Transcript: Eric Merkley
An interview with the author of Polarization, Eh?
This week was Canada Day and many of us were reflecting on our nation and where we are at. We know that we are more divided than ever, but how did we get here? My guest on the program has just written a book on political polarization in the country. He says the roots of our divisions run deep — and the consequences are dire.
Eric Merkley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and director of the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab. His new book is Polarization, Eh? The Causes and Consequences of Affective Polarization in Canada.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s wonderful to have you on the show. As I mentioned to you, my colleague Paul Wells did an excellent Q&A with you a while back. I knew I wanted to speak with you. This is a topic I’m very interested in. In your book’s introduction, you quote the Toronto Star reporter Susan Delacourt as saying, “The middle is the scariest place to be in Canadian politics.” That certainly hits home for me. What made you decide to embark on this book length project about Canadian political polarization?
EM: It was seeing quotes like that, really. Especially in the post-Trump era, a lot of concern about polarization in the United States and other countries, in Canada. We have a tendency to see trends in other countries and import them into Canadian politics. But at that point, there really wasn’t a lot of good scholarly evidence. There was a couple articles here and there, but nothing comprehensive. So when we make comparisons of things down there and [say that things in] the United States are happening up here, well, we didn’t really have a lot of data or evidence to show whether that was or wasn’t the case — and if there are caveats to that narrative. So, lots and lots of really interesting questions that were completely unexplored in academic work to that point. To be frank, I wanted an academic job and so I needed a project. That seemed like a good project to take on. Many years later, here it is.
TH: We’ll drill down into the specific threads that you pull in this book. But just to give listeners a general idea, what is it that you have found here in terms of our relationship to affective polarization versus the American environment?
EM: I’m interested in affective polarization. What that means, it’s about our feelings. It’s not necessarily about our beliefs or other things; it’s about our feelings about the other side, the other political party, and feelings about our own team. When it comes to the polarization component of affective polarization, it’s about feeling really warm and attached to your team, to the party you support, and being really hostile or even hating supporters of the opposing political party. That’s what scholars refer to when they say affective polarization. Or partisan hostility; there are other terms that are floated around about that. We did know, to that point, that that was happening in Canada. There was some early work that showed — using Canadian election studies data — that it seems like partisan hostility is on the rise in Canada. In-party warmth is also on the rise. So, this polarization is occurring. How concerned should we be about it? What’s causing it? These are the sorts of questions that I tackle in my book.
In a nutshell, the argument that I make is that the feelings that we have towards our party and the opposing party in particular are shaped by our beliefs, our ideology, our policy commitments, our beliefs about politics. It’s about our ideology and it’s about values. Over time we see the parties — particularly the Conservatives on one side and Liberal and NDP parties on the other — they’ve diverged in the electorate in terms of their values and ideology. That has produced greater hostility between those two political camps. That is the result of our political parties and the strategies and actions taken by our party leaders and parties, who have polarized over time in Canada as well. It’s that two-stage process that results in this affective polarization that’s really concerning for people.
Another part of the book is: What are the consequences for those types of feelings, that hostility that people have? I find that it leads to biased reasoning about politics. It can lead to feelings of aversion — that you don’t want to spend time or associate with political opponents in your day-to-day life. You may even discriminate against them. I find that this form of polarization contributed to COVID-19 polarization and undermined our pandemic response in the mass public. Most concerningly, I find that it sparks this dynamic where if we’re really polarized or really hostile towards our political opponents, we’re more likely to tolerate our own party taking anti-democratic actions. That’s what I find most concerning out of the findings from my project. It all boils down to this feeling of hostility that people have increasingly held in Canadian politics. And that looks like what we see in the U.S., but there’s some caveats to a narrative that I’m happy to talk about.
TH: I should say just from the outset, I share your concerns. Anecdotally, I encounter this a lot as a journalist speaking with people in the public. I’m very concerned about this trend as well. Especially, as you say, this piece about allowing for anti-democratic behaviour. Let’s just go back a bit, though. We do have quite a few listeners outside of the country, so I want to paint the picture for them. This idea of the polarization stemming from ideology and values — I want to start with ideology. Until the 1980s in this country, there was not a huge difference between the beliefs of the Liberals and the Conservatives. The divide was really between both of those parties and the NDP. Can you explain for our listeners what’s happened since then?
