 I'm always thrilled to be working with Kate Rader and Sue Rechanelli from the League of Women Voters. We've been doing a series, now I think this is our third series of programming. And this series is called Constitutional Crisis. Question mark? So I'd like to invite Kate Rader to come up here and to talk a little bit about the week and also to introduce tonight's speaker. Please help you out, Kate Rader. Thank you and thank you for coming. The League's mission is to empower voters and defend democracy. We hope that our collaboration with the Colorado Hubbard Library advances that mission. Our next program on May 15th is on the impact of single-issue politics by both organizations and individuals. I hope you'll be here in May. Tonight, we explore liberalism and conservatism and how the meaning of those words have changed over the years. To lead this discussion, I'm introducing Professor Anthony Jack Borzinski, Chair of the UVM, the Department of Political Science and Director of the Vermont Legislative Research Service. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. What I have planned for tonight is I wanted to go over a handful of things about ideology in the U.S. from the perspective of political scientists, particularly those who studied public opinion. And then my preferred vote of these sort of talks is to have more of a conversation. And so I'm going to sort of set the stage and see where you as the audience would like to take the discussion. So, first starting off, some sort of background, general context on ideology and how we studied it in political science. The use of liberalism and conservatism, it has a number of different problems with it in terms of the labels or categorizing people in terms of politics. But nonetheless, political scientists and others who study this and definitely as part of our political discourse and our culture, we use these labels quite a bit. So first off, I want to show you a distribution of where people are on the ideological spectrum in the United States. What we do, the American National Election Studies, which is an organization from my discipline that surveys the public every two to four years during election years to try to understand what the public's thinking about politics and try to explain their participation and behavior, their thoughts about politics. Anyway, every couple of years, the American National Election Studies asks questions where they basically give people a seven point scale ranging from extremely conservative to extremely liberal and ask people to put themselves on that scale. And what you find if you do that, that's kind of, the print's pretty small, I'll have to explain. The extremely littles on the left are color coded based on the current coding for liberal and conservative. And extremely conservative on the right, with the purple in the middle being people who place themselves in the middle are considered themselves moderate. One of the main points in living in Vermont, we don't really get this most of the time, but the rest of the country is pretty conservative. And so you see the scale tilting towards the conservative side after you move away from those who are moderates. This distribution has been stable for decades. With little bits of fluctuation, I just wanted to throw this up to show that there aren't any overall big trends that are going on as far as ideology. Pretty much the way people end up categorizing themselves has been consistent over a long period of time. And by the way, I can email this to you, and if any of you want to have access to this to look at the data more closely, I'm more than happy to share that. So as far as ideology is concerned from a political perspective, it's sort of cut off at the end, hopefully that's not going to be too much of a problem. We define ideology in a pretty simple way. Political ideology is a consistent set of values and beliefs throughout the proper purpose and scope of government. So what you want governments to do and how much of it you want governments to do. The meaning of liberal and conservative, which is commonly used in our political discourse, you can ask people to define these terms. And basically what we've found as political scientists is that for a long time, people aren't really clear on what a liberal and conservative mean. And so they'll reference either dictionary definitions, you know, liberal person is a generous person, or they'll use terms such as liberals are for big government and conservatives are for small government. The problem with that is that it's not always true. And that if you take certain functions that governments perform, the conservatives are often from time to time in favor of larger government. In particular for policies that maintain order in society, therefore spending more on the military, and for maintaining order in the sense of traditional ways of behavior in society that they feel need to be enforced to do things like regulate pornography or ban access to abortion, things along those lines. The conservatives are for big government, government involvement in those areas. And liberals on the flip side are not always for big government, but just taking the opposite of that. So there's a problem in using this notion of liberal conservative. And so some political scientists have argued that a better way of understanding where people fall ideologically is to go take a step back and look at people's core values. And the argument is that in a political system, there are a set of values that people hold that conflict from time to time. And that we can understand people's overall ideology to understand which of the values they tend to put a priority on over other values. So the main values are conflict, freedom in order and freedom in equality. And so if you think about it, freedom, just lack of any constraints on your behavior, order is maintaining law and order, but as I said, also maintaining social order. Vermont, we have issues with swimming holes and whether you can go swimming without any clothes on. Things along those lines sometimes don't like that. They ban that. That's a form of social order saying that's not appropriate behavior for people. Equality is the third value that's key in terms of democracy and that's whether the government's going to be involved in trying to promote greater equality, whether it be political equality or social equality, and social equality includes economic equality. And to a certain extent everybody in our democracy holds these values as important. But the problem is that when you're promoting government policy, these values often come conflict. So as you promote more order in society, you limit people's freedom to go through, you know, get on the airplane without having to take off their shoes, for example, as opposed to the government concerned about terrorist attacks and so they want to make sure they protect our life from those sort of attacks. And so we give up some of our freedom in that sense for that order. Or after September 11, there's a great expansion on the part of the government's attempt to maintain order. So the government, you know, we had the USA Patriot Act and that meant the government was getting involved in following us or violating our privacy. People didn't have the freedom to do the things they wanted to do without government surveillance sort of thing. And we gave up some of that in terms of public because we wanted to restore that sense of order, that sense of safety. Equality and freedom are the other two values that clash. If we want to create greater equality in our society, economic equality, we have to take the earnings of some and redistribute those to others to things such as a progressive tax or through social programs. And so the idea that the notion of liberal conservative or simple but right doesn't work too well, political scientists who argued that we need to look at these core values of ideology argued that instead of thinking of a simple dimension of ideology, we should really think about it as two dimensions of ideology that are formed by the trade-off in these values. And that if you look at, if you place the people in terms of where they land, their preference of order versus freedom and equality versus freedom, you actually come up with four different ideologies. So the true small government people are the libertarians who really want freedom. They don't want government involved in promoting a lot of order and they don't want government involved in promoting a lot of freedom or equality as well. Communitarians label for the people, it actually fit well for populists down in the south when the Democratic Party still had some strength in the south that was because they emphasized equality over freedom. But Democrats in the south were also those who were one favor of order. So those are the true big government people. Liberals and conservatives, as we understand them, fit in those other two qualities. And understanding this, you can see why people end up not fitting into each of the categories of liberal conservatives. It may be that some people really are more libertarian than they are liberal or than they are conservative. So just, I wanted to lay this groundwork as we move on with our conversation. It's a different way you can see that we think about ideology. So two-dimensional notion of ideology really doesn't function that well, but bottom line in our culture and