Expert on Political Violence Rachel Kleinfeld Warns of MAGA

Expert on Political Violence Rachel Kleinfeld Warns of MAGA

Postby admin » Wed Feb 22, 2023 6:00 am

Top Expert on Political Violence WARNS of MAGA Threats of CIVIL WAR
by Ken Harbaugh
Burn the Boats
February 21, 2023

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld is an expert on democracy, security, and international relations. She serves as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she regularly briefs the governments of the United States and allied democracies on issues of conflict, the rule of law, and security sector reform. In this episode of Burn The Boats, she and Ken discusses the growing threat of political violence in America, and how it could lead to civil war.



Transcript

0:00
I'm Ken Harbaugh this is burn the boats a show about
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making tough calls and tough times America today faces a critical test our
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democracy is under threat but good people are rising to the challenge
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now is the time to go all in now we burn the boats
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my guest today is Dr Rachel Kleinfeld an expert on Democracy security and
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international relations her most recent book a Savage order examines why democracies are crippled by extreme
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violence and how they can regain security Rachel welcome to the show so glad to be here I want to read back
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to you something you recently tweeted because it captures what I want to talk about today you wrote it's easy to think
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that the U.S is back to normal post-mid terms instead we are normalizing an
1:02
unacceptably high rate of political violence we have always been a violent country
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especially when compared to other liberal Western democracies what makes the political violence we are now
1:13
experiencing different why is it so dangerous so America's always had a lot of
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political violence I mean back to our founding but then it it grew under the know-nothing party in the 1820s and 30s
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it grew under Jim Crow and lynching and voter suppression and it grew in the 60s
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and 70s of course but what's different now is that it's mainstreaming so in the 60s and 70s you had violent fringes
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mostly on the left that were committing a lot of violence you know the symbianese Liberation Army and the
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weather under whether an underground and so on um but they were disavowed by major political parties and then in the 80s
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and 90s you started to get militia movements and anti-abortion and more right-wing violence but still disavowed
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by major political parties what we started seeing over the last five or six years now is that violence is not only
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not being disavowed by major political parties but but by the right I should say it is still being largely disavowed
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by the left although not entirely it's also mainstreaming so that you're seeing these greater numbers of people
2:18
justifying violence instead of it just being young unemployed men without kids
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without being married that's who usually commits violence all around the world or these kind of rootless young men you're
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starting to see older men married with kids who are members of their churches
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members of their communities justifying and committing politically violent acts and that's a real problem are there
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analogs in American history that we can learn from and it's a leading question
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because we had Dr Kathleen Baloo on who talked about the last time such
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political violence was mainstreamed with the rise of the KKK and the cover that a major American political party gave it
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what what can we learn from our history about what happens when political violence makes its way into a major
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political party so it's a it's a great point the KKK has
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risen a couple of times and it's a nice way of tracking this sadly enough at first rose during Reconstruction and
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what you saw was the Democratic party under reconstruction really embracing the KKK in fact they had an organizing
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meeting at the same Hotel over the same days where the Democratic Party formed a
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kind of southern strategy post reconstruction and the KKK had a meeting of its own and it really looks although
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the evidence is circumstantial as if the KKK and other violent groups were forming as a
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vigilante action to suppress the vote prior to elections in the South and you
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saw these incredibly violent elections in the 1876 election particularly that allowed the Democrats to regain power
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kick the northern Army out and start reconsolidating the KKK came back in the
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1920s and there again you saw it infiltrate both political parties and so you actually had a lot of KKK members
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who were right and leftovers the Democrats on Republicans and what you saw then was a lot of violence directed
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against minorities and immigrants so Germans as World War One Italians that sort of thing and
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gradually that went back down and then it came back in the 60s and 70s and I would say the last time we saw this kind
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of organized structured political violence was actually in the 50s right
