 We're on the air with another edition of Patience on the News. This time it's of course different, we're using Zoom technology and we're doing a remote interview with Professor Michael Frans who is a professor at Bowdoin College. Good evening Professor Frans, how are you? I'm very good, thank you for having me on the show. We're delighted. I want to tell the audience briefly and then ask about who you are but then ask you to elaborate a little bit on your work. Professor Frans, are you in the history department or the political science department? Well I'm in the political science department although we call ourselves government and legal studies. And you are an expert, we are told, on many things including public opinion, polling, etc. That's right. Why don't you just describe to the audience the areas of your scholarly interest? Sure, happy to do so. So my research is on American elections and I come at it from a couple different angles. I study the campaign financing side of elections and the role of political advertising and its influence on voters and I also study public opinion and the political behavior of voters around elections, namely the factors that influence why they vote for particular candidates and how that's changed over time. All right, well why don't we move to the present time and one of the things you and I have had brief chat that I want to talk about and I think the audience will be interested in your insights is we are in a period of extreme partisanship in the United States. I've been around a very long time, I've been in and out of government and clearly for most of my life this wasn't the case, this extreme partisanship and I don't know whether it's the result of political more sophisticated political advertising, more ways, internet, etc. to influence political thought but it's different now and do you have any insight on that? Yeah, yeah I think we well first we are deeply polarized in our politics today in ways that we really haven't been in a very very long time and one of the things that's I think deeply fascinating about our current political polarization and we can talk a little bit about how we got here but one of the things I think that's really fascinating about our current political situation is that our polarization is probably best understood as being a little bit more what we might call affective or emotional than it is specifically about public policies. Now policies matter a lot to Americans and we have real debates about those things but in today's American political environment people really actively dislike members of the other party and that's become risen to levels that we really haven't seen in the history of public opinion polling I mean it's a deep deep dislike that goes beyond just disagreements about policies but is about you know the sort of what we would characterize as a sort of morality or the right and wrongs of those on the other side of the aisle. What brings us to that I mean political debate has been part of the human condition forever and certainly in this country we've had fierce debates we've had fierce debates going back to the founding of our country but people get along and they work together and so forth. I happen to be a Democrat why would Republicans dislike me I'm not you know trying to do anybody any harm. Yeah well I mean it's this this how we got here is a long story and it's it's or it's at least a story that has taken shape over many different many different dimensions and over many decades but what we have today that feeds into our current polarization is you know for one a range of partisan media outlets that stoke these kind of affective disagreements and so a lot of people put the blame on our current polarization on on partisan media but I think we can sort of understand partisan media as first a consequence of a lot of the trends that preceded it that got us to the point where something like Fox News became something that could be started and could become popular but then since you know a Fox News was say created and talk radio in the 1980s that has had you know a sort of additive effect on the affective polarization that we see today so in our current political environment we come to dislike the other side because the messages we hear from political leaders and media elites casts our political debates in these moral terms and so you know we have in today's society when we're talking about policies or when we're talking about political struggles the other side is viewed as as you know downright in evil in some cases as something that needs to be stopped not something that we need to win the next election but something we need to stop we need to sort of defeat them because they're really undermining the American spirit and and that does come from in a more direct way the way in which media elites in partisan outlets talk about politics but them themselves and we can go before you know go back in time even before them are they are not the primary cause of it they're largely a consequence of these long decades of drifting towards polarization and I sort of think that uh that all of this really started in um in the civil rights in the civil rights era of the 1960s that when you go back into the 1950s there were plenty of as you know plenty of liberal republicans in the northeast and plenty of conservative southern democrats and the the the mix ideological mix in the parties at the time kept the two parties you know distinct on some issues but fairly moderated on a collection of issues when the civil rights movement started a long reshifting where uh democrats became the party of civil rights and republicans became uh first the party that opposed civil rights but then became the party that um didn't want large expansive government attempts to redress racial concerns uh and over time the two parties drifted and as that happened over a number of decades other things latched on to that polarization such that in today's political environment you know every issue can be sorted as a left issue or a right issue um you had uh uh the culture war issues of the 1990s the religious debates that were happening with the christian