EM: That’s right. It is an interesting point about the early Canadian party system where you had the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives (PC) on the one side. And most of that vote was structured by things like religious denominations. So Protestants voted Conservative, Catholics voted Liberal, and that’s just kind of how it was. It wasn’t really about policy. It wasn’t really about ideology or anything like that. But you had the CCF, which turned into the NDP, which was the prairie socialist anchor to the Canadian party system. And so it was that party versus the Liberals and the Conservatives, from an ideological perspective. But things changed in the 1980s. The first marked shift in this period was Brian Mulroney and the Blue Tories’ triumph over Joe Clark and the Red Tories in the PC leadership. And then at that point, the PC Party started taking on increasingly ideological positions on the right. At this time you had Thatcher, you had Reagan, there was this emerging neoliberal consensus among right-wing parties. It was part of this greater ideational shift on the political right. Then in the 1990s, you had Reform, you had the Canadian Alliance, another pivot to the right.
Over time, the Liberals also moved to the left and this came in fits and starts. They moderated in the ’90s during the debt crisis. When the Conservative Party merged in 2004, [the Liberals] moved to the left again. With Trudeau, it accelerated further. You had this growing divide, where it was not just between the NDP and the Liberals and Conservatives, but actually the Liberals started to move more and more towards the NDP’s position and the Conservatives started taking on more right-wing positions over time as well. Now the two major parties and main competitors for government are divided ideologically. That wasn’t true before the 1980s.
That’s a very big shift. You can see echoes of that in the United States too, where there’s this report that was released by the American Political Science Association. I think it was back in the ’50s. They bemoaned that, well, there’s no difference between the parties, that the electorate deserves real choice and that you can’t be accountable to the electorate if you don’t stand for something. They wanted more polarization. Because for them, the Democrats and Republicans were basically the same. And so it was kind of similar in Canada in that respect. When you put polarization in a comparative perspective, comparing Canada and the U.S. to other countries, in a lot of ways Canada and the U.S. have started to converge with party systems in Western Europe where there always was a large labour party in most of these countries, anchored on that class politics. There was always a lot of polarization in those contexts, but not in Canada and the U.S. Since the 1980s, both us and them have really started to converge with the European norm. But I think things have gone much more extreme in the United States compared to Canada, for reasons we can talk about.
TH: Just for listeners as well, Prime Minister Carney has moved the Liberal Party more to the centre, arguably even to the centre-right. But you say in the book that the base has not shifted in the same way. What are your thoughts on what you’re going to be watching for with that dynamic in the coming weeks and months?
EM: One of the lessons from the book is that people do change. They change their beliefs, they change their identities and their allegiances to parties. The Liberal base did move over time in response to polarizing signals from political parties, from the Liberal Party moving to the left. And so if the Liberals moved to the centre, it’s possible we could see depolarization. An analogue I like to use is the UK example. It might be hard to believe right now with Brexit and how polarized it is on that dimension, but there was a period in the 1990s coming off of Thatcherism … Thatcher leaves, the Conservatives want to move to the centre to win over voters that were alienated during that time. You had the Labour Party that used to be really on the left move to the centre under Tony Blair and New Labour. And so the parties became virtually indistinguishable in a lot of respects in this period and you had affective depolarization through this period. And so, it’s possible if Carney moves to the centre.
One thing about the Canadian system that’s unique is that our political parties are very shallow. What I mean by that is they are very leader-centric. A leader can come in and take a party in an entirely different direction and if they’re successful and they win, people get behind it. If it’s durable, maybe it could change things. But it’s hard to know because right now, like you said, the Liberal base is on the left. That is where the Liberal base is. It will be interesting to see in the years that come if that stays the case, but it is true right now. There’s awkwardness with Carney moving to the right where the Liberal base is. How sustainable is that equilibrium if the Trump threat dies a little bit? If these unique circumstances that are shaping Canadian politics tone down over time, how durable will that change be? I don’t know. So that’s what I’m interested in seeing — if we feel less threatened by the Americans and by Trump, and politics returns to normal, is Carney’s move to the centre sustainable for the Liberal Party? Or are they going to start bleeding votes to the left? Possibly, but I’m not a good at prediction, so I’m not going to stake a prediction one way or the other.
