Jonathon Haidt of NYU joins me to talk about his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he co-authored with Greg Lukianoff of FIRE and The New York Times bestselling book The Righteous Mind. We talk about how he got his start as a social psychologist, why he became a political activist, and why he thinks we need to get our own house in order if we want to be a light to the world, if we think that democracy and liberty are important virtues. We also talk about why it s so important to understand where people are coming from and where they re coming from, and how we can help them understand their ideas. And, of course, we get to the meat and potatoes of the book, which is why you should read it before you read it. If you like what you hear here, you ll love our companion podcast, The Sunday Special, where we cover all sorts of topics related to politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the Sunday Special on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to The FiveThirtyEight Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of The Five ThirtyEight Club Subscribe to FiveThirtyeight's newest podcast, SixThirtyEight's newest show, Six Degrees of Conservative Thought. Learn about our upcoming events, including our upcoming fundraisers, our upcoming live events, and much, much more! Learn more at SixThirtyeight.org/TheFiveThirtyEight. Don't Tell a Friend us what you think of the show? We'll be giving you a chance to be featured on the next episode of Next Week's New Year's Day's Day Off episode! Subscribe, Subscribe to our newest episode of Six Figures! Subscribe on Podchaserx=a& other links=a_t=1&t=3 Subscribe_e&q=a Subscribe Subscribe? Listen to our new podcast, Subscribe To Our New Year s Day Offers? Subscribe & Review our new episode of The Fifth Day of the FiveThirty Eight Days of the Week is out on Tuesday, January 15th, 2020! Get in Touch by clicking here! Subscribe on Anchor Subscribe and Share it! Send us your thoughts and other links to our podcast and we'll get a shoutout on your thoughts on our social media pages! Thanks for listening to our latest episode of This Week's Five Fifty Four?
00:00:00.000If we want to be a light to the world, if we think that democracy and liberty are important virtues, we need to get our own house in order.
00:00:14.000Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Professor Jonathan Haidt of NYU.
00:00:18.000We're going to get to all of my questions about his brand new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he's written along with Greg Lukianoff over at FIRE.
00:00:24.000We'll get to all that stuff, plus The Righteous Mind, all sorts of great stuff.
00:00:27.000But first, let's talk about your impending doom.
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00:01:11.000So if you need life insurance, but you've been putting it off because it's too confusing or you don't have the time, don't be a loser.
00:02:17.000And then as the, when the Democrats lost in 2000, and then again in 2004, I began, I was very upset, and I said, I can't stand it that the Democrats don't know how to talk about morality, and I can help them.
00:02:31.000And so I started converting my research over, my research from how countries vary, to how left and right vary.
00:02:38.000Because by then, left and right in this country were becoming like different countries with
00:02:43.000history and even different constitutions.
00:02:47.000And so I committed to understanding conservatives so that I could help explain conservative morality.
00:02:52.000And in the course of reading conservative and libertarian philosophy and ideas, I realized, oh my God, you actually have to look at problems from different perspectives to understand them.
00:03:04.000We can talk about the Republican Party later.
00:03:07.000I have very little good to say about the Republican Party.
00:03:11.000I no longer identify as being on any team.
00:03:13.000I study moral psychology, I'm a social scientist, and I think as a social psychologist, if you're doing social science, it's really helpful to not be on a team, to have the independence to just try to study problems.
00:03:25.000So as a precursor to discussing some of the issues you discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind, I think it's almost necessary to talk about your earlier book, The Righteous Mind.
00:03:32.000Because that sort of provides the intellectual framework for what you talk about in the new book.
00:03:36.000So I wanted to ask you some questions about where that... So to fill in folks who may not have read the book, you make an argument that there are a bunch of different moral axes along which people work.
00:03:44.000That people don't just work along the idea of good and bad, that this breaks down into a number of different categories, and that left and right see these categories differently.
00:03:51.000So what exactly are those moral axes, and how do they play into politics?
00:03:55.000So from studying morality across cultures and reading the Old Testament and the Koran and reading ethnographies from non-Western societies, it was really clear that everywhere you look, people understand harm and pain and suffering, that's a moral issue, and reciprocity and fairness, that's a moral issue everywhere.
00:04:14.000But when you go to other issues like respect for authority, what's very common, but some places are really egalitarian, and sort of in-group loyalty, that's very common, but some places it's less important.
00:04:26.000And then that's four axes or dimensions.
00:04:28.000And then the fifth one is sanctity or purity, the idea that the body is a temple, it must be protected from degradation.
00:04:59.000It's as though they have five or more different moral taste buds, and different religions, different political philosophies build a structure on some of those.
00:05:11.000What I found empirically from doing research, survey work, and other kinds of work, is that people on the left in America, and in general in other countries too, they build their morality mostly on issues of care, harm, protection of the vulnerable, and then fairness, but fairness as a quality.
