Recorded February 22, 2023
Evan Meyer welcomes the Past Chair of Public Policy at Princeton University, Nolan McCarty on this episode of Meyerside Chats.
Meyerside Chats seeks to eliminate the “us and them” narrative and toxic polarization by striving to create virtuous community leadership and authentic conversation. The intent is to showcase the humanity in those that take on the often thankless jobs of public service through civil discourse, and honoring differing points of view.
About Nolan McCarty
Nolan McCarty is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He served as the chair of Princeton Politics Department from 2011-2018.
He has written on a variety of topics related U.S. politics and political economy ranging from the causes and consequences of political polarization, economic and politic inequality, regulation, and the political role of business. He has also engaged in the development of statistical methodologies and the application of game theoretic models to political questions.
He has authored or co-authored four books: Political Game Theory (2006, with Adam Meirowitz), Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (2016 second edition with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal), Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (2013 with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal) and Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know (2019). With Frances Lee, he co-edited Can American Govern Itself? (2019) In 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his A.B. in Economics from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Political Economy from Carnegie Mellon University.
About Evan Meyer
Evan is the Founder of BeautifyEarth.com, a tech platform and marketplace that speed tracks the urban beautification process through art, as well as the original 501(c)3 sister organization and public charity that beautifies schools in the communities that need it most. Beautify has now facilitated thousands of murals around the planet, working with hundreds of communities, community organizations, cities and national brands.
He is also the Founder of RideAmigos.com, a tech platform that optimizes commuter travel and behavior through intelligent programs and analytics for governments, large enterprises, and universities, serving many regions across the US.
As a civic leader in the City of Santa Monica, he is the past Chairman of his neighborhood (Ocean Park), giving residents a voice in the public process, as well as helping the City of Santa Monica with innovative, actionable ways of civic engagement.
Podcast Summary
- Intro to Nolan McCary | 0:00
- What is Democratic backsliding and are we experiencing it? | 5:15
- Why every president is blamed or praised for his successes and failures depending on what side you’re on? | 6:30
- How the train derailment in East Palestine exemplified the fundamental toxic polarization issue? | 7:40
- Politics of confirmation bias | 10:55
- Why does every election gets delegitimized by the opposite party? | 13:30
- What is the general margin of error for election votes? Issues with our election process 18:00
- Why the context of “facts” matters & Trump/Biden election fairness | 25:00
- Why is civic humility so hard? | 26:00
- Marriage between couples of different political parties has become less accepted than that of different faiths, religions, or ethnicities | 35:00
- Many political leaders misusing social media. | 37:00
- Is polarization intentional? 39:30
- Where does Princeton stand with the claims about liberal University indoctrination? | 43:00
- Academic freedom and institutional neutrality | 48:00
- What are Nolan’s goals as a result of his efforts in polarization? | 55:00
- The importance of not eliminating polarization if it means not talking about important topics | 58:00
Transcript
Nolan McCarty
Thu, Mar 16, 2023 1:43PM • 1:00:02
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, problem, polarization, election, party, fact, bad, important, procedures, princeton, issue, partisan, politics, sudden cardiac arrest, vote, political, conservative, university, president, ways
SPEAKERS
Evan Meyer, Nolan McCarty
Evan Meyer 00:05
Hello everyone. Today we have a wonderful guest Nolan McCarty. He is the Susan Dodd brown professor of politics and public affairs, and the vice dean for Strategic Initiatives at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He’s served as the chair of the Princeton politics department from 2011 to 2018. He has written a variety of topics related to US politics and political economy, ranging from the causes and consequences of political polarization, economic and political inequality, regulation and the political role of business. He is also engaged in the development of statistical methodologies and the application of game theoretic models, to political questions. He’s authored or co authored four books, political game theory, polarized America, political bubbles, and polarization, what everyone needs to know. And he’s co edited. America govern itself. In 2010, he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his AB in Economics from the University of Chicago and his PhD in political economy from Carnegie Mellon University. Nolan, thank you for joining us today.
Nolan McCarty 01:22
Great, thanks. Good to be here.
Evan Meyer 01:25
Yeah, and I should say one more thing, you’ve got something like 25. Public publications in political science journals, if I’m not mistaken.
Nolan McCarty 01:37
Yeah, that’s that sounds about right.
Evan Meyer 01:39
Something like that. Yeah, you’ve done a lot of a lot of research in the area of polarization. And it’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to have you on today. And hopefully get to the bottom of some, some good stuff. And maybe we can think about authorization in a solutions oriented way today, in what needs to be done, how we want to get there, and some active approaches that we can take to get more of what people want faster. Because ultimately, polarization is for a least toxic polarization means that we’re taking a lot longer to get to the solutions we want, because people can’t communicate. That’s how I see it. So I’m going to open this up. And let’s start a bit general. And say, tell me what the problem with politics is.