TH: I’m no good at predictions as well. This thesis about ideology is really interesting to me in that it runs contrary to a lot of what we’ve heard in the last five or six years in particular about people making decisions based on identity, and in particular racial identity. It sounds like from your data, that does not apply to the Canadian context.
EM: There are identity components to Canadian polarization, but it’s different than what we see in the U.S. In the U.S., the common argument is that it’s all about social polarization. So beliefs, ideology are secondary to this narrative. On the Republican side, you have a whole bunch of identities line up — white, rural, evangelical, now non-college educated — and then the reverse of that for the Democratic Party. And as all these identities line up, the Republican and Democratic parties look very different and there’s very little cross pressure between voters. That, to a lot of scholars, is what makes American politics so toxic.
In Canada, I find that this social sorting between the parties is happening, but it’s not nearly as strong. We occupy an intermediate case between Europe and the United States. In Europe, what’s happened is the exact opposite actually, where the social cleavages that structured party support — like class, religious denomination, to a lesser extent urban/rural, depending on the country — they have become unmoored. And so voting is much more volatile in Europe than it used to be. In Canada and in the U.S., if social identity matters, we’re kind of in the middle.
What I find in my work is that there are a few identity groups that do seem to be polarizing in the sense that they seem to be lining up behind the Conservatives or lining up behind the Liberals and the NDP. Religiosity is very important. Education is increasingly becoming important, where educated voters are moving to the left and non-university educated voters are moving to the right. There used to be an age gradient, but that seems to be shifting, where in the past it was young voters on the left, but now that seems to be shifting. And then, urban/rural matters a ton. It hasn’t mattered more now than in the past, in terms of structuring the support of the parties in the electorate, but it is a very big difference between urban and rural areas in supporting the left and right.
The way I reconcile those findings with my own is that there are real attitudinal conflicts, real debates about policy that go on between those groups in society, between religious and non-religious voters, between people in rural and urban areas. It’s not divorced of ideology or policy or beliefs, as a lot of American scholarship would suggest. There’s real stakes. It’s real value conflict. To me, some of these identity dimensions go hand-in-hand with the narrative that I’m saying about this growing ideological divide between the parties, that these identities that matter now more than ever — there are real meaningful differences in policy attitudes between those groups. But other things that matter in the U.S. don’t really matter nearly as much in Canada. Race is one of those areas where, if anything, it’s become less important over time in dividing Liberal versus Conservative supporters in the electorate. Which is good. It’s good that those social stakes of our political conflict are more muted than in the United States. I think there are things in U.S. history that explain why it might be different down there, like the legacy of slavery and racial politics in the South, and just decades and decades of historical conflict under the surface in U.S. politics that doesn’t carry nearly as well to Canada.
TH: Interesting. I will say, too, that I have interviewed a number of Trump supporters and I do increasingly hear very specific public policy debates happening. And so I find that trend very interesting as well. I wanted to talk a little bit about the potential causes of affective polarization in Canada. One of the things that I hear from a lot of people is they blame social media. You don’t. Why not?
EM: This is probably the biggest hot take from the book that a lot of people will draw from. I’m a bit of a social media skeptic. It’s not to say that I don’t think social media matters. I think it matters to explain a lot of the dynamics in politics we see these days. But when we see affective polarization emerge over time, it’s one of gradual change over the course of decades since the 1980s, not a lot of nothing and then suddenly spikes in the mid 2000s, late to early 2010s or so. So it has to reconcile with that historical backdrop, where this has been gradually unfolding over time. That’s a big part of why I’m skeptical. But also I just don’t see any evidence.
In the book I have survey data from about 120,000 individuals and in some cases I can recontact the same people over time and get a sense of over time dynamics. I also have some data from a unique survey where we actually observe people’s behaviour online and what sorts of news sources they’re consuming, what sorts of social media platforms they’re using. I don’t find really any sort of association, just at a basic level of a correlation, between social media usage and partisan hostility and observed social media usage in their behavioural data and partisan hostility, or anything like that.
When digging into the data and looking at what news Conservatives are consuming, what news Liberal and NDP supporters are consuming, it’s basically the same news. We get hung up on “all the Conservatives hate the CBC.” It’s one of their top three used news sources, in terms of the behavioural data online — let alone what they are seeing on broadcast television or on radio. We make a lot about these really small differences, but at the end of the day, Liberal and Conservatives, they’re seeing the same news. Their overlap in their news diets is about something like 85 percent.