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before that after Brown versus Board of Education when you had a strategy in the south of massive resistance to that
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social change and political leaders quite openly would speak about their
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need for that kind of resistance and you had white citizen councils in a lot of southern states form among business
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people and kind of respectable people but then you had these KKK and vigilante groups forming among um more violent
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individuals who are willing to kind of work in parallel you have cited alarming statistics about the number of Americans
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who think we are on the brink of Civil War over half of Republicans and shockingly to me nearly a third of
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Democrats why do you think we are at this point where so many Americans think
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this is an inevitability um a lot of signs of Civil War are there
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is why I think now a strong democracy with strong institutions like America has never fallen into Civil War
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um when we had our civil war before we had I think 11 or 12
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um times smaller military just a tiny military huge amount of corruption we're
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just an entirely different country and so um on the one hand we have strong
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resilience factors but we also have a lot of the risk factors in terms of the
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the violent rhetoric that conflict entrepreneurs are really amping up a lot of people look to the number of weapons
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in private hands as a reason to be worried that's actually not a good um
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tell as it were we don't see a lot of correlation between that and violence
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but we do see correlation between weakening institutions and the ability to have violence and we are seeing that
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you know Abraham Lincoln predicted the Civil War decades before it happened he famously gave a speech saying that
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America would never die at the hands of foreign enemies but we might die by Suicide and it's because he saw targeted
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hate it was a speech right after a series of lynchings and kind of mob actions against African Americans and he
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could see the rule of law Decline and how that could lead eventually to Civil War and and that's what we're seeing now
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we're seeing political violence up five times threats against members of Congress up ten times that kind of thing
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you referenced these indicators of impending Civil War and there's this
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checklist that's been making the rounds that is has become quite popular what are some of the other items on that that
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checklist that last time I looked at it every box was was ticked when you when
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you think about countries that have the the precondition set for massive civil
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strife yeah I held a conference with a group called the bridging divides initiative in 2019 the fall of 2019 where Neil and
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Parker who now works with search for common ground created a checklist based on International factors that led to Civil War and even then a lot of those
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things were checked a lot of those books were checked and it's it's worse now one thing you look at is
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polarization not just of political parties but a real factionalization or fractionalization of their
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constituencies by identity the more those identities are stacked the more problematic so
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um if you're voting for a political party but you could look like anything
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that's not so dangerous but if you know by looking at someone what political party they're likely to vote for that's
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more dangerous and if you know by knowing someone's religion what political party they'll vote for where someone lives that's even more dangerous
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and we're starting to see that so these stacked identities where your race your religion your gender even and so on are
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all forming a kind of composite identity that makes you much more um much more risky when you start seeing
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political leaders who are willing to then play on that composite identity to build and US them kind of polarization
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that becomes pretty risky conflict entrepreneurs play a really big role in Civil War
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um they tend to start coming from both sides right now we're mostly seeing them from the right if we start seeing more
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from the left of these conflict entrepreneurs that'll be even more dangerous the structure of violence I
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should say is very different on the right and the left which is why I think the right expects it more the right is getting these conflict entrepreneurs
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that are getting these signals that their identity is so much under threat on the left partisan Democrats are
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actually much less willing to justify violence Than People of the left who don't see themselves as Democratic
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people on the left who see themselves as kind of too Progressive for the Democratic party are more likely to justify violence and I think that
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discrepancy means that we're not we're not quite equal we're not at a kind of
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equal Civil War standing one side that is much more belligerent than the other