Nolan McCarty 02:33
Okay, so politics actually has lots of problems. And one of the things I think we’ll want to discuss as we go through is that some of them are related to political polarization. Some of them aren’t. And as we go through these solution oriented discussions, we’ll have to be cognizant of that some solutions to some problems exacerbate other problems. And so one of the dilemmas and into these discussions is which problem do we want to solve at the risk of making some other problem, unsolvable. But I would say basically, that the bigger the bigger problems facing American politics, do lie in the area of political polarization. I think roughly speaking, that almost any essence of our politics today revolves around a conflict between people with ours next to their name, versus people with these next to their name. That’s not always been true throughout US history. And one of the things that I’ve tried to do in my work is to identify those areas in which we’re very partisan, like the current era, which areas were more bipartisan and what the benefits and disadvantages of bipartisanship might be. But we are in a situation where because everything revolves around this partisan axis, that it’s had the impact of making governing harder, because we’re a system that’s long relied on big majorities, big coalition’s consensus to do things. Having everything revolve around a partisan axis has made that harder. We’re in an era where either the government or the economy has failed us several times. And that has created not just the problems associated with that, but a lack of trust in our institutions. Because, you know, when, you know, government fails under a Republican administration, it’s automatically assumed that it’s Republicans fault. When the economy falters under a Democratic administration, all the blame goes to the Democrats is legend situation where you Do politicians and voters of different parties don’t trust each other anymore. And that in turn exacerbates the whole cycle of like, we don’t cooperate, because we don’t trust each other problems fester. Because we don’t cooperate, therefore, we don’t trust each other, which just makes things worse. Then I would say the latest manifestation that many people are concerned about is that it might lead to what political scientists called democratic backsliding is that it might erode democratic processes. Over time, if one side lacks any trust of the other side, then it comes easier to mobilize around the idea of denying political rights, opportunities to participate, D legitimizing opposition, etc, all of those things, which might lead to a less robust democracy. So those are things that relate around polarization. I mean, there are other things we should be concerned about, you know, conflicts that revolve around race and identity, those are separate, but related, we can talk about the ways in which they’re related conflicts around economic inequality between the middle class and the working class, the upper class, and the working class, all of those conflicts, those also began to could revolve around party as well. So why things that polarization has done is it’s kind of brought all the problems of politics into a framework that makes them much more difficult to solve.
Evan Meyer 06:41
Why do you think, you know, one of the things that you mentioned that I’ve always found interesting is no matter what President is the current president, the other side will blame that president for all the failures, and the previous president for all the successes and say, you know, for example, the economy like, oh, well, you know, Trump definitely didn’t do anything for the economy. Of course, not Obama gave them all, you know, anything that good that happened to the economy came from Obama. Right, and he set the stage for that. And then when you know that Biden’s President, that that same conversation happens with Trump, it doesn’t matter what Biden did. If you like Trump, then you’ll assume all the good stuff came from Trump and all the bad stuff came from Biden and Trump set Biden up to win if or to lose, if the economy didn’t do well, it was Trump’s fault for setting them up to lose, right? It’s like, how does that that cycle happens? Every single president, it seems so obvious to me,
Nolan McCarty 07:44
ya know, there’s a great example last week that the train derailment and he’s Palestinian Ohio, somehow, instead of becoming a humanitarian issue to be solved, became a partisan issue of blame, whether it was the Biden administration’s inattention to this issue, and they’re not traveling there, or whether it was the Trump administration, deregulating railroad safety. Quickly, something that was just a terrible tragedy, you know, became a set of partisan talking points. I would say now, to your point, it hasn’t always been this way. So be take a metric like presidential approval. So the Gallup is asked voters since the 1950s, do prove with the way the job, the proof of the job the President is doing. Responses used to be much more bipartisan, and, you know, Republican voters would give high approval marks to Democratic presidents when they did good things. Democratic voters would give Republicans high marks when they did good things. And the converse is that Democratic voters would give Democratic presidents bad marks when they did bad things. And so what you saw is that there’ll be these huge swings, you know, in the approval of the president through the 1960s and 70s. So that, you know, Richard Nixon could go from like 70%, approval to 12% approval on the day, he left office. Now, no matter what happens to your point, each president has been locked in at 40. It’s because they get all of their side, none of the other side, and like half the half of the undecided. So So I think this partisan lens that people had been kind of trained to approach politics with is really undermine the accountability of the president. There’s no upside to doing good things because you’re not going to persuade the other side. But then the problem is, there’s no downside to doing bad things is you’re not going to lose your guys, either. And so it’s really really a bad way for democracy to function democracies function best when politicians get rewarded for good outcomes and punished for bad outcomes. And now it’s now it’s just a flatline. You know, no matter why, you know, each side supports the wrong.
Evan Meyer 10:20
Yeah, and this it’s funny, this seems like an extension of a basic psychological principle, which is that, you know, people tend to attribute good things to their own doing. And if the something goes wrong, it’s because of some external factor. It tends to play, right. And then the opposite is also true, right? And that tends to play out in society where it’s like, the good thing gets attributed note no matter what, to the thing that you’ve already set your, your, your belief system to assume is correct. Yeah.