TH: Do you think that’s the case with The National Post too? Do you think that Liberal supporters are reading the Post?
EM: There are small differences between them. Slightly more Conservatives will read the Post than Liberal and NDP supporters. But Post readership in general is not that high, so we keep that baseline in mind. The other striking thing from the behavioural data is most people just don’t consume a lot of news. We tend to overestimate. When we ask people on surveys, “How much news are you consuming,” they are way overestimating how much news they are consuming as a result of social desirability and all that. So, there are these differences, but they are slight. In the grand scheme of things, they are pretty slight. There’s no echo chamber of this whole population of Conservatives that only get their news from the National Post or a population of Liberal and NDP supporters that are reading the Toronto Star. There’s a lot of overlap there. And so you have to keep that in mind too.
[Social media] feels like it’s part of the story. It feels like it. And I don’t doubt that there are certain things that social media does that make politics worse in a lot of ways. One thing is that I’m talking about nationally representative surveys, but I have no doubt that there are pockets of the Internet where there are really intense users of certain social media platforms who become radicalized in certain communities. I take no issue with studies that focus on that. Those people matter because they might be inclined to political violence or all sorts of other problematic behaviours. And so, we should care about those pockets in the public that might be radicalized by social media. It’s a real harm that exists to society, but it doesn’t pop up. Because they’re small populations — they don’t pop up in large nationally representative surveys.
The other thing to keep in mind is that what we see on social media is a distorted prism of reality. That is, most people don’t use social media intensely for political purposes and the people that do so — the people that we see commenting and posting online — are very different than ordinary Canadians. There are huge selection effects here. What I mean by that is people that have certain attitudes and dispositions are more inclined to post about politics, to be aggressive online. It turns out that what we see online is people that are jerks self-select into that behaviour. And because the platforms reward virality and toxicity, they see their behaviour rewarded and they do more of it and more of it. Then people that are moderate are like, “I want no part of this.” I know a lot of people who just don’t even bother anymore posting online because it’s just not worth it. Those are selection effects. People that are already predisposed a certain way see their behaviours and attitudes rewarded or not on social media and then they either do more of it or stay away.
Then when we look on social media, we say, “This is a cesspool of awfulness. Surely it’s causing polarization.” Well, polarized people are rewarded on social media and so they do more and more of it and moderates stay away. And so I think that’s part of the story. But that’s not to say that those dynamics don’t matter because we see that and then it might change how we perceive things. We think, “Oh, we’re so polarized, everything is so bad all the time”— this could lead to real effects in society, maybe breed cynicism or despair. You look online and become less hopeful about society. There are real effects there. Journalists look online. There’s some good work in the U.S. that shows that journalists can use social media discourse as a proxy for public opinion.
TH: One hundred percent.
EM: Yeah, exactly. We’ve all read the stories of, “Oh, what’s the public’s reaction to X event? Here are five tweets.” That’s not reflective of any sort of public opinion that means anything, but we see these stories. Elites do the same thing. Like politicians. They see what’s on social media, it might influence their behaviours too. I think all these indirect effects of social media matter a lot, but it’s very hard to study them. They don’t get studied as much as these direct effects do. I don’t want to leave everyone with a sense that social media is no problem whatsoever. It’s just not explaining these historical trends that have been occurring over decades. But it could explain a lot of other bad stuff that’s going on right now. I don’t want the message from the book to be, “There’s nothing going on there. Everything’s A-okay with what’s going on on X.” It’s really bad. It’s just maybe bad in a slightly different way than people think.
TH: Just anecdotally, that tracks well with what my experience as a journalist has been talking to the public. The vast majority of people I speak to — in-person, particularly — are very reasonable. Perhaps they lean left, perhaps they lean right. Some, even very far left or quite far right, are still happy to concede points, happy to debate. They are not posting all the time online. They definitely have similar goals and aspirations for us as a country. You just don’t see that reflected at all in the online discourse. This elite point I think is an important one as well. You’re making the argument here that affective polarization is an elite-driven phenomenon.
