129 | Solo: Democracy in America

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I’m not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I’m using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We’ve talked about related topics recently with Cornel West and David Stasavage, but there are things I wanted to say in my own voice that fit well here. Politics is important everywhere, and it’s a crucial responsibility for those of us who live in societies that aspire to be participatory and democratic. We have to think these things through, and that’s what this podcast is all about.

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Apologies to Alexis de Toqueville, who wrote an important book whose name I stole, and who is mentioned nowhere in this episode.

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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll, and I’m recording this podcast around noon time Pacific on Saturday, January 9th, 2021. Now, long time listeners will know that I’m usually not that specific about when things are being recorded, in part because I wanna be flexible about when they’re released and so forth, and in part because we aim here not for currency of the moment responding to events that are going on in real time, but rather the big questions, the eternal truths, the issues that are going to matter for long-term consequences. Today’s a little bit different, this is a special episode that I’m doing on the fly, that means that a couple of podcasts that were scheduled got bumped a little bit. Sorry, folks, but that’s okay. You’ll appear eventually, but those of you who know… Well, actually, let me state it this way, we like to be very considerate of those archival historians, 500 years in the future, who are bravely going through all of the Mindscape episodes one by one to see what people 500 years previously thought. So for those folks, I should explain what’s going on here, okay?

0:01:07.8 SC: So right now, as of this moment, Donald Trump is the President of the United States, but he lost an election back in November and ordinarily, this would not be a big deal. The votes were counted, it was clear that he lost, but he didn’t accept, he didn’t concede, he did not believe that he lost the election, and he and his allies spread the idea that the election had been stolen. So on a couple of days ago, January 6th, Wednesday, this was the day when the Electoral College, which is the bizarre system United States uses to elect a president. Their votes had already been cast, but they were gonna be counted and approved in Congress in the United States Senate, and so this was the last chance before the election was completely certified, and Trump had a big rally in the United States capital… In Washington DC, the capital city of the United States. And he mentioned that he’s not going to let it happen. He told his supporters, “After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” and he said, “We’ve come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who’ve been lawfully slated.”

0:02:18.3 SC: In other words, he’s telling his supporters that he does not want this usually formality pro forma acceptance of the electoral college results to go forward in Congress and they’re gonna walk down to the Capitol. Of course, he didn’t do that, he said, “I’m gonna walk down with you,” and he went back to his office and hid there, but the people who were in the protest, many of them, quite a large mob of people descended upon the US Capitol, overran the police and took it over. Did a lot of damage, did a lot of vandalism. There were… It’s really not… I’m saying this in a somewhat jocular tone, it was not at all funny. It was quite serious. There were… Some of the people there were clearly trained and looking for bad things to do. There were people with guns, there were people with explosive devices, there were people with zip ties and other things you could use to get hostages, there was talk of hanging people. A lot of the protesters were just there for the lark, right? They were basically tourists and having a good time Instagram-ing the whole thing, but a couple of them were a little bit more serious, a little bit more nefarious, and I think they were in some sense quite fortunate that no one died.

0:03:31.1 SC: Sorry, people did die, so we’re not in any sense fortunate. A couple of people died, I think five is the fatality count as of right now, but what I mean is we’re fortunate that no members of Congress died in the whole thing, it could easily have happened. Anyway, Congress went back to work as soon as the people were removed from the Capitol, and they actually did certify the results of the election, and it nevertheless has shaken us up and things are still changing, that’s why I’m exactly time-stamping where we are, because events are happening very, very rapidly and I can’t even tell you what the events are gonna happen between now and when I release this podcast on Monday, January 11th. But all of that is to say, this is a time for reflecting on what democracy is and how it is supposed to work, and that’s what I wanna talk about. I’ve already had a few podcasts in the last couple of months on democracy in different senses, but I wanna home in on this idea of failure modes for democracy and what we can do about it.

0:04:37.8 SC: I’m not pretending to be an expert on history or Democratic theory or anything like that, but my attitude is that, this is our responsibility. We should all be talking about these things, this is part of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, that we participate. It is not a passive thing. So this is not something to leave to the experts, it’s absolutely something where we should listen to experts, I’m always a big believer in that, but we should listen to the experts and then keep talking about it, it’s an ongoing conversation, an ongoing discourse, not just learning things and then going home. Democracy is a really weird thing. We take it for granted. In a country like the United States, we’re very proud of our democratic traditions. It seems to most people to be the obviously best form of government. Footnote there, of course, people argue about republic versus democracy. That’s a silly argument. You can be a Democratic Republic, and that’s what we are. Okay? My point here is that it really is asking a lot of the citizens in a democracy to take up this responsibility to govern their own country, and some of them do a good job at it, some of them don’t, and we can think about that.

0:05:50.2 SC: Also, the theory of democracy is intellectually fascinating, right? The idea that rather than a boss up on top having the responsibility and telling people what to do, rather than that, there is some emergent collective behavior that bubbles up from the people to the governing apparatus it is kind of fascinating. There are analogs to this in nature in various ways, but there’s no one right way to do it, and so it’s worth thinking through the specific mechanisms that we use to make democracy go from theory to action. And finally, there is the fact that these protests a couple of days ago, were very violent, right? And I think a lot of people are focusing on that, it’s a shock to the system when you see that kind of violence in what is supposed to be, the peaceable deliberation of political conflicts, and that’s a natural focus of attention. But I’m actually not that interested in the violence, I’m not gonna talk about how many cops or National Guards, people we should have guarding the Capitol, or who instigated what or whatever. I do wanna talk about the factors that led us to the place where you could imagine having this kind of violent reaction.

0:07:06.4 SC: The Capitol has not been breached in previous times. The idea that a relatively disorganized mob of rabble could just break into the Capitol and start busting into Congress people’s offices and taking their laptops is not something I would have actually imagined just a few weeks ago. I was completely ready for a demonstration, even a violent demonstration, even a demonstration that went to the Capitol Building and tried to break in. I had never imagined that they would succeed, and so that’s a little weird thing, but again, the tactical issues of the demonstration as interesting and fascinating as they are aren’t my point here. Why in the world would that ever be able to happen? And what can we do about it? What does it tell us about how democracy is going? Is it something that we can prevent going forward? What does it mean for the people who in some sense won? As dramatic as that riot/demonstration was, they lost, right? The mainstream consensus opinion is that it was bad, they were wrong, in fact, there’s pretty a significant backlashes against many people who not only supported that kind of thing, but weren’t even sufficiently against it.

0:08:23.5 SC: So in some sense we can pat ourselves in the back and say, “Okay, we’re doing okay.” Well, what does it mean to be doing, okay? What is the correct response to this kind of thing? How do we deal with those people who are on the other side? This is the crucial question of what it means to live and function in a democracy. What is our attitude toward the people we disagree with? And I think that this is an example where everyone, no matter what side you’re on, no matter how involved you are, there’s some difficult choices to be made in these questions, and so that’s what I wanna talk about. So in fact, I’ll give you a little preview in case you might just be bored and don’t wanna listen to the whole thing. I’ve narrowed it down, I have lots of things to say, long time listeners will also know I can talk at great length about many things for better or for worse. So I’ve narrowed it down to five questions that I wanna talk about. So first is, how should we think about these dramatic, let’s say, let’s not prejudice the idea. I was gonna say outrageous, but these dramatic claims in the political arena such as the election was stolen, right? That is a dramatic claim and has enormous consequences, you might be initially skeptical.

0:09:35.4 SC: What is the epistemic stance we should take towards such a thing? Do we have some responsibility to take it seriously, or can we dismiss it more or less immediately? The second question is, what is the role of violence and violent action in political change? Can we just say something like, “All violence is wrong,” or are there times when the violent action is actually justified? And if that’s true, if sometimes it’s justified, then we have to be a little more nuanced about condemning it, right? We can’t say, “Well, it’s violence therefore I condemn it.” We have to say, “It’s the wrong kind of violence, which is a much more difficult thing to work through, but maybe that’s what we have to do.” The third question is, do we take the lesson here that our democracy is fragile, right? People have certainly been pointing this out for quite a while now, that just because our democracy has lasted for a couple of centuries doesn’t mean it will last forever. No other democracy has ever lasted forever.

0:10:30.4 SC: How fragile is it? Is it really plausible that even if we survive the next couple of weeks, the next few years might be a different story? And if so, how could we shore it up? You can’t predict the future exactly, so what are the steps we can take to make democracy in the United States and elsewhere a little bit more robust? Then the next question is, as I alluded to earlier, what is the sort of personal stance we should take toward, let’s say our opponents, right? Not just people we disagree with, but people we disagree with a lot, really deep down. Are they simply our enemies, or does living in a democracy demand that we find some accommodation to live with them, even if not happily, then at least peaceably. And finally, the last question I’m gonna talk about is, how can we make things better, not just by changing democratic institutions and shoring them up, but by convincing other people that democracy is important and they should not do things like storm the Capitol building. How do we change people’s minds? And this is an easy question to be fatalist about, because we all know some people whose minds will never change, right? Who are just not worth talking to.