Nolan McCarty 10:55
I mean, to that point, we do have a politics of confirmation bias is the psychological term you’re referring to there. I mean, the puzzle, though, is like we haven’t, the American public hasn’t always operated this way. Republicans were quite willing to throw Richard Nixon overboard in 1970, for both Republican voters and Republican officeholders in a way that Republican voters and officeholders were not willing to throw Donald Trump overboard, you know, in 2019, and 20, for what any, I don’t want to be partisan, but what many would consider to be kind of, at least as egregious violations of constitutional practice in principle. And so that’s a huge, that’s a huge difference. And so one of the things that we have political scientists want to do is kind of explain how we went from a system where people could hold their side accountable to a system where they seem less likely to do so. Now, in saying that, I do want to point out one thing, which is I think it’s important not to overstate the extent to this problem in thinking that it’s absolute. Well, I think what was remarkable about the 2022 election was at least a subset, not a huge subset, but a large enough subset of Republican voters in a variety of states were willing to cross, you know, split their tickets and vote against the most extreme election denying, you know, Republican candidates out there. People like, you know, Herschel Walker, or I’m blanking on his name, the gentleman who’s running for the Senate in Arizona, a bunch of election denying people running for secretary of state. So there’s a small fraction of people that are still, you know, willing to split their tickets, vote for the other side, you know, to hold people accountable. And if they were big enough and substantial enough to prevent some really bad outcomes from the last election, but then the question is, will that block who got the accountability block? Well, that accountability blog remained, you know, big enough going forward? You know, to prevent, you know, the Democratic backsliding that I referred to before?
Evan Meyer 13:31
Yeah, well, I, why do you think it is that they’re, you know, because this is another thing, like I’ve heard the election, the election thing became the denial of the like, became this big thing with Trump. But everyone’s had a problem with the previous elections. Also, it’s another story that I’ve heard, you know, over and over, every time someone gets elected, there’s something with the election. That was not fair. That didn’t work out. Trump. It seemed to be this big conversation now, with him for a number of reasons, obviously, but it’s not a new story.
Nolan McCarty 14:09
There’s no sir. But there’s a third, there is something new and I think this gets it to where some of the problems come from. There. Obviously, there was a big election problem in 2000, between George Bush and Al Gore. But Al Gore eventually conceded the election after the Supreme Court’s decision, and then, you know, as I like to joke, grew a beard and became a college professor. He did not spend, you know, the next the next two years, trying to re litigate that that elect that election. There were some controversies in 2004 about, you know, voting machines in Ohio, which helped george bush over John Kerry John Kerry. We didn’t spend the next two years litigating the election. There’s the case in Georgia with Stacey Abrams, she did spend a lot of time trying to re litigate that election, but it got really no traction among the leadership of her party. So it kind of petered out. But with the 2020 election, you don’t just have, you have a situation where the objective evidence of an electoral problem is actually less. There’s less objective evidence. And there were in the three cases that I mentioned, although I don’t think there was a lot of evidence in 2004, or Stacey Abrams, but here’s at least objectively less problematic than what happened in 2000. And the leadership of the Republican Party, rallied around the leader of the Republican Party, to pursue that, for what has now been, you know, over over two years. So some of this is not the voters and their distrust is the fact that they’re being led to this mistrust by the fact that, you know, the leadership of the party has taken on these issues as being ones that are kind of existential, to the party in ways that John Kerry or Al Gore didn’t do. Now, I’m not saying that in a partisan way to say that, you know, Trump is worse than outdoor John Kerry. It’s just that, who knows what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot these days, but you know, is a different time and a different time, there will be problems in the election. And we would have a set of legal procedures to solve them. And the losers accepted the legitimacy of those legal procedures to solve election disputes in ways that the current Republican Party does not because the top of the Party decided that they did not want to do that. So then we thought about polarization, we, it’s important to like, do some proper names from time to time, because it’s not all generated from below, a lot of it is actually dictated by what leaders do, what people in the media do, what members of Congress do. They’re not just reflecting what the voters want. They actually are shaping voters information demands in ways that that kind of lead to the kind of polarized outcomes.
Evan Meyer 17:37
Yeah, that’s a scary feedback loop. Actually. Well, let me let me ask you this, what percentage of votes in any election do you think, are somehow incorrect? I didn’t. I’m curious. Because like, I believe there’s a margin of error. And in any election, there’s gonna be some margin of error. Some things happen. It’s paper moving through many hands, right. The purpose of technology, right, as a guy in tech build, right, what what what do you think the margin of error
Nolan McCarty 18:12
is? You know, I think it the stage of counting the ballots, I think it’s pretty, pretty small. If you look at read there, they often do recounts, I’ve never really seen recounts, that change the margins more than, you know, a couple 100 votes out of 10s of 1000s. But, you know, there are lots of things that can go on wrong before the votes are ever counted. Because voters make mistakes marked ballots incorrectly in ways they didn’t intend to do. They could have screwed up their registration and not been allowed. Been able to vote because they screw up a registration or a challenge. You know, they can get to the, you know, ballot box. And, you know, again, like I said, just, you know, vote for two candidates when they’re supposed to vote for wine or skipping election, you know, so those things happen. That’s actually the bigger issue. But then you just have procedures for dealing use our procedures for dealing with those and you can’t fetishize there’s one true margins, that if everything perfectly, this will be the margin. You just have procedures to adjudicate, and the kind of central to the continuation democracy is that both sides can accept those procedures with their fair and just say, okay, you know, this was a one vote margin. There’s 1000 ways in which it could have gone differently, but, you know, by the official procedures by which we count ballots, it’s a one vote margin and the winner wins and the loser loser that’s how it needs to work. But it It’s hard, because, you know, we live in a society where everything can be litigated. And so, you know, creates incentives, actually create professional incentives of people who are involved in litigation to end candidates on to challenge these things. And we just get a lot more challenges over kind of the basic procedures and how they’re implemented in ways that make it very, very difficult. You know,
Evan Meyer 20:26
everyone’s every county,
Nolan McCarty 20:29
it’d be great to have a site where, you know, you know, the future of America should not depend on like a one vote margin, we should have good candidates on both sides. And, you know,
Evan Meyer 20:42
it just seems like there’s a lot of opportunity in New
Nolan McCarty 20:44
Mexico, they like draw, could they like draw cards, if it’s a tie, you know, you shouldn’t get bad outcomes, whether you draw a heart or a club. And that’s really the problem much more than you know, there’s irregularities in the calculation of elections?
