Democracy and Its Discontents, Ep. 5: Living in Hope and History

Introduction

Democracy—as we know it—is under threat.

Political actors are fostering disillusionment and stoking discord in countries around the globe.

[Christina Schneider: “These actors are known to use money, disinformation, misinformation, and a strategic stoking of economic and cultural anxiety to further polarize the public.”]

But we know democracy is worth fighting for.

[Emilie Hafner-Burton: “So, the really tough question then becomes: can we change course? Is that possible? Can we learn from these lessons? If so, what would that look like?”]

I’m Lindsay Shingler. This is a special miniseries from Talking Policy we’re calling: “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Over the course of five conversations, we’re exploring some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving polarization and opening the door for aspiring autocrats.

In our fifth and final episode of this miniseries, we’ll reflect on what we’ve learned with UC San Diego professors Emilie Hafner-Burton and Christina Schneider.

Both are political scientists, who direct IGCC’s Future of Democracy Initiative, a project designed to produce new academic research, engage with decision-makers, and understand what is going on with democracy globally.

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Lindsay: The U.S. presidential elections are nearly upon us. You are both scholars of democracy. How are you feeling? Or as the kids would say, what’s the vibe check? Christina, you first.

Christina: I’m a bit nervous, of course. The political climate is pretty heated. But I would also say very hopeful, because even though there’s a lot of polarization, we see a lot of misinformation circulating, and there’s also conflict, the U.S. elections have remained remarkably clean. And I see a lot of efforts to address some of the main challenges U.S. democracy faces.

Lindsay: And Emilie, what about you?

Emilie: I think the 2024 election is going to be unlike any other in modern American history, because voters are so polarized. And because I think the threat of civil breakdown is real. And it’s really concerning to me that wide majorities of the voting public in the United States don’t have confidence in the election.

But I am energized, because whether you like the politics of the candidates or not, whichever side of the aisle you sit on, there are some younger and more diverse candidates on the ballot.

So whoever wins this election, and whatever your political points of view are, this is going to be pivotal for the future of democracy in the United States, and so therefore for the future of democracy around the world.

Lindsay: This is the fifth and final conversation in our special miniseries about democracy, and the idea for this series originated out of conversations that I had with the two of you.

You both have dedicated your careers to exploring questions about our civic life, human rights, how we organize ourselves as citizens of democracies. So we wanted to conclude the series by bringing the two of you on to help us make sense of everything that we’ve been thinking about.

So let’s start with Episode 1. I spoke with Simone Chambers about the impact disinformation is having on our democracy. Simone said that disinformation is a really big and pernicious problem because it undermines our faith in a variety of things: in news sources, in institutions, and even in each other.

I think all of us can probably relate to the feeling of being a little overwhelmed and mesmerized with uncertainty about what we can trust. But is there really nothing that we can trust?

Christina: I very much agree about the concerns that Simone Chambers raised. And of course, we have to take this and misinformation campaigns very seriously.

But it is important to remember that here in the U.S. especially, there are still many reputable media outlets which provide not only solid information, but they also represent a diverse set of perspectives. And these professional news agencies generally have relatively strict guidelines for fact-checking before publication, so that mis- and disinformation is less likely to occur.

So I think when we talk about ourselves as individuals, media literacy is very important—that we do not only take information from social media, especially when it comes to political news. But that we at least check with more reputable news as well.

And, generally, I also see that it cannot just involve ourselves as individuals, but we do need to see coordination between various government agencies, social media sites, and political parties, and get their willingness to address these types of issues.

Lindsay: What advice would you give voters? What sort of an information mix is a healthy one? If we think about a healthy diet, what’s a healthy information diet?

Emilie: I love this analogy. I think there’s three parts of an information diet to think about. So the first one is how much of it you’re consuming. The second one is what it is that you’re consuming, much to Christina’s point. And then the third one is how it is that you’re consuming that information. Those are the three key ingredients, I think, to an information diet.

So I think it’s really dangerous, If we’re living in an environment of silos where you only watch Fox News, or you only watch NBC, or whatever your poison is.

And many people seem to think that we should all be looking at everything all the time. And I just disagree with that. I don’t think that’s a healthy or good strategy. We have to consume, but we don’t have to overload.

So we have to make careful choices about what we’re consuming. We should be looking for sources that are credible. We should be looking for environments that stick mostly to the facts, to Christina’s point, that involve fact-checking and other things, so we know we’re talking about real things and not make-believe.