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as it were is there some constitutional difference and I don't mean in the legal sense I
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mean in the the Deep definitional sense between the mindset on the left and the mindset
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on the right that these days um leads the right to Violent solutions
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for for societal problems I'm I'm just thinking about uh past conversation with
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Miles Taylor we had on here and and my reaction was you know the right seems
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motivated today out of fear and revanchism and a desire to turn back the
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clock and violence is suitable for that the left at least constitutionally is motivated by this idea of of progress
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for which you know a violent solution is is anathema is that too naive is that
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just the Democrat in me speaking or are there you know deep personality differences that drive people on the
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right to violence so personality is what's most correlated with violence after you get past the fact that most
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violence is committed by young men um then it comes down to personality and you find that a aggressive personalities
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and there's a scorecard for it that social scientists use much more likely to commit violence we also see really
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strong correlations with domestic violence and with misogyny particularly kind of a dominance this idea that men
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should be dominant in society you see people justifying violence because they're uh racist and they score high on
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various indices of racist belief but they don't actually commit it the ones
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that are committing it more seem to have more issues with women and of course those things are highly correlated so yes it's a personality it's a
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personality that says um men should be dominant I'm a man
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generally most violence is committed by men and to reassert my dominance in the
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face of a sense that I'm kind of losing status or that things were getting out of control I'm going to resort to Violent measures but you take that
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personality set among a broad group of people and then you put an ideology on top of it because most people who are
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kind of normally socialized just don't commit violence whether they want to or not first of all they know they'll be punished for it in most countries but
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also it takes a lot to get someone to commit violence so atop that you have to lay a foundation of dehumanization you
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kind of make the other side seem less than human talk about them as rumors rather than as people or pedophiles or
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use other kind of coded language you can pose them as a threat a threat to your
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way of life people are much more likely to commit violence if they feel they're being defensive rather than offensive so
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if they're defending their kids against an elite pedophilic ring as the Q Anon
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story tells them or if they're defending Christianity against an onslaught of
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foreign religions that'll make them more likely and so as you
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as you dehumanize as you pose other people as a threat and as you let people have a sense of a role in a heroic story
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that their Patriots their citizens they're actually doing the right thing to defend democracy then you greatly
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increase the chances that these aggressive individuals will act and what we're seeing on the right is exactly
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that and I think you're right that it's because they don't have a great future story to paint and it's and it's just
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incumbent upon all of us to find that future story before dangerous things happen I like that framing finding a a
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future story The response the dominant response on the left right now seems to
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be to uh to to inform better to to tell the truth is as best the left can about
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the nature of the democratic party and to you know just pump more information into the the information ecosystem that
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uh that Democratic politicians aren't for example groomers and I just think
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that might be hopelessly naive in a current context where that information
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isn't getting through the Fox News filter much less the news max filter or the other right-wing Outlets where these
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these people who tend towards violence get their their information is is there
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is there another way uh besides hoping that that disinformation can be
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countered with with the truth uh sir absolutely right that there is no uh
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quality research that suggests that the truth will win out or that it can be disinformation just none everything points in the other direction
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um and uh people remember stories much more than they remember facts and so telling
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a story is really important right now the right is telling a really potent story it's basically the great
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replacement Theory which used to be a white nationalist white supremacist story it wasn't in polite company but