Evan Meyer 21:04
Yeah. I guess you know, that thing, because there’s so close. So often, people tend to say, well, could it have shifted this at all? Is it is it enough to actually shift the vote? And I guess, the reason one of the things that I’ve thought, it’s, I guess an assumption, it’s a hypothesis, but if you if you are to accept that any election that was ever an issue was actually flawed systemically, then what you have is an entire history of America that is potentially flawed. Because if it happens once and then in 2020, in 2020, or in any election, right, in the more recent election, and that’s the newest and latest we have, then you have to imagine that like in the 1800s these things, just who’s counting where things go? And right, like it probably improved over time. So I think
Nolan McCarty 22:05
it’s almost it was almost certainly improved over time. You know, I’m not an expert on election administration, but the people in that area that I trust, say that it was probably the the cleanest election, you know, 2020 and 2022, probably the cleanest elections that the United States has ever is ever had. I mean, it was pretty bad. You know, even in recent years, I mean, the problems in Florida, the problems with long ballot lines, turning people off. You know, those are pretty recent. And I think that made I think it made real progress. I mean, you know, to the broader point, I mean, there is, I guess an electoral butterfly effect. You know, you know, people will do these kinds of counterfactual histories. Suppose Al Gore had won in 2000. Would we have had the Iraq war without the Iraq War? Would we have had these problems with Iran? Would we, you know, so you can, you can do that. But I think it’s bad. I mean, unless you’re like, current carrying social scientists, it’s probably best not to do that. Because you know, as a voter, you can drive yourself crazy. The key to play the FDA is to kind of accept the outcomes that are determined by fair procedures and move on, but didn’t go anywhere. Right, lots of things. Reconstruction was different because of went differently because election rate irregularities in 1876. And all those are lamentable. But I think paying my own view, I think is paying too much attention to those concerns, is a way to delegitimize the person who’s declared the winner by the Fair procedures, is not good is not good for democracy. So I thought that, you know, some of the treatment of President Trump after he won, but she seemed to have won fairly. Although there are a procedure that many people don’t agree with the Electoral College. Other people’s attempts to de legitimize him as president were wrong. In the same way, his attempts to delegitimize Joe Biden’s president because of the procedure irregularities are wrong. You know, I think the best way for democracy is to kind of commit to the procedures try to change them if you don’t like them. But you know, to accept the maybe a sore loser essentially lobbyists or like you can’t be
Evan Meyer 24:43
Yeah, and, and I don’t know, as another thing that seems just very obvious. In all of this, that it’s a problem that that is consistent it continues the sort of the sore loser attitude. There’s that and then the cognitive bias that helps you find all the information you want, you go to, as Bill Burr says, you go to amiright.com. And then you find all the points and you don’t half of this room. So much information. People think are facts are not facts, but whatever it is, you find, you, you you go, and you use that to build your argument. And of course, so much of the media is liberal media. So that’s, especially in California very, very heavily pushed in the story that you’re told you believe. Right, and I don’t know if this, it’s, it feels like, this is one of the biggest issues that we’re having. And it also feels like most people know this. Yeah. But they’re, but when it comes to thinking when it comes to actually using your intellectual capacity to decide whether you’re gonna get, like, emotionally invested in a conversation about whatever it is that Trump did, or, you know, or Biden did, and before getting emotionally invested, say, oh, maybe I’ll have some civic humility here. And and, and think that, oh, maybe I’m not being told the whole story, or why can’t we do that? Why? Why is it that in the moment, people can’t do that, and they’ll argue to the death on this stuff and lose friends and family? And
Nolan McCarty 26:22
yeah, so So one thing I think is important to recognize here, at least in my view, I think this is backed up by some evidence. The problem really isn’t that people are getting facts wrong. I’ve gotten arguments with you know, old friends about politics. And their facts were impeccable. The lens in which people view facts varies very varies a lot. So, you know, you, somebody knows that x happened, their interpretation of what it means that x happened, and why X happened, is much more important than whether or not, you know, X happened, because they know x happened. And so I think that’s part of the problem, which is you just can’t correct people with facts, you know, because they’re not getting the facts wrong. It’s the it’s also the difference between the narratives in which they’re viewing the facts, which often comes out of kind of their experiences, their identities, their, their, their cultural commitments, their religion. And so it’s not a fact checking exercise, your, you know, I think fact checking, like, you know, Politifact, whatever, it’s useful, because, occasionally there are facts that are wrong, is that when you’re disagreeing with somebody, you’re increasingly saying, that is not the you can’t correct them with a new fact, you have to correct them by saying you’re looking at this problem, all wrong. And by telling them looking at this problem, all wrong, you may be implicitly criticizing their, you know, religious commitments, cultural commitments, their experience, you could come across, you know, as I know, as an academic, you can come across as an elitist by telling somebody that all you’re looking at this all wrong. And so I think that’s the central problem is that these views get, you know, tied up in these other commitments that people have, and simply by correcting the facts, is not going to have much of an impact. And there’s a lot of experimental evidence on this, you know, on Twitter and other platforms, you know, researchers Well, you know, provide people, you know, on Twitter, the correct fact, and it doesn’t really change, there doesn’t really change their behavior very much, because it was worth noting
Evan Meyer 28:54
that you’ve repeated, it is worth noting that you’ve repeated correcting the facts, your times, which is interesting, because I hold the theory that if I wouldn’t really notice what I’m
Nolan McCarty 29:06
correcting the facts correct. And the information Yeah,
Evan Meyer 29:09
there you go. Yeah, I do hold this theory that like people don’t have the same definition of a fact they believe whatever, a fact is. Not truly empirical. Right, their version of fact, is different. And there’s different types of ways that you can look at what a truth is versus a fact for example, right? Subjective versus objective truth or absolute truth.