0:11:41.9 SC: But I’m a firm believer, there are other people whose minds can change. I think that’s obvious since people’s minds change, as an empirical fact, people’s minds do change. How do we make that happen, especially in this world where we’re so splintered and social media are so important now, and the whole communication process and news gathering and Information Network thing is way different than it used to be just a few years ago. We have to totally rethink this question of persuasion and making our case for our positions in a democratic free speech kind of society. Okay, so those are what the things I wanna talk about. I’ve already been talking for a while. So let’s go.

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0:12:41.1 SC: You may have noticed something about politicians namely that they do not always tell the truth [chuckle] Politicians sometimes lie, or at least let’s say shade a completely accurate representation of the facts. That’s not surprising, and maybe even in certain cases, it’s not even bad. You can get things done while not being completely candid about what you’re doing, and if what you get done is for the better, you could make some kind of instrumental argument that it’s for the best. But there’s untruth and then there’s untruth, right? There’s different sizes of lies that politicians can put forward to the people, and there’s different amounts of egregiousness that those lies can be labeled with. So the first question that I wanna talk about is, how should we deal with claims made by politicians or elites, people in the media, people with large platforms, that seem to be completely dramatically wrong on the face of them. What is the thing that we should do about them? And what I mean is… Again, I’m trying to not prejudice the answer right away. I’m imagining that some claim is made that in ordinary circumstances would seem very unlikely to us, okay?

0:14:00.4 SC: And we don’t need to go into details about exactly what criteria, what situations, what conditions that would be, but there’s basically two kinds of attitudes that you might reasonably think taking. One is, if the claim is just so outrageous sounding, we just dismiss it. We just don’t really give it any credence, right? We say, “Oh come on, we’re not gonna take any of our valuable time and put it into worrying about that.” But there’s another perfectly reasonable sounding attitude that says, “Look, if someone in power, or some elite, someone with a big platform, someone with a track record of one form or another makes this kind of outrageous claim, it is our duty to at least give it a hearing, right, to at least take it seriously enough to listen to the evidence, to let the data come in, and then make an informed decision based on whatever data that is.” In the particular example, we’re thinking of here, the claim is that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, and that the fact that they got more votes was a fake, was cheating, something like that, okay? And therefore the election result was illegitimate. That’s the claim we’re thinking about.

0:15:13.8 SC: Now, let me tell you right away what my attitude toward that claim is, it is complete nonsense, it is way false, it is egregious bullshit. If you wanna go back to the podcast I did with Carl Bergstrom a little while ago, using bullshit in a technical sense, right here, okay? The election was not stolen. And then there’s a lot of reasons you can put forward to that, but what I’m really interested in is what should our tool kit be epistemically for dealing with something like that? Even if it sounds like egregious bullshit, should we nevertheless, spend some time taking it seriously, because if it is true, it would be very, very big. I think that’s the calculus, what we’re weighing here, right? Something might seem very unlikely, but if it’s true, it’s dramatically, dramatically important. So at what point does the dramatic importance of a claim outweigh the fact that it seems very unlikely to us. And in fact, in this particular case, the idea that the election was stolen was made by a whole bunch of partisan actors, but it was also, I think, importantly, taken up as something worth considering, even if not necessarily true, by various contrarian, centrist pundits, right?

0:16:32.1 SC: A small set of them, not a majority of them, but there’s a certain way of being kind of naughty and showing that one is anti-establishment, to not be hauled into the conventional wisdom that one gets by saying, “Well, sure, this might be wrong, I’m not saying it’s right that the election was stolen, but it’s at least worth letting the process play out, listening to what they have to say and so forth.” Okay. So the answer I would have put forward is, “No. [chuckle] It was never worth taking that kind of claim seriously.” And you can not justify this in a number of different ways, right? We like to talk here about being Bayesian, and in fact, it’s almost a cliche in certain corners of the internet talking about being good Bayesians, and what is meant by that is, for a set of propositions like the election was stolen, the election was not stolen. Okay, two propositions mutually exclusive, so you assign prior probabilities or prior credences to these propositions being true. So you might say, “Well, elections are not usually stolen, so the credence I would put on that claim my prior is very, very small. And the credence I would put on it not being stolen is very large.”

0:17:44.7 SC: But then a good Bayesian says, “You let the information come in, you collect data, and you have what is called a likelihood function. A likelihood is a way of saying, “If this proposition were true, it’s either certain… It’s… How likely is it that that particular data would be collected?” Right? And I think that in a lot of these discussions about being a good Bayesian reasoner, a lot of attention is paid to one’s priors, what it means to have a prior, and it makes perfect sense from a sort of philosophy of probability point of view that that’s a fascinating topic worthy of a lot of discussion because it makes probability sound subjective, and I think the answer is yes, they are subjective, because after all, the election was or was not stolen. Right? This is not flipping a coin, this is something that already happened, and you’re assigning a credence, a degree of belief to one attitude or another, that’s a subjective thing to do. Okay? And so a lot of attention is given to that. And then also a lot of attention is given to the idea that when information comes in, you should update your priors via this likelihood of function.

0:18:51.0 SC: But usually attention is most often focused on the idea that information comes in that changes your priors in a significant way, right? The idea that the data that comes in is exactly… Could be, it might be true that the data comes in is exactly what you would have expected. I think is under-emphasized. This is a thing that can happen, right? So in a case like this where a bunch of people are saying, “Oh, there was election fraud, irregularities, the counting was off by this way or that way. It all seems suspicious.” You should ask yourself, “Did I expect that to happen?” The point is that if you expected exactly those claims to be made, even if the underlying proposition that the election was stolen is completely false, then seeing those claims being made provides zero evidence for you to change your credences whatsoever. Okay? So to make that abstract statement a little more down to earth, in the case of the elections being stolen, how likely was it that if Donald Trump did not win the election, that he and his allies would claim the election was stolen independent of whether it was, okay? What was the probability that he was going to say that there were irregularities and it was stolen?

0:20:19.6 SC: Well, a 100%, roughly speaking, 99.999, if you wanna be little bit more meta-physically careful, but they announced ahead of time that they were going to make those claims, right? He had been saying for months that the very idea of voting by mail is irregular and was going to lead to fraud, and they worked very hard to make the process difficult, both to cast votes and then to count them, different states had different ways of counting, certain states were prohibited from counting mail in ballots ahead of time. The Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than the Republicans were, they slowed down the postal service, trying to make it take longer for mail-in votes to get there. There’s it’s a whole bunch of things going on in prior elections in the primaries, Trump had accused his opponents of rigging the election and stealing votes without any evidence.

0:21:15.3 SC: So your likelihood to function, that you would see these claims rise up even if the underlying proposition was not true, is basically, 100%. And therefore, as a good Bayesian, the fact that people were raising questions about the integrity of the election means nothing. It’s just what you expect to happen. If you really want to spend any effort at all taking a claim like this seriously, you have to go beyond that simple thing, “Oh someone claimed that something’s going on, therefore it’s my job to evaluate it and wait for more evidence to come in.” You should ask further questions, “What else should I expect to be true if this claim was correct?” For example, if the Democrats had somehow been able to get a lot of false ballots, rig elections, you would expect to see certain patterns, like Democrats winning a lot of elections, they had been predicted to lose different cities where or locations more broadly, where the frauds were purported to happen would be ones where anomalously large percentages of people were voting for Biden rather than Trump.

0:22:28.3 SC: In both cases, in both the idea that you would predict Democrats winning elections, they had been predicted lose and places where fraud was alleged to have happened would be anomalously pro-Biden it was the opposite. And you could instantly see that it was the opposite, right after election day. The Democrats lost elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate that they were favored to win. So they were very bad at packing the ballots, if that’s really what they were trying to do. In cities like Philadelphia where it was alleged that a great voter fraud was taking place, Trump did better in 2020 than he did in 2016. So right away, without working very hard, you know this is egregious bullshit, there is no duty to think, to take seriously, to spend your time worrying about the likely truth of this outrageous claim, all of which is completely compatible with every evidence, the falsity of which is completely compatible with all the evidence we have.

0:23:32.2 SC: So just to make it dramatic, let me spend a little bit of time here… Let me give you an aside, which is my favorite example of what I mean by this kind of attitude because it is very tricky. You should never, and I’m very happy to admit, you should never assign zero credence to essentially any crazy claim. That would be bad practice as a good Bayesian because if you assign assigned zero credence to any claim, then no amount of new evidence would ever change your mind. Okay? You’re taking the prior probability multiplying it with the likelihood, but at if the prior probability is zero, then it doesn’t matter what the likelihood is, you’re always gonna get zero at the end. And you should be open to the idea that evidence could come in that this outrageous claim is true, that the election was stolen, it’s certainly plausible that such evidence would come in.

0:24:21.9 SC: Now it didn’t, right, when actually they did have their day in court, they were laughed left out of court because they had zero evidence, even all the way up to January 6th when people in Congress were raising a stink about the election not being fair, they still had no evidence. The only claim they could make was that people were upset and people had suspicions, right? Even months later, so there was never any evidence that it was worth taking seriously. But nevertheless, even without that, I do think you should give some credence and therefore you have to do the hard work of saying, “Well, I’m giving it some non-zero credence, but so little that it’s not really worth spending even a minute worrying about it.” That’s a very crucial distinction to draw, and it’s very hard to do.

