let me return to something I touched on earlier, which is the fact that checks and balances have actually worked better in the British system. So if we go back to the prime ministership of Boris Johnson, who was elected, you know, overwhelmingly in 2019. In a very short space of time, by 2022, he was gone, and that was because he was held. He and his government were held accountable for several things they had done. Number one, they violated COVID lockdown rules. That information came out. There was public outrage about it that began to penetrate across the great perceptual divide, and there was some, you know, some transcendence of that divide because there was outrage even among supporters of Brexit, supporters of the Boris Johnson government, and then what began to happen is that some members of the of his own party began to take a position critical of him in a parliamentary system.
Mitchell Smith
The fate of all those members of parliament are tied to the popularity of the prime minister and of the party, and so they're more motivated to take action. Now they didn't oust him immediately, but there were several more violations of parliamentary norms that he engaged in, including you know misleading Parliament about appointments that he made of people who were had really tainted backgrounds, and eventually members of his own party ousted him. You know this hearkens back in the United States to say you know Nixon and Watergate, right? I mean people may not be aware that it was Republican senators that went to Nixon and said, "You are finished. There is no way forward, and he resigned. We can't imagine that today. In fact, I there's a part of the book where I look at instances of financial malfeasance by members of Congress since the Watergate era, and I whittle it down to sort of life cases, of which I think there are 18 that I found, and I look at one in particular that happened in a district in Southern California, in which there was initially an investigation of this person for financial malfeasance, and then they were found to have be guilty of it. And in fact, what happened over that period, and this is you know within the last few years, is that support for reelecting the person actually increased because of all of the disinformation, the discrediting of authoritative institutions that have laid the groundwork for people to say this is about the machinations of the deep state, and oh, other members of Congress are also guilty of corruption. It's just not been found out yet. So this instance is really something we can dismiss. And based on partisanship, people and identity, people continue to support this person.
Mitchell Smith
You mentioned Hungary briefly, and I wonder if the the election there of Peter Magar is an example of how the perceptual divide can be overcome, or some type of path forward through all of this. Yeah, I mean it's a very hopeful development. The same thing in Poland. Poland had turned in a an authoritarian direction, not maybe as solidified as what seemed to be the case in Hungary. So I think that does pose hope for democracy. It was a very heavy lift. I think in the prior election in Hungary, there was a great deal of hope that things could change, and that did not come to pass. But eventually, it did. It took very significant mass mobilization in an environment in which control of the media was very restricted for the political opposition. You know, one fear is that the United States is the United States headed in that sort of direction. I do think Orban's Hungary has been a blueprint for a movement that seeks to push the U.S. in a similar direction, and so in some in some sense, what's happened in Hungary maybe is hopeful for the United States as well.
Jenna Spinelle
So you know, all of this can seem just beyond the control of any one person, right? We have all these big forces in the media and the the government and the the culture. All these things we've we've spent the last 45 minutes talking about. I wonder what what advice you might leave our listeners with about what they can do if they you know besides buying your book and reading all about the great perceptual divide, if they are concerned about it and its its ramifications on not just American democracy but democracy. Around the world, like what can they do? What steps can they take? What advice would you leave our listeners with?
Mitchell Smith
Yeah, so in my in the conclusion of the book, I try to be hopeful, and the case I make there is that you know there have been studies of dialog across difference, and honestly, I don't think there's necessarily a great deal of evidence that that's changing minds. So how does one engage with people that have different views? And I think that the the British election from 2024 gives us some insight into that. As does you know one of the things I was listening to when I was writing the book was I was listening to a podcast with a Republican political pollster named Frank Luntz. He's very well known in Republican circles and in the political world, in which he was talking with people about vaccines, and he came at this as someone who maybe shared many perspectives with his focus group, but he was a believer in the efficacy of vaccines, and those in the group were vaccine skeptics. And he was exploring, you know, how can I, out of an interest from his perspective, in in saving the health of these and protecting these people, convince them to get vaccines?
Mitchell Smith
And I think an interesting lesson came out of that experience, and that was that whenever he tried to invoke the public health authorities, there was resistance. And what became clear is that the perspectives at work were not so much anti-science or anti-medicine as they were anti-government. And so I think understanding that allows us to appeal to people who maybe see things differently from us in ways that separate those issues from the issues from identity. So you have strong anti-government sentiment. Well, I'm not going to try to convince you to overcome that. But what I am going to tell you is that vaccine maybe can save your life. And he began when he when he talked about it at an individual level, at a health level, and referred to the medical community as opposed to the government, he began to see some minds changing. So I think it's about you're not browbeating people in ways that try to change who they are, but maybe separating some issues. You know, and this is true of you know higher education too. That some of the things that higher education has been attacked for, you know, the attacks are gaged in ways that appeal to people's identities. So we need to kind of separate those things and say, you know, you you believe these things about you know about what meritocracy is. That's understandable. Here's what higher education is and tries to do, and I'm not going to argue with you about those other things because we just see the world differently. There,
Jenna Spinelle
Mitchell, this this book and the perspective you shared, I think, are an interesting new lens to view things that we've all been thinking about and hearing about for going back at least 10 years, if not a little bit longer than that. So, thank you for the fresh perspective, and thank you for joining us today to talk about it.
Mitchell Smith
Thank you so much for the conversation. I hope people read the book. For me, writing it during all of the things that were going was really important and cathartic, and I want to be hopeful about the future.