Nolan McCarty 29:31
Just example, so you know, if you read like anti Vax stuff, they’re all over the fact that, you know, there’s a lot of people, you know, die of sudden cardiac arrest. That’s actually a fact. A lot of people do die of sudden cardiac arrest, but people have always died in in measurable numbers of sudden cardiac arrest. There are no studies suggesting there’s any connection between take In your vaccine and sudden cardiac arrest, but they’ll have the basic fact about the prevalence of sudden cardiac arrest, right. And they’ll know that where this particular case involves a sudden cardiac arrest or not, but the broader context. How to think about that fact analytically with respect to all the other information that’s out there is something that gets trickier.
Evan Meyer 30:24
Its context and often perspective and from what, from what virtues or moral foundations you’re looking at the problem from, and people have, I always love to reference Jonathan heights book, The righteous mind on this with the with different moral foundations, they, they can see the problem from, from being completely ethical, from a handful of moral foundations, but not from others. So it’s just not. In other words, it’s not black or white, when even even you can see a fact from from as good or bad. And you can do based on how it effects your life, your community, your family, the way you’d see the future. And they’re both often. They can both often be right.
Nolan McCarty 31:21
Yeah. Well, another example is the discussion over the increased rates of people transitioning from one from one gender to another, the rates have increased, that seems to be a fact, one side sees that as emblematic of greater acceptance of transsexuals and therefore, a good thing. Other side sees that as a social contagion, therefore, a bad thing. And it’s not an issue of like how we, you know, whether we measure these trends better, and people have the right data on the trends. There are a lot of, you know, as you point out ethical, religious, cultural commitments that goes into people determining whether this trend is, is a healthy thing, or, or a detrimental thing. So, you know, that’s a very clear example. And I think there are lots of them where, you know, the issue is not that the statistics on transitioning have been hyped. It’s literally about how people interpret
Evan Meyer 32:25
how you interpret it. Yeah, I think that’s a really strong, really strong point. And part of why I do what I do here is to help people understand, particularly that way of thinking, and I don’t know, it’s almost like a reactive thing where many people eat to take a position on something, for whatever reason, I got to the point where, like, I stopped taking adamant positions on things. And even after I vote, I still reserve the right to say I use the best judgment I did, can based on the information that was provided, right, but otherwise to take such staunch positions, seems unwilling to think that anyone thinks differently than you. It’s almost very childish behavior, right? Like to, to see the world as everyone thinks the way that I do, or my or my community does, or my political party, or else, they’re wrong. It’s very, it’s it seems childish to be. Yeah. And I don’t know how to I would like to think about how to get out of that. What is a real way that we can we can get out of that and coming from, from Princeton, you know, universities have this a little bit of a stigma around, kind of, I’m sure you’ve heard this, the university stigma of doctrine, aiding students to be in a certain certain way. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on on on on that as well. So
Nolan McCarty 34:06
we can indoctrinate our students enough to even look at the syllabus before they come to class. quite skeptical of our real impact, I do but before addressing that, while we can do that, I do want to make one one point here, which I think sometimes the can be obscured by the gloom and doom over over polarization. So it’s important observation, maybe five or six years ago, looking at some survey data, which actually show was actually a question that had been asked several times over the decades. How would you feel if your child married? Someone from the opposite political party? The 1970s parents didn’t care. Now they care, they care a lot, in fact interparty Marriage is much more unpopular than interracial marriage, or inter denominational or inter religious marriage. And people will often say, Well, isn’t this horrible that inner party marriages do so unfavorably compared to these other things. And my view is actually, that’s actually wonderful that inter party marriage is the most unpopular marriage, because interracial marriage has become more acceptable, inter denominational inter religious marriage has become much more acceptable. So, you know, one way to put a silver lining on it is that lots of old conflicts based on purely on irrelevant characteristics, like like race related, whatever, had been replaced by disagreements over fundamental values that are reflected in, you know, partisanship. So if you see, we’ve been proved me and my daughter were to come home to me and say, I want to marry a member of this party, I would know how they felt about, I’d have a pretty good guess how they felt about abortion about what the tax rate should be business regulation, climate change. So if I’m discriminating or at least discriminating on some things that plausibly plausibly matter, its value based. That’s I will put that silver lining out there before. Before I talk,
Evan Meyer 36:25
we’ve moved we’ve upgraded to values as opposed to any other to the characterised bias and discrimination. Yeah, right. Right.