0:25:03.4 SC: So the crazy example I I’d like to use is the claim that the moon is made of green cheese, as I said, I’ve used this before, but let me set spend a couple of minutes explaining what I mean. So someone says to you, “I think the moon is made of green cheese.” And you say, “Well”, and you decide to take them seriously, right? You’re trying to be a good rational actor, Bayesian interlocutor, you say, “Well, I don’t think that’s true. We have telescopes and we’ve looked at the moon, it doesn’t look like it’s made of green cheese, we can take its spectrum, it doesn’t look like the spectrum of green cheese.” And your friend could say, “Well, that’s just because the surface of the moon… The top one centimeter is not green cheese, it’s like a thin layer of moon dust, but below that, it’s green cheese.” And you could can say, “Well, we’ve actually gone to the moon, we’ve taken back samples, we’ve returned them to Earth and analyzed them. Furthermore, we know the density of the moon, right? We know the total mass of the moon from its gravitational field, it’s not the density you expect cheese to have.”

0:26:01.2 SC: And your friend says, “Well, you have to understand that lunar green cheese has a different density than terrestrial green cheese that’s obvious, who would expect anything other. And for that matter, once you pick it up and put it into your sample bag, then converts from green cheese into moon dust.” So of course, you don’t have any evidence that you brought back that it’s green cheese. Okay. So there are two lessons that I wanna take from this completely silly concocted ludicrous example, one is you can always wriggle out of any evidence that purports to be against any claim whatsoever, right? It’s not a matter of whether something is probable or not.

0:26:41.2 SC: But just as a matter of whether something is conceivable, any crazy claim is conceivable, this is a fact in the practice of science, that science doesn’t prove things with metaphysical certitude. It just gathers evidence and creeps up on greater and greater credences in and claims that we think are true. So you don’t just say to the claim that the moon is made of green cheese, that’s impossible, that’s the wrong attitude to take, okay? But also a much more subtle and interesting fact is the fact that when you gave your counter-arguments, “Well, we’ve looked at the moon, we’ve brought pieces back, we know what the density is”, you’re lying to yourself. You’re not being honest, because those are not the reasons why we think the moon is not made of green cheese, right? Long before we invented spectra, or brought samples back from the moon or accurately measured its mass, we already knew that the moon was not made of green cheese. And the reason why is because it’s embedded in a bigger context.

0:27:39.3 SC: When you set your priors as a good Bayesian for these kinds of claims, you don’t… You’re not under any obligation to forget everything you know about reality, in fact, you’re under the opposite obligation. You need to take into account what you know about reality, so in the case of the moon, the fact that you are able to bring a sample back is nice, but long before you were able to do that, you have an idea of what it means to be cheese. It comes from cows or sheep or goats, and you get their milk and you process it in the right way, there was never any sensible idea that the moon would be made of green cheese. It’s just a joke, right? So you’re allowed to use that information, you’re allowed to use that background information, and so the correct attitude when someone says, “Oh, I think the moon is made of green cheese”, is not to take it seriously and sort of provide evidence from science and whatever, it’s just to say, you know, “Whatever, dude, I know better than that. I’m gonna go on with my life.” And this is an example of that, to the idea that the election was stolen without any evidence being put forward when they told us ahead of time that they were going to say that deserves nothing more than a “Whatever, dude, I don’t need to take that seriously.”

0:28:56.0 SC: And I think, I feel strongly about this because it’s more than just a little political tiff, it has to do with how we think. This is a lesson of much wider applicability, when you spend time… When you spend your cognitive powers thinking and trying to be clever and refuting these completely egregiously wrong claims, you degrade your own cognitive capacity, you damage your own ability to separate reasonable ideas from unreasonable ones. And so it is completely okay. In other words, I would argue when people are making claims about this election being stolen without any evidence in complete contradiction of everything that we actually saw happen, to just say, “No, it’s not worth taking seriously.” And if it were just your friends or people on Facebook making these claims, you could do that, the difficulty of course here that it’s being done by officials at the highest level of the government, and that is a problem, and we’ll get to that later in the podcast.

0:29:56.5 SC: Okay, the next question I wanna look at is this idea of violence, okay? What is the role of violent action in political change? We all know, or not you, of 500 years from now, historians, how’s it going there? But those of us who are living here in January 2021, know that there was violence, on January 6th, when the mob stormed the Capitol and there was also violence earlier in the Summer of 2020, there were a whole bunch of different demonstrations roughly centered around the Black Lives Matter movement, just expressing outrage at the treatment of Black people and other people at the hands of police and law enforcement more generally. And this is a very complicated question because in the summer protests, even though there was violence and there was certainly property damage, there was it was actually more property damage, then than violence against other people, but there was property damage and it’s not clear who exactly was doing it.

0:30:57.2 SC: It is clear that in some cases, it was being done by people who were just there trying to make the protesters look bad. Okay? Or just trying to have a good time and had nothing to do with the underlying political motivations of the protest protests going on, but for the purposes of this conversation, I don’t wanna try to adjudicate exactly which little bit of violence or property damage was done by who, I just wanna sort of figure out what is the theory of when it is okay to do violence. Now in my… I’ll just give away my personal belief about this, I don’t think that the demonstrations this summer or the demonstration we had on January 6th should have been violent or caused any property damage at all.

0:31:38.5 SC: And roughly speaking, the reason I believe this is that it comes down to deontology versus consequentialism. Okay? Something else we’ve talked about before on the podcast in the context of moral philosophy. In moral philosophy, we distinguish between deontological approaches, which basically say there are rules of behavior, and to be moral, to be ethical, to act correctly is to obey these rules, and the trick is figure out what the rules are. Whereas a the consequentialist would say, “It’s not that there are rules of behavior, it’s that there are goals of behavior.” We judge a behavior not by what it is for itself, but by what its consequences are, if a behavior makes the world a better place, it’s good. If it makes the world a worse place, it’s bad. And when it comes to moral philosophy, I’m in between. I’m not a strict deontologist or consequentialist, I think that there are bits and pieces of both, and it’s not a very clean crisp set of distinctions that one can easily draw. But for politics and for political action, I would argue that one should largely be a consequentialist because the idea of politics is to shape the society, to shape the world around you, especially democratic politics, where it is a bottom-up kind of system.

0:32:57.4 SC: And so the question we should be asking ourselves is, is the particular action that we’re imagining taking going to make the world a better place or not? And what that means is putting aside the question of, will this action I’m contemplating taking make me feel better? Or to again, to state it a little bit less judgementally from the start, do I think that this action is sort of intrinsically justified no matter what its consequences are? Is that a rational opinion or attitude to take perspective to have on in these kinds of questions? And so I would argue not for political kinds of questions, you should always be asking yourself, what will the consequences be?

0:33:38.9 SC: And I think that in… Even in the case of the summer protests, which were completely justified as protests, they were protesting against something that was really bad, that there was no obvious good consequence or a reason to do property damage, or you know to bust down windows or anything like that that didn’t, in my mind, advanced the cause. And in fact, there are studies that show exactly this, the studies are always hard, so I don’t wanna say this closes the book on the question, but the studies that I’ve seen indicate that non-violent protests or peaceful protests and violent isn’t even the right word in this case because it’s not really violence when you break a window, but completely peaceful protests do a better job of affecting public opinion than the ones that are a little bit more knocking things down, causing a mess. Right? Causing a ruckus. Okay. But again, that’s an empirical question that is a difficult one and maybe further studies will change my mind about that.

0:34:37.3 SC: The point is that in those two cases, just to be clear, I don’t think that there was much cause for violence at all. That is not to draw a distinction between them. Okay? I think that it is much, much closer to… It’s a much, much closer call in the case of the Black Lives Matter protests, for the simple… For the simple reason that the justification, the reason why you were protesting in the first place was a good one rather than a bad one. Okay? There is no analogy or direct parallel to be drawn between protesting against police brutality and protesting against the idea that your candidate lost an election, right? Protesting in disbelief of the results of an election outcome, those are just not analogous in any way. So overly glib comparisons between them are also wrong, even though I don’t think that property damage is justified in either one of those two cases. It’s not because they’re the same case, okay? They are completely different cases.

0:35:37.8 SC: And furthermore, I think that in… Just because I think that in those two cases, there is was no reason to knock down some windows, that doesn’t mean in any way that we should just say, violence is always wrong. I can certainly imagine cases where violence would be called for, right? Namely, for example, when you were actually protesting against a dictatorship rather than protesting in order to keep a dictator or it would be dictator in office. It’s a big difference, right? I think that rebelling against tyranny is perfectly justified. So it is not at all safe to just say, “Well, I don’t like violence, and so all the violent people are bad.” You need to think through it a little bit, you need to think through what exactly is going on. I would rather protest against tyranny or authoritarianism or dictatorship, non-violently if that could have the consequence that I sought. But I am not at all convinced that this it is always the case, there is a time for revolution. In fact, it’s more than that. Let me back up a little bit because I think this is actually not just a sort of necessary evil, but almost a feature of democracy.