right in the 1980s you have identity politics today uh all of it has begun to stack up on one side of the aisle of the other side of the aisle and it really started with this big debate around civil rights so let me give you an example uh i was reading something about jerry farwell or son i don't know if son has the same name president of liberty university yeah from his conservative preacher uh donald trump is you know he's not a guy who goes to church doesn't know much about religion he's interested in religion uh does things that would have in the old days offended religious people uh but now of course they love the religious leadership loves donald trump and is that part of this partisanship they just say well we're on the republican side and we don't care what donald trump does we don't care what he does with women what he says how he conducts himself what his character is like he's on our side is that it simply well in many ways it is because i think what they you know what many on the the christian conservative side would would argue is that the most important thing to them is the issue of abortion and judges and so they're willing to to deal with uh an individual that morally doesn't fit say their standards um but who is on the right side of that particular issue for them and so they've made the political calculation that they will get the judges they need with donald trump and they obviously won't with hillary clinton and they certainly won't with joe biden and they definitely didn't with brock obama and so uh when push comes to shove in that zero sum game donald trump's donald trump's their their candidate and so they've been able they've attempted to rationalize that you know i've heard all sorts of arguments uh attempting to rationalize that but ultimately i think that it's a political calculation that comes down to the fact that if the democrats are in charge the judges they appoint given the fact that we are at you know at this elite level polarized so much on these issues the democrats are going to nominate judges who are um disposed to support the pro-choice side and so um it doesn't matter what kind of person donald trump is that what matters more to them is is in this particular case the policy and going back to something you mentioned uh earlier about the difference in media now and the various sources of information uh when i was the younger person of course uh on television we just had three networks a bc cbs and mbc everybody in the country no matter what their political opinions got their news from the same source so uh we could disagree on our reaction to the news but it was from the same source and we had to rely on it do you think that now everybody gets to choose whatever source they want uh including simply propaganda whether it's one side or the other democrat or republican there are many people that say you know i only want to listen to the democrat propaganda or i only want to listen to the republican comment on that absolutely i i actually think there's two two primary reactions to that the first is is exactly what you said in the sense that you know back 50 or so years ago when there were many fewer media outlets there was also simultaneously trust in those media outlets so even republicans had you know respect for um the major news networks and the major papers of record even if they you know didn't always agree with with the way you know politics was covered and americans themselves had deep to deep trust in those media sources and so everyone across the political spectrum would get the same news if you will uh and one of the things i find fascinating to to think about is that in those days people were fascinated with television as a as a technology and most people would turn the tv on and and many people would leave it on and watch during dinner and so scores of americans who otherwise were not necessarily interested in politics learned about the vietnam war learned about the civil rights movement learned about the economic challenges of the 1970s and were informed about politics by virtue of that sort of single broadcasted stream of information and that was true across the political spectrum and as the media developed into more partisan options including today's internet age where you can get any range of political uh political views very narrow slice to a wider slice on any internet page you you want um people self select into the media that reinforces the views that they they have and that allows people to be in these what are oftentimes called the echo chambers where they hear only from the political perspective that they prefer the second point i'll make is that parallel to all of that is that there are large percentages of americans or at least a you know an importantly large percentage of americans who actually don't like politics all that much who aren't interested in politics they vote maybe and they participate when they feel like they need to but ultimately they're not really interested in politics deeply interested like you know many of us um and what happened when the media changed in the 1980s into the 1990s with the development of cable and many entertainment options was people went from watching walter kronkite and hearing about vietnam to opting into espn or to hbo or towards other you know the cooking network or uh shopping network and they opted out of politics entirely because they didn't really they weren't really interested in it so in the past it was the only thing on at 6 30 or whatever and so they watched it because they were you know that's what it was tv was kind of an interesting uh technological thing but now they could watch whatever they wanted and so they would watch movies or they'd watch sports and so a large percentage of americans have opted out of politics and into entertainment and that has made them less informed and it has left the pool of people who are interested in politics opting into the partisan outlets and so we have this sort of simultaneous story of some leaving politics and some moving deeper into their partisan camps and and that i think is a sort of long again a long trend but a deeply fascinating one