00:05:26.000Whereas social conservatives, they have those, but they see fairness more as proportionality.
00:05:31.000Do the crime, do the time, that sort of thing.
00:05:34.000And then they also care a lot more about group loyalty, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity or purity.
00:05:39.000And if you have that vocabulary, those five moral foundations, you can understand why left and right can't understand each other on most cultural war issues.
00:05:47.000And so what that sort of implies, and it's underscored by the other point that you make in The Righteous Mind, which is that people are largely driven by intuition rather than how we like to think of ourselves as reasonable creatures.
00:05:57.000If that's the case, can there ever really be any sort of conciliation in terms of politics, or is all of this sort of chimerical, like there's no way to come to any sort of even conversation?
00:06:06.000So, philosophically and psychologically, I'm an intuitionist.
00:06:10.000That means I think intuition is where the action is.
00:06:13.000Our moral intuitions come first, and they drive our reasoning afterwards.
00:06:17.000That might make it seem as though we therefore can't agree because we're all just driven by gut feelings, but it's more complicated than that because our intuitions come first, but they are educable.
00:07:14.000And one of the tragedies of our national life is that while we used to be fairly mixed politically, and we were more separated racially and in other ways,
00:07:22.000We've gotten more mixed along a lot of axes, but we're getting more and more separate politically.
00:07:26.000We live in more and more purified filter bubbles.
00:07:29.000And that makes it harder to empathize, it exacerbates our political divide, and it damages our democracy.
00:07:35.000So that brings us to the new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which really talks about the ramifications of exactly this sort of divide.
00:07:41.000And in The Coddling of the American Mind, you talk about what you consider three big problems in American society today.
00:07:47.000If you want to just illuminate those, that would be fantastic.
00:07:50.000So the book is based around three great untruths.
00:07:53.000My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was actually about ten insights that you find in ancient cultures all over the world, psychological insights.
00:08:01.000And so one of them is, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
00:08:08.000But you find the exact same idea in Mencius in ancient China, you find it all over the world, that kids need challenge, human beings need challenge, obstacles, failure, setback, in order to grow.
00:08:22.000But what we're finding on campus, what we're finding in the lives of American kids, is an increasing presence of the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
00:08:33.000That is, in fact, oh my god, just recently there was an article making the rounds.
00:08:50.000One of the lines in this Atlantic article quoted a high school kid saying, nobody should be forced to do something that they're not comfortable doing.
00:09:05.000If this is true that we need challenges, setbacks, even fear, we have to be afraid and overcome it and realize, oh, I can do that.
00:09:14.000And if we give in to this idea that no one should be forced to do anything they're uncomfortable doing, we are setting up the next generation for failure.
00:09:22.000And that's exactly our subtitle, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
00:09:29.000More briefly, the second great untruth is always trust your feelings.
00:09:32.000And the third is life is a battle between good people and evil people.
00:09:38.000And our contention in the book is that if we can successfully teach the young generation all three of these great untruths, they're almost guaranteed to fail.
00:09:46.000Well, let's talk about that last one, because that last one seems to me the most dangerous one of all.
00:09:51.000The attempts to favor feelings, I think, have a long subjective history, and in some ways may tie into the intuitionism that you talked about earlier.
00:10:00.000I mean, David Hume suggesting that basically we are creatures of passion, and then the reason sort of rides on top, pretending.
00:10:05.000But, with all that said, when it comes to the question of people seeing each other as good and evil, do you think that's springing more from one side of the aisle than another?
00:10:15.000How do you see that chain of causality moving?
00:10:17.000Well, let's hold off on the question of who's to blame or who is more guilty of this.
00:10:23.000Let's just start with the basic psychology here, which is that human beings evolved for tribalism.
00:11:06.000We're curious about other groups as well.
00:11:08.000And so a good modern society is one that finds ways to turn that down, allow people to live near others who are different from them, with no hostility, no violence.
00:11:16.000And we did a pretty good job of that in the 20th century.
00:11:19.000And there was a huge wave towards democracy.
00:11:21.000So we've made a lot of progress in the last few centuries overcoming tribalism.
00:11:25.000And the problem is that it's so easy to turn it back on.
00:11:30.000And a lot of what's happening in our politics between left and right, that's been accelerating since the 1990s.
00:11:35.000Cross-partisan hatred keeps going up and up since the 1980s or 90s.
00:11:39.000And unfortunately now, with certain forms of identity politics, we're finding these tensions between groups in the United States.
00:11:46.000And I just read, there's a new book out called The Tribes, something like that, in Britain.
00:11:50.000Very much the same process is happening in the UK.
00:11:53.000So this I find very alarming, that our society, our politics, social media, are turning up our tribalism.
00:12:00.000So where do you think that increased tribalism is coming from?
00:12:02.000Because my theory would be that based on sort of Robert Putnam's beliefs in diversity, of ethnicity being less beneficial than, for example, solidarity with regard to opinion, meaning that diversity is great so long as we all share a common goal.