0:36:49.6 SC: Not violence per se, but the idea of unrest, the idea of churn, of drama of protests and demonstrations and political dissatisfaction, okay? Exactly, because a democracy is a nuanced, complex, emergent bottom-up kind of process rather than a clean crisp, pure the rules from on high kind of process. It’s important that we disagree and that we try different things, that we argue sometimes quite loudly for our different things, as a much more peaceful, smaller scale example of this, think about the fact that people on both sides of the political spectrum are always upset with the kids these days. The kids these days have these crazy ideas one way or the other, especially kids in college. Oh the college students, they’re just… They’re not like when we were kids. Well when we were are very reasonable. But these days, they have these crazy ideas.

0:37:50.9 SC: So I think that it’s good that kids in college have crazy ideas. I shouldn’t even call them kids, I’m trying to do that in the voice of the people who were clutching about it before, but college students, college, undergraduate education is a time of your life when… It is exactly when you should have the craziest ideas, when you should try on new things, right? It’s the first time when you sort of have left home, you’re exposed to a completely different set of people and ideas than what you grew up with your whole life.

0:38:22.6 SC: And it’s sort of the most form, the most flexible you will be, as you get older, you’re gonna settle into some set of beliefs one way or another. So those crucial years, college and maybe high school, right? Maybe even graduate school, but around that time of your life, this is the time for intellectual exploration and also kind of emotional exploration, right? Being outraged about things. College students care about things in a way that, for those of us who are beyond those times of our lives, can sometimes just sort of bleed out of us because we get tired and also locked into our opinions. And many of the crazy ideas or the very emotionally held positions that young people have are going to be wrong, from the point of view of we wiser old heads, but I think we should still be glad that they have them.

0:39:12.6 SC: I do not think that we should complain about the idea that the kids today don’t think in the same way we do, and the analogy I have in mind is evolutionary biology, we have a genome and we pass it on to our descendants and we mix and match because of sexual reproduction, and they’re also just mutations. So our genomes are constantly trying out new ideas in a very real sense, and most mutations are bad, right? This is part of the statistical mechanics of change in complex systems. If you have a system like a living organism, it’s pretty well adapted to its environment, most ways it could change would make it less well-adapted. But some ways it could change will would make it better, right? That’s how improvements happen over evolutionary time. And so you have to take the bad with the good a little bit. As an evolving genome over time, you have to try out some ideas that end up being bad and then discarding them, and the reason why you have to try them out is ’cause you don’t know ahead of time whether they will be bad, you have to try them first, and in my mind, this is an analogy for how we try out ideas over the course of our lives, and especially when we’re young, we try out different things and we don’t yet completely appreciate all of the consequences of ramifications of those ideas.

0:40:31.6 SC: So we tend to sort of regress to the mean a little bit as we get older. But it’s crucially important that that energy, that willingness to try out new things is there, and those of us who are of a certain age and for whom our college years were quite a while ago, should be lenient in that sense, should be willing to cut some slack to younger people who are trying out dramatic ideas on either side of the political spectrum, okay? And the wider scale lesson for democracy is that, we need protects, we need people out there marching on both sides, or not even both sides, all sides, people with all sorts of different ideas should be out there making their case, both in the form of ideas and also in physical manifestations of people marching, right? This is part of what democracy is. It’s a feature, not a bug. Okay? And as far as violence is concerned, I’m not in favor of it happening frequently, I think it should be a last resort, I think that it very often, it results just from sort of a cathartic emotional, very short-term, non-consequentialist thinking going on on the part of the people doing it.

0:41:47.0 SC: But sometimes it could be necessary, right? Sometimes things are bad. What if this egregiously wrong claim the election had been stolen was right? What if the election just had been stolen by a small cabal of bad actors, in the sense that it truly overthrew the legitimate result of a democratic election? Then absolutely dramatic response would be called for one way or the other. I’m not exactly sure what the best response would be, but it would be dramatic and maybe some windows would have to be broken.

0:42:21.8 SC: So the real bad aspect of the disaster that happened on January 6th was not primarily that people were violent or the people were unruly or a mob, it was that all of their actions were based on a lie. That’s why the previous discussion is so important, that the fact that they were doing these things could in completely other circumstances have been justified. But in this actual world in which we live in, the real world where they were just lied to and they bought it, that’s the problem, because they did these terrible things for all of the wrong reasons, and I don’t think that you can separate out the reasons why they do them from what it is that they did.

0:43:04.5 SC: Okay, moving on to the third thing I wanna talk about. This leads right into this question of the fragility of democracy, right? Again, we’re saying when once you reach the point where a system of government has been around longer than the life span of the people who are living in that society, it seems eternal, it seems kind of permanently baked in. None of us was alive at the birth of American democracy so it just seems like a feature of the background, just impossible to imagine it being any different, but it can be. And so, during the actual events of January 6th, I and probably a few of you folks out there listening, could not help but think back to the podcast interview I did with Edward Watts on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. If you remember that or if you didn’t listen to it, I absolutely encourage you to listen to it. Ed Watts was talking about the last years of the republic, before the Roman Empire grew, like if we think about the decline of old Roman Empire but before there was an empire for 500 years, there was a Roman Republic, and it was very successful. It was successful both in governance and in prosperity and things like that.

0:44:18.3 SC: 500 years is a lot longer than the American republic has lasted so far, right? But it did fall, and there’s a lot of things that go into its falling, maybe there’s just some inevitability, some time scale that says like after a while, democracies are self-undermining, and I would be willing to entertain that kind of theory although I don’t know if it’s actually true. But in particular, there are events you can point to at crucial points, right? At moments in history where the consequences of small actions could be very large. And Watts points out these… It’s not his original idea, but he highlights the role of the Gracchi brothers. Gracchi is G-R-A-C-C-H-I, I think. These two brothers, and both of them were probably, if we were to not quite legitimately shoehorn them into modern political categories, they were more leftist than rightist, okay? They were more populous, they wanted to take wealth away from the aristocracy and distribute it among the peasantry and so forth. So a more typical left-wing point of view.

0:45:23.8 SC: But the point was not what they were actually arguing for, the point was their tactics. And Ed Watts points to the fact that they assembled mobs, right? That they inflamed the passions of the people, and they sent these people to demonstrate and to threaten the Republic, the Senators, right? The elected representatives of the people. And it didn’t work at first and the Gracchi brothers were not actually… They didn’t take over, but what they did is they set a precedent. They set a precedent that political disagreements wouldn’t always be settled by voting. You could settle them just by displays of power, and that spiraled out of control. It is his argument that that snowballed to the point where it went back and forth with different sets of people trying to have displays of force, and eventually the whole Republic was overthrown.

0:46:19.8 SC: And at the time… I forget when it was, like a year and a half ago when we had this conversation, this seemed like a really good metaphor for what might be going on in the United States, that different sets of people were violating norms. That’s the metaphorical relationship between what happened with the Gracchi brothers and the Roman Republic, what was going on with Trump and his allies in the US, is that in both cases, there were norms of behavior. There were ways of behaving that were considered okay and other ways that were not considered okay? And it was not written in stone or even in legislation, but it was taken for granted that there are certain ways you behave and certain ways you don’t. And both the Gracchis and the Trumps violated these norms, and that would be bad.

0:47:05.4 SC: Now, given the events of the last week, we know that it is not just a metaphor, it is actually pretty close to a literal parallel between what is happening now in the United States and what happened back then in ancient Rome. So all of this is to say, we have to always be cognizant of the fact that democracies aren’t forever. Not only can they fail, they tend to fail, right? Another thing that has been a correct point that was pointed out on Twitter, and has been going around, is that coup attempts, if you want to classify something like this as a coup, okay, we can argue about whether or not that’s true or not, but the point is, coup attempts very often fail and then later succeed. The failure of a coup at any one moment in time is not a guarantee that the underlying energies that powered it will fade away and disappear. It very often happens that a few years later, they pop up again and succeed. So, not to be too alarmist, but let’s be alarmist about this. It’s just not at all guaranteed that the government we grew up with is gonna continue on forever.

0:48:12.9 SC: So we should think about what the weak points are, right? We should think about if I’m taking for granted the idea that we’re in favor of democracy. You might not be. I am. I’m not actually mostly doing this podcast to defend democracy, that would be a different conversation. But let’s assume that you’re in favor of democracy, okay? You should be worried even if you think that we didn’t really come close to any really disastrous thing going on over the last week here in January 2021, you should still be worried that in principle something very bad could happen. One way of putting it is, how different if you think, and again, it’s January 9, Joe Biden is supposed to be inaugurated on January 20th, there’s all sorts of room in the next few weeks or in the next few years for things to go disastrously wrong. But under the assumption that democracy has lived to fight another day that we’re fine, and I think that’s overwhelmingly likely to be true in the short term, we can think about other possible worlds, right?