We should be staying away from content that’s based on advertising, because that content is oftentimes quite biased. So those are the three components that I think make a healthy information diet.

Lindsay: In Episode 2, I spoke with Marty Gilens about how the unregulated, limitless money that flows into our politics in the United States weakens the voice of the majority and gives outsized influence to elites who can distort the democratic process in their favor.

Marty said that this “undermines people’s faith, not only that their system is working for them, but that their system can work for them.”

I’m curious how you respond to what Marty said, this idea that not only does it weaken faith that the system is working for us, but that it even can. How do you respond to that?

Emilie: So I’m going to agree and disagree with Marty. And I think the points he made were very important. What’s critical is that whether it’s true or not, most Americans believe that money and politics is to blame for a wide array of problems in American society, and that it threatens our democracy.

But I think the answer to whether that is true or not is actually quite a bit more complex than the way it’s been portrayed, right? It’s simply the fact that’s what most of us believe, whether it’s true or not. Money absolutely shapes elections. But to put it in the simplest terms, it does not necessarily buy them. The rich can lose, and the underdogs can win. So I think it’s actually a much more complex picture of what role money plays.

Money is just one part of the problem fueling the disillusionment, right? I think the real problem is that so many Americans are just fed up with politics as a whole right now. And money is certainly one piece of that, but it’s not the only piece of it.  But there’s no question that the American public is very concerned about it and believes that it is a taint on our democracy.

Christina: I have a slightly more pessimistic take on this. I generally do agree with Marty. Of course, money is not everything and it doesn’t completely determine politics, and it also doesn’t always determine political success as Emilie said. But it does really play an outsized influence in U.S. politics when we compare it to other nations, both in terms of who gets elected and also whose interests are represented.

And a number of different scholars have worked on these aspects and find support for that. But just think about it, the notion that someone has to spend 2-3 million dollars to get a seat in the national legislature has to discourage less wealthy individuals from pursuing politics in the first place.

Which of course also reduces—at least the perceived—influence of these less wealthy citizens in political decision-making. And I do agree that many citizens feel their interests are not represented by the two mainstream parties anymore, which has made them lose faith in the system and much more susceptible to right-wing or populist notions.

So I would agree that money does matter and it does have an outsized influence in American politics.

Lindsay: And like you said, Christina, most of our listeners are in the United States. And I think many Americans—myself included, before I read Marty’s book—don’t totally know how money and politics works outside of the American context. And don’t just necessarily know that it’s not like this everywhere.

So there are other models. There are other ways of doing it.  This isn’t sort of inevitable to politics. And you know, you’re German. There are different models in Europe and different countries. So it’s something that I’m interested in having our listeners kind of absorb, that it works differently in other places.

Christina: Yeah, and I’m happy to speak to this, and that’s why I’m also not too pessimistic about money, because first of all, it’s important that we have to believe that we’re more than greed, and we certainly are. I truly believe that many Americans who pursue politics have much more idealistic notions to work toward the good of the people. And we see that on an everyday basis, that they push aside their own interests in order to work for the people of the United States. But there’s also a lot that we could learn from campaign financing in other countries.

So most other countries in the OECD, for example, even though they do not have necessarily limits on campaign contributions, they do have limits on candidate spending, right? And they also provide substantial government funding to political parties for their campaigning. So they do not have to rely on raising money from private sources, which then brings in that influence from individuals or individual groups.

And in addition, they also get free access to media so that they can campaign on radio, on TV, and in newspapers. And this access is free to all parties and candidates. And some countries even forbid political parties to campaign until a relatively short period before election day.

And all of this means that if we compare the U.S. election campaigns to election campaigns in other countries, then in other countries, election campaigns are much cheaper, but they’re also relatively quiet. They’re not as politicized as American elections.

Lindsay: So in Episode 3, I spoke with Zoli Hajnal about the symbolic power of immigration in the American imagination, and how even though it’s well documented that immigrants don’t increase crime, they contribute more than they take, it is nonetheless a really galvanizing issue for voters.

And this is true not only in the U.S., of course, but in many other countries where we’re seeing the rise of far-right extremists vying for power, like in Europe.

Zoli said that this isn’t just an anti-immigrant narrative, but it’s an anti-democratic narrative. Do you agree with that?

Emilie: Yes. I agree strongly with that. Immigrants come to the United States to find a better way of life. That’s the whole idea behind it. And rather than posing a threat to our democracy, they enrich the values that make America the democracy that it is.