in the research, there's still a lot of reliance on that notion of liberalism versus conservatism. And it's interesting, you know, just one little side. For example, how you might, if you back up and think about liberals, libertarians, conservatives, communitarians, there's long been in charge by the conservatives that the mainstream media has a liberal bias. As you've all heard, they won't let us or let the culture forgive that claim. But if you actually look at journalists, they always point at journalists and say, look, journalists are liberal, therefore the media is liberal. But if you actually look more closely at journalists, they're more libertarian than they are liberal. They're not liberal on economic issues. They're liberal on social issues. And the economic versus social issues is a short answer to that. It's interesting. They're liberal when it comes to the freedom versus order trade-off, but they're not so liberal when it comes to the freedom versus equality trade-off. Does that make sense? All right. So despite those shortcomings, you know, we still talk about liberal versus conservative, most common way, and I may give you some information and data on liberal versus conservative in the U.S., but keep in mind that notion that these categories don't work that well. All right. So the main thing in terms of ideology in the U.S. that I'm thinking you might want to discuss is the notion of polarization. And so polarization is, as you probably all know, I'm sure you've talked about it, that notion where people on either side of the ideological spectrum or the partisan spectrum seem so far apart and get so angry and can't even have arguments about anything or discussion about anything because they're so polarized. They're so far apart on the ideological spectrum. To understand polarization and what is known as partisan sorting, I have to give you a definition of partisanship because ideology and partisanship are not the same thing. My ideology is that, you know, I repeat the definition up there, it's a set of values and beliefs about what government should be doing and how much of it it should be doing, set of values, political values. Partisanship is the way we study in my discipline of political science is more about your affinity or affiliation with one of the major parties or not. And so we've measured partisanship for a long time now in the U.S. Political scientists have, with a question generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent? And then there's a follow-up question that people say they're a Republican. You ask, are you a strong Republican or not so strong Republican? If they say independent, then you ask, do you find yourself leaning more towards the Democratic party or the Republican party? And we come up with a seven-point scale, seven-point scales, even the nine I guess. Partisanship, and this is what partisanship, the distribution of the electorate look like from the 2016 Native American National Election Studies survey, you actually find more people identifying as Democrats than Republicans. When was that started? 2016. And it's pretty, the Democrats have long-handed edge in terms of party identification. The one thing about the way we as political scientists measure this is that sometimes in media polls they really don't ask people a follow-up question about being independent. And it turns out that people are independent of leaning towards one party at just like regular partisans. They just don't like to label it, the party label. And it's the independents who are actually, the independents are the ones who are the least informed, least interested, least involved, and the least likely to vote. They're actually the worst citizens in the world. They're pure independents. Do they lean more to the Democratic or to the Republican party? That's a pretty good question. What? You said before that there's a question as to independence, whether they lean more to the Democratic or the Republican party. But does he know the results? Yeah, they're right here. On either side of that, independent. So that separates out those who lean one way or the other. So 11% of the public are independents who lean towards the Republican Party and 11% independents who lean to the Republican Party. So you can't really be a strong independent? Well, you can. These are general, you know. These are, in the social sciences, we're describing the general patterns. So there can always be an outlier, but in terms of strong independent. You're an independent, you're an indecisive individual if you're an independent? Well, if you go back to the, you know, we'll come back to that later. Because if you didn't, one time you had about the rest of this, it's kind of clear that if you're a pure independent and you hold any political values, it's hard to see given how divided we are. So you might not be an independent, you might not be leaning toward one of the other principles of the political party. Yeah. That you're, then you can be pretty strong about your belief in an individual. Yeah. If you have a mix of beliefs at crossbow parties and going back to that ideology, it's possible that you could be a sale libertarian and you support the Republicans on some views and the Democrats on other views. So you can be an informed pure independent that way. What we found is most pure independents are not informed at all. Because once you find out what's going on, it's hard to not end up taking a side. All right. Any other questions? So that gives you the definition of partisanship, gives you distribution, we went over ideology. One of the big trends right now in terms of our culture, and this is not going to be a big surprise to you, but I'll show you some data on that, is how it used to be that ideologies were a little more mixed among the parties. You know, when I first moved into Vermont in 1992, the state had voted for Democratic candidate for president in many, many decades. I think it was going back to Johnson if I recall correctly. And it was, you know, in the Northeast was, you know, a Republican territory. What has happened over time is that, is that what's known as partisan sorting has taken place in that the ideologies have sorted themselves out into the Democratic or Republican party. So that where we had more of a mix of ideology in both parties, we now have a Democratic party that is very liberal and mostly liberal, and a Republican party that is very conservative. And the data I have for that comes from the Pew Research Center. And this shows you, over time, I'll have to walk through it. But again, if you want to get this PowerPoint slide, it has the data and the sources you could look up for this information. It starts in 1994, ends in 2014. And basically what this does is it maps out, it asks a series of questions of the public on policy matters and political values that were, if you came down on one side, you were conservative, you came down on the other side, you were liberal. So this gets to that sort of mix of where people might stand on that. And it then charted, all right, where's the median Democrat in 1994 and where do the Republicans, people identify as Republicans land on that scale based on those 10 questions of measure ideology. And so back in 1994, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat, and 70% of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican. So you see, and you can see by the tails here, that there's a bit of overlap between people who identify with the two parties. You see the general change over time until the year 2014, and you have 92% of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican. So what has happened over time is there's been a great deal of sorting, whereas in the past 30, 40, 50 years even further back, the parties weren't so clearly ideologically defined in terms of the people who identify with the parties, they are now. So we've had a great deal of sorting so that the liberals have gone over to the Democratic side and the Republicans over, and the conservatives over the Republican side. The other thing about the other trend as far as partisanship and ideology are concerned is that along with this change, this partisan sorting, we've had a rise in the level of feelings, the amount of the level of affect people have about the political parties, so that we have an increase over time in unfavorable ratings of the party, the other party that you don't identify with. So back in 1994, 16% of Democrats had a very unfavorable view of the Republican party. And only 17% of Republicans had a very unfavorable view of the Democratic party. You can see the bars go up 2004-2014 and they added on an additional question asking respondents whether they saw the other party as a threat to the nation's well-being and you can see in terms of polarization there's been a big increase over that there's a significant amount of this negative affects that is associated with actually thinking the other parties as a threat to the well-being of the nation. And I'm sure you've all paid attention to the rhetoric, the discourse and politics in the news and that should be no surprise to you. So we have this ideological sorting so the parties have become more similar along the lines of their ideology, Democrats becoming more liberal, Republicans becoming more conservative and people really the level of emotion that's associated with their political views of partisanship and ideology