0:49:16.9 SC: If you go back to the philosophy discussion I had with Ned Hall a while ago, we talked a little bit about the notion of different possible worlds, the worlds that are much like ours but things are just a little bit different, and you can ask how does a small change from our world to another one lead to larger changes? I think that Ed Watts would have said that you can pinpoint these moments when the Gracchi brothers got their mobs together. Had they not done that, that small change would have led to large changes in the future of the Roman Republic. Likewise, we can ask, Are there small changes we can imagine in our current political setup that would have led to a much more disastrous result for our current democracy? And I think the answer is pretty clearly yes, that you don’t need a very large change in our current system. I think that even if the system was resilient enough and it survived, even Mitch McConnell, who for someone like me is just a huge threat to the good workings of American governance. Even he gave a pretty good speech. I don’t wanna give him too much credit ’cause he was a huge factor behind the problem happening in the first place, but he did say, “Look, we’re still a democracy, we have to obey the rules.” So I’m willing, I’m able to both condemn him for almost anything and then give him credit for that.

0:50:42.9 SC: But so part of that was, that this idea that the election had been stolen didn’t have quite enough support and among public officials for it to really be taken seriously. It had support among some, okay? Let’s point out, in particular, there were Republicans in Congress. For those of you in the future, Congress is roughly speaking 50-50 Democrat and Republican, and roughly half of the Republicans in Congress, so 25% of Congress overall, bought into the idea that we should not certify the election results of the electoral college because of doubts about the election count, because the possibility of fraud. Not that they necessarily said there was fraud, but there was enough doubt. And again, for the previous conversation, they’re lying, [chuckle] they know better, right? They have no evidence that there was any fraud. They know perfectly well, it was a perfectly safe, fair, reasonable election, but for political reasons, about half of the Republican delegation in Congress, of both Senate and the House combined, voted to not accept the electoral votes from the State of Arizona, for example.

0:52:03.8 SC: And I didn’t even follow all of the machinations because so they failed, so it was only one quarter of Congress overall, but half of the Republican Party was willing to go along with this blatantly and anti-democratic suggestion, because being in a democracy doesn’t just mean you have a vote, it means you respect the results of the vote. And no matter how safe and secure and fair an election was, you can always throw sand in people’s faces, you can always raise doubts, as ridiculous as the doubts were. The kinds of doubts that were raised for this election were completely preposterous. There was a bunch of weekend warriors at their keyboards who knew nothing about the process of counting votes, who were watching the votes come in, and they were struck with what they thought were weird sort of anomalies, people who were experts knew perfectly well, that those were not anomalies at all.

0:52:57.8 SC: Again and again, many, many lawsuits went forward in court to challenge the results of these elections, and they were thrown out as completely ridiculous. They didn’t just lose. These lawsuits were ridiculed by judges nationwide, okay? For a complete lack of evidence, there was really nothing wrong with this election. So, nevertheless, half the Republican caucus voted to not take the election as finished and done, and to be super duper clear about this or to mention the other fact that you need to take into consideration the vote time talking about to reject the votes of Arizona’s electors happened after the mob had taken over the Capitol Building and delayed that vote, okay? So in other words, a mob of rioters, terrorists, honestly, who were motivated by a blatant big lie stormed the Capitol Building, put the lives of senators and Congress people at risk, and it was a very, very real risk. And some people did die, right? There were fatal incidents during that mess. Offices were ruined, etcetera.

0:54:10.5 SC: Offices were trashed and certain famous Democratic politicians, if I were them, I would have been very, very, very worried about my life. Even Mike Pence, who was the Vice President, supposed to be on Trump’s side, Trump was denigrating him on Twitter as sort of betraying him by doing his job as the President of the Senate and then letting the vote go forward, and so he was a target of the rioters. So the point is, after this crazed, violent, dangerous demonstration, all of which was motivated by a big lie, a deranged conspiracy theory about the outcome of the election, still half of the Republicans in Congress voted in favor of that crazy conspiracy theory, okay? So to me, that says that it didn’t need that much of a difference from person to person to make that outcome be much worse than it was.

0:55:09.9 SC: Now, this is… You have to be very subtle here, you have to be very careful, I should say, because there are calculations going on. I think that just as I do not think it is a surprise to say that politicians sometimes lie, politicians also sometimes take votes, which are not necessarily reflective of what they believe is true, they do it for political reasons. And the fact that there were a substantial number of people in Congress, Republicans and Congress voting for this, gave them some cover. It was not just one or two weirdos, right? But the fact that it was only 25% of Congress overall also gave them cover, because there weren’t any consequences for their actions in terms of Congress doing anything about it. So you could try to make the case that even if more people in Congress really believed the election had been stolen, some other members of Congress who voted in that direction would have changed their vote, okay?

0:56:02.6 SC: But the very leaders of the congressional delegations in the House and the Senate were not behind this whole attempt. They thought that we should just get on with it, count the votes, Biden won, let’s just accept that and move on. You can imagine that a tiny number of changes in leadership of the Republicans in the Senate would have made things very different. Certainly, a tiny number of changes in election outcomes could have put Republicans in control of the House of Representative, as well as the Senate. You can imagine that there would be a few state legislatures who were dramatically partisan and therefore undermine the electoral votes of their state, you could imagine that there were a few more judges who were dramatically partisan and therefore, did not laugh the lawsuits out of court, etcetera. I don’t think this is completely implausible, it’s not that you would need to change the actions of millions of people to make this happen, you have to change the actions of a few people to get into a situation where the actual functioning of democracy would be dramatically undermined.

0:57:14.0 SC: Something like this, more or less, happened in Pennsylvania, where there was an election for a state senator, and it was won by a Democrat, James Brewster, and the Republicans sued to overturn that election because there were detailed questions about… Pennsylvania made it especially difficult to figure out how to do a mail-in ballot. There are all these very persnickety rules, and so there’s a challenge like, how should the date be put on the envelope if you are giving a mail-in ballot, okay? So Republican sued perfectly within their rights. The Pennsylvania court system looked at the lawsuits and said, “No, we throw them out, they’re not meritorious, we should accept these ballots.” And therefore, this guy, James Brewster, is the rightfully elected senator, and that is the process by which you go through. And the Republicans simply refused to accept it, they said, “Well, we’ll file a suit in federal courts,” which do not have jurisdiction over this issue, but they said, “We’re gonna do it anyway.” And when it came time to swear in Brewster as a Democratic state senator, they didn’t do it, they refused to do it, they kicked out the lieutenant governor from the Senate chamber.

0:58:29.4 SC: That kind of thing can happen, right? And that’s something that is part of the system. I think that it’s almost trivially true, that if more than 50% of a citizenry don’t believe in democracy in some consistent way, they’re all in agreement with each other and in disagreement with the idea of democracy, then you can’t have a democracy. You need at least 50% of the citizenry to believe in it, but I don’t think that’s… And that’s a very worrisome thing, but that’s always gonna be a worry, that’s just something we have to take seriously. And I’ll talk later about how we should deal with that possibility, but there’s another possibility, which is that even if almost all of the citizens are in favor of democracy, a small but crucial number of elected officials are not, and they have enormously more power. One elected official is not enough. Donald Trump by himself, or Mitch McConnell by himself, or Ted Cruz by himself, could not overturn the results of a fair democratic process. But a handful of them, a few dozen let’s say, could do it.

0:59:35.4 SC: And I talked about this a couple of times on the podcast, I think probably most recently with Ezra Klein, when we talked about political polarization. There’s a game theory question here. If you’re an elected official, what is your utility? What are your goals? What is it that you want to have happen? And I think that a couple of things have become clear over the years that maybe weren’t clear in previous years. One is, the system is… It’s polarized, but it’s polarized in part because it’s a winner-take-all system. When we vote for a senator, or for a representative, or for president, one party wins and other party loses. And this is why the United States is always going to be a two-party system, as long as we have the kind of system of government we do. If you are the third place party, you will never win any elections, right? You don’t win a third of the elections or 10% of the elections, or 20%, you win 0% of the elections because it’s just too hard to get over 50% of the vote if you’re the third biggest political party.

1:00:37.1 SC: And if you also have a situation where the parties are nationalized, right? So this didn’t used to be the case, but right now, there’s more or less political homogeneity among the national parties, right? Democrats in California and Democrats in Idaho believe more or less in the same things, not exactly. At the margins, they’re different, but more or less, they believe the same things, and therefore, most Californians like the democratic point of view, most Idahoans don’t like the democratic point of view. And so, if you wanna win statewide office in Idaho, you don’t run as a Democrat, that’s just pointless, you’re never gonna win. That can change, of course, over time, but currently, that is the situation.

1:01:18.6 SC: And so, you’re not appealing when you run, you’re not appealing to greater than 50% of people in your state or your district, you’re appealing to greater than 50% of people in your party in your state or district. And this kind of setup increases polarization in our elected representatives. Over and over again, you can see this, it’s explicit, there’s data, okay? If you plot the political beliefs of American voters on some simplified left-right spectrum, you get kind of a bell curve. There’s a lot of people in the middle, and there are some people on either sides. Whereas, if you plot the political beliefs and actions as demonstrated by their voting patterns of our representatives in Congress or the Senate or whatever, they’re bimodal, there are Republicans and Democrats, and they’re cleanly separated from each other, unlike the people they represent, okay?