So being anti-immigrant is inherently being anti-democratic, just by definition. So he’s correct. Because we are, after all, a country of immigrants. And whether you arrived yesterday, or your family arrived one century ago, we are all immigrants.

Christina: I also fully agree. Many Americans truly experience status anxiety and social marginalization. And this anxiety and the increasing feeling of injustice and resentment are really reflected in American voting behavior over the last few years.

So Americans who experience increasing economic and cultural anxiety don’t feel represented by traditional mainstream parties. And this has not only made them less likely to vote in the first place—which is problematic for democracy—they’ve also started to support right-wing entrepreneurs that use the immigration rhetoric strategically to garner political support and to get into political power.

And these populist candidates here in the United States, they appeal to voters by arguing that elites are protecting and expanding their own privileges at the expense of ordinary citizens and promising to defend them against the established national and international elites, all the while dismantling democratic institutions and norms while they’re doing so.

Emilie:  I agree with everything Christina said, but this isn’t just a right-wing problem. The left in this very election has moved towards anti-immigration, towards walls, towards policies—those policies might look slightly different, but the rhetoric exists on both sides of the aisle.

And that’s extremely problematic. So this isn’t a right-wing, left-wing question. How they are addressed is perhaps different across parties and across political spectrums, but this is a national problem.

Lindsay: At the deepest level, the immigration debate is about fear of others. How do we get out of that way of thinking about other people?

Emilie: It’s a really hard question, but it’s a really important one. So it has to start with relentless education to squash these myths that immigrants are security threats, and are stealing our jobs, and are ruining our way of life. So there needs to be relentless education on this.

The difficult part is that facts aren’t enough. You need people to believe. You need to change hearts and minds. And the facts can help to do that. But you can’t throw all the facts—think of climate—you can throw all the facts you want at a person who doesn’t hold that belief set and that’s not going to by themselves change their minds.

So that’s the harder part of it. It’s the process of socialization. It’s the process of integration. It’s the process of not siloing ourselves. It’s the process of putting ourselves in environments where you’re surrounded by people who don’t look, and talk, and act like you, and you recognize that they’re—they’re still human beings.

Christina: I completely agree with Emilie that for the longest time, our thinking was if we just throw facts at the problem, it will resolve itself. But we’ve seen that here in the United States, we’ve seen that in other countries around the world, just providing facts is not working.

And we’re really fighting somewhat of an uphill battle in this very polarized news environment in which mis- and disinformation are prevalent. And everyone wants to stay in their own bubbles, as Emilie already said. So it’s sometimes really difficult to listen to and internalize information that might not fit with our own beliefs about the world. And that makes it very difficult to say simple facts by just providing the truth that will make a difference.

There is existing research that paints a more optimistic picture about how to reduce those fears. So we can focus—and we should continue to focus—on providing factual information by educating, by civic education of individuals, by addressing disinformation, and by fact-checking information. But also by taking fears of individuals seriously and by increasing experience that reduces existing anxieties that surround immigration.

But again, this requires cooperation. This cannot just be done by us, by individuals. This really requires the political willingness of different political parties and political actors, by the media. And so with this cooperation, we might be able to address these issues.

Emilie: And it doesn’t just have to be a political process. Christina and I are both political scientists. So we’re obviously thinking about the politics first, but I was thinking about this beautiful cookbook called Jerusalem.

And it’s co-authored by an Israeli and a Palestinian. And there are no politics in this book. There are beautiful pictures. There are extraordinary dishes. But it became a pretty profound societal statement for both of these communities. And no one was talking politics.

It was just the acknowledgement that “hey, we make great food and together we can make great food. And our countries are at war, but all the people are not necessarily at war.” And I mention that because I think there are, in addition to the political ways, creative, cultural ways—plays, music, cookbooks, all kinds of ways—that people can come together to try and create messages of—hey, it’s not an us versus them, but look what we can do when it’s an us with us.

Lindsay: In Episode 4, Steph Haggard said that populist strongman leaders are taking advantage of the discord, disaffection, and distrust that all these other things are generating to get political power, promising to bring democracy back to the so-called true citizens.

But the danger is that these leaders are also promising to sidestep the checks and balances that make democracy work and to trample on minority rights. And of course, the U.S. is not immune from this phenomenon.

Steph and I talked a lot about polarization. I’m curious how the both of you see these issues—disinformation, money in politics, and the stoking of cultural anxiety—how did these things work together to sort of pull us apart?

Christina: I think Steph is absolutely right.

