 Welcome back to Teens on Topic. I'm your host, Cedric Hughes. And today, I'm joined by a special guest. I'm Ben Skinner. Today, we'll be discussing political polarization. But first, let's take a look towards members of the Davis community and see what they have to say. OK, so how do you feel about the way that Trump's impeachment trial ended? I have never been so worried for our democracy, ever. I take great heart that Mitt Romney found it within his heart and his conscience to be the sole Republican to vote for conviction. I applaud him for that. He will suffer for that. But I applaud him for that. And I can't say enough about how Adam Schiff has done remarkably well in trying to protect our Constitution. And a lot of Republicans say they were convinced that what the president did was wrong. But none of the saved Mitt Romney voted to remove him. But we, really, we are the ones who have the power now. We have to show up in November, November 3. I can't think of a more consequential election in my lifetime. And I'm 69. I was very disappointed then. Well, I've been very disappointed once they announced there was going to be no witnesses. And I think it's a very dark day for us in history. Democracy was just gutted when Mitch McConnell was speaking. It wasn't that the president didn't do it. It wasn't about bringing this country together. It was off and just nonsensical. It was very bleak. It was horrible. No evidence, no witnesses, no truth, no justice. And he's going on his merry way and lying in the State of the Union about everything like he always has. It's just horrible. And we need to try to do something about it. I mean, something drastic has to happen. Maybe they can impeach him and Rom, not Romney, McConnell, and get him on about 40 or 50 counts because they've done a lot of horrible things. Merrick Garland should be the Supreme Court justice instead of Kaganoff, Kavanaugh. And it's just bad things have been happening. And we can't just sit still and do nothing. So how do you feel about the end of the impeachment trial today? How do I feel about the end of the impeachment trial? It was a bad ending. It was 52 of the 53 senators voted to give what Trump get away with, what he's been getting away with. So at this point, we know that our institutions are not going to save us. We have to save ourselves. And I look around here, and I see these people back here. And it's a start. It's a good start. There's good energy here. But we need a lot more of it. Way more of it. I've thought about two or three years ago that we need to have daily random across the nation, wildcat strikes, demonstrations, just constant, disrupting business to get our point across. Because at this point, the government isn't here for us. I've lost faith in our government. That segment, it focused heavily around the opinions and the emotions that people were feeling following the impeachment trial. So a lot of what we heard there centered around what people were calling a miscarriage of justice. So you, after watching the impeachment trial, do you think that there was a miscarriage of justice? I do. And it's not necessarily just because Trump was acquitted. I think it has a lot to do with how the votes actually aligned. I think the fact that almost every Republican voted to acquit and almost every Democrat all voted to impeach, I think that shows that the senators' votes are not based on actually their examination of the evidence. Rather, it's based on their own personal political biases. And I think that's what the problem is. I personally think Trump should not have been acquitted. But I don't think that's actually what's important here. I think what matters is that people in the government are not willing to do their job properly and are not willing to distance themselves from what benefits them personally and do what's actually best for the country. I think that's the major issue here. So you talked about the witnesses and how witnesses were not allowed in the impeachment trial. So one of the main actors who ensured that this was the case was Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate Majority Leader. How much of a role did you see Mitch McConnell playing in the impeachment trial? And do you think that he was exercising too much power? And if so, in the wrong way? Yeah, so I mean, in recent years, we have seen the Senate Majority Leader gaining power. I don't think that's a good thing when he's, rather than using his position of power to actually try and further justice, he's basically just using it to help his own political party gain power and then, by extension, help himself gain power. I think that's a really bad thing to see. I think when Mitch McConnell keeps doing that, that's just yeah, it's not good for the country as a whole. But what I think is interesting is that there are even some Republicans who are speaking out against him. Like, there was a West Virginia candidate for office. I forget his name, but his motto was basically like ditch cocaine mits. He was like super anti Mitch McConnell. And I think it's good to occasionally see candidates who are willing to basically go against their own party, kind of like what Mitt Romney did, where he voted to impeach rather than voting to acquit. So I think it's just that's really what we should be hoping to see is a vote on issues that's not party line, something where you have bipartisan support for whatever ends up happening. Yeah, and I think that's interesting that you say how some Republicans are being sparked against Mitch McConnell. Because I, from what I understand, the sentiment among everyday Republican voters is actually quite the opposite. So the New York Times ran an article where they talked about lifelong Republican voters who had, until the impeachment trial, viewed Mitch McConnell as a Republican of the past, kind of a figure whose time in politics was over. And then when the impeachment trial came along, they saw how Mitch McConnell was kind of a champion of the president that they supported as a base. And he was brought back into the limelight by that. And they supported him. So we saw a lot of Republican voters who had said that they had formally lost confidence in Mitch McConnell, who are now confident in him again as a politician. So do you think that that's worrying? I think that is worrying in large part because basically the president has kind of like a cult of personality. It's like his support oftentimes goes beyond just political support. It's like personal support. Like people think Donald Trump is like the greatest. He's the best president. I would do anything for him. And that's not really the perception people are supposed to have towards candidates or towards politicians. So I think, yeah, when that kind of thing is motivating people to support the president's allies and basically hate his opponents, that's worrying, yeah. So earlier you touched on political division and how every single Republican had voted to acquit Trump except for one. And meanwhile, we saw most of the Democrats voting to convict. So we saw a very hard party line between Democrats and Republicans. So this political polarization that we're beginning, or not just beginning to see, but that we are seeing and have seen in our country, especially made worse by the rise of a