1:02:12.9 SC: So that’s one element. The other element is, if all you want is to stay elected, in other words, as a representative or senator, whatever, if your goal is just to win re-election, in other words, it is not to necessarily sacrifice your elected position for the better of the country. So if all you want is to win election, and the way to win election is just to appeal to greater than 50% of the people in your party in your district, the incentive is not to govern, the incentive is not to work with people across the aisle, the incentive is not to make compromises, the incentive is not to do any of those things that was talked about in the Federalist Papers. The federalists were just scandalized at the worry that there will be factions in the United States, right? That there’d be different groups that hung together and we’re enemies with each other, and of course, they set up a system where this was maximally true. So, the founders made some mistakes to be honest. They would not be happy with the current system, and therefore maybe we might imagine changing it, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

1:03:20.1 SC: The point is that the incentive structure of people in Congress is not to get things done, it is very much to demonize the other party as the enemy, right? And sometimes that’s made very explicit. You can think of your own examples of quotes from this or that, a likely representative saying they just don’t want the people on the other side to get anything done. So that’s not a necessary feature of the system. So if what we’re asking ourselves is, how fragile is democracy and can we shore it up? Can we fix it? This is not necessarily an intractable problem, it is a hard problem, but there are possible solutions. And again, I’m not a political theorist, and so I’m not gonna try to talk too much out of my pail of wick here, but I have to mention one very popular suggestion, which is called ranked-choice voting.

1:04:14.9 SC: Probably you’ve heard of this, most of you, but the idea that when you go to vote for, let’s say a senator from your state, the current system is, you vote for your favorite candidate and then you count the votes and whoever wins wins. Sometimes, as we recently saw in the State of Georgia, if there are more than two candidates, if there are third party candidates or whatever, there can be an extra rule that if neither candidate, if no candidate gets more than 50%, then we have a run-off election. You can do that, but ranked-choice voting is a way to build that process into a single election. So if you say rather than you just vote for your favorite candidate, you vote for your three or four favorite candidates and you rank them. So you say candidate number one for me is this, here’s my second favorite, here’s my third favorite, and what they try to do is to say, “Well, did anyone get more than 50% of the first place votes? No? Well, then we’ll take all of the votes from the loser, from the person who ever got the fewest number of votes, and we will give the second place choices of those voters and then distribute them among the other candidates.” And you keep doing that until someone gets more than 50%.

1:05:27.2 SC: The thing about this system is that it makes it matter who your second place choice is, okay? So it de-incentivizes demonizing people from the other party, because in this system, you want to be the voters’ second place choice, if you’re not their first place choice, right? So you want to be as much of a representative of the whole populace as you possibly can be. And arguably, we are seeing this in action right this minute, very recently, like today or yesterday, and again, talking on January 9th, 2021, Lisa Murkowski who is the senator from Alaska. Alaska’s extremely Republican state. Again, because of political polarization, no Democrat has a fighting chance of winning statewide election in Alaska, for Senate anyway. And so, Murkowski’s Republican, has been for a long time, but she’s a moderate Republican, this has been her self-image and representation. So she is willing to consider breaking with her party when she thinks it’s the right thing to do, and that can be annoying to everyone. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a virtuous thing, I’m just saying that is what she does.

1:06:40.8 SC: And she has made it clear that if the Republican Party continues to be ruled by Donald Trump or Trump-ism or people who are pro-Trump, then maybe it’s not the party for her, right? Maybe she should not be Republican anymore. And the point is, that Alaska is one of the very, very few states in the United States that has ranked-choice voting. And in fact, Lisa Murkowski, it’s a fascinating story that I wish it were more and more known, she ran in a primary, in the Republican Primary in Alaska and lost. She was not the Republican nominee, but then she ran as a right-in candidate in the general election, and won because she was everyone’s second choice, right? Roughly speaking. And so, she knows that given the electoral system in her state, she doesn’t need to be as extremist to win a statewide election. The argument can be made, and I don’t wanna defend the argument right here, but the argument can be made and is absolutely worth taking very seriously that something like ranked-choice voting or other tweaks you can do to the electoral system will make the game theory calculation a little bit different and prioritize politicians being more moderate rather than more extreme, and you can argue, “Well, that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” But it’s a thing that you could imagine doing.

1:08:00.7 SC: And I would at least like to raise the possibility that something like that would be healthy for democracy. Again, I’m not even saying that it’s necessarily true, it’s a complicated question, we should think about it. But the thing that I do want to say is true, is that the current system in most states in most locations isn’t necessarily set in stone, right? We can imagine changes to how we apportion representation of citizens, and it might actually make democracy healthier rather than weaker. That’s one thing we can try to do. The other thing that is worth keeping in mind is, the other thing that the founders did; they were very, very concerned with minority rights. This is where it does become important that we’re a republic not a democracy.

1:08:47.7 SC: So again, democracy is actually pretty broad umbrella. People who want to say bad things about democracy instantly go from the word democracy to some sort of extremist direct democracy where literally every decision in government is made by majority vote among the whole people, okay? And something like that was what you had in ancient Athens, and it’s bad because the whole people, bless their hearts, they can have whims and can change their minds very quickly, okay? So, you don’t want to give people the direct handles of power in government. You want to let them elect representatives and let those representatives do the work, and we call that a republic, it’s a democratic republic ’cause those representatives are elected by the people, okay?

1:09:34.7 SC: And so a republic gives you the chance to protect minority rights, and that’s an important thing to do, and so the founders came up with various mechanisms to make that happen. One is the United States Senate, right? The idea that every state gets two senators regardless of how many people it has, giving extra representation to the certain minority, mainly people who live in less populous states, okay? Now, of course, this is a zero-sum game. If you get more representation to people who live in underpopulated states, you’re taking away representation from people who live in more populous states. The relative impact that I as a Californian have in the Senate of the United States is way, way smaller than the relative impact of that someone in Wyoming or Montana has in the United States Senate. And they also did the Electoral College where rather than a direct popular vote for president, each state would vote, and then that’s a little bit fuzzier ’cause it’s a little bit unclear that the system is built into the Constitution in quite the same way.

1:10:44.2 SC: All of these are supposed to be mechanisms that protect minority rights. The problem is, that to some extent, they’ve been used to enshrine minority rule, right? Right now, as we’re still, we haven’t yet had inauguration day, etcetera, we have a Republican president, a Republican Senate, a very Republican Supreme Court. The House of Representatives is democratic right now, but there’s a lot of Republican power and the net number of people represented by that Republican power is much less than the number of people who voted for Democrats, both in the presidential elections and in the congressional elections. And that’s wrong, I think. That is a mistake. I am a very big believer that minority rights should be protected, but that does not mean that we should hand over the power to the minority. There has to be a better way to ensure that minority rights are protected without sacrificing majority rights. The majority has rights too, and the majority of American voters for many years now have been mostly voting for Democrats, not by a lot overall, but it has not been reflected in electoral success, in part because of all of these mechanisms that we enshrined hundreds of years ago to protect minorities.

1:12:00.4 SC: So I don’t have any great suggestions as how to do a better job at this, but I think this is something we need to take very seriously, making if we want democracy to survive, we need to do a better job of making sure that the actual will of the majority of the people is reflected in the rulers of the country and our representatives in Washington, DC and elsewhere, while still protecting minority rights. We should try to do that. I don’t have any great scheme for doing that, but that’s something we should try to do. Okay, which leads us to the next question I wanna talk about, four out of five, so we’re getting there. How should we think about, let’s say our opponents, the people we disagree with? This is the thing about democracy that is kind of… We don’t wanna face it sometimes. When people are for democracy, they’re very much for the idea that they get a vote, right? “Oh, I’m not being ruled by somebody else, I get a say ’cause I get to vote, and this is good, I’m being represented in government.” But it also means that those other jokers out there get votes, right?

1:13:04.0 SC: And sometimes there are more jokers than there are sensible people like myself, and they’re gonna win, okay? This is the seedy underbelly of the Democratic agreement, namely that if most people disagree with us and most people vote then our opinion is not going to get put forward in the government, and this can be very annoying sometimes. And sometimes it’s merely annoying, sometimes it’s well, I really wish the tax rate were higher, the tax rate were lower or whatever. And it can be very annoying and it can actually have a big impact on people’s lives, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just clearly a relatively rational policy kind of disagreement. Other times it’s big, and especially because Trump getting elected and many of the people who vote his coattails and followed in his footsteps did it in a way that seemed really strongly against certain segments of the American people and certainly certain segments of the wider international community. There’s a lot of rhetoric directed against immigrants, against poor people, against black people, and so forth.

1:14:14.4 SC: And so if you’re someone who is the target of this, if you are listening to people on the other side of the political aisle, not just disagree with you about policy, but undercut your very humanity, right? To really question your right to exist or your right to be counted as a full citizen, and sometimes this is very indirect, right? And very subtle like the idea that real Americans are rural people at diners rather than urban people at jazz clubs. Why is one of those are real American and the other one not? Or university professors for that matter, they can be real Americans, right? There’s this subtle picture of Norman Rockwell, real America that has undercurrents of not counting other people as real. And so, that can be something that is very personal and very central to your identity, and it can be hard to then say, “Well, even though these other people don’t even think of me as a full human being, I have to sit down and govern with them or work with them and compromise them and reach out across the aisle.”