that brings us in part to where we are today let's talk about facts for a minute uh just the notion of what's a fact and what isn't a fact i'm a lawyer i've been a lawyer for a long time and of course our justice system depends on uh ferreting out facts and uh so i like facts and evidence and put somebody on the stand and say did you say this and they say yes i said it and they have i put somebody else on and they corroborate it that's tending to prove the fact now i think a lot for a lot of people facts don't mean anything we have a president who tweets constantly those are his words he tweets something or he goes on television and he says something and now we have video recordings of everything we have recordings of voice and his lips moving and uh and then a week later he says i didn't say it and people believe that he said it there's video of him saying it same with democratic politicians the same thing but there's video of trump saying it and then he says i didn't say it fine with a lot of people they say okay he didn't say it what makes human beings able to pull that off well you know so i think there's in many yeah i mean it's it's stunning that the environment we're in that in that way and i think there are um maybe two two tears to that so the first tear is is not the really bad one that you just mentioned which is where people sort of decide not to believe something that can actually be be proven completely wrong right but it's it's where people bring to the debate the evidence that they need to make their point and so what and what i mean by that is where there is a contestation over what's actually true and i think the ugly secret of of our world today is that you know evidence and facts are deeply important but very rarely are complex things either or and so in our political world let's just use this current crisis for example um we could very you could very straightforwardly say here's the facts here's the evidence of donald trump's um delayed reaction to the coronavirus issue you know what are you doing february here the here the things he said on tv about you know um it's not that big of a deal it's we're going to take care of it quickly but then you might say well you know the other side might say well but eventually he got around to it and it's actually the who's problem and democratic governors have messed it up in their states and in a way you might sort of be able to build a story where some facts support that particular case and then what you do is you fight that fight with your facts and the other side fights with their facts what kelly and conway called alternative facts but in reality everyone's using correct quote unquote information to make their case and nobody's seeing the complexities right and so that's a situation where you actually have i don't want to call it post truth or post modern but where you actually have people sort of selectively using true information to reinforce the position that they want and and that's a deep deeply problematic issue today especially when when politics are complex but the second layer is the one you mentioned which is where people just refuse to believe clear evidence that they see president trump saying something or they see a democratic politician saying something and then when they contradict themselves you know we just dismiss that and i think a lot of that comes down to again believe it or not it just comes down to that deep dislike of the other side most of us are making that zero sum proposition if donald trump is is a liar then i have to maybe not vote for him because that would what would that say about me and so well i'm gonna actually stack him up against hillary clinton and say well i don't like either of them but she's worse and so they kind of rationalize the the choice that they have to to make the other side worse and and that's how they kind of get around that tricky situation of of not wanting to believe evidence that's clearly in front of them they also think i'm gonna talk to to people who are trump supporters and of course they focus on what the press does the press is doing all of this to donald trump he has these people in the press that are just after him well of course i was a deputy when i was press secretary and i happened to know every president has the press after and particularly presidents if a president brags a lot or says something that's not true that's just like waving a red flag in front of the press they just get on it they love to try to poke holes in things but every president said the same problem but these folks think that when trump gets criticized by the press it's a bias it has nothing to do with anything he says or any way that he he acts and i guess that's just part of what you're talking about you know these people seize on a position this is the position i have and uh and nothing else matters that's true and and you know and there are examples you know true or there are examples and have been over the years that give folks who want to make those claims some ammunition you know i mean the new york times has made mistakes or they've reported some uh they've reported things that haven't been fully sourced sometimes and so they have made mistakes they have um uh uh as every media outlet does and so that gives republicans in this case or it might give democrats in the other in in in another case the opportunity to um to use those as examples for why we shouldn't trust those outlets uh and um uh you know and so that that raises the stakes these days for every journalist to make sure that and you know the good journalists are doing this all the time but to make sure that they fully sourced everything that they've got as many people as they can on the record that they anticipate that in fact they're going to get blowback if the story isn't is critical of a of a particular candidate um but yeah people people have been told by partisan uh media outlets and by political leaders for many years that the media is biased and that it's out to to bring um their side down and when you do have the occasional um you know the occasional evidence to suggest that journalists have been sloppy that just