EM: Yeah. So the mechanism that I spell out in the book is mostly about position taking. I measure elites with this dataset that a bunch of scholars use to compare party systems around the world. They’ll code manifestos or platforms of the parties and give them a code of how left wing, how right wing a particular party is on a whole bunch of different issues, or in general. I use that to show that as these platforms have diverged over time, the public became more sorted, that is their ideology became more essential to their partisan identity over time.
Part of it is a position-taking argument that the parties became more ideological between the Liberals and the Conservatives over time. People in the electorate noticed that and they can do two things in response to that. [First, people think,] “The Conservatives are becoming more right-wing, the Liberals are becoming more left-wing. I am going to switch my partisan affiliation in order to better match my own values.” So that’s one response you could take to those signals from politicians. The other is, “Well, I’m just going to change what I believe. I’m just going to become more opposed to a carbon tax, more supportive of public daycare” — things that are in the news — “because my party believes it, and so then I’m going to believe it.” A mix of those two things happen. I think the former more than the latter in Canada, but I think both things are going on. And so, my argument is one of this position taking.
I just want to say I don’t think it’s bad necessarily that parties take on different positions on politics. I think that form of polarization is good because people should have meaningful choices when they go to the ballot box. It’s just that the consequences of that, that spillover, need to be managed. But I think there are other mechanisms also that I don’t tackle in the book that can also explain things. I do think that politics has become nastier over time, and that sends signals to the public as well about what is or isn’t acceptable. This isn’t in the book. I have some work with a colleague from University of Ottawa that measures attitudes of political candidates. We find that political candidates who are affectively polarized or more hostile, they’re more likely to support campaign strategies that rely on negative messages that touch on culture war issues compared to candidates that are less hostile.
So I do think there’s a second mechanism here and that’s politicians also choose to take on strategies that are toxic and polarizing. I think there are things in our environment that reward them to do that. One thing that I think is critical in the Canadian case is that we have these changes in campaign finance laws. We had the removal of the per-vote subsidy that was giving parties public support for campaigns and all that, and it kind of forced all the parties to rely on a lot of small-dollar donors in order to fund their campaign war chests. If any of your listeners have been members of political parties, you get all these very inflammatory emails all the time that encourage you to send in donations. Regardless of how many donations you give, you’re just going to get more and more emails. And so it incentivizes this play to the base — you need to raise the money — and there’s some good work that’s done in the United States that shows that small-dollar donors, the ones that contribute in that fashion, they tend to be more ideological and more polarized. And so, you have to play to those people in order to raise money.
The second thing that’s making this problem worse is that we’re in an era of very continuous minority governments. There are structural reasons in the party system why it’s just very hard for a party to win a majority government nowadays in any manner of consistency. The Bloc plays an important role in that. And so, then you have election after election after election. You’ve got to keep replenishing the war chest, you’ve got to prepare for the next election, you’ve got to spend pre-writ — there’s no restrictions on pre-writ spending. You have to raise money, raise money, raise money. I think it’s encouraging politicians to, again, prioritize the base over persuading people to join their political coalition. I think these incentives matter.
This isn’t covered in the book, because [the book] is just about position taking and party platforms and sending those ideological signals, but I think this rhetoric also matters quite a bit. And I think it’s tracking with the polarization of our political parties in an ideological sense too. I think it’s part of the story and I think we need more research on it. A lot of my colleagues that study institutions and electoral rules and all this, I think they need to be engaged in this topic too. Because I think there are ways that we could reward politicians for being a little bit more constructive. We need to change the incentive structure. That’s where I would hope future research goes.
TH: I want to talk now about the consequences of affective polarization. The first one I want to talk about is social — this idea that people in Canada are no longer particularly comfortable forming social associations with political opponents. This is worrying. I’m Gen X. I come from a background of open debate. I really enjoy speaking to people across the political spectrum. I learn a lot and sometimes just change my mind about things.
EM: That’s right, yeah.
TH: What are we missing in a society where we group together like that?
EM: Yeah, it’s not good. And you can imagine it sows the seeds for even more polarization down the line. Because if you don’t have people in your day-to-day life that believe different things than you, you don’t know anything about those people beyond the stereotypes that you form from news coverage you read or from what you see online. Which is, again, an inflammatory, distorted prism of reality. Then you draw on those sorts of lazy representations in your mind about who your political opponents are. You need in-person contact in order to break down those barriers. So yeah, it’s a really big problem. Because again, that lack of contact, it sows the seeds for even more polarization down the line.