00:12:18.000But if we don't share a common goal, then everything fractures pretty quickly.
00:12:48.000So the way that I think about what's happened to our country is that in a large secular society, there are a lot of forces blowing us apart and there are a lot pulling us together.
00:12:58.000And if you go back to the mid to late 20th century, everything was lined up to pull us together.
00:13:03.000We'd had extraordinarily high rates of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century.
00:13:09.000That's when my grandparents came over from Russia and Poland.
00:13:13.000There was a big wave of anti-immigrant backlash.
00:13:34.000David Brooks has written brilliantly about how the WASPs set up a meritocracy within which Jews and Asians and other groups were able to succeed.
00:13:41.000We had a common enemy still in the Soviet Union.
00:13:44.000We had a functioning political culture in Washington where there's a lot of bipartisanship.
00:15:01.000One of the things that it's going to take is something that's completely unpalatable to one side of the political aisle, at least, and that is a return to social institutions that people don't like very much, particularly on the left.
00:15:10.000So I want to ask you about that in just one second.
00:15:13.000First, let's talk about your psychiatric health.
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00:15:36.000You need to get something off your chest whenever you need to?
00:16:31.000If my career falls through, I'll be the guy at the end of the commercials who issues all of the legal warnings.
00:16:36.000So if we're talking about the sort of forces that need to come back together, it seems like there are certain forces that it's almost impossible to bring back together.
00:16:44.000And the ones that most need to be brought back together are the ones that may be least palatable.
00:16:48.000What I mean by that, to clarify, is that social fabric for 200 years and for hundreds of years throughout Western civilization was basically based in church.
00:16:56.000You found your community in the church, in the synagogue, you had a common Judeo-Christian heritage, and with the rise of secularism, which has come along with a lot of economic benefits for sure,
00:17:19.000And it seems like that hole is being filled by political tribalism.
00:17:23.000I'm going to fill those values with whatever I think my tribe is, and it seems to me particularly, now to get to the left-right issue, and obviously I'm on the right, and I have plenty of criticisms for the right, but my main criticism of the left these days is that the left has fallen into a sort of tribalism that refuses to even acknowledge that another tribe exists, or that there are other people who perceive problems differently.
00:17:44.000To go back to your discussion of the various values in Righteous Mind, you suggest that basically the political left bases itself on a couple of values, fairness and harm.
00:17:53.000Well, if those are the values you base yourself upon, then by necessity you have to be implying, even to yourself, that the other side is for unfairness and for harm.
00:18:02.000That in order for, that there cannot be any bridging of the gap because the only values that matter are harm, perceived as anything bad that happens, anything I disagree with,
00:18:12.000Results in a certain number of people getting hurt and fairness in that a person who disagrees with me is in favor of the Reinstitution of a patriarchy or a hierarchical system and you're spotting that evil everywhere you look
00:18:24.000How can that possibly be bridged without folks on the left actually acknowledging that there are other sets of values that come into play and that those ones actually drive people and may not be in fact bad?
00:18:34.000So I think what you're pointing to is an asymmetry in mutual understanding.
00:18:40.000So I run a research site at YourMorals.org.
00:18:44.000And we've had about a half million people go there and take our surveys.
00:18:47.000And in one experiment, we had people take our basic instrument, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which it gives you a score on these five foundations.
00:18:55.000And we had one-third of the people just filled it out for themselves.
00:18:59.000One-third were told, please fill this out as the typical liberal or progressive would.
00:19:03.000One-third were told, fill it out as a typical conservative would.
00:19:06.000What we found is that moderates are able to correctly predict how everybody would fill it out.
00:19:11.000Conservatives were almost as good as moderates.
00:19:14.000And it was people on the left, especially the far left, were very inaccurate.
00:19:18.000And it's for precisely the reason that you say, that because they couldn't see these questions about loyalty and fairness and sanctity, they couldn't see those as moral virtues.
00:19:27.000So on the questions about harm and fairness, they said, well, conservatives don't care about cruelty to animals and children.
00:19:32.000So I do think, and this was my case too, you know, I was very well educated in the United States, which means I learned nothing about conservatism.
00:19:39.000I learned very little about a large portion of political philosophy.
00:19:44.000And so it's impossible to grow up in this country without knowing what the left believes through the media, through newspapers, through movies.
00:20:07.000And so political surprises tend to be where the left is surprised, as happened in Brexit.
00:20:13.000I think they have a harder time understanding conservatives than vice versa.
00:20:16.000I personally think that every high school civics class, not that they teach them much anymore, but high school civics class should include the best of progressive thinking, the best of conservative thinking, possibly libertarian too.
00:20:34.000Political diversity through the lens of the worst, because social media guarantees, if you're on one side, you are force-fed constant stories of the outrages by the most outrageous, horrible people on the other side.
00:20:45.000And if that's your view of who they are, of course you don't trust them.