feeds into that narrative and i'm thinking also of the big controversy in 2004 around dan rather and um the reporting on on uh george w bush's service uh uh or exemption from service in vietnam and that proved to be a mistake in terms of the information that rather uh reported i think on 48 hours and so um boom bam that's all you need as a hook in order to try to sink all major mainstream news outlets as being in the tank for the democrats all right so we don't we have something else that counters that going on in our society now in 2004 16 years ago we certainly had a lot of television and a lot of video but i have a sense just a sense that today in in the current age 2020 that we have more of reporting by video by video record that is that politicians presidents may say something it's recorded and then three years later four years later five years later when they say something else it isn't uh dan rather making a mistake it's uh it's the media putting a video on television with the president or the power whoever the politician is speaking his voice is coming over he's saying something and that's all they do they say well in 2010 he said x watch this right what is a what does a partisan do with that right well i mean i'm thinking of in particular in the example you said i'm thinking of all of the videos that i watched in um december and in january uh of this you know this year and late last year of democrats on the opposite side of the impeachment issue when clinton was being impeached some of the same democrats who are in congress today and republicans who are in congress then you know saying the exact opposite about witnesses and so forth uh and around the impeachment trial there um absolutely i mean mitch mcconnell has on record many times over the years uh saying the opposite of what he believes my own research is on campaign finance and and senator mcconnell was on record for many years as being you know against all campaign finance laws but for a vigorous and strong disclosure regime of campaign financing and now he's opposed to even that um and so you have him on the one hand you know a video saying this and in the other hand a video from today saying the opposite again i think i think it's a lot i mean political psychologists talk about this as you know selective exposure and motivated reasoning you know where we just we we literally will just listen and rationalize however we can rationalize it in order to make our party um right and so in this particular case you can imagine someone say oh well that was yada yada yada and the circumstances are not exactly the same today and um you know and they might even go so far as to say is why can't a politician change his mind for goodness sake you know and everything becomes rationalized through the partisan lens talk a minute let's talk a minute about campaign finance that that's an area of expertise that you have um why is it i can never figure this out democrats seem to favor campaign reform and and restrictions on campaign finance and money in politics and republicans are opposed to it they say they're not but they are and i don't care what they say there's a body of evidence that shows that they're opposed to it why would that be i mean they're both involved in campaigns they have the same issues they have primaries that people might out raise them or whatever do you have any insight on that well i mean to some extent you know i think that uh democrats are on record as being in favor of certain campaign finance reforms um some more vigorous than others in particular for particular politicians or in particular times but they are not opposed to exploiting all of the loopholes that they can in a given political situation if you know if the the laws allow it and so you know if democrats could get their way they would pass a series of reforms that would be more restrictions on the flow of money in politics today than um uh more than that you know that exists today but they're not opposed just to just to state this a different way to um using big money big donors holding huge fundraisers starting and running super PACs even though they're in principle opposed to those things uh and so to some extent whereas democrats in principle want reform but in practice are happy to exploit the laws as they are today republicans you know oppose these oppose new restrictions knowing that they can benefit from them politically but i think that one thing that divides the democrats from the republicans on this issue is is what i've been fascinated about for years is the way in which the two parties will treat corporations and unions and so for democrats obviously the big problem is corporate money and so a lot of their reforms want to limit the flow of corporate money and large um large wealthy individuals and their resources probably accumulated through the corporate form over the years uh into into the political system but democrats don't like to treat unions as the liberal equivalent to corporations in democratic mindsets unions represent people power and so when after the 2016 election when uh there was real concern about digital advertising and um the lack of disclosure around who was funding some online facebook ads democrats came up with provisions even after the 2008 and 2012 election that tried to make more disclosure and limit corporate spending in elections but they didn't necessarily want to put unions in the mix they wanted to let unions use union dues for large expenditure campaigns because to democrats unions are people power they're not you know big money well republicans don't view it that way at all republicans have made the argument for years that unions are essentially the other side of the coin with big money if we if we're going to limit corporate influence we have to limit union influence and so that's an under I think appreciated distinction between democrats and republicans on this issue it's a bit of a philosophical one but it also lines up nicely for the democrats which is that if they can prevent corporate money into the system but allow union money into the system then democrats would benefit from from those laws um but it also