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now it gets told by Tucker Carlson and so on you know it's this idea that white Christian people and particularly men
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are being replaced by Elites who want to push up women and minorities and push
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down these white men and particularly rural men and so on and those Elites might be Jews who are bringing in
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foreigners they might be business Elites and corporations they might be Democratic Elites who are linked to
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pedophiles but in any case what they're trying to do is push down this majority
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group of Americans who used to run the country and push up themselves in these other groups now that is a strong story
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it's really easy to remember lots of information seems to point out that it might be a little true there's lots of
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kernels of Truth which is how conspiracy theories work and um it's deeply emotional no one wants to be replaced or
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made redundant and so if Democrats try to counter that
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story with facts there will always be facts that can be found on the other side that that bolster that story
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particularly since there are immigrants in our country and there are women and there are other groups that are trying to to get ahead
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themselves and so I think what needs to happen is that Democrats and the left and Republicans who believe in our
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democracy and who are also being targeted quite a bit by political violence all need to get together and find a
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better story and it needs to be future oriented I think the folks who are believing these
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horrible things are not necessarily horrible people and it's really important to separate
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those two things out you know I work a lot and I've worked in the past a lot in post-conflict societies where you
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welcome back Rebels young people all sorts of um groups that have done just
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unspeakable things and they have to come back into society we're not at that point yet and we have
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to find a way to bring people back from the brink who are currently in this really dark path but who do have better
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angels can you think of a a national story that is future oriented that
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doesn't require an adversary I'm trying to imagine that future story you're you're invoking and
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and want to imagine one that is that is oriented towards progress and
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not just aligning around a new enemy America's uh specializes in these
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stories really you know in the 1800s for maybe 50 years we had a national story of progress that said we are a country
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chosen by God to lead the world in a means of progress in all sorts of different ways it deeply connected with
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America's religious Roots it allowed people to think of progress in various
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different ways and they did interpret in various different ways but it also led to a lot of self-improvement and a lot
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of good things you had right and left interpreting that basic story differently but it drew on these this
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deep sense that we were chosen again a historic heroic Mission we all have a
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role in that heroic Mission and that heroic Mission requires us to be our best selves and to work as a community
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or as independent and you saw it back then too the right and the left moving in different directions on that particular issue in order to build the
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country so that we could literally bring about the second coming you know as a
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very religious Evangelical kind of a story I happen to be Jewish it's not my
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story but you can pull parts of that story for America to have a mission in the world again we do have a moment in which
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democracy is under a threat so you can pull in foreign enemies if you want but you can also just say you know we've
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never had a multi-ethnic nation on this scale that has achieved a real inclusive
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democracy how do we do that so that no one's Left Behind not just a new hierarchy given how unique America's
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circumstances are especially the scale of our multi-ethnic democracy are there
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contemporary examples we can look to you've done a ton of research in post-conflict societies and I'm drawn to
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your study of Colombia for example but how relevant are these case studies of
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countries that have managed to emerge from these these incredibly destructive bouts of violence
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um so I think there's there's two different questions in there um the first is whether we have any uh
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parallels we can draw from Justin guest has written about the white working class he's written about immigrants and
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he also wrote a book called majority minority I'm not fond of the name but it's about countries that have gone
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through this transition I'm not fond of the name because I don't know that we're actually going to go through this transition Hispanics could well become
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white the way that immigrants in the past Italians and Irish or reinterpreted