have really gone up significantly and there's a lot of disdain or contempt for members of the other party. So I have some, this is where I'd like to stop and this is what I do with my students as well. What explains this? I have my next slide where I have ideas I can throw out. I thought it might be better that if we had a conversation about it first off there are any questions about what I presented but also we can move on and say okay this is you know we know this polarization is going on here's the evidence to really suggest that it's much worse than it used to be in the past. How do we explain this? How do we explain the nature of our political culture? I sort of have a prior question. And is there any way of measuring cycles in history of this country where things have been more polarized and less polarized and is that information that you rely on or can rely on? Yes, we had a whole public opinion polling only came around in the 1950s so we don't have anything that goes back further in terms of assessing polarization but we know from the start of that time that that polarization was not there and you can extrapolate by looking at elections, election returns and people are elected from different areas. The South was solidly democratic for a long time and the ideology there was more conservative or communitarian if you would but it was you know and driven by racism basically to maintain power in the South and because of that mix and they were part of the National Democratic Party you know that the ideological distribution within the party was quite the mix back then and you can look at the appeal of candidates from New England going back who were Republicans and look at their policy stances and their success so you don't have to rely just on public opinionables to say that we are more divided than we have been since the Civil War and political scientists will put it in those terms. Right, I'm going to bring where the Civil War is a benchmark for division in the country but also during the Chancellor's administration that you know there was heavy polarization at that time as well it just seems like there's a cycle that runs through art. Do you think this is just part of the normal cycle? No, I think it drives this polarization in conscious and unconscious ways. You know you look at the rise of Fox News its relationship with the White House is a very different basket of eggs than we've ever before and it seems to be. Has anyone studied what are these cycles how long they take? There is a theory about partisan realignment that is tied into some of these cycles but you know if you're going back to the Civil War this is an awful long time to actually say anything is really a cycle at this point. And I do think there are more things going on here I started on the media issue and I'd like to run with that a little bit in the back side. Yeah, so I wanted to like just piggyback on what he said I think John Stewart called it out well when he went on Tucker Cross show on Crossfire on CNN. I showed that to my media class. Yeah, I just thought that's so perfect because it's not just Fox News it's like they set up this whole like either or this or that and I remember he just went on saying stop hurting America which please stop and begging them and Tucker lost the show after that but anyway so it's yeah definitely and it's hyper I think at this point with all the fake news on Facebook that's really gotten us into a really bad hole and they did studies and found that it's mostly elderly people and conservatives were almost always the huge amount of fake news was spread by those people so it's kind of not to be partisan that's just what the study shows. It's a it's a great little piece if you want to do a Google search and look up the YouTube video John Stewart the pair of CNN Crossfire and they cancelled it a week later and John Stewart provided this wonderful critique of the way the media is just providing theater for us and it just carries the talking points by their side and he called them both political hacks and it's interesting they didn't really get in a lot of the people and you could tell they didn't get it they didn't understand what he was trying to get at since then I've seen that quotes from that appear in books on the media and I open my class and politics in the media with that video up until this year it's for sure I thought it was getting too old because it was 2004 but the media is a central role here but in a lot of different ways so you mentioned social media and Fox we have these partisan news outlets and we have top radio the liberals tend to follow the Daily Show or the satire shows instead we have changes in our media environment that we haven't really ever seen and one of the things about politics people often say well you know candidates are always going negative against other candidates yes but they didn't have the megaphone and the distribution and the ability to go viral that they do today so thank you step back on the Fox we'll pick on that one first one of the changes that happened during the 1980s of the Reagan administration you know going back to that conservative you want less government so there's deregulation on the media and they eliminated the fairness doctrine I don't know if you guys know what the fairness doctrine was but it required if you there was a gave time to one political point of view you had to give equal time to the other side you get rid of that and media organizations can go well we can just go all one side and so you have the rise and talk radio after that and then the media outlets like Fox News and now on the left you have the response with MSNBC so that sort of deregulation of the media really opened up to partisan opened up the broadcast media to more partisan media and that provided more choice for people and so individuals started to sort themselves out in terms of which media they would pay attention to and allow for the creation of echo chambers where you only hear those things that support your views sorry about that I have a kind of technical question if the fairness rule is reinstated that would only apply to broadcasts but really airways so now that everything is cable and internet even if you somehow could get that through congress it probably would have very little effect except maybe even diminish further the marches left that barn they were going to go back and especially you know but it came at a time as far as the media is concerned we really opened the door and got the ball rolling in terms of this polarization my other point was that somehow MSNBC went back oh yeah another thing you'd have to then write a whole new law and probably have constitutional problems because the internet and cable are not airways you'd have to somehow define those exactly so you can never go back well the last point was going to be that back when it was three networks ABC, NBC and CBS the government sort of had a straight line to everybody's brain so back on your chart which I think is I'm glad you got rid of the false dichotomy liberal and conservative but I think you traded it for false trichotomy but of order, freedom and equality so the government anytime they want to beam order, freedom or equality into your brain they had a ready-made channel and it was expensive to do that in the old days that's why you only had the three networks but there's also but the government didn't control those well yeah but through their sources and you know if you go to a university the university is going to oftentimes they're either on government grants or on industry grants so you're going to get similar opinions but opening this up to any Jimmy Joe with a computer now all opinions possibly equally doubted now that's dangerous because not everybody's in a position to have good information so that's about where we are right now so how do we see it? yeah I got a couple of points from that it's so 1984 yeah and the research doesn't support your argument about government control the broadcast media at the time it really doesn't if you go back and look at the actual news broadcasts during the Cronkite era and before that was a period where the journalists and the actual news, the organizations that own those broadcasts media actually took a loss in terms of their profits to run the news because the way the government did affect what they did was it really held them to the public service standards as part of the federal communication that they had to they were given the airways for free they needed to actually provide a public service and for the ovens of the 1980s the networks did that by actually providing a well staffed broadcast news program that had bureaus around the world and that took it very seriously in which journalism was the journalism, the bellies of journalism were really prioritized compared to what we have right now and so what has changed between then and now is that you take away the public service requirements which was the other thing that happened in the Reagan era so they no longer enforced that and that allowed the corporate owners of the media organizations to push the bottom line and profit more which then changed the nature of the news from an attempt to present some journalism to an entertainment program which in my view all television news right now is just entertainment and it has very little substance in it going back to the Daily Show of John Stewart there was a