TH: The second consequence I wanted to talk about is democratic norms. What does your research tell us about affective polarization and support for this ongoing erosion we’re seeing in democratic norms?
EM: One thing I was interested in [with] this project is there’s always a possibility that elite norms may break down, that politicians might engage in boundary pushing, do things that maybe are not explicitly against the law or against certain norms that are really important for the functioning of Canadian democracy or democracy more generally. In an ideal world, we want people to recognize when those transgressions are being made. That their punishment of that is partisan, colourblind — that regardless of who does it, you recognize it as anti-democratic and you act accordingly.
In my project, I have these vignettes that I give people of a prime minister who’s engaging in some boundary pushing, so to speak. In some cases, pretty alarming boundary pushing. One vignette, for instance, was pushing for the prosecution of a journalist who wrote some things that the prime minister didn’t like and didn’t disclose their sources, something like that. Do you support or oppose this action by the prime minister? I varied the partisanship of the prime minister in question. Was it your own team? Was it the other team? In some cases, I masked it entirely. I find that in general, people are kind of hypocrites about the defence of norms — that when it’s their team engaging in those sorts of transgressions, they are much more likely to support it than if it’s the opposing party. But this is especially true among the most hostile among us, the people that have high levels of affective polarization. There’s something like 43 percent likely across all six vignettes to endorse the anti-democratic action compared to endorsing it about less than 10 percent of the time if it was the opposing party engaging in that sort of action.
That leaves us vulnerable because if we continue polarizing and become more and more polarized over time, if there’s anything that pushes elite norms to break down — where they’re willing to try it out, to take an action that’s really questionable — the blowback they are going to face is more circumscribed if their own base isn’t able to recognize it. We see that in the United States all the time right now, where elite norms have broken down and punishment is not forthcoming. The base still supports the Republican Party for engaging in that sort of boundary pushing.
It’s a big vulnerability. I have another study with one of my students where we engage in a candidate choice experiment where we randomize norms about candidates endorsing certain anti-democratic actions, then they have an opposing party candidate that takes other positions. We find that people’s proclivity to punish candidates for endorsing anti-democratic actions, it’s there, but it’s really small. That’s alarming because it’s quite a vulnerability. It just goes to show that even though things are fine — the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the NDP, they all endorse democracy. They’re not undermining our institutions at every turn. But there’s this vulnerability in the electorate that’s out there. We really need to shore up our democratic foundations if we’re going to continue on the path of polarization.
TH: Yeah. Just to be fair to the Republicans, one of the things I hear a lot in interviews with Republicans is the concealment of Joe Biden’s health and how that played out. Many felt that was very anti-democratic.
EM: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Again, certain actions that can be taken are illegal. Some are very clearly in defence of certain norms or conventions, constitutional conventions in Canada. And other things are just not fair play. Concealing Joe [Biden’s health], certainly not great.
TH: Yeah, it escalates.
M: It escalates, yeah. Then it becomes tit for tat and then it gets worse and worse. And if the public is polarized, then there’s no accountability for these sorts of actions and that’s a problem.
TH: Yeah. The last couple minutes that we have together, I want to talk about interventions. I hope you don’t mind, but I want to talk about this on a personal level. As a journalist, I have some ways that I try to work against this. Exposing myself to a range of views, reading across the political spectrum, speaking to people who I disagree with. I don’t vote, for example, so I don’t feel like I have a horse in the race. That helps me personally. Trying to maintain strong relationships with people who have very different views than me. I don’t argue online. There’s a great piece by Amanda Ripley, a groundbreaking essay called Complicating the Narratives about how you cover polarized societies. But I’m curious about you. This is something you’ve thought about a lot. How do you push back against this tide in your own life and your own thinking and your own scholarship?
EM: Yeah, it’s tough, especially nowadays. I would say that what you want to do ideally is first recognize that what you see on social media and what you see in the news, those aren’t representations of what most people think about most things. Most people maybe pay attention to politics a little bit, but it’s not a huge part of their lives. They’re just ordinary people that have a job, that have a family, that are leading normal lives and have normal interests and are just generally normal. So you have to try to come into conversations with opposing folks in that vein. You don’t want to draw too much on stereotypes when approaching these interactions. And you want to engage in some form of perspective taking or empathy — try to see what they think and try to understand it and put yourself in their shoes and so on.