populist president, is that something that we should be worried about? I definitely think so. I mean, I think any time you have a government that's job seems to be something other than running the country effectively, that's obviously a problem. And I think kind of the good part about that is there's a really obvious solution, which is just vote the people out of office who aren't doing their job properly. So the fact that that's not happening shows that the American people, generally speaking, in many cases, are okay with what they see happening. I think that's a bigger issue because if you have a few groups of politicians who are not doing good things, that's not great, but you can overcome that. What's a much deeper issue is when you have the American people as a whole thinking that what's happening is okay. That's not a problem you can easily get rid of. So I think, to me, that's a lot more worrying. So what you're talking about is a very ingrained issue. What do you think led to that? Led to the rise of such an ingrained partisanship? Interesting question, yeah. I think, I mean, I'm no political scientist, but I would say I feel like it's a very natural human tendency to create groups of people who agree with you. They've done psychological experiments where they basically take two groups of kids and they say you're the red team, you're the blue team, and just based on that alone, they automatically start creating groups and thinking, blue team's awful, they're all terrible. And that kind of thing happens even with artificial categories. So I think when you have groups that are based on people's political and moral beliefs, it actually makes a lot of sense that people would have a tendency to start feeling very strongly about those and feel very negatively towards people who don't have those same beliefs. And I think, yeah, kind of by extension, and it makes sense that people would want to support candidates who are the most willing to fight basically as aggressively as possible to uphold those beliefs that they have. So I don't know why that's specifically happening now or recently more so than in the past, but I think if I had to guess, that would be kind of the underlying psychological reason for that. Well, I mean, since the 90s, we've seen an exponential decrease in the amount of bills that are co-sponsored by Republicans and Democrats. So now it's a bill that's either full Democrat support and only Democrats or only Republicans. So now we see very few that are coming out of Congress that have both signed on. And I think that it reflects this idea that now what we would think of as something that's good is people working together. Now a Republican and a Democrat working together, it almost, it has a bad image. A Republican doesn't want to be seen working with a Democrat and a Democrat doesn't want to be seen working with a Republican. And I think that when you're talking about that coming as a result of these ingrained values that have pushed people apart, I think that that's a really interesting point to analyze and to maybe at least partially attribute to what is happening right now. Yeah, and I think part of the issue with that is when you have people with such radical beliefs, then you'll have like say a Republican president who spends basically his entire term undoing what his predecessor did, followed by a Democratic president who basically does the same thing to that Republican candidate, such that you have half of politics being just undoing what the previous person did. And I think that's a really major issue when you aren't willing or when candidates are not willing to do what they need to do to make progress rather than this idea of trying to go backwards. Like the whole like make America great again thing. I think what's really funny about that is that Trump supporters like polls have shown they don't agree on when America was actually great. So this idea of going backwards in time oh if only Obama hadn't been president, we can go back to pre-Obama, no Obamacare, stuff like that. I think that's really not a very logical mindset to have and I think that's not a healthy way for people to be conducting politics. So in the clip that we saw in the Davis views, one of the woman protesters had said that what she wants to see happening is more protests like what we've seen and a lot more disruption to kind of civil society, to businesses, so she wants to take it beyond just maybe standing on a straight corner, beating a drum and holding a sign. She wants there to be some sort of real disruption to society on a daily basis. Do you think that that is an effective way of pushing policy and exacting political means? I would say to some extent yes, but I think the force that really motivates politicians to change is the way that people vote. It's kind of like a business, basically you can do whatever you want, but as long as you keep buying their product, they're not going to actually change what they're doing. And I think it's the same thing with politics. You can protest, you can complain, but as long as these people keep winning elections and keep receiving your vote, they're not going to change what they're doing. So I think the real answer is people have to start voting for candidates who are willing to do what they actually want them to do and that also means people need to actually come out and vote because a small group of people who care very much will in a country like ours be completely drowned out by a large group of people who kind of care just enough to come out and vote. So the amount you care when you vote doesn't really matter, it always counts for one vote. So I think while that might be an effective way to some extent, the reason why it's effective is because it gets people out to vote because that's really the force that's capable of driving change, I believe. Yeah, and I think we've seen a lot of that, not just now or recently, but throughout history, where one of the big goals of political parties has been to spur elections and voting not just nationally, but locally and statewide too. So we saw what people would call the blue wave, right? After a couple of elections and midterms where the Democratic Party kind of, they organized, they got together, and they said, okay, if we lost the White House, we can't lose Congress too, so they pushed, they pushed a hard Democratic majority into the House of Representatives, even though the Democrats still don't have the Senate, they have been a major block to the administration and they got him impeached, they got Donald Trump impeached. So I think, and the first woman who was interviewed, she touched on this too, is that the best thing that we can be doing right now is getting out to vote. And so whether you're a Republican, Democrat, independent doesn't matter. The best way for you to be heard is through your vote. So I think that, and we could do an entire segment on protests and voting and their impacts on our society and on politics, but I think for right now, I think that's a good place to end it, is that no matter what you are, Democrat, Republican, independent, your voice is heard through your vote. So come the Super Tuesday and come the November election, get out there and make your voice heard. Thank you. I've been your host, Cedric Hughes.