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from being ethnic and racial minorities to to being white and so our belief that
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we're going through this transition might be erroneous actually however he looks at a number of
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city-states cities places like New York that have gone through this transition and comes up with a set of lessons that
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we can draw about how best to do it among other things
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controlling keeping control over borders and so on not doing it in an illegal or
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out of control manner really matters to people it's not that they necessarily hate the other but they want to feel in
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control I have a kid who has this kind of tendency you know just really wants to have control and you can see it in a
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seven-year-old very easily but we can see it in our fellow citizens too when when they feel that they've lost control
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over one part of life they're going to push it down in another so I think that's one one major lesson we can draw
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the other part of your question was really you know how can we look forward as a country
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um and and draw lessons from from other countries about violent conflict luckily
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we have not had a lot of violent conflict I write about the violence we have had because it's too much for a
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Consolidated democracy like our own but it's not anywhere at the scale of Colombia and even Sicily that I write
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about and so on and so we should take a lot of heart that we're not that far and we can draw a lot of lessons from their
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depolarization that you can't you can't just try to win in a polarized country one side wins and the other side loses
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and the other side wins and your side loses it just goes back and forth because you're so polarized you have to
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go around the polarization by finding a new story that can unite people in some
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level of agreement the way Colombia said okay we're never going to agree on whether the gorillas or the
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paramilitaries or the bad guys here but can we agree that we need a new constitution because nothing in our
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government is working people could agree on that and that was a first step forward so we need we need to get around this polarization rather than just
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trying to beat the other side because eventually the other side will beat us how much help do you have that that we
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can achieve that I mean we're at the point now where we're talking about accountability not reconciliation and
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you have you have talked about the dangers that come with holding popular
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leaders uh accountable I'm really on the fence about accountability I think I I rethink this
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question 10 times a day one idea is that we cannot have the
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Republican party right now is at war with itself really we worry a lot about the violent spillover that's happening
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to minorities and women and Democrats but the real war for power is within the Republican party and
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the Maga faction much much more violent if you look at um Garen wintermute's
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survey findings really a lot of the violence almost all is being driven by the Maga faction within Republicans and
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they're targeting other Republicans you know they're targeting the rusty Bowers and the Liz cheneys and Adam kinsigors
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and so on so one idea of accountability is that if you start holding the the most violent
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leaders and these individuals who are allowing the proliferation of rule of
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law failures to account you can actually allow the re-emergence of a just a normal conservative party our country
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needs a normal conservative party we have a lot of conservatives in the country and so somebody's got to
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represent them and hopefully it is a pro-democratic group of conservatives who just told policy beliefs that I may
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or may not agree with but to allow that group to re-emerge we might need to have
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some accountability to Tamp down the other side because right now you have someone like Liz or illustrating running
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in in Wyoming and she can't even hold public campaign events because she's getting so many threats you know did she
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lose because of her beliefs or did she lose because she couldn't campaign it's it's hard to know yeah I think the
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the implication there is that there there is a silent majority in the
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Republican party that that if it's will could be expressed would relegate the
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extremists to the fringes my fear is that that is
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that's no longer the case when you have the extremists actually literally holding the gavel in the in the House of
23:43
Representatives Marjorie Taylor green presided just just last week you have
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people like Doug mastriano as the Republican nominee for for governor in
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uh in Pennsylvania the extremists are winning if not with the general public
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at least with the the Republican voting base what hope do you hold that that
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cooler heads will prevail that the pro-democracy wing of the Republican party will will