But it is important to know that you can’t do this for everybody. In a really highly polarized climate, there are a lot of folks that are really hateful and have very odious views. We do see them on social media. They are out there. It is not up to you to solve them and to make them not a conspiracy theorist. There’s only so much you can do. With those folks, don’t try to beat yourself senseless trying to reach them. There are plenty of other people who are much more representative of the public that you can engage in conversations with and learn about their perspectives. So, there’s a middle ground. You don’t need to go out there converting the diehards that are really locked in. But you also don’t want to cocoon yourself in a group of people that just reinforce everything that you believe. You want to expose yourself to different perspectives. It’s not about “go watch Fox News.” That’s not the approach. It’s to talk to normal people that might disagree with you. It’s not about watching clips of Tucker Carlson. “Maybe he has a point.” No, he doesn’t. You don’t have to do that. Just talk to normal people.
And so, that’s part of it — extend empathy, be reasonable, be respectful, that sort of thing. 90 percent of the time, or 95 percent of the time, that will be returned to you. But I do want to say: It is not up to us. This was broken by politicians. It was broken by our political class and it needs to be fixed with institutional changes and changes in rules and incentives. I think we miss that a bit. We have all this work in my field and in political psychology that tries to make people less polarized and all that, and that’s fine. But the whole climate is polarized. It’s far beyond our day-to-day interactions and we can’t lose sight of those structural issues too. That’s really important.
The other thing that we need to keep in mind, too, is it is true that in contexts that are very affectively polarized, sometimes it’s not politics as normal. Sometimes it’s a case of democratic backsliding. Sometimes there’s something else going on. The most hyper-affectively polarized — think Hungary, think Turkey, think now the United States. In some cases, democracy is being eroded. There are people that are eroding it and other people that are trying to hold fast to what they have and to protect their rights and liberties.
I have no problem talking about this with Canadians in this context, which is kind of normal politics. But it gets normatively murkier when you venture into other contexts where the stakes are very high, where people are being abducted, rights are being violated. It’s hard to say, “Well, you just need to be nicer and be more empathetic.” So, I struggle with this because I do think that’s part of the solution, but in some contexts it’s weird to deploy that sort of both-sidesism. That’s something we still need to reconcile with. A lot of my colleagues would say polarization is entirely the wrong frame to think about something like what’s going on in the United States — that it’s about asymmetric extremism and rising authoritarianism, and that’s a whole other beast entirely. I think there’s probably something to that. We have to think about that. If we want to coach people about what the right thing is in their own lives in those contexts. Maybe that’s not the right way of thinking about it. I don’t know. It’s something I’m still not fully settled on myself, but it’s something to keep in mind.
TH: It’s something I’m definitely grappling with as well. I would say, I think maybe we differ a little bit here, but I see the work of the depolarization groups in the United States like More in Common and Braver Angels and journalists who are really working to complicate the dominant narrative. I would land more on the side of feeling quite hopeful about that. I will say from a media perspective as well, strictly from a media perspective, that declaring a state of exception with Donald Trump has not been healthy for us. And when you speak to journalists who come from explicitly non-democratic contexts, they will say that becoming advocates is really one of the worst things we can do in that context. So, this is very complicated. I think you’re pointing to some of that complexity. I want to end on this: Back with the personal, you’re a dad, you’re a father. Your kids are growing up in this. What do you think is ultimately at stake here for us in this country?
EM: Yeah, I want my daughter and my son to be able to learn about politics and appreciate difference in a way that’s healthy and constructive. I want them to be intellectually curious and intellectually humble. Polarization makes that challenging. To some degree, one could argue polarization is kind of — well, it is infecting institutions of higher education, too, and making people less inclined to have those conversations. That’s an intellectual loss because we don’t learn anything by only speaking with or hanging out with people that just agree with everything that I say. It inhibits their intellectual development.
I do think it is important that we take polarization seriously because it makes a more insular society. A more combative society is not one that’s healthy in the long run, even if I think we are in better shape than other contexts.
It’s something I think about a lot. In our family life, we have folks in our family that believe very different things — and in some cases extremely different things — about Trump and other things. For them to have a healthy family life requires resolving some of those issues. We haven’t found the magic solution yet and I hope we do.