study on the 2004 presidential election that actually looked at the substantive content of the network news broadcast news and compared it to the substantive content of the Daily Show with John Stewart and found that they were equal your hand popped right back I was thinking of some of these other folks who have manufactured consent and I think of World War I in the PR industry what was Sigmund Freud's nephew's name came over here and invented a war for us so I think the governments had their PR arm of the government to talk to the media if you had three big channels it sort of calls the tune that all the little channels dance to I think you had a good point with a robust press and a lot of people out there doing print media who are fighting against that but I think the tidal waves just come over us now there's no fighting the government propaganda because they say both things and now with Trump they say both things out of both sides of their mouth so there's no no sort in any of that sorry I don't mean to dock it no that's fine and Chomsky's I mean it's really don't stand in terms of the research on the media anymore we can talk more about that later but Chomsky is a linguist not a specialist in the media who came at this whole study of the media through from an activist perspective and those academics who studied it more specifically really punch a lot of holes in his arguments as far as the media is concerned but I actually used to show a manufactured consent to my media class for quite a long time now it's kind of in the past and the students are like yeah it really doesn't apply anymore right now but there's evidence suggested it didn't apply and people made his argument as well but I don't want to keep going down that that's a whole other discussion so another part in this in terms of the ideology you know this entertainment value goes over everything else and it goes to the heart of why we can't really talk to people on the other side of the political divide right and that's because you know it's no longer what the situation is no longer what Senator Moynihan used to argue you're entitled to your own opinion but that's your own fact you've totally lost that in our culture now everyone feels like they're entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions if you can't agree on what reality is you're never going to have a decent conversation about politics and how to deal with reality as it is and so we see that and we see that on the left hand and the right you know the classic one is climate change but you know a lot of people who believe in conspiracies and conspiracy thinking about vaccinations on the left and then both those sides they use the same arguments to deny the sides and it's something that we could agree on and then build on as far as political discourse so part of this ideological polarization and those attitudes or those emotions I should say is that we've lost that common ground of agreeing on some sort of basic fact you guys how do we restore that how do we restore that you want the solution yeah can we get back to that moment because we could do how do we deal with this all in one big package but if there's more we want to talk about explaining the situation and then be persistent please have some 90 professor I'm going to forget and I'm not avoiding it but I think it's an important conversation I have a question about the sorting and I don't really know a lot because I did that there was something that happened in Green Ridge and about a party at a national level loyalty where at one point people were intermingling and then something happened that made a separation and maybe there's some trickle down from that can you say it's not all the media that led us to where we are right now and this is what we call off center I can't remember the authors right now I think it was one of the authors political scientists who looked at what the political parties have done particularly the success of the republican party and they in going back to Newt Gingrich and how they shifted their parties so far to the right but also they brought in their affiliate groups such as Americans for tax reform that are so ideologically they want your ideological loyalty that they made it so that the republican party really moved further and further to the right and they enforced that loyalty in a number of different ways so much so that you know a republican broke their tax pledge Americans for tax reform over norquist would finance people a republican to run against a republican who actually cooperates with some so the republican party and the republican party built successful party out of that sort of loyalty and set up an agenda but it's all but they continue to move to the right so far so much so that it was some believe that they would have trouble winning national elections because they've gone so far to the right and they're not a very diverse party Trump definitely messed up that argument but he's not a typical Republican but in 2016 was in a fiscal election so yeah that's another source of this polarization what else, what other sort of things urban and rural I just kind of curious about it, it seems like there's a huge split when you look at how people vote across the country there's actually been sorting in terms of residential patterns is that what you're referring to so that you're all familiar with the problem of redistricting and gerrymandering one of the problems that is associated with an analysis of the parties that have drawn on their legislative districts so that they're more reliable districts to get more members of their party elected is that some of the polarization comes from the intentional drawing of those districts but some of them comes from residential patterns that with blue state people or red state people which then they don't really know anyone from the other side and so they're unable to have those sort of conversations so that definitely contributes to it as well and going back in terms of congress and polarization in congress and looking over time again if you look at the votes party line votes in congress congress itself is more polarized than it has been since the civil war as well just on voting patterns and you see that with the disappearance of modern republicans from new england and the disappearance of southern democrats and now fair party polarization back to the media one other point I wanted to make in terms of the media environment is that in social media there's we can talk a little bit about those effects but if you some of you mentioned cable so you broadcast cable and then the internet comes along and we're now pretty much on demand culture we've moved from and if you compare our choices that we have right now to what we had back in the 1970s when it was broadcast news you had no choice it was you know ABC and CBS as far as the media are concerned and so if you wanted to watch something around dinnertime you only had one choice news so most of the people were exposed to news that way even those who might not be that interested in politics so then you add in cable you add in the internet you add in our handheld devices all that sort of stuff and we go from a low choice media environment to an extremely high choice media environment and so what do you think the public what happens then to the public in terms of their sort of media sorting well it's a question I had that but it seems like kind of connected here which is about when you talk about the independence being not informed were they self declaring independence or were they labeled as independence by people who said oh they weren't really they said they were independent they didn't lean toward that part but in terms of the media choice environment so there's the obvious liberals would go to liberal media and conservatives conservative media but the thing that people miss was that a lot of people who don't are not really interested in politics will stop paying attention to the news completely that's a good question actually were some of those independence do you think they were don't cares or was that in the study if you don't care just mark this box we'll throw your data because they don't care the answer is they don't know it's a very very small percentage of people who fit into that category I'm not sure I remember from the chart that you had which party suspected the other more was it the republicans in terms of national security or something no just hard into the nation the well-being of the nation so were the republicans 36% of republicans saw the democrat party as a threat to the nation's well-being compared to 27% of democrats seeing the republican party as a threat to the nation's well-being that's wrong I would say those numbers should be switched I was thinking the same thing 2016 2014 63% that kind of switch well just that today yeah I would think today a threat has changed and that's where Trump brings in something that's really not related to ideology at all yeah a lot of conservative disown Trump he's a reality democracy is what scholars are arguing right now because he's attacking our political institutions he's now very familiar with the constitution and the notion of checks and balances and the role of various institutions play and he's he attacks the press and the media so much so that it's encouraged violence against the media and he's encouraged that as his rallies as well so the different