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re-emerge and reassert itself when you have all of these data points that suggest the the extremists not only have
24:25
the the loudest megaphones but are are taking positions of power
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so what the survey data shows is that there's about a quarter to a third of Republicans really around 28 to 30
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percent that are just hardcore Maga really personally involved really deeply
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committed to that it's not a majority but it's a large plurality
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and the way our institutions are structured the way our primary system works and so on that large vocal
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plurality gets to pick the nominee and then what you have are just a lot of identity Republicans they're never going
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to vote for a Democrat they're deeply committed to their team you know I saw some pictures of Marjorie Taylor Green
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from the state of the union yesterday and it looks like she's at a football match she's you know she's cheering and
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she's yelling and she's acting in a completely non-congressional manner but I think that football match energy is
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how a lot of people think about their side partisan-wise and they're not going to vote for the other side and so the
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problem is if you've got this hardcore base that's a plurality but a system of primaries and safe seats whereby over 90
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percent of our congressional seats are safe right now at the state level it's often even more everything gets decided
25:40
in the primary and you have this rabid base that's going to come out in the primary then yes you're going to lose a whole party to these extremists in
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Europe and other places that have different electoral systems where they still have 25 or 30 percent uh populist
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or given to extremes they don't win they win some portion of parliament but they can't win the the whole
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um game because they they have a different system we need a different system and it's one of the reasons I've
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argued a lot for a whole bunch of flavors of different systems from what we have in my native Alaska which is now
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kind of final four to final five in Nevada just voted uh in favor of
26:19
thinking about that Massachusetts and Maine have been experimenting with ranked Choice voting but basically any
26:26
system that takes power away from the primary and lets general election voters have a stronger say is going to reduce
26:33
the extremism and let the Republican Party come back to the majority of Republicans the problem with achieving
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that kind of Reform is that it depends in most cases on the people in power or
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for whom those reforms are are fatal I would love to learn more about
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how Alaska pulled it off and and stopped an extremist from going back to to
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Washington um Sarah Palin was that a Grassroots
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effort that the powers that be could not resist so the effort to build these more open
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systems that that issue primaries is both Grassroots it's extremely supported
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by a lot of of rank and file people and there's some national organizations and
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the basic strategy is to look at states where you can win by referendum so you can go to the people and ask because
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you're absolutely right power holders of both parties do not like the way that they achieve power to be disrupted
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because they're you know if they're holding power they're good at the game and they want to keep the game's rules the way that they are and so you
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generally need the voters themselves to push for it and and um
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and case after case when it's put to the voters they're willing to experiment people are tired of our current politics
27:54
they want a way out you've talked about the threat to American institutions which raises for me the
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Specter of losing our democracy not through some violent Crescendo but
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through piecemeal attacks on our institutions can you share with us some
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of your your thinking and writing about how those key institutions in American society are being weakened primarily
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from the right yeah so this is actually what most concerns me because as I said you don't
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get a Civil War in strong democracies the institution stop it particularly the military stops it before you get to that
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point um but when institutions weaken it becomes more likely and what we're seeing is
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attacks on our institutions what does that mean it means things like Trump not filling all these Ombudsman positions or
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demoting ombudsmen getting rid of the investigative areas within different
28:54
government agencies that are supposed to root out politicization and use of those agencies
28:59
really boring stuff but really important to the functioning of of democracy you're also seeing um
29:07
the attempt to alter our election institutions things
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like the the body that oversees whether election financing is done right or not not appointing people to that body
29:20
um efforts to demonize the media this is just every populist around the world does this sometimes they try to control
29:26
the media sometimes they try to delegitimate it and that's what's happening in in America in order to keep
29:33
just the idea of facts out of the the public mind they often play with statistical agencies we saw that here so