From the perspective of threats to democracy, polarization is one of the greatest that we’re facing right now. And polarization in the United States and beyond is generally driven by actors—whether they’re political actors or other societal actors—who want to use polarization as a way to get into power and also stay in power.

So they are pursuing their own agenda. and it sometimes shocks me how willing they are all of the sudden to use means that would have been taboo just a few years ago, because they’re so afraid that the other party might get into political power. And this is really, really problematic.

So these actors are known to use money, disinformation, misinformation, and a strategic stoking of economic and cultural anxiety to further polarize the public.

So for example, in some recent research that Emilie and I have been working on with a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, Austin Beacham, we find that illiberal leaders—so those that do not necessarily respect liberalism and democracy—they’re particularly likely to make use of the Internet and social media to polarize societies with very unfortunate effects on the quality of democracy around the world.

Emilie: I agree completely with Christina and with Steph that this is one of the biggest dangers to democracy.

But the problem is really what we call anti-pluralism. So an anti-pluralist is the person who refuses to respect the democratic process as legal and legitimate. It’s the person who refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of a justifiable opponent. Justifiable is important in that sentence. It’s one who is willing to tolerate the use of violence, of political violence against opponents. And it’s the one who’s willing to curb the civil and political liberties of minorities.

So it’s that part of the wave of what’s occurring inside the United States, across Europe, quite frankly, across most of the world, that is most concerning. The money fuels that problem, the disinformation fuels that problem, the lack of trust fuels that problem.

The key is that actors are using seemingly democratic tools to undermine democracy, and they’re doing it because they’re holding these other values.  They don’t want to lose elections, but they find other ways to get around it.

Lindsay:  So each of the prior episodes went back in time, looking at how the issue has evolved over the last—anywhere from 50 to even 100 years. And one thing that was very clear is that none of these are new problems.

What does history have to teach us about the present and future of democracy?

Emilie: Geoffrey Stone is a First Amendment scholar and he puts it really nicely. I like his words, so I’m going to paraphrase them for you, which is: there are very clear lessons from history.

So, pick your poison. You want to talk about the Civil War, World War II, the War on Terror. One of the lessons is that anxieties that arise in the time of crisis—that could be a real crisis or a perceived crisis—cause us oftentimes to seek protection from enemies in ways that have been very problematic, not just in American history, but in democratic history more generally. And that’s both real and imagined. So that’s one of the key lessons from all of this.

Another is that government officials often are acting way too quickly to acquiesce to these types of demands. So there can be really quick responses in the times of crisis that later we may come to regret, but that are much harder to roll back once they’ve been put into place. And this is not a new phenomenon. We’ve done this over and over again.

And the third, according to Geoffrey, is that political leaders often exploit the fears and anxieties of citizens for partisan political advantage. And that has happened throughout the entire history of America, and the entire history of most other countries, including democratic and non-democratic countries alike.

So, does this sound familiar? I mean, this describes today, and it’s very likely that it’s going to continue to describe the future, because it’s described the past and our history for centuries.

So, the really tough question then becomes: can we change course? Is that possible? Can we learn from these lessons? If so, what would that look like?

On the upside though, I will say that I think a lot of features of democracy from the past have helped us really build the underlying features of what our democracy is today. And I think that’s pretty amazing, right? We’ve ousted emperors, and dictators, and bullies, and criminals.

If you think about the idea underlying democracy, it’s about being able to manage your own life. It’s not the government managing your life for you, but it’s about us dreaming up institutions that allow us to determine ourselves together, how it is we want to live together, how we want to breathe together on the planet.

And our whole history is a sequence of us attempting to do this, messing it up, trying to fix it, getting it right. Things change, doing it again. It’s not been easy. It’s not been equally available to all. It has been a process, and we can be very critical of it, and we should be. But it’s also part of our history and who we are, and we couldn’t be who we are without that history.

Lindsay: So we’ve talked about democracy throughout the series and it’s a word we hear about, we read about it, all the time. Especially if you’re scholars of democracy.

Words have a way of—when we hear them over and over for years and years—they have a way of losing their meaning and losing their ability to motivate and move us.

And in some ways, I think democracy and the words that we define democracy by, like equality and human rights, freedom—are sometimes at risk of losing some of that ability to move us because we’re just so used to them. So I want to ask you a question that can help bring this concept to life in a really tangible way.

I’m gonna ask you to describe something in your own life that is emblematic of some piece of democracy that’s meaningful to you. And I’ll start by giving my own example for my own life, which is I had to renew my driver’s license recently.