1:15:25.9 SC: So my suggestion is, yes, we do, we do have to do all of that. This is what it means to live in a democracy. You don’t have to like the people who you disagree with. You don’t have to invite them over to dinner, but in some sense, you have to work with them, you have to live with them, that’s what it means to be in a democracy. So your choices are, treat those people as people, and this is completely… The idea of both sides is a terrible bad thing because it leads to false equivalencies when one side is being bad and the other side is not, but this is not a both sides issue, but in every side issue, it doesn’t matter what your specific views are. The ideal of democracy demands of us that we work with the other side, that we accommodate them, that we sometimes compromise with them, and this has become harder to do because of political polarization.

1:16:24.9 SC: If you haven’t already listened to them, not only the Ezra Klein interview, but also the conversation I had with Will Wilkinson about the urban rural divide and its relationship to political polarization was extremely interesting. There really are different kinds of people economically, psychologically, etcetera, who live in cities versus who live in rural areas, and that is now the primary driver of polarization in the United States, and it’s a fascinating topic. But the point is, it’s there. Whatever its origin is, it’s real, and the idea of living in democracy demands that we somehow nevertheless work together, okay? And that can be a very, very difficult thing to do. And it’s not just in principle, what attitude should I have kind of question, it’s a very practical question. We’re facing a time right now as we’re about to go from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, where there’s gonna be a lot of calls to investigate and punish, not just Donald Trump, but people who worked for him or with him or enabled him, right? A lot of bad things happened, a lot of crimes were committed, and there’s gonna be a real strong urge for retribution, right? For punishment, for vengeance.

1:17:39.6 SC: It’s sort of the flipside of the criminal justice system. When we talk about in the principles or the philosophy of criminal justice, why do you arrest people and put them in jail? There’s a philosophy that says, “Well, we’re trying to rehabilitate them. They went wrong, we’re trying to fix them, we’re trying to teach them something better.” But there’s another philosophy, which is while we’re punishing them, they deserved it, they did something wrong, I feel this is kind of, as you can tell, it’s more of a deontological move, and I’m against that in this context, but they’re saying it’s just right that they are punished in this way. And I think that’s what drives a lot of people’s feelings about Trump and his cronies and his enablers and so forth, and even his supporters. And I do wanna draw a distinction here.

1:18:30.4 SC: So I think that it’s okay to be nuanced about this, some things it’s not worth being nuanced about, this is something it is worth being a nuanced about. I think we have to somehow move on, we have to somehow get past the acrimonious atmosphere that we’ve had for years now, but that does not imply that we have to pretend that truly bad criminal things didn’t happen, or that we have to let them go unpunished. So here is a case where being consequentialist is really, really important. So the question we should ask is not, Does this or that person deserve punishment? The question we should be asking is, Does this or that person, does punishing them, does implementing consequences for their bad actions make the world a better place? Does it make it less likely that something is going to happen equally bad in the future? I think it’s very easy to make the case that that is often true. I think it’s very easy to make the case that you shouldn’t let people in government who did bad things go scot-free afterwards, you should punish them. I’m all in favor of investigating. Not punish them because we don’t like them, but if they actually did criminal things that can be proven in a court of law, they should face the consequences.

1:19:55.8 SC: The fact that they have lots of supporters, the fact that they are heads of political movements and served in public office is completely irrelevant because we can’t let people going forward think that if they get into power, they can get away with things, okay? But I wanna draw a distinction between punishing the political actors who did criminal things versus punishing their supporters who let them do it, okay? I think that’s a different kind of thing. And here, it’s almost sort of therapy self-help kind of thing, and something that I can only say very, very tentatively because if you can’t go along with this, I get it. I’m sympathetic. I have a lot of people I know, a lot of friends who have had their families dissolved, who have lost lifelong friends over the last four years because of political differences. And I’m a big believer in political differences, I don’t think they should be ignored, right? Political differences are real. And when you think that people who you thought were your friends or your family or your loved ones, and you can see them support a set of people in positions which in your mind are manifestly racist, authoritarian, disastrous for the country in various ways, misogynist and so forth, it makes absolute sense to not keep going forward with those people as friends.

1:21:28.6 SC: I completely support the idea individually that you can say, “Look, I’ve learned something about you in the past four years that I don’t like.” On either side, I can imagine people who are Trump supporters feeling the same way about Democrats as well, but the point is, as a general principle, I think it’s completely plausible and in the right circumstances okay to say that my personal relationship with you has been irrevocably damaged by our divergent opinions about this and that political issue. Nevertheless, that’s different than saying, “And yet, you’re a citizen of the United States and we gotta work together to figure out how the country is going to move forward.” So I am not one of these people who makes fun of Joe Biden for saying he wants to try to work with Republicans.

1:22:20.4 SC: Now, there is a case to be made about naivete whether or not he will succeed. I think that this was a big, big problem in the early days of the Obama administration, that they were just far too naive about their ability to get Republicans to go along with them, when the Republicans had said out loud, they were not going to do that, so that was a little bit naive. But you know what, you still have to try. This is just the paradox of Democratic politics. Even if you think that they’re not gonna try to help you, you have to try to convince them otherwise ’cause that’s what democracy is all about. And also, I’ll get to do this more in the next section, but there are people you disagree with and there are people you disagree with, there are people who are just entrenched, yeah. I said almost entrenched.

1:23:12.3 SC: There are people who are absolutely set in their ways, and nothing you will say to them or nothing you can do to them will ever change their minds, and other people who maybe you can work with a little bit or who are a little bit less intransigent. That matters. That distinction matters a little bit. So, again, this is very wishy-washy and also it’s easy for me to say, look, if you wanna accuse me of being in a comfortable position where I can say things like this. Yeah, you’re right. I know that what I’m asking is especially difficult to ask of black people. They have been spat on not just for the last four years, but for the last 400 years. And to say, “Okay, well, turn the other cheek, be the better person, try to build a better country by working with the people who have treated you like crap for centuries now,” that’s something that is a big ask and it’s not anyone asking me that. I don’t need to do that.

1:24:03.8 SC: So nevertheless, it’s an ask that I would make. And I think it’s difficult, and I think that we need to try to do it anyway. I can’t really say any more wisdom than that. Except the last question I wanted to address here is this issue of, what can we programmatically do constructively to try to make things better, to try to change the minds of people, of those people who we don’t agree with? So as I just said, it’s easy to brush off this question, How do we reach across the aisle? How do we try to change people’s minds by saying, “Look, have you met these people? They’re crazy.” And again, both sides can say this, “They’re completely Looney Tunes, they have completely lost the plot. There’s no reaching them.”

1:24:48.1 SC: Of course, that’s true for some people out there, and I think this is one of the times when I completely buy the critique of social media and our fractured information ecosystem, that it amplifies the crazies on any individual side. It is so much easier these days not just to find like-minded people and live in a bubble and hear only people we agree with, it’s also so much easier to be exposed to the worst of the other side, right? We see pictures of them, we read their tweets, it’s impossible to not be exposed to them. So, we can easily get the idea that there’s only two groups of people, people who agree with me and complete lunatics. And if that’s what you think, then it’s easy to lose motivation for trying to change things at all. You just shrug and you say, “Well, it’ll never happen. These people are not changeable.” But I think that’s a misimpression of the actual facts on the ground. There are crazies out there, there are extremists, there are people who’ll never change their minds, but there are also people in the middle. And like most people, most Americans, anyway, the problem is not that they’re rigid ideologues on one extreme of the spectrum or the other, is that they’re medium to low information voters who don’t care that much.

1:26:03.9 SC: I think a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because he was entertaining, he was a talk show host, he put on a good show, right? And the details of the policy prescriptions didn’t really matter that much. I will always remember soon after the election in November, there were a bunch of rallies that were had, people protesting the vote counting, and because the way that it worked out was, many of the Republican votes had been counted first ’cause they were voting on the day and it took longer to count the mail-in votes, and so there were various states in which early in the counting, Trump was ahead, and then as time went on, there were more and more Democratic votes coming in and Biden moved into the lead. Now, as epistemologists have pointed out, it’s not that the actual results ever changed. Biden had always won that election, but the count was not released simultaneously, so you were counting in homogeneously amongst the votes, and so the temporary count was different than the final account.

1:27:04.7 SC: Okay. Nevertheless, given that situation, there was a set of people who wanted to stop counting, right? Like, “As soon as I’m ahead, stop the game. That’s the way we should have their rules.” And so, there were people who were encouraged to go around to places where votes were being counted and to try to stop it from counting. And what I remember is that someone, and I forget who it was, sorry about that. But some amusing person went with a video camera to one of these rallies and he started leading chants about, “Go Trump! Make America Great Again,” etcetera. And then he started ranting about how we need to count the votes, like, “It’s a democracy, you should count all the votes.” And he got the whole crowd to start chanting, “Count the votes! Count the votes!” Which was exactly the opposite of what they were there to demonstrate for. But within 10 minutes, he convinced them all that that’s what they were in favor of.