Nolan McCarty 36:34
So I’m, so does that sit up? Great. But the good spin with a good spin? Yeah.
Evan Meyer 36:39
Well done. Well,
Nolan McCarty 36:41
I think we can do about about it is, again, I want to put a lot of the blame not on every day, ordinary citizens, but a lot of the blame on political leaders, political leaders, leaders in the media. Because I think a lot of what’s going on is that there have become technological change, other changes, which increased incentives for people in public life to be dividers, rather than unifiers. So, you know, the best example are the ways that many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, in my mind misuse social media. They don’t use it to kind of, you know, inform their constituents on issues of the day or to inform their constituents what they’re doing on their behalf. They’re doing it to generate outrage, which is associated with generating publicity, which is associated with campaign fundraising, which is associate increasingly associated with, you know, obtaining obtain political power. So, I think, you know, that’s where the least currently, I mean, it’s probably not the origins of the problem. But I think that’s the the bleeding edge of the problem. lies there. Now, what to do about it that’s consistent with free speech. I mean, we can’t, you know, we, we, as a government or society can’t tell Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ocasio Cortes, what they can say on Instagram and what they can. But the political parties themselves, I think, should take much more responsibility and police in doing what they can to kind of police their members in rent and you know, in rent and writing them in, I’m not optimistic that they’re going to do so anytime soon. They seem to be, you know, highly tolerant of this behavior and inept to doing anything about it. But I think if there were more attempts to just de legitimize the extreme behavior of certain members of both parties, you know, that would, that would take some of the stake some of the state say, take some of the steam off.
Evan Meyer 39:10
Sam, Sam Rosenfeld makes the case that it’s intentional in his book, The polarizers, which I know you’re familiar with it. So do you do you believe it’s intentional? Do you believe it’s partly intentional, and partly not intentional? And
Nolan McCarty 39:27
so I you know, I, I agree with Sam and that the historical origins have some intentionality into it that injured mostly interest group activist and you know, they they cooperate with party leaders, in order to make the parties more coherent and differentiated. I believe that was kind of an important mechanism for both for you know, creating a more progressive Democratic Party but also by creating a The competitive Republican Party by bringing southern conservatives into the Republican Party, that intentionality is there. The argument I would make, and I actually think Sam agrees, because he’s done some recent work with a colleague is that the parties as institutions have been completely hollowed out. And so they actually no longer playing a role in developing this and that the that the transition they put in place, they’ve sort of lost control that they sort of lost control of. And, you know, there’s no better example than this and the speakership battle where, you know, you know, the Republican speakership was held hostage to 16, you know, radical extreme members of the conference, because the party is an institution has no way to, to sanction that behavior, sanction that behavior. And there have been other times, you know, the Democratic Party is a little stronger institutionally, or at least Nancy Pelosi was able to deal with her rebels a little bit more effectively than Kevin McCarthy was. But I think it’s a sign of like, you know, party witness that Matt gates doesn’t need Kevin McCarthy to get real to get reelected, he doesn’t need him to raise money. Even if he wants to run for the Senate or something later on, he doesn’t need McCarthy or McConnell. You know, he can he can do it on his own. That’s a big change from politics where, you know, members who are ambitious needed to cultivate, cultivate strong ties with party leaders, and that perhaps constrained, you know, some of their behavior. So, I think, you know, the start of this process was pretty intentional, but I think the least the party leaders lost control of the process, and now is being dominated
Evan Meyer 41:58
primarily by created with the right intention, but then spun out of control, just by the spin out of content. Um, so what do you think? Because you’re with Princeton, what do you think the university responsibility is around? And there are, you know, there’s two sides to this, of course, and a lot of people say that many of the universities are responsible for you, they use the word indoctrinating students with a certain way of thinking about it and pushing a liberal agenda. That is a common accusation. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on on whether that’s true or not true in general, and how Princeton sits with that I’m sure everyone has heard that.
Nolan McCarty 42:45
Yeah. So again, gets back to our kind of, you know, facts, the facts that we can stipulate to, or the university faculties, especially in the social sciences, the humanities, are left of center, or left to center. And further, on average, there are some exceptions. Prison is actually one of those places with more exceptions than than others.
Evan Meyer 43:12
Probably exceptions, meaning it means Farther, farther left other I mean, there are
Nolan McCarty 43:17
fewer counter examples to the kind of left liberal faculty at Princeton than there are, you know, in other universes, we have more conservatives at Princeton. In other words,
Evan Meyer 43:27
I say you’re more balanced in general.