So I had to go into the Department of Motor Vehicles and take a ticket and sit down beneath the neon lights at the DMV and wait my turn. And I looked around at this very humble public services office in San Diego. And there around me were all matter of different types of people. There were apparently rich people, apparently poor people. There were young and old people. There were people dressed in all kinds of different styles.

There was this great diversity there, much more diverse than I would encounter in my day-to-day life. And we were all equal in that setting. We were all waiting. We all had to take a ticket.

And for me, that is emblematic of a part of what democracy is, which is this idea that in—in our civic space, we are all of equal value, that American democracy isn’t just for some of the people in the DMV, it’s for all of them.

Can you share a story from your own life about some aspect of democracy that is meaningful to you?

Emilie: So, many years ago I used to be a blacksmith. And I worked with a bunch of people who held personal, social, political views that I could not disagree with more. Racist, homophobic, sexist, anti-immigrant. We could not have come from [more] different backgrounds. I was the only woman really working on the floor of this shop. And I spent every day with these people.

And I walked in on that job thinking, “oh, these are really bad people. I don’t agree with anything that they’re saying or doing. You’re just a bad person. It is not okay to be any of those things.” And to this day, I do not believe it is okay to be any of those things. But I did learn in that process, they’re not bad people. They hold those views for a variety of different reasons, but that does not make them bad people.

And it took me every day from 7:00 in the morning till 5:00 p.m. of hanging out with them on the dock and eating lunch together and talking—not always directly about the issues, but just being around each other to recognize, “okay, well, we disagree on our points of view, strongly disagree.” Surely they strongly disagreed with me. [But] at the end of the day, we were still people.

We still had lunch together every day. We still went bowling. And I think after some time, it shifted the needle. Not in my thinking racism was okay—certainly under no circumstances—but in understanding that, well, these people are holding these views for a reason, so maybe we need to engage with those reasons.

And maybe it’s not: “you’re a bad person because we disagree.” Maybe it’s: “we disagree and let’s think about why we do that.”

And at the end of it, when I left that job, I think I shifted their needle too. Because when I walked in there, they’re like, “who’s this woman who’s walking into this world of, guys who do this profession, she can’t do this job.” And I can tell you they respected me by the time I left that job.

So that doesn’t necessarily change how we think about these concepts, but I do think it’s possible to change minds, and that’s a really important—for me—life example of when you put yourself around other people who are not like you. You can fight, and you can go on the television and throw lobs at each other, or you can also have lunch together and recognize that we’re all human, even if we don’t agree.

That to me is the essence of the kind of democracy I want to live in.

Lindsay: That’s a great story. Christina, how about you?

Christina: When I was a postdoctoral student in eastern Germany, I went to visit a Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald, which is near Weimar. It was one of the largest camps within the German borders. And generally, of course, just going to these camps, and walking through, and getting the information about how many people perished in these camps is sobering enough.

But what really struck me was something else. So the memorial includes an extensive multimedia exhibit with videos from survivors who spoke about their experiences. And these people were individuals with all types of backgrounds that had a very normal life before the Nazis came into power—by the way, through elections—and took that away.

And there were Jews, Poles, and other Slavs. There were mentally ill and physically disabled people, political prisoners, Roma, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. There were also very ordinary criminals, and those that were perceived by the Nazis as so-called “sexually deviant.”

It really struck me that these people, who in many ways were just like me, just like anyone who I knew, had to live, work, and die under truly horrendous conditions just because the political elite in an autocratic Germany had determined that they were not worth living.

And I know that democracies are flawed in many ways, and we like to focus on these flaws, and we like to say, money matters, and we don’t have that much influence, and there’s so much that we can need to work on to ensure political equality and freedom. But this moment has forever shaped my conviction that it’s only in democracies, where we strive truly for political equality of all, that we can live in a system where everyone, no matter what their background is, has a chance to have the same rights and freedoms.

Lindsay: Thinking out across the prior four episodes of the series, one of the really strong themes which we’ve talked about here today is polarization, this sort of breaking apart, driving apart.

And each of the episodes described these underlying dynamics, the attack on truth, money and politics, cultural, economic anxiety that are breaking us apart and that are setting us—like as a society—against each other.

One of the things that the historian Tim Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny is of the importance when tyranny is potentially at the door, of looking at each other, making small talk, making eye contact, if you’re in the grocery store with your neighbor, whatever, seeing each other’s faces as being an important part of kind of keeping tyranny at bay.