isn't you know pure politics because democrats just view unions differently yeah that's an interesting I agree with what you just said and that's an interesting issue because um unions I've never been a great fan of unions but I think they're absolutely critical in our society um you unions are the only way that non-rich people employers employees can organize to have any power if I'm a capitalist and I own a big paper company or mill and I own it and I do what I want and uh I want to endorse a candidate and I spend um I'm like Sheldon Adelson in Nevada I say okay I'm going to give a hundred million dollars of my money uh for the republicans to win the particular races but a guy who's showing up to work with a lunch bucket he has no impact zero no one would pay attention to him whatsoever he's not going to give him any money if he gives him five bucks it's nothing so he organizes and it's the reason why we have unions it's an organized group of people who singularly have zero power but together they have a lot of power and so it's uneven I don't compare the union I know the argument you're right about the argument yep but I don't compare the problem with unions and a bunch of people having 20 dollars taken out of their paychecks to give to the union to make a big donation to somebody who is enormously wealthy controls a company does whatever he or she wants and so but I understand uh the argument it's interesting after citizens united of course the congress did try to pass a law and it was essentially because republicans wouldn't vote for restrictions on amounts it was a disclosure law that's right and 100 percent every single member of the republican caucus in the senate voted against it because mitch mcconnell told him to including our two quote moderate senators in maine uh snow and collins they voted against that reform so i've just always been intrigued why it's so important and i think it comes from the top the republican donors generally and this is there's many exceptions to this our uh big money donors shelter natals and being uh a great example the coke brothers a great example and it's those people who want to keep their influence who put the pressure on the republican party i think to to oppose reform anyway we we can type anything else you want to comment about yeah just just really quickly on that point i mean if you go back quick you don't have to be quick okay sure thanks um but uh if you go back to even the debate around that that bill disclose act after the 2010 supreme court case um republicans arguments were oftentimes that the democratic bill was unfair because it didn't put the similar restrictions on on unions it treated unions in many ways differently than than corporations and non-profit corporations and so forth and so um in our partisan age to kind of loop back to that that partisanship that characterizes our politics today even moderate republicans like snow and collins come to view the democratic efforts here as sort of trying to sneakily undermine republican uh republican ideological views so i'm you know i might be a moderate republican but gosh i cannot trust what harry reid or what chuck schumer are trying to do here and i think there's something that they're trying to slip in uh that um that is going to damage the republican party and so even in principle more disclosure sounds great but there's there's a distrust of of the sort of democratic policy making that goes on there the second point i'll make is is just not to forget that barack obama was in office for eight years he was one of the first candidates to refuse to take public funding in the presidential public funding system and he did almost nothing in eight years to prioritize campaign finance reform obviously he stood up in front of the american people and chastised the court around the citizens united decision and he supported the disclose act but he put almost no political energy into those efforts primarily because he also knew that um uh he had won in 2008 by vastly outspending john mccain and was a prolific fundraiser and could mobilize democratic super PAC efforts to help his campaign in 2012 um and so um even though democrats in principle strongly support these things when they see themselves as benefiting from the status quo they won't put a lot of political energy in trying to change that oh that's a good point and that takes me back to something you said earlier that the democrats in principle say they're against unlimited spending but they take advantage of it but of course that's practical politics too they would be pretty stupid to say okay susan collins is going to spend 30 million dollars in their senate campaign this year and the democrat says i'm a personal principal we're going to spend 500 000 because you're certain to lose because that's taking political advertising matters i trust you think well you know yes that and if you know it it does matter but i i um it matters so it matters where it's important which is on those margins and so absolutely if susan collins spends 30 million dollars and a democratic opponent spends half that those ads are going to matter because there's a huge out you know there's a huge imbalance there ads don't you know can't can't make you a better candidate if you're a bad candidate but um but definitely if you can vastly outspend your opponent you know you're going to be in the driver's seat there so democrats have to play that practical political game and they know that and so we all have to understand that um but it ends up being frustrating for us and i think does contribute to a cynicism that people have when they see you know a party like the democrats standing up against big money but participating in a big money system and then justifying it as well we have to play the game that's you know played by the rules that exist i think people want you know some principle and and so i think that that feeds sometimes into our cynicism when we don't see that play out yeah i think about we many of the progressive candidates so-called progressive i don't even know what that means but they call themselves progressive candidates uh actually do take a stand