Cyanne Loyle
Well, thanks so much, Jenna, for really for leading that really interesting conversation. You know, one of the things that I was most struck with, probably from kind of an international or comparative lens, is thinking through the where the U.S. and the U.K. sit in a comparative context, and certainly what I think you know some of the arguments that Mitchell is making helps me to think through the fact that many of these politics are not an authoritarian issue, right? These are not authoritarian politics. Mitchell very deliberately picks two democracies as the cases that he uses to kind of explore the the phenomenon of the great perceptual divide. I spend a lot of time thinking about authoritarian regimes and the way that authoritarian regimes kind of control the media and control the narrative, you know, some of this Mitchell talks about this in terms of the deep state, right, and kind of deep state stuff that is that is driving some of these thinking.
Cyanne Loyle
But it it really is this this market turn in how we think about the world and the type of information that we receive. And and I still need to kind of think through it for myself. What about this argument? Are you is uniquely democratic, right? We shouldn't expect to see this in authoritarian regimes versus you know something that you know, Chris. You started us out by thinking about this in terms of human kind of brain function and like the neurological capacity we have to bring in threats, which may you know transcend regime type.
Chris Beem
I completely agree with you. I think this is a basically a democratic issue or an issue for democracies, right? If there's only what's the point of being a Boston Red Sox fan if you don't have the Yankees, right? If you're an authoritarian government and there's only one government, I I think you're likely to. Try to find your identity elsewhere, unless your self-interest is so completely tied up with the regime. But it's also true that in many of these nations, some of which you mentioned, and some of which we can go on, and we've talked about them here, these nations are democracies. But in response to a kind of resentment, sense of resentment, sense of dissatisfaction, sense of frustration, it gives rise to a populist kind of politics that is, at least as an adjective, more authoritarian, right? And in by doing that, there is a kind of oh, everything your identity is telling you is correct, right? You have you are right to feel this sense of resentment and this sense of estrangement and this sense of being screwed by the authorities and me, the populist politician, is here to not only validate what you said. "Quote just come to my mind. I am your retribution, is what Trump said, but also to kind of like try to at least claim to to restore a kind of status quo ante, and you know, think about make America great again, and think about come on, what did what was the oh take back control on the part of in Great Britain. So I mean, there are these kind of you know realities that extend across the world in a number of democracies, and I think it's a really interesting question to ask: What is it about the time in which we find ourselves that makes this happen? But it's also the case that these governments, including Great Britain and including the United States have responded to this state of affairs by pushing a more authoritarian stance with regards to politics.
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah, I mean, you you asked the question about kind of why this moment, right? So you know, what is it about about identity politics that are taking hold? And I think you know there's a step earlier in that argument, which is thinking about the economic and social dimensions of the world in which we find ourselves. Right, there are we think about Turkey and India and Hungary. There are there are unique social and economic conditions in these countries that didn't exist before. Right, so we're entering kind of new times when we think about these things, and and so those are interacting even in the United States now, right? With identity politics and and so there's you know there is a shift here, right? There's something new going on that's allowing identity politics to become so salient and for populism to take hold.
Chris Beem
Yeah, and and that that it leads to a a kind of scary question: What happens next? What do we do? Right? In how do we get past this sense of my identity is the only thing that's going to determine whether or not I think something is true, or whether or not I think some information is valid or worth my hearing, and if that's the case, what's the point of argument? What's the point of persuasion? What's the point of developing information? Right?
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah. I mean, I I've got kind of two responses to that. So the first is, you know, I think about some of those questions in the lens of as an educator, right, at a higher education institution, kind of what is what is my job to my to my students, right? So, what is my responsibility to my students? And you know, I start at the beginning of every semester telling my students my kind of educational background, my work background, kind of how I got there, and then opening myself up to questions about whether or not they believe I'm fit to lead them, right, in the discussions and the learning process that we're going to have going forward, and so putting it in a context of kind of here is my experience and here's what I've learned, and that's why I think I can help you learn this stuff, right, and so not assuming that they think my title gives me any additional authority, but rather helping to kind of coat my authority, right in in the the work that I've done, right, in the experiences that I've had, and that's why you know for me it's the real root of these problems is is less about the identity politics than the the step before that, which is the conditions that are causing the threat, right? So the kind of economic, social, climactic, right conditions that are making people feel like they have no other options, right? Right. That are starting to erode kind of these basic humanity responses.
Chris Beem
Mitchell stops. You know, his book stops. In 2024, things have not gotten better in Britain. You know, we have they're going to have an election in 2029, and likely it's going to be what their seventh prime minister in a decade. This is this is precisely the advantage of a parliamentary system: is that they, if you're doing all right, you can keep going. You know, you don't have to have these automatic. You know, you're out after a year, but now it's become a powerful negative on the on their politics. They don't have time to engage these questions, and let alone address them meaningfully, and you know, in the United States, we'll see. But again, it's what Mitchell does and does very well is just show that if you act as if identity is not at the core of the problem, you are not going to address the problem, and that is an argument that is that is worth making, especially in this moment. Okay, so lots to chew on, lots to talk about, really important stuff, right? And and we're we're fortunate to have Mitchell kind of expand our horizon here, our frame of reference. So, for Democracy Works, I'm Chris Beam. I'm
Cyanne Loyle
Cyan Loyal. Thank you.
Chris Beem
This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.