Nolan McCarty 43:30
I mean, not numerically. But, you know, we have more notable high profile conservatives than most campuses. I think it would be the content of those courses, I think tends to reflect the things that I left liberal faculty find interesting. You know, things like climate change, income inequality, you know, etc. But I think by and large, faculty try to teach those subjects fairly. And, you know, I do think they, you know, by the nature of our job, we do get a kick out of disagreement. And I don’t I mean, obviously, there are exceptions. I don’t think by and large, that faculty member really tried to, to, you know, indoctrinate our students in any particular side of the debates of the issues that we’re confronting them. Now, the debates we choose to talk about, are clearly inflected by the things that we find interesting. And I think there’s no doubt that that that’s going to shift that’s going to shift the shift to the left. So, you know, I think it’s important to look at this with some some nuance. I don’t think any individual faculty member is or that many individual faculty members are actively engaged aged in indoctrination. But the fact that the composition of the faculty leans one way over the other does have some consequences in terms of the types of materials that students are, are confronted or confronted with,
Evan Meyer 45:17
what do you think? Where do you think that comes from? You know, I know. Jordan Peterson is one of the people early on was talking about some of the stuff that was going on at the university level and in his experience. Do you agree or disagree with any of any of his claims? Or or in general? And where? Where is it coming from? Why is there such a push? And how do we, if it’s, if it’s deserved thing, great? If it’s not? How do we make sure that we create the balance and thought like we’re talking about around this?
Nolan McCarty 45:50
Yeah, I can only speak to my my own experience, my own experiences, Pearson may have others. It’s quite possible that Canadian universities are different than American universities. And that prison is different than most American universities. I don’t see the the kind of extreme forms of anti conservative bias that he and others have pointed have pointed to, I think is mostly so I think it’s mostly self selection. If you’re, you know, there’s a set of people who probably lean to the right who are more comfortable in business than an academia, because the association with the values that are associated with that, so there are fewer libertarians in academia than there would be because many of them decide that they want to go into business. You know, for social conservatives, they might find other avenues attractive. But then there’s a dynamic, which is that once this process starts, then people want to be near people that are like them, and then becomes less welcoming, not because there’s a push out. But because there’s a lack of role model, there’s a lack of role models, or, you know, it appears that it’s a homogeneous community, and they don’t, they don’t want to enter it. I don’t think university should pay some attention to this. I don’t like the idea that they should give preferences to hiring conservative faculty. But I think they should pay pay some attention to notions of institutional neutrality, to least can maintain a reputation, that the institution itself is not going to choose one side over another. And that, you know, conservative voices should they choose to interact with, and you should feel comfortable that the forces of the administration and the governance of the university are not going to be weighed, weighed against them.
Evan Meyer 47:52
I mean, even just starting the process, if it was an accusation for some universities, you think that they would start the process of saying, well, that’s not our intention. And we should go ahead and at least start putting out the message to the world that we are attempting to do this. And here’s how it seems like a relatively easy.
Nolan McCarty 48:11
So your campaign, yeah, so many universities have done this. And you may be aware there’s a document called the Chicago principles on on free speech. That’s related that’s related to these concerns, obviously, there’s another set of principles. Also m&a from the University of Chicago on institutional neutrality, where some institutions are adopted, are looking at there are a lot of organizations on campus have sprung up to support both academic freedom and institutional neutrality. And I think those are the best ways to approach the problems that may exist. I think having the administration tried to rebalance things by hiring, you know, you know, more conservative faculty with a preference for conservative faculty will just not be productive and will backfire. I think the best thing for the university has to do is to commit to a set of neutrality principles. And they know and hope that, you know, that that makes it a comfortable place for anybody to engage in academic life irregardless of their, you know, political views. Yeah.
Evan Meyer 49:33
One of the things that I always love to think about is how, like, the same way you can’t prove in basketball unless you challenge yourself, you actually can’t learn anything unless you challenge your beliefs, or the way that you think about things you can’t possibly take in new information. If you’re not willing to accept it doesn’t mean you have to believe it, but to be able to think about it entertain it and converse around it means that you’re actually able to embrace perspective and learn about that the pie may be bigger than your one slice.
Nolan McCarty 50:11
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think the only way you can really know that, you know, something is when you’ve been confronted with the arguments against it. And you’ve rejected those arguments if you never see those arguments. Exactly. Hard to know, you know, whether you actually know anything at all.
Evan Meyer 50:27
Yeah, that’s right. You just keep hearing? Yes, yes, yes, yes, from your friends and who you are.
Nolan McCarty 50:33
I mean, one of the, you know, disappointing things in recent recent years, in this regard, as I used to, in one of my seminars used to teach a case study on a political issue. And I was quite able to get students to talk about both sides of that issue. And that issue was actually whether or not it was a good idea to create private prisons. It was a great case is a great case study, because it brings in lots of values regarding, you know, what’s the role of the state was the role of coercion and violence, versus what’s the efficient way to provide public goods and maintain accountability of bureaucratic actors. So it had it had, it had everything. But the issue of private prisons became quite active one on campus with students leading a movement to disinvest university resources and private prisons, which, you know, may or may not be a good thing. But the bad thing about is basically shut down any discussion in class about whether there are any advantages of law at all to privatizing pensions? And I think that’s not just that it made me come up with a different topic for a seminar, but I think it’s a bad thing. Yeah. When, you know, things, discussion items are taken off the table, because students are concerned about, you know, taking the wrong side of the issue. And that’s a case where, you know, the Fed my faculty colleagues, it wasn’t pushed off the agenda because of, proselytizing faculty member it was, it was pushed out of the classroom, because students wouldn’t call him debate on the topic any further.