because i won't take corporate money i won't take pack money and so forth but oftentimes they don't get very far politically you know they say it but they don't but they lose well one one of the great examples of that is russ feingold from wisconsin who was obviously one of the architects of uh mccain feingold bill which was passed in 2003 uh 2002 and um uh uh he famously refused to to um he absolutely rejected any super PAC spending on his behalf in the 2010 election um uh as he had done in previous elections uh but he lost and so um he barely won some elections in wisconsin because he had been so vocally against outside groups coming in to spend on his behalf kind of won by the skin of his teeth there for a few times and then eventually lost and so um many candidates look around and think i can't uh i can't risk that you know if i want to i'll i'll fix it when i get there but i got to get there first and you know it's an old story you you you uh back to the union uh campaign contribution limit issue uh why you were talking i was thinking if i was susan collins who voted against the disclose at allegedly for the reasons you outlined uh i would say to myself well i got 7 000 or 6 000 voters down at bath iron works they are all union members they all contribute to the union the union makes contributions and so i got all of those voters down there union members and then you know i have other people i have very wealthy main industrials who control companies who make contributions big big contributions in their own name or in their in some cases through their company PAC or whatever uh why wouldn't i why would i do something why wouldn't i say i'm not voting because this for the disclose act because this this doesn't limit the unions i would be a little worried about that maybe union members would say but what have been we won't have no impact unless we're permitted to make these contributions but that doesn't occur to anybody and i don't think it occurs to the union members either so well and i i think because primarily if you think about you know uh to go back to the early conversation we were having you know that presumption you know is based off of workers today um to the extent that we have you know manufacturing and other sort of sort of blue collar workers who um otherwise would would mobilize around their economic their shared economic interests um presumes that that is a primary driver of people's sort of political orientations but in fact because our politics has become polarized on everything you can mobilize you can kind of cut into that sort of economic discontent that many workers might feel in opposition to their employers or to wealthy uh wealthy industrialists or to an elite political class by appealing to other cultural issues that might peel off some of those you know preserve some of those votes and so um one of the things that donald trump did did really you know was very successful in the midwest upper midwestern states in 2016 was winning um uh working class white votes uh which if if you're a working class voter you would presumably policy wise economically think that hillary clinton would would you know implement better policies for your economic situation than um donald trump who has a history and was highlighted history of of you know oftentimes not even paying employees when he was you know running the trump uh trump organization um but in fact trump was able to emphasize you know nationalism was able to emphasize a different set of political issues that appealed to many um uh working class white voters namely concerns about you know quote unquote the other concerns about uh diversification of the american citizenry concerns about globalization concerns about uh uh you know patriotism and and those things were able to cut into what would normally be you know a clear democratic talking point which is vote for us because our policies are better for your your wallet right but many voters were thinking more about i'm thinking more about culture i'm thinking more about my country i'm thinking more about the direction of the country and those things donald trump was able to prioritize donald trump of course didn't invent that uh i remember i'm you probably weren't even born in 1968 were you no but uh in 1968 because i was involved in that uh campaign uh nationally and uh george wallis uh did the same thing and he really captured uh the interest in sport of working class people in the upper midwest in michigan and minnesota and ohio just as donald trump did and since that time since 1968 uh those have no longer been uh democrat votes that democrats could vote could could count on and let's just i'll say it i'll get it on the on the agenda here but when we say cultural and the other and so forth uh it's race i mean the fact of the matter is since human beings have been on this planet they have lived in fear of somebody who's strange who's different who who they're not familiar with uh it from cavemen the antitholes on that fear has always been part of human nature and politicians trade on it and and it's a very effective thing to do and i don't think donald trump is a racist but i certainly think he knows how to send little signals to people who are racist and i would say one other thing i want you to comment on this uh most human beings do not regard themselves as racist i mean there are a lot of people who say you know i like trump he says it like it is he doesn't have any tolerance for black lives matter or other movements like that that irritate people uh so he says it like it is he's not politically correct there i understand about political there are things that are politically correct that drive me nuts they drive me nuts but the fact of the matter is what those people are talking about when they're talking about he's not politically correct is he sends these signals and race is exceedingly important in american politics you agree with that or disagree with it oh i think it's it's it's deeply deeply important to understanding the american story so um you know we oftentimes think about american politics says or at least american cultural history political cultural history