And the South African poet Mongane Wally Sorote wrote about the same kind of concept in a slightly different way in the context of apartheid, another thing that tore people apart. He was writing, imagining a future where we have put these kinds of things aside. And he wrote:

So we shall have buried Apartheid.

How shall we look at each other then?

How shall we shake hands?

What shall we look like when that sunrise comes?

And I just love that poem. It’s a fragment of a poem.

So I want to end by asking you both—thinking across all of the questions, all the things we’ve talked about, all the things that you have studied this past year for the past five years, the past 10 years—how in this context today, heading into this very consequential election in a year of tumult globally, how should we look at each other?

Emilie: We’ve been talking a lot about voters, meaning people who have to be 18 years or older in this country, and polarization, but this problem starts in elementary school. This problem starts before elementary school. This is an all of us issue, not just a voters issue.

So I have a 12-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son. And I was very concerned about them growing up in a bubble. And it’s very hard to get out of a bubble once you’re inside the bubble.

So my answer was, we need to leave the bubble and we need to leave the bubble often. And I am lucky enough that I’m able to do that in my job. So since they were babies, we have traveled to every single continent. Not resort travel. We have encountered some very difficult situations, some very diverse situations, and it’s been brilliant because the whole idea was for these two kids to learn: it doesn’t matter if you hold a cell phone or not. It doesn’t matter what food you’re eating—irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what color you are. It doesn’t matter what language you speak. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re living in a mountain in a yurt or if you’re living on the ocean in a hut. It doesn’t matter.

And it’s really hard to say those in words and have somebody believe it. It’s a very different thing when you simply put people in environments and you recognize, “hey, we’re all people. Oh, you play soccer? So do I. Let’s go to it.”

So that’s been the strategy that I’ve used in trying to impress upon my younger generation in letting them grow up to be able to answer that question so they can say, “yeah, we’re all people and I know it because I’ve seen people from all different walks of life.”

Christina: Lindsay, that’s a beautiful poem. And my answer is very similar. I think one of the big issues at the individual level, at the us level has been that we started to dehumanize others based on their political beliefs. And I think we have to remind ourselves and we have to look at each other as fellow humans.

We’re all much more comfortable in our bubbles and we do want to believe the information and the values that reinforce our own political views. And so that makes it very hard to get convinced otherwise sometimes.

Things that have helped me is, first of all, in my interactions with students and colleagues as a teacher, I oftentimes have the opportunity to be confronted with opinions that I want to dismiss out of hand, but I find myself speaking with people who I actually respect, and I know they’ve been thinking about these issues as seriously as I have.

And so these conversations, they’re very valuable to me because I realize these are not just people who haven’t thought about it, and they’re just trying to rehash certain standpoints. But they’ve thought about it very deeply. And so they’re valuable because they show me that we all care and that it’s not necessarily impossible to overcome the current climate of political polarization and mistrust.

So, to the extent that I know that they have thought about this, they have fact-checked, they have these beliefs. And that I care about these people, I need to take them seriously, and I need to think about how this affects my own thinking about these issues.

We’re all people. And we have to look at them with kindness and empathy. We have to understand that they come from different experiences, and that’s why they might help different political views. But in the end, we’re all fellow humans.

Emilie: It’s one thing to try and solve these big problems, difficult problems we’ve been talking about over the series of this podcast by having more debate, and more political discussions, and more policy discussions, all of which are important and we need to do. But it’s another thing to just operate at a human level.

And as you were mentioning earlier, and as Christina was mentioning earlier, somehow we can manage to get along at a human level in a much easier way than when it comes down to actually debating the issues. And the critical question is how do we mirror those two things, and is it possible?

Lindsay: Emilie and Christina, thank you so much for being on Talking Policy. This was a wonderful conversation.

Emilie and Christina: Thank you! This has been wonderful.

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Outro

Democracy, this attempt to govern ourselves so that we can live together in freedom, in political equality, in a system that protects us and gives us the best possible chance to have a rich and fulfilling life, this system is worth fighting for, protecting.

We are far from perfect, but history shows us that things can get better. So it’s up to us to keep engaging, with the political system and most importantly with each other.

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Credits

Thanks for listening to “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a special miniseries from Talking Policy. I’m your host, Lindsay Shingler.

Our production partner for this miniseries is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Anna Van Dine. Mixing and sound design by Alex Brouwer. Special thanks to Tyler Ellison.

“Living in Hope and History” comes from the book of the same name by Nadine Gordimer.

Talking Policy is a production of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.