00:20:48.000Of course you don't want your legislators to compromise.
00:20:51.000So I think we need to understand, we are coming apart in this country.
00:20:54.000We are facing the actual danger of the dissolution of the country over the next 10, 20 years.
00:21:01.000I think it's not likely to happen, but it is possible in ways that none of us thought were coming or possible five or ten years ago.
00:21:09.000So I think we need to take this seriously, start educating beginning in high school for more political tolerance, respect, and mutual understanding.
00:21:16.000So when it comes to the sort of pessimism that you're expressing about the nature of the country, with which I fully agree, there are a bunch of people
00:21:49.000So, Steve Pinker, I think, is brilliant.
00:21:51.000I think he, in the big picture, I'm pretty confident he's right.
00:21:55.000That if we were just to check in at hundred-year intervals, each hundred years things would be much better than the hundred years before.
00:22:01.000Now, of course, at some point we might see the smoking wreckage of a global nuclear war, but odds are he's right in the long run.
00:22:09.000But as he grants, and as Robert Wright granted in his book Non-Zero years ago, you can have some big setbacks.
00:22:14.000It's only in the big picture that you see the march of progress.
00:22:18.000But along the way, you can have some pretty bad stuff happening.
00:22:21.000And I think where we are now, some of our problem is caused by social media.
00:22:27.000Of course, these problems of polarization were getting worse before social media, but social media is really messing things up all around the world.
00:22:35.000Odds are we'll learn how to deal with it, as we've learned how to deal with junk food.
00:22:38.000It took decades before we could learn how to live with the constant presence of junk food.
00:22:43.000I heard that for the first time last year, the obesity rate in America actually went down a tiny bit.
00:22:48.000So maybe we've learned how to coexist, and maybe that will happen with social media.
00:22:53.000But a lot of bad stuff can happen along the way.
00:22:56.000In terms of what's going on on campus, there's been a really productive debate, it was an excellent debate, started by a political scientist in Canada, Jeff Sachs, who pointed out that if you look at the general social survey, attitudes about free speech, it's not changing.
00:23:09.000In fact, if anything, younger people are more tolerant.
00:23:12.000And so that pushed me and Greg and others to refine our claims.
00:23:16.000And that's the way it's supposed to work.
00:23:17.000And what we found as we dug into the data is, yes, this national survey data shows no drop, but that's because it's focused on millennials.
00:23:26.000And this book, our book, The Coddling of the American Mind, is not about millennials.
00:23:29.000The millennials are fine on free speech.
00:23:31.000It's the generation after the millennials.
00:23:55.000Most of them don't have, you know, they're commuter schools, they don't bring in lecturers, they don't have riots.
00:24:01.000So, if you look at nationally representative data, on most campuses, nothing is happening.
00:24:06.000If you go home to a family, if you have a job off campus, you're not going to develop this arcane morality that we'll talk about, this safetyism morality.
00:24:14.000However, if you look at especially in the Northeast and the West Coast, if you look at the elite schools, there as far as I can tell,
00:24:23.000This new culture is present at almost all of the schools.
00:24:26.000It's not in the engineering schools so much.
00:24:29.000So it varies even within the universities.
00:24:31.000My point is, there's a lot of diversity.
00:24:34.000We should not have a moral panic where we say, the new generation is lost, something's eaten their brains, or colleges are going up in flames.
00:24:42.000But there is a new morality that is present in parts of most, maybe all, elite schools on the coast.
00:24:47.000That's where the shout downs and what little violence there's been, that's where it takes place.
00:24:52.000So we have to refine the story, figure out what's happening, and I think figure out how to reverse this cultural shift because it leads to a culture that's really bad for the students themselves and their mental health, and that's really bad for a culture of free inquiry.
00:25:07.000So how indicative are those outlier schools, statistically, of a broader trend across young folks?
00:25:14.000That's, yeah, that's complicated to answer.
00:25:17.000In terms of broad trends across young folks, the one, the most important one, the one that I think guarantees that we will be attending to this for many years to come, we cannot sweep this under the rug, is that rates of anxiety and depression are rising quickly for kids born after 1995.
00:25:35.000It's rising across social classes, across races, not so much across genders, or rather I should say, things are getting worse for boys,
00:25:44.000Substantially, but for girls, it's several times worse, several times faster, the increase.
00:25:49.000And what's very important to understand, because there's debate around this, some people say, oh, you know, kids, they like to say they're depressed.
00:25:55.000They're comfortable with this language.
00:25:57.000There was an op-ed in the New York Times a couple weeks ago by a psychiatrist saying, oh, you know, it's not real.
00:26:05.000It's just changing diagnostic categories.
00:26:07.000No, because if you look, there are studies, we cite them in the book.
00:26:10.000If you look at hospital admission data, this is the number of kids admitted because they cut their body with something sharp and had to be admitted to a hospital.