as being about the the debate between or at least the sort of simultaneous synthesis synthesizing of the sort of you know can do individualism spirit of the sort of um uh you know heratio alger stories of lift yourself up by boost straps and cowboy with the sort of community you know um uh town hall meeting uh a collective civil energy that tokeville documented in his travels through america in the 19th century and so we oftentimes have this debate about individualism versus civil society in america as under is sort of underscoring the sort of american story but if you don't add to that race as a sort of primary debate in american politics and a debate that americans have been having about who is a real american which has been happening for 200 plus years i mean the whole 19th century was a debate about slavery and then post slavery and racial integration and then in the 20th century about civil rights and now we're talking about identity politics in the 21st century as the country becomes more diverse um you can understand american history without understanding the way race racial distinctions um and racial hierarchies have um uh frustrated our capacity to call ourselves a true democracy um and so i think that that's deeply important here and i'll just say one thing i'm not really i'm not a scholar of racial politics american racial politics specifically it doesn't factor into my own in any specific ways on research to the extent that it might show up in studies of campaign spending and obviously political behavior but i think one of the things that's really fascinating about our current political environment is most of course you're absolutely right most americans would of course uh vehemently deny that they're racist or that they hold racist views but i think what's oftentimes lost in this is a debate over what it means to be a racist so in the in the olden days racism was about biological inferiority you know to say someone was not truly a sort of as human as someone who was from european background that was a traditional understanding of racism now almost nobody would argue that today um that's sort of been not everybody of course but that has has largely been sort of expunged from our sort of contemporary discussions about race and racial differences in america and i think it's been replaced by what we might call sort of cultural distinctions you know you'll hear a lot of people who might say well i'm not i'm not a racist but certain groups of people just don't know how to do this or just don't work very hard and they're not making a biological argument they're making a cultural argument and they're not making an argument that's based up well many people have challenges because of structural inequities or because society doesn't accept everybody no they're making a cultural argument about people's motivation to work hard or their devotion to family and they're saying certain groups of people don't have those traits might not be a biological argument it's a cultural argument and they refuse to accept that that's racism and i think that that's why many americans say that they're not a racist even though they might have very deeply held opinions about how groups of people on the basis of the color of their skin are or are not likely or less likely to be hard workers or to be devoted to their family or to hold certain moral positions and and so i think we should really be having a discussion in this country about what it what racism actually means what it looks like and how we define it because i think there are a lot of people who hold race racial views that are not based off of very old traditional understandings of what racism is but when i talk to my students and when i try to understand and read about american history i i do uh uh very clearly point out that i think racism is critical to understanding race in general is critical to understanding how this american experiment has played out the you pointed out something important i think talking about answering that question uh the diversity in america and it's a changing face of america then people say uh that uh 30 years from now there will be more people in this country whose skin color is closer to barack obama than whose skin color is close closer to mine and so there is change and people do fear that don't think they sure do they absolutely do so so um the arc of history there is an arc of history and do you think that if you look ahead uh the arc of history is bending against those who want to preserve the status quo when it comes to race or nationalism or anything else that it's it's it's swimming up river i think that's i think that's broadly true in the sense that you know for democrats for many years they have have have understood that a long term game here is that they will benefit from increasing diversity in the american sort of composition um that you know as more hispanics african americans asian americans as it all diversifies as the democratic party um as their tent includes more of voters of different backgrounds as more and more people feel comfortable expressing sexual orientations that they feel comfortable with that they feel is is naturally theirs if they're the party that accepts everybody's based on their own terms i think democrats see that as the sort of long term strategy to win against a republican party that is increasingly reliant on white voters and christian white voters as their base um but the only thing i'll say that's a bit of a wrinkle to that sort of playing out perfectly for democrats is that you know democ democ demographics are not destiny that um many voters who uh hispanic voters or black voters may hold conservative issue positions and they may come to hold conservative issue positions where they might find some home in the republican party in years to come but also the structure of american politics still in many ways will benefit or disproportionately benefit republicans especially with the u.s senate in the way it's currently constructed and so small states what wyoming montana with small populations they're not going to get very diverse in the next 30 or 40 years they're not going to