Evan Meyer 52:30
I mean, and that’s another classic example where I don’t think there could be a harmony between both there’s a lot of things that are better run publicly, but have a some level of privatization that helps IT function properly, more efficiently. Maybe the you know, maybe their uniforms are coming from the private sector, but the wardens are managed by a public service of how to train wardens. I don’t know I’m just like to write that blend that public private blend often it’s a very common solution. So if you don’t hear the other sides of why private is good, you may never figure out which one of those you want to insert into your public model, even if you were entirely pro public prisons.
Nolan McCarty 53:18
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, you could learn a lot about which public goods should be privately provided from this discussion even if the end you decided Princeton I mean, the prisons are not one of those things.
Evan Meyer 53:31
Right. All right. Last question for today and I’m what you embarked on this journey, obviously polarization is very or depolarization or understanding the sociological factors that create this I guess all that is poli sci.
Nolan McCarty 53:57
A nice area because it touches on political science, history, sociology. It does. So it’s it’s been good that I’ve been able to engage a lot of scholarship from from a lot of different eras increasingly because of the social media stuff computer science.
Evan Meyer 54:19
So hearing Why did you so this is this is to the why right? Your your I want to know what in addition to the why you decided to take this on as essentially one of your life’s purposes. Obviously, this is something you’ve invested so much and it’s it’s clear you care about it. What is your goal what would you like to see happen? And what Yeah, what do you want the what do you want the world to look like as a result of hopefully your efforts?
Nolan McCarty 54:51
That’s a good question. So how I got into this, it was almost serendipity is like a lot of academics they they discover a puzzle and they just keep unraveling it and they creates, you know, new puzzles and new questions. And I’ve just sort of followed those threads for longer than I care that I care to admit. One Goal, this, you know, is not. This may not sound too grandiose, but one guy they have is to try to keep people from spending too much time on the wrong, wrong solutions and keep keep their eye on the ball. So, in this space of polarization, there are a lot of people out there with the the one easy fix, if we just did this, we just reformed the campaign finance system, we could get rid of polarization. If we just adopted rank choice voting, or open primaries, we get rid of polarization. So a lot of my research is just evaluating those ideas and letting people know which ones work and which ones don’t. And trying to keep people from wasting their time and energy. on them. I also concerned that when people propose these reforms, and then they don’t work, it just further erodes, you know, confidence in our democracy, and makes the makes the problems worse. If the reform doesn’t work, that we have to do something much more radical, and that that worries me. So I’m getting not grandiose, I, you know, I’d like to see, you know, progress made I, you know, like our government to work better. You know, I’d like democratic practices to remain to remain robust. But I don’t think the answer lies in eliminating polarization altogether. The, you know, one way to eliminate polarization is to just to leave important issues off the public agenda and ignore them, because they’re unresolvable. So you know, one period of US history that wasn’t very polarized and partisan terms were the 1940s and 1950s, largely because there was a very conservative bloc and the Democratic Party in the south. And a, you know, they coordinated very heavily with the Republican Party from the north, I on on a variety of economic issues. But the bargain was that we weren’t going to talk about segregation, Jim Crow, integrated schools. So you can get something that looks unpolarized by just leaving out important discussions. And so last thing I would want is for polarization to be eliminated by, you know, pushing some important issue, like racial equality, for example, under the rug, so I think it’s important to manage polarization to learn how to govern with it, to have it not further erode public trust. But I think it’s also important not to fetishize bipartisanship and getting along if it means, you know, ignoring, or putting to set aside important issues that need to be reckoned with.
Evan Meyer 58:18
You could make a bonus question, okay, make one change in Congress, that would help fix this problem. What would it be?
Nolan McCarty 58:31
I think in Congress, I think the biggest issues would be to strengthen the party leaders to try to keep better control over the way in which the memberships you know, use use social media. I don’t exactly know what they can do legally by like to say, leader, see leaders more aggressively kind of deal with members who, you know, go outside, you know, democratic norms, you know, on social media, whether that means strengthening their hand in terms of their role in primary elections or other campaigns or what have you, I think that would be very important in dialing back some of this awesome.
Evan Meyer 59:20
Well, I guess the hope is that we we all can just get along even if we disagree.
Nolan McCarty 59:27
Yeah. Or just, you know, muddle along, muddling along is fine, you know, as as long as we as long as the model doesn’t get worse.
Evan Meyer 59:36
Right. All right. Well, I very much enjoyed this. Thank you for spending the hour with me and imparting your knowledge and expertise over over these years. For for people to hear and, and, and hopefully we can achieve some of these positive outcomes.
Nolan McCarty 59:57
Great. Great. Thanks. Enjoyed it. All right