00:26:18.000It shows exactly the same pattern as it does for depression and anxiety.
00:26:23.000That is, it's way up, it's up even for the 11 to 13 year olds, and it's up especially for girls.
00:26:28.000And then you look at the suicide data.
00:26:30.000This is CDC data, federal data, same thing.
00:26:33.000The boys' suicide rate for teenage boys,
00:26:36.000From the first decade of the 21st century to the last couple years, it begins going up around 2010-2011.
00:27:59.000We did spend some time researching social class differences, because we know there's a huge amount of research on social class differences in parenting.
00:28:07.000Annette Leroux has a book called Unequal Childhoods, and Robert Putnam has a book called Our Kids.
00:28:13.000And they both come to the same conclusion, which is that differences by race in parenting are actually fairly small once you control for class.
00:28:20.000So upper middle class black parents are more similar to upper middle class white parents than they are to working class of either sex.
00:28:26.000And so working-class parents do give their kids less supervision, which is good.
00:28:31.000Part of the problem is, in the 90s, we took away most of kids' unsupervised time.
00:28:36.000By the 80s or 90s, we stopped letting kids out to play without supervision, fearing that we thought they'd be abducted or something like that.
00:28:44.000So the working class is not as overprotective.
00:28:46.000Now working class kids have a lot of other problems.
00:28:48.000They face a lot more trauma, a lot more threat, like real trauma, like physical trauma, relational trauma.
00:28:54.000But in this country right now, at elite schools, there was some research came out last year, at many of our top schools, there are more kids who are children of the top 1%
00:29:24.000So the culture of safetyism seems to be especially intense in upper middle class, upper class, elite coastal
00:29:32.000Yeah, when it comes to the identity politics that's cropped up so recently, and you sort of classify as a subset of emotional tribal-driven politics, where is the identity politics issue coming from?
00:29:44.000Does it have deep roots or shallow roots?
00:29:46.000And is it really just a new form of the kind of tribalism you've been talking about?
00:29:51.000So let me make a point here, which I hope will be helpful to your audience.
00:29:56.000In this country, we're in the middle of a long-running culture war in which terms become, they get tagged and they get used either as attacks or defenses.
00:30:06.000And identity politics and social justice are two of those terms.
00:30:22.000My view from writing The Righteous Mind is that whenever you have a political movement, there's always something that they're right about.
00:30:29.000There's always something that is good or true about it.
00:30:31.000And so what we did with identity politics, you know, because I came in very suspicious of it, thinking, you know, this is probably a bad thing.
00:30:38.000But as we read about it, we realized, okay, you know what?
00:30:44.000If people can organize because they're wine growers in California, they can form a group to advocate for the rights of wine growers in California.
00:30:52.000And chess players can, I mean, you can have, politics should be responsive to every possible interest group.
00:30:59.000Why can't gay people or LGBTQ, why can't African American, of course, every group can organize.
00:31:05.000So you can't say identity politics is bad.
00:31:08.000What you need to do is say, okay, in the current American,
00:31:14.000How are you pursuing the aims of your group?
00:31:16.000And this, I think, is a distinction that I found just clarified things right away.
00:31:20.000You can either pursue it using a common humanity approach, which is exactly what Martin Luther King, Pauli Murray, a lot of the early civil rights activists did.
00:31:31.000You start by saying, listen, my brothers and sisters.
00:31:34.000Or you use this soaring American language, as he did in his I Have a Dream speech.
00:31:41.000You first establish, we, we Americans, we human beings, they used a lot of religious language, Christian language, but obviously Judeo-Christian language.
00:31:51.000You start that way, and now right away, you're already halfway down the road to success, because now you're talking to people as members of a common group, and you can say, some of our brothers and sisters are being denied access to dignity, to jobs.
00:32:04.000So that worked, even if, of course, there was resistance at the time.
00:32:07.000It calls on our better angels, it establishes a connection, and in the long run, it works.
00:32:15.000What's new, or at least what's newly intense on college campuses in the last just a few years,
00:32:22.000is what we call the common enemy form of identity politics.
00:32:26.000It's based on the idea, the Bedouin proverb, me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, me and my brother and cousin against the stranger.
00:32:35.000And if you unite everybody on campus against the enemy, and the enemy is on campus too,
00:32:42.000Because the enemy is straight white males.
00:32:45.000So what's new is the idea of intersectionality, which as we say in the book, intersectionality is not a bad idea.
00:32:51.000The idea that identities interact, that being a black woman is not just the sum of the two, but there are special obstacles that black women face.
00:33:03.000But the way that it gets implemented on campus is to train students to see, look around, oh, you know, oh, female, white, and to see, okay, female is oppressed, male is oppressor, white is oppressor, black is oppressed.
00:33:19.000To see people in binary dimensions, to imagine trying to create a diverse environment on a college campus.
00:33:30.000And at the same time, you're telling people to judge others through this simple, binary, bipolar dimension, good, bad, good, bad, to make moral judgments of people.