get as diverse as new york california florida estates texas and they're still going to keep those two senate votes and so republicans even as a party that's disproportionately reliant on white voters may still be very competitive in senate senate elections and controlling the senate for decades um and if they're able to kind of hold on to power in the senate they can stop anything the democrats want to propose um and so uh that will keep our national politics fairly competitive that's very interesting observation uh you know we're getting close to the end of our interview but many of the things that we're talking about of course are not new in this country uh in the 19th century uh we had a period uh before and after the civil war the age of reform and um and then we had uh more reform with teddy roosevelt and wilson and then with roosevelt uh so reform has always been with us and the resistance to reform i think some historians have called it social dowanism look it's just the way it is you're always going to have people that are on in equal unequal positions because all human beings are born unequal and so that's just the way it is and we ought not to try to change something that can't be changed whereas the reformers uh those who are not social dowanists they say look as a community we can come together as a community and look after each other a little bit society as a whole is important to all of us whether we're powerful or not powerful rich or poor and that would you say that that is the debate that continues in america absolutely i i i i think um the just to re characterize it a little bit i think what you'll oftentimes hear that in that first camp about the social darwinists is instead sort of a a repackaging of progressive views or reframing of progressive views as the desire to let everybody live a happy life regardless of whether they work hard and so you'll oftentimes hear people talk about equality of outcomes and so social darwinists will say well that's the last thing we want is for you know everybody to get two thousand dollars a month from the government or to be able to to work a four day work week everybody to be guaranteed a minimum income i mean oh my gosh you know society progresses on winners and losers in competition and and so we can't possibly initiate some of these policies in order to um uh in order to you know i'll let people sit at home all day and so forth and so there's they reframe the debate to be about encouraging you know uh or at least rewarding the lack of initiative to discourage entrepreneurship uh and that's how things get framed whereas the other side of the argument i think you know in many cases many people would would love to give everyone a guaranteed income and and have a four day work week and a 30 hour work week and so forth because they want people to you know you know not be uh have their lives not determined by work but i would say most mainstream conservatives are not about equality of outcomes at all they're about equality of opportunities and they're about trying to redress um historical inequities in access to resources and opportunities and so the debate is less about outcomes and more about opportunity and i think that's where people sometimes miss each other because we want every american i think every american should have the opportunity to participate in politics and to participate in economic life to the extent that they can um and to not have structural inequities prevent them from doing so but to the extent that policies try to implement that they'll that view might often get characterized as being sort of um uh anti-american in a way because it's uh repackaged as a giving away free stuff kind of thing what what is an structural inequities use that term uh what are they money financial situation race color of skin are those are those this kind of structural things you're talking about you know all of those things but i think you can think of it as examples of you know like if you across the across america if you look at you know sort of our education system for example um you know you have really good schools and you got really bad schools and you have underfunded schools and a lot of that because we we we fund our our school systems locally um poor communities have disproportionately worse schools you know they have worse they have worse buildings worse books worse technology they can't pay their teachers very well um and then you have you know upper income communities obviously have excellent schools and so if you're a kid born into a poor community you have a structural inequity that is a block for you to achieve success because you go through an education system that doesn't have as many opportunities for you as if you're born into a rich family and so our education system has long been considered the a place of mobility for people um where anybody who works hard can um end up in college and then make their own destiny but if you're already behind the eight ball in terms of you know you're funneled into a school system that uh prevents you from succeeding i would call that a structural inequity and if you add on top of that you know views people have about race and if that cultural racism plays out such that people view your lack of success in the inner city as a reflection on your capacity to work hard whereas in effect it's actually a large part of consequence of the fact that you just haven't had the chance to learn well then um it feeds on itself in a couple different ways and so i think those those are the kinds of things that you know speaking sort of as a citizen as opposed to a professor that you know um we might want to sort of try to solve professor france this has been absolutely fascinating uh you're a very interesting guy to listen listen to and talk with uh and i'd like to have you back on this program uh some more because i think people can get a lot of insight and learn a lot uh from a discussion with you i think we're getting close to wrapping this up i appreciate your uh being here and talking to my audience and i look forward to seeing you again thank you so much and it's been a lot of fun thanks bye bye