dimension that Trump adds that you will actually probably find republicans you will find republicans who are concerned with the impact Trump has on a democracy as well as democrats so that kind of totally changes this equation right now and that's about something entirely different there's a question that I ask all the time is why does Congress still continue to unify behind them to such a large extent well you're pragmatic they now control the Supreme Court for quite a long time and if with Bader Ginsburg doesn't make it they're going to have a large majority on that court for a long period of time so they know the effect of you know they voted party if you would ignoring the person ignoring all his you know I wouldn't go there you know what I'm talking about and it's assault on democracy but they're getting what they want out of this guy in terms of ideology and it's ratting you know from a very purely pragmatic perspective for their ideology they're quite happy with that they're sacrificing so much they could be and the 2020 election will show whether that comes into play because you know Trump also attacks our electoral system the legitimacy of our electoral system and so a lot of people are concerned if he loses in 2020 what does he do because he's set the groundwork like a lot of other autocratic leaders around the world set the groundwork to just brush away an election result I want to go back to that in tennis and the media thing and do you know if there's been a growth that Trump knows maybe can't know because we have such a proliferation maybe he can't really figure it out so not even though we don't know what's really been true so is there a growth of that sector that's saying well I'm independent I don't know can't know I'm just not going to get involved there's growth in the there are a lot of the ones that I guess I'm putting them together with I don't know or I'm not sure what they answer that well I think even more in terms of the level of knowledge in the American public I think that's what is really at the heart of your question well I wonder if there's a connection with almost over saturation and you can't figure out what the truth is everything's truth in reality getting affected science is getting into everything just getting into it I'm not too sure where to go with in terms of your question I'm asking it have we gotten it are you asking me I'm asking the independence because I'm seeing I thought I heard you say that independent group is saying I'm not sure I don't know I don't I'm not informed about the issues we know they have a low level of information not because they're saying they're not informed but the way we do our analysis is we ask a series of different questions than the use of statistical analysis to compare different groups so if you look at the people that appear independent you look at their levels of information other questions and compare those to the partisans if you would and that's where we see those differences so it's not they're not saying we're not informed but I guess what I'm wondering is there's so much is the media a problem in making someone not be informed is it possible there's a connection between if you have a short attention you know like you're all over the place you never get any depth of understanding and then you're not really informed you're getting lots of stuff from it you see what I'm saying exactly and that actually I would use that as an explanation for why that feeds the part of the polarization as well people are so overwhelmed with everything that's out there because of the infinite choice that we have and because of the partisan media outlets and because of all the different websites that you can go to YouTube that just pedals you know there's a there's a good piece in the New York Times on how the algorithm on YouTube you could watch some YouTube videos on some serious subjects and they'll suddenly start taking you into conspiracy theory territory so my students are totally the first conversation I had in my media class was they were totally overwhelmed they didn't know who to believe anymore and so your fallback position is to believe those you agree with which then feeds that polarization it also feeds a high level of cynicism in terms of the public so that you just kind of start tuning things out and you particularly will tune out the things you don't agree with in the first place and so that also feeds that whole path do you tell them old books with old copyright dates that's a good place to get information the one book that I have used since I started teaching the class in 1993 is a book by Neil Postman called amusing ourselves to death 1985 a book that was really prescient in it for explaining how we ended up in a culture where we lost our ability to reason and we lost our ability to actually assess what is factual but it's not factual which also feeds that whole polarization on top of that as well because if you break down reason and you break down evidence and you break down the institutions that actually do that kind of work then you've illuminated that ability to find some greed upon understanding of our reality and then everybody can just believe what they want to believe and think the other side is harming our political stuff so what happens in 2020 in 2020 and you kind of mentioned it if Trump loses a popover and he says I don't care I'm not going any electoral college over to you I'm sorry? He has to lose both the electoral college though because he lost a popover but he claims he did and that's enough so what happens his true electocracy comes to the board he says I'm not leaving and he has enough that seems to be sick events in Congress who are just going to say well say what you want well I don't know it's hard to predict what would actually happen it's terrible I don't put a fast in trying but at this point I think our institutions are strong enough and I don't think that I think enough Republicans would say he's gone over the line and that's too much I don't have any confidence in that at all legally if he lost the election and he lost the electoral college he couldn't stay in there he could say as he has said with the 2018 election that it was massive fraud or as he said in the debates in the 2016 election that he would not accept the results of the election if he lost he said that and that is so outrageous for a presidential candidate this has nothing to do with ideology this has to do with an autocrat or an authoritarian who is not a Democrat in the lowercase D sense of the word but he's already been he claims massive fraud in California that Hillary Clinton didn't really win by 3 million votes that it was all the illegal immigrants but he's been saying those sort of things and it is based the Leave Senate the evidence is the public right now well the evidence is not with him and then his base is not necessarily sandwiched I think that's one reason why they voted down in Florida that a million people get to vote who couldn't before because of their criminal arrest the Republican governor is doing in response to that he's blocking that initiative from actually well he may be blocking you but a lot of Republicans and conservatives because they all fight with those four votes just like the Democrats will they know that those of us are most likely Democratic votes and so the Republicans are not big fans of in fact they're supporters of trying to make it harder to vote for the harder you make it to vote the more likely you're going to discipline just Democratic voters and non-Republican voters that's empirically demonstrated they don't see span in their gathering that they had we'd give us all a go they claim to be very much for this now they're not Republicans they're conservatives but that's what they claim claims are you know it's the action we got to look at see what they're doing is there any way you think that it would boil down to the army and the way the army would go oh my goodness well because I don't think the army would go with one of the books on the last slide I have a number of books recommended if you want to explore some of these things further and one of the books that I referenced a couple of times here oops that's the end of this besides this is a book How Democracies Die by the Biskins of Black it's actually sold quite a bit for a political science we don't really sell that many books I've got five I haven't made that much money off those but the bottom line is they actually look at this question by saying alright here's the behavior of individuals would be authoritarians would be autocrats and other nations and this is what they did once they gained power you know things such as attacking the other institutions to sort of reduce people's support for those other democratic institutions taking control of the referees like the police forces and the military and the court system this is you know if you were to look at what's his name from Venezuela and what he did you can see chart out how he gained power that way anyway they look at that they look at what Trump has done what he has said and they show the parallels and you know he's doing what a lot of these autocrats have done in other nations and he really respects and reveres a lot of autocrats in other countries and it's not surprising because his personality tendencies are towards that kind of authoritarian rule so I don't I think the Republican Party