29:40
again facts get reduced but the most dangerous of all of these kinds of
29:45
institutional attacks are attacks that involve security institutions and for obvious reasons because that's kind of
29:51
your last line of defense what we saw under Trump was a real effort to reach
29:56
out to police and sheriffs in particular um and to politicize those institutions
30:03
they were helped a little bit by the fact of the the BLM protests and so on that made a lot of police quite
30:09
uncomfortable at the same time that they were getting this Outreach from Trump but the sheriffs are particularly
30:15
problematic because sheriffs are directly elected and there's a movement within the sheriff's called the
30:21
Constitutional Sheriff's movement it comes from a white supremacist movement in the 70s that says that they're
30:26
allowed to directly interpret the Constitution and while it's erroneous history it's shared by a lot of sheriffs
30:33
in the rural West and parts of the South and so on and and so you have a lot of
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these law enforcement bodies that think that they have the right to get political and there's organizations of the right like the Claremont Institute
30:45
that are pulling these sheriffs together starting Fellowship programs for them trying to kind of politically indoctrinate them and make them
30:51
political actors that's really dangerous also within the military we know that we
30:57
have an extremely professional military probably the most professional in the entire world but Germany just saw that some of its
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special forces were literally planning to launch a coup we have some issues of extremism within
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our own military we know that foreign actors have been particularly targeting our military because they're high value
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targets if you can get a military person you get a lot of skills that come with that person it's why the military gets
31:22
so trained by our government and it's why other folks want them and so they're being really targeted by misinformation
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and disinformation and radicalizing groups like The Oath Keepers and if that creates dissension in the ranks where
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some of your rank and file move toward that belief set while the the leaders
31:40
don't and you've had a couple of lost Wars that's the kind of situation that can
31:45
create dissension in the ranks and and that's kind of where we are how about the threat that radicalized
31:51
and disillusioned and highly trained veterans May pose
31:57
so there's some great groups like we the veterans that are working on exactly this problem because
32:03
um because it's a real thing you know we see The Oath Keepers targeting veterans and saying you know you took an oath
32:09
once take an oath again continue to be a citizen continue to defend your country it's a really
32:14
emotionally potent call for someone who feels that they might have lost some sense of meaning when they stepped out
32:19
of uniform and are looking for some meaning again and if you look at the survey work on particularly Veterans of
32:27
the Afghanistan war by more in common it's pretty devastating I've been to
32:32
Afghanistan I had an awful lot of friends of the generation that fought in Afghanistan and the way we pulled out
32:38
was dishonorable and a lot of people feel that way who served in uniform or who lost friends over there and the
32:46
desire to reassert some form of dignity and honor through Force of Arms could
32:51
lead people to a pretty dark place again I don't think we overlapped at yeah well
32:58
but I had a professor there who who studied this this issue and would talk
33:06
about the crescendo of violence that that was a prerequisite to
33:12
reconciliation and it always bothered the heck out of me this idea that you had to have a Northern Ireland style
33:20
conflict in order to emerge as a peaceful society and and his
33:26
comparable was South Africa which didn't have enough of a crescendo and and
33:32
remained a violent Society I mean I think I've just I've just offered my my
33:37
objections to that but but what do you think is there any conv anything convincing in that argument that you
33:42
have to go through a crucible to emerge a more peaceful Society
33:48
so he wasn't one of my professors but I certainly know who you're talking about and um you know the work just the data
33:55
suggests that before the 1990s that was actually true that that was the way you
34:00
achieved more lasting peace after the 1990s that became less true and then not
34:06
true at all what you saw was that the United Nations negotiated settlements all this sort of thing just got much
34:11
better it became a much more professional field people learned how to do it they learned how to do it in Northern Ireland as well they learned
34:19
how to stop spoilers they learned how to placate different Elite groups they learned that war was really about the
34:24
elite groups that the rebels were fighting but they were fighting because various Elites wanted pieces of the pie
34:30
and you had to figure out how to Dole out that pie in a way and they figured out how to bring other
34:35
groups in so that the the stability of that piece lasted and so the findings themselves got discredited over time and
34:43
I don't think they're true now I do think though that we're in a really difficult period all right about this
34:48
and other violence experts like Robert muga and so on write about this what we have now with most conflicts and what we
34:55
would have in America if America falls into conflict is lots and lots of groups
35:01
fighting so this isn't the gray and the blue in our civil war with organized generals and and a clear cause and one
35:08
person can surrender the way Robert E Lee uh surrendered what you have is 20
35:14
30 40 100 groups who generally share a cause but lots of splinters lots of
35:21
little leaders lots of splinters as you try to make peace and it becomes much much harder some of
35:28
those groups are ideologically focused some of them are more pecuniary so they what they're
35:34
trying to do is get some money or make some profit or sort of move themselves up in the social ladder because of the
35:40
violence I am sure we would see that in the United States you're already seeing that with the misinformation and disinformation that some people seem
35:46
ideologically motivated and some are descriptors who are trying to make a buck on Maga hats and and their websites
35:53
ads and so you know you can't placate those people because they actually benefit from the conflict the longer it
35:59
goes the more money they make and there might be a lot of those people you can just imagine the sales of security
36:05