1:27:56.7 SC: The point being that what they were there for was not primarily motivated by this particular policy, this particular suggestion that they should count the votes or not count the votes, stop the count, or whatever but there was a sort of tribal identification. They were there to support Trump, whatever that meant at the time. And if you change what that meant, they would still go along with that idea. And what that means to me is that it can be easier than you think to change people’s minds because what you’re changing is sort of a surface thing, not a deep down thing. I think for a lot of people, they’re just not rigidly adhering to some particular policy prescriptions, and if you think of those policy prescriptions are what matters at the end of the day, there’s an enormous room to change people’s minds about those underlying things.

1:28:44.4 SC: There are studies that might lead you to believe otherwise. There are studies by psychologists, political scientists, where you try to have some people with an opinion, you show them some information for that opinion or against that opinion, and then you ask them if their minds have changed. And in many of these studies, they’re hard to do, there are replication difficulties for many of these studies, etcetera, but you can easily get depressed about how hard it is to actually make someone’s mind to change if you just look at the results of these studies. But I think that I’m very skeptical of these studies, to be honest. For one thing, I think that they misrepresent how minds work, how people’s opinions work. People are not perfect Bayesian reasoners as much as we would like to aspire to be. People do not have a set of priors that are well delineated and then collect new data and update them according to Bayes’s formula, that’s not what people do. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t change their minds, people change their minds all the time.

1:29:48.7 SC: What often happens is something that can be very familiar to physicists who know about phase transitions, the thing that causes someone to change their mind might not be, and in fact, rarely is the straw that broke the camel’s back. There can be a little thing that they get, the little piece of information and experience, whatever it is, that is associated in time with the moment they change their mind. But the actual cause of them changing their mind is a set of many, many things stretching back in time, okay? You have a person with an opinion, with a belief, a credence in a certain proposition, and they get data that is against that proposition, and data in the very broadest sense, it’s not like they’re being physicists, but they get information, experiences, new stories, conversations with friends, that cause them to think about that particular proposition, and then they don’t change their mind immediately, ’cause that’s not how people work, but that has an effect on them. Even if the effect is invisible at the level of their actual beliefs in propositions, hearing that thing can nevertheless affect them at a deeper level.

1:30:56.8 SC: And if they hear something else, and something else, and something else over a period of time, they can eventually be led to change their mind without it ever being possible to associate the reason for that change with a particular piece of information that they got. Not to mention the fact that often, this data in a very, very broad sense is not data. In other words, the thing that is causing people to change their minds is not some piece of information or some rational argument, but something much more visceral, something much more emotional. Realizing that this person who is a member of a group that they have hated and denigrated for years, they meet a member of that group and become friends with them, suddenly maybe their minds change, right? You are against gay people getting married and then you have a child who turns out to be gay and wants to get married, maybe you change your mind, right? For no especially good reason epistemically, rationally, but you realize that, “I wasn’t really that devoted to that opinion in the first place.”

1:31:55.4 SC: There are many ways to change people’s minds, and it really does happen, and all of this is just to say it’s worth trying. It’s not worth trying reaching out to the extremists, to the crazies, but there are plenty of people who are not like that. There are plenty of people who are just not that devoted. And those people might not be wedded to the views that they very readily profess to believe in right now. This is part of the challenge of democracy, those people count, just as much as the most informed voters count. And of course, there are hyper-informed voters who are extremists on both sides, so it’s not just a matter of information levels, but there are people who are, in principle and in practice, reachable and people who are not, and we should try to reach the ones who are reachable. And again, I would give that advice to the other side as well, if the other side thinks that they wanna reach some people who are on the opposite side, they can try to reach me and I’m here to be reached, right?

1:32:54.6 SC: Change takes time. Often it is not a matter of marshaling better arguments, it’s just setting a good example, providing people with a soft landing. One of the hardest things about changing your mind politically is that it is associated with a million other things in your life, your friendship networks, your families, etcetera, your beliefs about many different things. The joke we had back in George W. Bush’s days, I think Michael Berube was the first person who’ve made this joke, but the joke was, “Well, yeah, I was a life-long Democrat but then 9/11 happened, and now I’m outraged about Chappaquiddick.” The point is, for those of you young people out here, Chappaquiddick was this scandal where Ted Kennedy was in an automobile accident and Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman who was in the car with him, and he plunged into the river and she died, she drowned and he was able to swim to shore, and survived obviously, and continued in the Senate. And Republicans were outraged though, this was like a terrible thing, and Democrats made excuses for it.

1:33:57.7 SC: And the joke being that once you change your tribal political affiliation, your opinion about this historical event changes along with it, because these are connected to each other. And so, I wanna mention this in the opposite way also, so not just that all of these other opinions will change along with you if you do change your mind about something, but that in order to get someone to change their mind, you have to make it seem reasonable for them to live in a whole another world, right? For them to live in a world where a whole set of beliefs are no longer taken for granted in a certain way. That’s what it means by offering a soft landing.

1:34:33.9 SC: One of the very first podcast I did was with Tony Pinn, who was an atheist theologian, who reaches out to black communities and tries to spread the good word of atheism to them. And one of the points he made over and over again is that black people are very religious in part because atheism does not provide them with a soft landing. You can make a rational argument that God doesn’t exist, but they need to figure out a way to live their lives and in the lives of many black communities, religion plays an important role, and if you simply say, “Well, we’re not gonna replace that role, you gotta learn to live with it,” then they’re not gonna be persuaded to go along with you. So part of persuading the other side and reaching out to it is making them feel welcome. And again, I get it if this seems hard to do, if you just want these people to be punished and they don’t deserve it, etcetera, etcetera, I get that, but that’s gonna make living in a democracy harder for all of us, if that’s the attitude we all take.

1:35:33.2 SC: So to close, let me go back to the point of how much democracy demands of us, because that’s an actually two-edged argument. Living in a democracy, taking democracy seriously, suggests that every citizen, every voter or prospective voter, eligible voter in the country needs to have some responsibility to be informed about politics, to think carefully about who they’re voting for, etcetera. So the flip side of that is that if you want democracy to work, you should work to make sure that people have access to information and knowledge and education, okay? That people are able to put in the time and the resources and the thought power to think about the country and other people. If you want people to be empathetic and understanding of people in different circumstances, then you have to expose them to people in different circumstances, you have to let people have experiences that take them outside of their bubble. Economics, health, education, equality, all of these go into having a healthy democracy.

1:36:44.7 SC: I talked in a fairly narrow political way about our political system and how it might be made more robust, which I think is important, but it’s not nearly as important as just creating a fair, equitable society for everyone. Give people education, give people healthcare, give people jobs, give people a feeling that they have prospects, so they have a future. We’ve all seen these statistics of how the tiny fraction of wealth that is in the hands of people who are roughly age 30 now, compared to what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago, people in the generation that was at that time 30 years old, at that time owned a far larger fraction of the wealth of the country than the 30-year-olds do today. We’ve created a society not only in which wealth is more concentrated than ever in the hands of rich people, but in the hands of old people, right? So we’re making it perfectly reasonable for young people to be frustrated, and that’s bad. That’s a recipe for disaster. That’s asking for trouble, okay?

1:37:53.8 SC: So all of these hopes for economic equality and relief from debt and access to healthcare, these aren’t just good because they’re good, they’re good. I think it’s good that the people have access to all these wonderful things as basic human dignities, they’re also important for democracy, right? If you want someone to be informed, if you want them to really think about the information sources they’re getting and try to separate the bullshit from the facts, etcetera, it helps enormously if they had the powers to do that and the time to do that and the resources to do that. It’s not a fair race if some people are more burdened than others. We can think about basic income, universal education, whatever it is. But all of these policies should be thought of not just for their immediate short-term economic impacts, but for their service in the cause of keeping democracy thriving. As a privileged academic, I would even go so far as to say that cosmopolitanism, liberal education, the humanities, not to mention, of course, science and math and all that stuff, all that stuff, but being educated in the world in a broad sense, it seems almost obvious, it seemed almost cliched and too obvious to be said out loud that this is really important for a functioning democracy.

1:39:20.7 SC: You have a bunch of people in whom the responsibility of governing the country is being put. Well, it’s in all of our best interests of those people are as well educated and as exposed to the world and all of its manifold wonders as we can possibly allow them to be, right? And in this case, those people are everybody. So economic justice and equality and access to good things, education and ideas, and philosophy and history and literature, all of those things should be part of watering the soil in which democracy grows, if you wanna put it that way.

1:39:57.9 SC: And is it gonna work? Is it gonna happen? Are we gonna be okay? I don’t know, I’m not gonna make any predictions here. I want to be optimistic about democracy because I like it, and I think that there is a lot of robustness to our current institutions, but it could go all disastrously wrong. We’ve seen that, we’ve seen in other countries, and we’re not that special in here in the United States. Shoutout to all those listeners who are not in the United States. I hope that I’m saying something interesting to you also, but I’m here in the United States, we’re in the middle of a crisis right now so that’s what I’m thinking about. I think that we should act as if democracy could die at any moment. That’s what we should have in mind, and we should be asking ourselves how to make it healthier, how to push it forward, how to protect it. A lot of that means how to get along with and work with the people who are not on our side. That’s the challenge. Let’s see whether we can live up to it.

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