would stand up at that point and that would be a bit too far in terms of Trump he still has his supporters who are very strong I'm going to believe whatever he has to say so the way I would see it if he lost and he attacked the legitimacy of the elections is that we would have a period of pretty bad violence in the country a period of what sir a period of what sir bad violence I'm going to ask about the army not the army no I know the army would be called Ben as it has been if you look at the conservative I mean I don't think the army would go the conservative faction I mean they're this category putting people in the categories but they're the ones that are that have the AK the 14's I mean I've got 9 guns ranging from 100 years old or 200 years I don't know the last time I shot one but the people that that make me think I mean my father was in the service my father would go and I think the reason that that a lot that I can't remember now but some of the generals that Trump had that people that don't normally think that highly of military people this brings an adult into the room and I guess praying that there's enough adults in the room that we don't get into this more of a malicious spike when we start shooting each other who's got the most higher I think actually your point too that those generals leaving in a way is a good sign in terms of you're asking about the military that's a sign that the military wouldn't go long with us I would like to get away from this dystopia and as when did conservatism separate from conservation because like Nixon established the EPA and it's just being better I read actually something recently on that that was a little more in-depth with the Republican Party and why they promoted that and because the Republican Party long being an ally of businesses when the environmental movement came along Nixon just rode the wave in a way it wasn't because he was some idealistic conservationist he rode the wave and other Republicans joined them in but when the business supporters got a chance once they adjusted to that change because it came off pretty quick and caught a lot of business organizations in interest groups if you would off guard when they had a chance to respond and they got the Republican Party back in line in terms of trying to limit the regulations on industry if you would and if you actually look at the growth of say political action committees you've seen in the 1970s that the business political action committees and interest groups really exploded at that time in reaction to those regulations got the Republicans in line so that was more of an aberration in terms of it wasn't conservative as in being conservationist although we've had the libertarians kind of libertarian main or republicans or moderate republicans in New England were pro-environment if you would or pro-environment or regulation for quite a while including James Jeffords and that made a little different but Jeffords left the party because he wasn't allowed to continue to be the moderate republican US and that goes back to the Republican Party really holding their people more in line and using the tools that they have to punish those who aren't faithful or loyal to them and we need to do that in redistricting that I mentioned before and especially in the House of Representatives then you have members of Congress who come from districts where they're more concerned about a primary challenge within their party than they are with competition from the other party and that adds to that polarization in a lead level and then that feeds the polarization at the more public level in the nature of discourse Is that happening in the Democratic Party at all? Oh yeah I mean the same kind of you either Well Yes it's hard to believe it's only in one side Right now the Democrats are struggling I'm sure you've seen the news on that especially since if you go back to this chart on ideology the one thing that's pretty clear is that if the Democrats are impossible to live the Democrats if they want to win they need to be I'm sorry in terms of ideology if the Democrats want to win they have to be a Senate Left Party they can't afford to be a pure Left Party whereas the Republicans can actually afford to be more of a conservative party and not as concerned with the center especially with the campaign tactics that they develop it's both off-center that I mentioned there's really good talking about they would disguise their policies in order to win over people who were more moderate or working class so their tax cuts they would you know up and low heavy in the front they would put all the tax cuts that would benefit people across the board but the ones that really benefited the upper class were kind of hitting and came later or as in the current tax cut the tax cuts that hit the middle and the other ones for the higher-income groups are going to continue and so they did a very good job not just keeping their people loyal but disguising their policies in a way to really push very right-wing policies they didn't mind they would attack Democrats on budget deficits but they actually like budget deficits because if they lose power they handcuff the next administration to make it impossible for them to actually do anything because they loaded up on the deficit so they've been very successful in those sort of strategies and they've been able to do it some people argue they kind of box themselves in a corner before Trump came along but Trump changed his equation in the back I just have a question about I guess I would say it depends on how you in parts of Europe what they would consider far-left is not what we would consider far-left here at all so I think what people here might consider left would be considered more conservative there and so I think often it's like when you say Democrats did not move far-left to when I would personally disagree with that just based on taking policies out of it like whether your Democrat or Republican studies show that some of the what you might label far-left policies of Medicare for all or raising the minimum wage and the Green New Deal are actually popular among most people so how do you square that with this idea of it we would need to not move far-left and a lot of the people that didn't win in the Democratic Party were people who were like center right and a lot of people like one were more to the left actually that's not exactly true that the Democrats wouldn't have won the majority if they didn't win a lot of red districts House districts were the centrist candidates and so part of the dispute if you're filing is those centrist candidates saying look, you needed us as well to win the House so it wasn't just the what's her name Cortero C Casio it wasn't just that group but there was definitely a group of Democrats who came in and it was also those who won in those red districts that Trump carried in the past election and if they hadn't won those districts they wouldn't have the majority as well so they need that sort of mix the other thing is going back to ideology on economic issues you do not see liberalization in the U.S. where you see the liberalization is on social issues only things like same-sex marriage but on economic issues you ask there's some good polls out there where you could look at stories that this notion you gotta be really careful in answering questions about whether people actually have the information to answer the question so Medicare for All once you push past that and actually try to find out what they know about it and what that means you lose support you go below a majority in support for something like Medicare for All when you make it clear if you're talking real Medicare for All that people lose their current insurance and then everybody is out on the same insurance you lose a majority support for that but I think that's because people are misinformed like people don't care about their insurance they care about whether they can meet their doctor most people don't HMOs are actually popular nobody I know likes an HMO or any means so I think a lot of that's like the media misinformation and spreading once it's presented to them in a way that every other industrialized nation does it in a world here's how we're going to pay for it which mathematically has been proven and could easily so I'm just saying but in terms of back to the ideologies you don't see that you don't see the American public becoming more liberal in economic issues so we're in the same spot we have been in terms of ideology we can talk more and encourage you to dig into some good journalism not partisan on either side analysis and poll and public opinion on that and you know I'll let you do your own digging but I think what you're both having where would somebody find a balanced dig? a dig? the Pew Research Center that's a really good source it's funded it's a non-profit organization funded by Foundation Money I've never seen anything that would attack them attack them for any bias I haven't argued with them over how they define generations but that's a whole different issue tied to some of the work I've done but so they fired the what is his name, Nick Silver in his website it's a really good analysis of the polls there's an ancillary New York Times organization that does the deep dig dive into data what? box I think they do a pretty good analysis of them too what is the New York Times section called it's