00:33:40.000So intersectionality, as it's practiced on many campuses, amounts to trying to unite a coalition of victim groups against the evil straight white males.
00:33:49.000And this is a recipe for, in addition to misdiagnosing the nature of not just American society, but especially college campuses,
00:33:58.000Isn't there a deeper critique of identity politics even than that?
00:34:01.000Because you're taking identity politics at sort of its most favorable level.
00:34:32.000Should we be fighting harder against identity politics than even you're saying?
00:34:35.000In other words, let's not group ourselves as blacks or Jews or gays.
00:34:39.000Let's group ourselves as a group of individuals who all agree on these common principles of how the society ought to be governed and how we ought to be left alone.
00:36:00.000There are a lot of intellectuals in every different possible identity category.
00:36:03.000And a lot of them are rejecting this binary or in or out kind of identity.
00:36:08.000Politically, doesn't this tend toward libertarianism just naturally?
00:36:10.000Because what you're really talking about on a political level is we all have an agreement about the basic things that we should all do together and then everybody should basically be left alone to identify how they please.
00:36:20.000How does this play out politically in terms of, you know, if you were to take it to straight party politics?
00:36:24.000So, you know, as I hear you talk, what I'm thinking is that's really the definition of liberal.
00:36:29.000And what I mean is the word liberal, its origins are you believe in liberty.
00:36:34.000Its origins are originally, you know, like the liberal arts are the skills needed to be a free person in an open society.
00:36:41.000And so that's when we talk about liberal arts schools, we talk about the liberal tradition.
00:36:49.000Now, I stopped using the word as the left began to kind of split between what I like to think of as there's the liberal left and then there's the illiberal left.
00:36:57.000Most professors, in my opinion, are liberal left.
00:37:00.000They are uncomfortable with many forms of identity politics.
00:37:03.000But it's the illiberal left that has had the loudest voice.
00:37:08.000It's often dangerous, as you found, as many people have found.
00:37:11.000It's dangerous to stand up against them.
00:37:25.000I've said many times, I speak on dozens of campuses, it's really only a couple of years that are a serious problem.
00:37:32.000This is one of the things we most need in this polarized time.
00:37:36.000Just that little bit of nuance that you just added, that goes so far.
00:37:40.000Whenever we're having these conflicts, these talks, just to acknowledge anything about the other side, and then you can make your critique.
00:37:47.000Listeners everywhere, this is the way to be more effective.
00:37:50.000If you don't believe me, read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
00:37:55.000So, but your question was, does that mean we should be libertarian?
00:37:58.000And I guess I would say it ought to mean that we should be liberal in the traditional sense.
00:38:02.000Unfortunately, the libertarians are sort of left as the guardians of the liberal tradition.
00:38:08.000So, what do you think has been the response to all of your research, which has been a lot friendlier to the right than a lot of other things that have been said in sociology departments around the country?
00:38:17.000How have people reacted in the academy to you?
00:38:20.000You know, ranging from Evergreen State College to Northwestern, to Yale with the Christakis's, where people are legitimately run out of jobs.
00:38:27.000You call them witch hunts in the book.
00:38:29.000What's been the reaction to your work?
00:38:31.000Have you gotten any of that sort of blowback?
00:38:34.000You know, other than, you know, I occasionally get horribly nasty tweets.
00:38:37.000And I got an email the other day, which was from an anonymous server, and it was just a string of obscenities, which I can't even say on camera.
00:38:46.000So other than things like that from strangers,
00:38:48.000Nothing bad has happened to me, and I think this is actually very important to point out.
00:38:52.000So when I started critiquing the left, from the left, you know, there were some people who were suspicious of me, but a lot of people realized, you know, the left, we do have problems, we do need this critique.
00:39:03.000And because I would do it in sort of a gentle way, and because I clearly was not on the right, so I think I moved up to sort of the edge of what was possible, nothing bad ever happened to me.
00:39:12.000Then when I stepped out and I started saying, I'm not on the left anymore.
00:39:23.000Some people didn't like me, but nothing bad happened to me.
00:39:26.000And then when Greg and I wrote our Atlantic article critiquing this new culture on campus, and it is a critique of a certain kind of identity politics.
00:39:34.000You know, my wife said, John, are we going to have to, like, hide our address?
00:40:13.000My advice to people is if you speak up in this polarized climate, a lot of us are afraid to speak up, but if you can do it in a respectful way with just a little bit of nuance, the blowback is often much less than you would expect.
00:40:26.000So you teased much earlier in the show that you have a lot of critiques of the Republican Party.
00:40:30.000Because I, of course, am a conservative, that means we spent most of this program critiquing leftists on campus and some of the kind of rising leftist ideas of identity politics, intersectionality, microaggressions and such.
00:40:40.000So what are your main critiques of the right?
00:40:42.000How could the right be doing a better job and what exactly is the right doing deeply wrong right now?