equipment and all sorts of things going through the roof so so that kind of a conflict which is
36:12
what can I see can I interrupt for a second I mean you don't have to imagine the sales of security equipment you look
36:19
at what the Firearms industry is doing creating these fears telling women that
36:25
the only thing that's going to keep them safe is a is a handgun in their purse and sales have shot through the roof in
36:33
some communities during the the height of covid I mean I'm lucky to live in a community that
36:39
came together but my parents live in a community where gun stores were one of the few essential businesses that were
36:46
allowed to stay open I mean it is it is with us now you're absolutely right
36:52
um gun sales went through the roof in 2020 they kept growing in 2021 and not only did they start growing
36:58
um just period but most gun sales in the past had been to people who already owned guns they were just acquiring more
37:03
and more but we started to see was lots more first-time buyers and lots more first-time buyers who are women people
37:09
of color people who um previously might have issued uh Firearms so you're absolutely right and
37:16
um the the trust metric is really important here and it gets to those two
37:21
communities that you were just talking about when people distrust each other they seek to protect themselves and you
37:27
don't just have the NRA whispering in people's ear although you certainly have that
37:32
um we saw gun sales go up in Hungary during covet and lots of other countries where guns were actually pretty
37:38
restricted so what's important is to rebuild the social trust and populists
37:43
like Donald Trump thrive on destroying social trust their voters tend to be the least trusting people who believe in
37:51
conspiracy theories are twice as likely to vote for populists which is one reason they spread them and so this this
37:56
distrust that just erodes the ability of society to come together is actually probably the most pernicious thing that
38:03
we need to start dealing with when it comes to rebuilding trust and creating
38:09
those bonds within a society that can overcome these violent tendencies what are practical things that people can do
38:16
at the ground level in their communities to achieve that so I think different groups can do different things it sort
38:22
of depends you know where your stand is where you sit the person who writes about this best is Amanda Ripley who's a
38:28
just brilliant journalist who writes about complicating The Narrative and has done a whole book on how you get out of
38:33
what she calls high conflict that I strongly recommend so a lot of different things can be done
38:39
if you're a journalist or work in the media or have blogs you need to complicate The Narrative you know there
38:45
are people on the right who feel differently about immigration a lot of business owners are actually quite pro-immigration
38:51
anti-violence there are people on the left who feel differently about all
38:57
sorts of issues some of your most conservative Democrats are actually African-American Democrats who are
39:02
having a real hard time on abortion issues right now especially some of the religious ones and so complicating the
39:07
story by mixing the identities that we've grown to think of is so simplistic I mean we've become such a fairy tale
39:13
children's story kind of a country we can't handle any kind of Shades of Gray we need a lot more Shades of Gray and so
39:20
that's one thing the media can do but it's also something we can do you know looking at the neighbors and seeing
39:28
is there a shared identity you know you both live on the same road do you both shovel your uh your drives and make it
39:36
safe on the sidewalks after a snowstorm or is one person just a pure out and out jerk
39:41
um coming from Alaska you know shoveling from snow is important part of of community service but there's there's a
39:46
lot of others that you can look at you know if they're not a total and complete anti-social jerk is there something you can build on and I'm not saying Kumbaya
39:54
we all love each other I'm just saying complicate your identity think about whether your side has blind spots and
40:01
whether the other side doesn't because that's the first part of Outreach we need to be really careful about the jokes we tell I've gotten hit on this by
40:07
social media people don't like you know some woman telling them especially it's a misogynistic thing don't make jokes
40:13
but the research shows that jokes get beyond our rational filters so you might be a kind of peace-loving democrat who
40:20
would never pick up a weapon but you're happy to share a meme of someone chopping off Donald Trump's head
40:26
the fact is uh because it gets Beyond filters it normalizes a kind of
40:31
discourse in a kind of crudeness in our discourse that leads to the kind of MTG
40:36
outbursts that we saw yesterday and then leads aggressive people to be willing to commit violence and so it's really
40:42
important to kind of be be aware of that and then I think all of us need to be aware of where we're creating a sense of
40:49
threat because when people feel threatened they're operating from fear and people who operate from Fear get
40:55
defensive their IQs go down there's all sorts of psychological things that happen when people are scared and their
41:01
desire to buttress their identity grows and so just like you know if you're
41:07
married and and you push the button of your spouse that you know is going to make them feel defensive you're you're
41:13
you know your fight is not going to go in a good place after that both sides in America keep doing that we keep pushing
41:18
the others button and then stepping back and saying but I'm rational and I'm just arguing that's not how you get past this
41:25
and I think that the base idea is that we we have to want to get past this I
41:31
don't think a lot of people do I think it's actually much more pleasant to feel that your side is right
41:38
and that you can just crush the other side and that's really where most people are
41:43
the problem is we're really pretty 50 50 as a nation we're not going to crush the other side there are about 30 states
41:49
that have Republican trifectas and triplexes that means the governor the Attorney General both houses of the
41:55
legislature basically up and down everybody's Republican you're not going to turn those states Democratic and so
42:01
we just have to get out of the idea that we're going to win this and crush the other side and we have to look at okay
42:07
if we're not going to win it how do we bring another side back to normalcy and to do that you need to stop pushing a
42:13
button that makes them defensive and fearful all the time and start pulling them toward your side and that's where
42:18
we need to be well Rachel I think that's a great note to end on thank you so much for joining
42:24
us thank you
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