a special section to do this sort of deeper analysis of data and collect data and information so digging to those sites that's where you find some good information so I would go back to the idea and I don't have personally the sense that he's a big thinker and really I feel like he's a pawn in a larger system and rather I don't have the fear about takeover I feel like he's a symptom of other forces and he was he didn't cause this he took advantage of it I don't take it to him personally I don't think he's capable of masterminding political strategy so I think he was a pawn for other people to do that I think he was in an accident yeah or whatever it's a symptom of us so if it's not him I think we really have to go look at what are the forces that allow this to happen and are those shifting are we just going to have another whack of chaos head towards chaos you didn't mention of course there's a lot of things we'd probably be here for five days and so but I see a lot of tribalism on the left side I think that's one of the reasons why I didn't particularly like her Hillary Clinton but I voted for her and but then some of the people which I won't mention any names that were candidates for the Democratic combination and then when I came down and said well I like Hillary Clinton more than I like Donald Trump and they wouldn't do it because we've degenerated into a bunch of tribes it was a real tragic and Trump will get elected again and not to center on the Democratic Party can't work it out and get by on one candidate that is you know that's just false right in there can't we stop well that's the thing and this goes to the heart you can see that in our conversation the intensity about the politics and the understanding of reality that exists even within this room and it makes it really difficult to say alright well what do we do how do we work together and one of the ways by the way in the book how democracies die that autocrats were stopped was when parties that were parties that had the autocrat come up and decided no we're going to shut that person out or we're going to put this person in check and so you know that is the way to stop that so you know if you really wanted to stop Trump you need to build a good left center and maybe even some Republicans to join in on that the Republicans have been loyal and they've been loyal because they've gotten what they wanted and there's all the Democrats who voted the way you voted and said alright I don't really like Hillary Clinton but it doesn't matter who the person is because we'll be able to appoint Supreme Court justices for a long time that will really keep the court on the little side or flip the court to a liberal position on things and look at all of the things that were done in the Obama administration the Trump administration is reversing right now that wouldn't be reversed all the progress for liberals and so you know we do focus a lot on personal personalities and that also is a problem in terms of our political system as opposed to really you know the other thing I wanted to get in the heart of there's two different dimensions of polarization that are going on in party sorting and one is polarization based on actual differences in policies or values going back to the chart that that sorting is happening and liberals and conservatives are different because of different core values and that kind of polarization and sorting among the parties if it's based on policy and based on values is actually a good thing for democracy because it provides the voters with a clear choice and we have an incredibly clear choice right now more so since we had over a hundred years alright that if you prefer promoting equality it doesn't matter who the Democratic nominee is you're going to get greater quality and this is empirically verified if the Democrats control the White House alright if you want more order and less equality more market freedom in the marketplace then you should vote for Republicans no matter what who they are in a way Trump again messes all this up in some ways but if you look at the percent of Republicans who voted for Trump it's overnight it was around 90% so they knew they were going to swallow Harry in the sky a lot of them couldn't stand and had other problems with but they knew they were going to get the policies and they've gotten them and it's been a huge success for conservatives the Trump administration except for maybe on trade trade conservatives are for free trade and he hasn't got any satisfaction from many Republicans conservatives and Democrats over the issue of the separation of the families and children at the border I mean I talk to people who are big conservatives and they can't stand that and even his wife didn't like it but in the big picture they're getting a lot of what they want oh they're getting a lot of what they want but if they're big they're getting 90% of what they want so let's think about the courts not just the Supreme Court but the appointments to the Pellet Courts as well that are now being stacked with conservatives and Republicans that's going to make a huge difference over time in terms of promoting conservative ideology and in fact the opposite if you go back and look at the Obama years once the Democrats got rid of the filibuster for Pellet Court judges and Obama was able to fill all the vacancies in the fields courts and those at Pellet Court judges that basically voted in support of same sex marriage and there were enough the Pellet Court rulings around the country that really in essence forced the Supreme Courts hand to accept same sex marriage as a reality so those are the things that you know looking at the big picture looking at the courts not getting lost I don't think that's a little picture I really don't but this big picture for a lot of people it is in the core of the family and those are Democrats and Republicans when you take people's children away from their families put them in concentration camps send them to New York as they have a robust to Democrats who have a robust foster care system then yes we can find Republicans who are outraged by that the question is when how are they going to vote you look at the numbers there and you'll see that when they're confronted with that decision they're going to support Trump again well there's a lot of people Democrats and Republicans and others who are not going to tolerate the situation at the border and he hasn't got his ball and the minute the Democrats cave in on either of these issues they are going to lose people because the party will be divided if they don't keep up on these basic moral issues they will and you may be right but I don't think so because I think there are a lot of conservatives who are questioning this whole thing from what I see going down south and talking to people and all you know they're questioning it but the bottom line is what's the wrong way I think they're changing fast Georgia may not get another Republican Florida may not get another Republican but that's due to demographic changes they're putting no it's not due to Democratic changes demographic changes it's due to the determination of the black community not to be put back again that's part of the demographic change well that's why the Republicans are going down to Charlotte for their election they're having a Republican national convention in Charlotte this happened they think they're going to get North Carolina I don't think so I may be wrong but North Carolina is a very purple state and I know they did I know what they did a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing but I'll try anyway where do these terms left and right actually come from if you look back at it it's the French estates general and it depends on what side of the room you sit on with the kings and nobles or otherwise and since our constitutions specifically outlaws kings and nobles what are we even talking about are we just like that old married couple where somebody burnt the roast three months ago and she won't let them forget you know and we just poke each other for quarter years is ridiculous there was so much to go in terms of history yeah if you look at Federalist number 10 Madison is writing about how they've been creating the constitutions are you familiar with the discussion about factions and Federalist number 10 that you know the most important thing they did was design a constitution in order to control factions in the political system and the way you control factions it occurs you to read it sometime it's the wonderful piece of political analysis well then Washington did one part if I remember right he did one part in Washington no well actually on factions they knew factions were inevitable and factions are a people united by a common impulsive passion united against others who want to take control of government in order to exercise their vision so they're aware of the fact that it's going to happen and in Federalist number 10 by the way the Federalist papers I'm having quizzical looks the Federalist papers going back to the history of the adoption of the constitution we had a first constitution called the Articles Confederation and it weren't working out so well so it was decided that we would have a constitution convention to amend the Articles Confederation but instead they threw the whole Articles Confederation out, wrote a whole new constitution and then they had the campaign