00:40:47.000You know, so what really attracted me to conservatism was reading the philosophy.
00:40:51.000So, you know, one of my gateway drugs was Thomas Sowell.
00:40:54.000I read Conflict of Visions, and boy, that book, when I assigned it to my classes at UVA, you know, that really opened people's eyes.
00:41:00.000And he talks about, do you have the constrained view of human nature, which is where you think people, if you take off the constraints, they're going to do selfish, greedy, sexual, aggressive things, and we need religion, family, law.
00:41:14.000Versus the unconstrained vision, which goes back to Rousseau, or it's the John Lennon song, Imagine.
00:42:10.000Um, but I look at the Republican Party, well, since Newt Gingrich, I think, converted to a much more confrontational party, which again, I can't criticize that.
00:42:20.000The Democrats didn't treat the Republicans well when they were in the majority.
00:42:22.000But I think Newt Gingrich and Fox News created an environment in which, in which the Republicans were more incentivized to sort of go rogue, to develop an, to
00:42:42.000The worst critique of the Republican Party, or a common critique, is all they seem to really care about is lowering taxes on the rich.
00:42:50.000That seems to be their top priority, and that's been true for a while.
00:42:53.000And so a party that is just focused on its relationship with its donor class, and then its ability to do things... Well, don't get me started on Trump, but the things that Trump is doing to destroy our alliances, to disrespect our allies while sucking up to dictators, and the fact that the Republican Party has not repudiated him,
00:43:12.000So I think that Trump clearly is not a conservative.
00:43:15.000He is appealing much more to authoritarian tendencies.
00:43:18.000I can't see any lineage from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.
00:43:24.000There is no way to get from here to there.
00:43:27.000So the fact that the Republican Party has lost its conservative soul, I think, and is following Donald Trump,
00:43:34.000Is I think a mark of damnation that it will wear for many decades.
00:43:39.000We quote research in the book on how however the political world looks between the ages of 14 and 24 sticks.
00:43:47.000And so I think the Republican Party is signing I can't say it's death warrant but I think it's going to lose a generation.
00:43:57.000I mean, I tend to agree with that assessment, which is one of my great fears about President Trump before he was President Trump, was that I listed several fears about President Trump that I had, and my chief one, which I think is still on the table, is the toxification of conservatism thanks to all of this.
00:44:11.000With that said, is there any way to put the political genie back in the bottle?
00:44:14.000Because it seems like political leaders of both sides have a real interest in revving up the culture wars, and I think that when it comes to Republican legislative priorities, it has less to do
00:44:22.000With the stuff they'd like to do, and the stuff that they can actually do without blowback.
00:44:26.000So tax cuts are popular because who exactly is going to whine about them?
00:44:40.000But the point is that there's the stuff that people can get done in Congress, and then there's the stuff that people can jabber about in Congress.
00:44:45.000And by looking to our politicians as our moral leaders, by looking to our politicians as our philosophical leaders, what we've actually done
00:46:04.000I think Obama, I like him philosophically and he started the right way.
00:46:10.000The Republicans, however, there was a particular retreat they had early in Obama's, in the first couple months of his term, somewhere in Maryland, I can't remember where it was, and they did a calculation and they said,
00:46:21.000Should we work with them and try to make them successful?
00:46:44.000You have three months to join me on it.
00:46:46.000If you don't join me on it, I'm going to break your knees.
00:46:48.000I'm going to blame it all on you, and we're going to do it my way.
00:46:50.000But because Obama didn't play hardball, and he did this internationally too, because he didn't know how to negotiate and have a tough side, the Republicans correctly calculated that they could make him fail.
00:47:08.000And then also on the health insurance, yeah, it was, he got no Republican votes, but he tried and tried and tried to take a Republican idea from Mitt Romney for how to do health reform.
00:47:17.000So Obama tried, and it was this hyper-partisan Republican party that I think drove him ultimately to have to just do it in a partisan way.
00:47:25.000Obviously I would disagree with that political analysis almost in full, but I do think that election 2012 was basically
00:47:31.000In my view, sort of the breaking of the country.
00:47:32.000Because by election 2012, there was a belief on the right that Mitt Romney was a decent guy who was pretty moderate in a lot of his politics, the only Republican who had ever provided Obamacare for a state.
00:47:43.000And then he was torn apart and savaged as a bad guy in exactly the same way the left savages Donald Trump, except that Mitt Romney is not Donald Trump.
00:47:49.000And so we've now been locked into this mutual rock-em-sock-em robots combat where it's a lot easier to punch the other guy than to have a conversation.
00:48:28.000There's no one thing we can turn around and change.
00:48:31.000I think the most basic thing we need to do is we need to have some major reforms of our political institutions to encourage more moderation, compromise, and cooperation in Congress and at other levels of government.