to get it enacted and the Federalist papers were the outfit pieces written by the framers of the constitution Madison, Hamilton and Jenny to argue why we should adopt the constitution and so they are a great thing to look into to see what the intent of the framers of the constitution were and so they deal with that whole notion of action back then that did not exist the constitution in a way, the structure of the constitution created political parties they will get to that in a moment but the bottom line is they knew factions were going to happen and the main cause of factions they knew were unequal distribution of property and so they said we need to build a political system that can control those factions to make sure that no one faction can take over this violence that is depriving other faction other groups in society of their rights and freedoms and that's how they designed the system so they are aware of that and the initial factions were foreign against the US constitution because there was concern that the new constitution would be too strong in the national government those factions figured a way and initially what happened was because of the electoral college it became quickly it quickly became clear to people of like mind in terms of policy in terms of what they want government to do that they needed to organize and build a majority in order to win the electoral college vote so it's actually the electoral college structure creates an incentive for you to build a majority to try to gain control of the government because if everybody puts forward all sorts of different candidates nobody is going to have a majority and the party that can pull those people together or the group the faction if you would back then are the ones who are going to capture the electoral college and so that started in congress around the electoral college and then moved out into the public as a whole and the ideology was varied parties were built more patronage in terms of trying to gain control of the government so what you do is you you basically promise people who will work for the party and get out the vote that they'll have jobs after the election so it wasn't very ideologically based and this goes back to the history and cycles it's really now that it's kind of is unique that the parties are really so sorted in terms of ideology that's your question and you know that whole you were talking about the reliable sources of news have you had a chance to share if the website truth is treason or if you have any familiarity with it how you're not familiar with it that reminds me of Stephen Colbert who said that reality has that little nice cold moon days on the cold moon so is that kind of the tenor of that the tenor of that website true true he's very fond of the sections of the constitution that he feels are not being observed and he quotes word for word a lot of different sections of the constitution yeah and then he relates that to policies in the United States today interesting I'm not familiar with it one other thing I want to point out in terms of the discussion about polarization and about ideology in the US is another book and the arguments this book enchanted America how intuition and reason divide our politics by Oliver and Wood is I would highly recommend this book in trying to understand the nature of our divides their thesis and their argument and their social scientists so they back it up they find ways to measure where people land on intuition versus reason scale they argue that we all use both intuition and reason to some people who rely more on intuition gut feeling that sort of thing then on reason and on evidence so they measure that out and they actually use this difference between this notion of where you fall on the intuition scale and they actually find that in some ways that intuition is a better predictor of people's views on certain policies on belief and conspiracy theories things along those lines than ideology is and they also found and this is most disturbing is that there is sorting going on here as well over at 830 and the sorting is that the conservatives and the Republican party are becoming more and more the party of the intuitionists which shouldn't surprise you denying science and not really handling reason very well as our president illustrates quite nicely I do want to get to we now got to well what do we do about all how do we do that we have two minutes two minutes that's all that I think we're going to do tomorrow oh my gosh just thank you I think the solution has to go back to the public and I really think we have to as a public we have to learn how to reason and weigh evidence a lot better than we do right now and sort of set aside our cynicism in favor of skepticism so a cynic is going to dismiss pretty much any sort of information anything they disagree with they're just going to dismiss that outright whereas a skeptic is more willing to look into claims and evidence and follow the reason and what I mentioned before amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman that helps explain in many ways why we are here right now his solution I think is the only one that really holds and as a public we really have to educate ourselves about our biases in terms of our understanding of the world and our explanation of the world and when we think we are right about something those are the sort of beliefs we have to challenge the most and that if we can get to that point and that's something we have to teach in schools and that's part of my job when I teach American politics which I teach regularly it's actually I love teaching intro of American politics the book I start out with is a book called Unspun How to Find a Fact in an Age of Disinformation and the whole book is designed to say we can't rely on the media anymore because all the gatekeepers in the media are gone and they're not gone, they're still there but all this information flows around the gatekeepers and lots of misinformation that's out there so as a citizen we have to be able to judge that on our own and the book provides a great set of recipes if you would or a checklist that I go over with my students alright, you got this information on my website how do you judge the validity of the information how do you find out you know, analyze your methodology as a citizen we're going to have to do that sort of thing because it's not done for us in a way that we could rely on in the past and so I think that's the core the author Jackson and Jameson Unspun they're actually the people who created the site factcheck.org political scientists but it's a great it's actually a cheap little paperback great piece, it talks a lot about spin and consumer goods as well as the political ground the examples are getting old from the 2004 election but it's still how you evaluate websites how you evaluate research studies what you need to look for in those areas and the biggest thing I think is we've lost the sense in our culture not only in the facts and reason but our ability to see the big picture to say I don't want to kill you again, but big picture you're going to get if you're a liberal, if you value quality you're going to get a lot more out of that and you're going to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't go to the polls on that case the righteous mind, I think that was kind of popular it's the same vein it's actually on my desk waiting to be read so it's talking in that same way and it's sort of where I'm kind of thinking about how we are which is, he sort of researched how people come to an ethical understanding of things trying to look at the poll and it was kind of fascinating because what you're saying about intuition we make moral decisions based on our whole experience not out of reason thinking and then we back into it and we make up excuses why did I say it was okay, why did I kill that it was okay because of not because we and it feels like if we're not in that realm accepting that we're human beings and that we do that then we're not totally rationed right and pull back from that and go okay then let's incorporate that into what we're doing inside into reality it seems like we're going to keep so but it's the same can I make one final point sorry it's more promo than anything my current researching was this large choice media environment, a lot of people are going to entertainment media and not paying attention to the news at all and my research is connected showing the connection between people's exposure to various entertainment media outlets and their political views and one of the conclusions I'm trying to get people to think about if you get your views about whether torture is effective or not by watching Jack Bauer torture people on 24 what maybe think more about how rational we are as human beings we're not and that's why you know various entertainment media outlets can actually shape our political views in ways we're not really aware of and the other thing about that was in terms of ethics that I got out of it unless people nobody's really that at the that unless you have a framework that's holding you accountable that's what really matters so that was another sort of dimension of it to think about if we're falling into chaos there's nothing you can rely on individually innate inhuman thoughts we really answer to the structure around us interesting looking for your reading okay well thank you thank you all