00:48:44.000This is an idea from Norm Ornstein, who wrote the book It's Even Worse Than It Looks at Political Scientists, is at some point, the next president, somebody will say, OK, we're in big trouble here.
00:50:02.000One of the suggestions we make in the book is that however bad things are, the young generation, which has had very little time to work out problems, they've been given very little freedom and independence, when the current generation, iGen or Gen Z, when they reach the age of political power, things might get a lot worse because they haven't worked out the skills of compromise, dispute resolution on their own.
00:50:26.000So, I think we're in big trouble and we're going to have to take a comprehensive look at how we raise children, how we educate them in high school and college, how our political institutions work.
00:50:35.000I've done what I can, Greg and I have done what we can in our book.
00:50:38.000This is going to take a collaboration among political scientists and historians to really focus, as we're focusing on other threats to the country, to really focus on the threats to our democracy without blaming one side or the other, saying the system is messed up.
00:50:52.000If we want to be a light to the world, if we think that democracy and liberty are important virtues, we need to get our own house in order.
00:50:59.000And this is, I think, where a really deep solution is going to require a rebuilding of a social fabric that has almost nothing to do with politics.
00:51:08.000And when we watch the social fabric torn apart on everything from sneakers to football, it seems very difficult to put all of that back together.
00:51:16.000It seems to me that bipartisan legislation is not going to make everybody feel better about everything.
00:51:20.000It seems like whatever legislative remedies are sought to various problems, just because you got a Democrat and a Republican shaking hands doesn't heal the problem.
00:51:28.000What we have here is that neighbors don't trust each other.
00:51:31.000Neighbors don't see each other in any social setting.
00:51:33.000If the only thing that we have in common is government, we have nothing in common.
00:51:42.000You have a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old.
00:51:43.000I'm a parent with two kids under five.
00:51:44.000What's the best way to educate your kids to be part of that social fabric, to rebuild democracy from the ground up in every generation?
00:51:51.000So we have a whole chapter on play, and why play is so important for the development of any human being, and why play basically lets you practice the skills of democracy.
00:52:01.000When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled in America in 1831, he was so impressed.
00:52:06.000He said, you know, in France, if some great thing needs to be done, it's going to be done by the monarch.
00:52:13.000And in England, it's going to be done by the aristocrats.
00:52:15.000But in America, if they need to build a bridge or start a hospital, they get a bunch of people together, they form an association.
00:52:22.000Americans have a genius for the art of association, he said.
00:52:42.000All the parents are overprotective, including us.
00:52:44.000When we try to send our kids out, like we send them out to go do an errand, go across the street, my son would say, but daddy, everybody looks at me funny because there are no other kids out there.
00:52:53.000So it's a social coordination problem.
00:52:55.000I'm hopeful that Americans will realize we have a mental health catastrophe.
00:53:15.000And it has all kinds of suggestions for how you can make your neighborhood and your elementary school and all your schools, how you can make them better able to support free-range child rearing, kids having a few hours a day in which there's not an adult watching them, how you can get administrators to back off and give them more room.
00:53:36.000So we have a lot of ideas there for how you can address the problems from childhood up through high school.
00:53:43.000Next, we have to look at all of our institutions, all the places that we congregate.
00:53:47.000And so, let's talk about religious congregations, workplaces, universities.
00:53:54.000Beginning a year or two ago, I started getting calls or hearing from CEOs saying, we're being torn apart, battles over bathrooms, battles over this.
00:54:02.000A lot of the identity politics issues, which again, have to be solved.
00:54:05.000But if you do it in a common enemy way, it's impossible to solve.
00:54:10.000So leaders of almost any organization are facing these problems.
00:54:14.000My rabbi, I go to Central Synagogue in Manhattan.
00:54:17.000My rabbi, when a rabbi speaks, says anything about Israel,
00:54:39.000Runs on any app, it's free, any platform, it's free, in which it walks you through some basic moral psychology.
00:54:45.000In a sense, it kind of walks you through the righteous mind and some other social psychology about why viewpoint diversity is good for you.
00:54:59.000And our belief, our hope, and we have some evidence, is that if any group takes this training, it only takes about an hour and a half, if any group does this training,
00:55:10.000Whenever problems come up, they'll be better skilled.
00:55:15.000So I think we need to see this as a national crisis, rising polarization, which is making all of our institutions less functional.
00:55:23.000My fear is that if the Nike gambit pays off for Nike, more companies will do that.
00:55:29.000We'll have red and blue restaurants, red and blue dentists.
00:55:32.000Everything will be politics all the time.
00:55:34.000My God, what a nightmare that will be.
00:55:36.000So we all have to take responsibility for this, and it starts with us as individuals, and then steps right away from us as individuals into every organization or institution that we're part of.
00:55:46.000We can all be part of the solution at that more local level.
00:55:50.000I do have one final question, and that final question will be, what is best case scenario for the country in 20 years?
00:55:55.000What's worst case scenario for the country in 20 years?