Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Can The Political Divide Be Fixed?

Transcript

Can The Political Divide Be Fixed? · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:12
  Fast Movement program. I can't ever get my hands on why there are some
• 0:19
  shows that just move so quickly, and this is one of them. It
• 0:25
  is June seventeenth, show fifty one point eighty one of the Morning Show with
• 0:30
  Preston Scott On Preston, He's Jared. Great to be with you this morning,
• 0:34
  and I'm really pleased to have with us. He's Professor James Hunter.
• 0:38
  The website James Davison Davison Hunter dot com. The book is Democracy and Solidarity
• 0:46
  and on cultural roots in America's political crisis. Professor, how are you,
• 0:52
  sir? Doing well? Thanks? How are you? I? You know,
• 0:56
  it's tough to answer that question because this is your book is addressing a
• 1:00
  topic and the reason it stood out to me when Steven sent me a little
• 1:04
  opportunity here to get you on the program several weeks ago. We had a
• 1:08
  discussion on this program about what's the course of action here to bridge the political
• 1:14
  divide? Do you begin building a bridge? And before we go into and
• 1:19
  I want your opinions on what I heard, tell me about your reason for
• 1:23
  writing this book, because I would imagine to some people even the title triggers
• 1:27
  if you will interesting well, about thirty years ago I wrote and published a
• 1:38
  book called Culture Wars, The Struggle to Define America, and that book introduced
• 1:47
  the concept of a culture war to our public discussion. It's just as a
• 1:53
  truth and advertising I didn't come up with the term culture wars. That was
• 1:57
  Auto Bon von Bismarck in the eighteen seventies as he was trying to unify Germany
• 2:07
  at the time of nation building there. But what was going on there was
• 2:12
  very similar, eerily similar to the conflicts that were taking place in the United
• 2:17
  States very quickly. Most of the twentieth century, the division between right and
• 2:24
  left was a division over economic and political I would say political economy. It
• 2:32
  was about the conflict between corporate interests and labor unions, between the wealthy and
• 2:38
  the poor. That was most of the twentieth century. In the last quarter
• 2:43
  of the twentieth century, conflict between right and left began to change, and
• 2:49
  it was mainly over cultural issues and the cultural assumptions that under right certain kind
• 2:57
  of ways of thinking about government. That culture war over the last forty forty
• 3:06
  five fifty years has only intensified to the place that we are in right now.
• 3:12
  This book, in a way is its bookend an attempt to understand the
• 3:16
  political crisis that we're in today, but not by looking at polarization. Rather,
• 3:25
  I look at the other side of the same coin. Our national motto
• 3:30
  is e pluribus unum. Rather than looking at faction or the pluribus, I
• 3:37
  look at the unum. What about the cultural resources always kept us together across
• 3:46
  our differences, and in spite of our differences that glue, that sense of
• 3:52
  weakness has lost its capacity to bring us together. And wanted to understand where
• 4:00
  that came from and what it's led to and its consequences. Your audio magazine
• 4:10
  a journey into whatever is left of journalism and always pointing out and correcting what
• 4:15
  is not. The Morning Show with Preston Scott challenge is keeping this in between
• 4:27
  the rails because the questions I could ask Professor James under are endless. You
• 4:33
  said I wanted to learn. What did you learn? Broadly speaking, well,
• 4:44
  I would say that the most important lesson here it changes our perspective when
• 4:55
  we learned this lesson that we think that democracy tend to think of democracy mainly
• 5:01
  as elections as the rules by which we operate politically. We therefore think that
• 5:12
  the crisis of democracy is mainly a crisis of of the ways in which parties
• 5:20
  misuse their their authority. That the way that parties manipulate populations. There the
• 5:30
  electorate and so on. That we can just and if we just fixed the
• 5:35
  technology of our of our political systemic we just tweak election laws and and disinformation
• 5:44
  and so on, we could fix the problem of democracy. And that's just
• 5:48
  not true democracy before it is anything else. Uh is is a set of
• 5:57
  ideals, a set of values, a set of belief PEFs, and they
• 6:00
  all underwrite they provide a kind of infrastructure for democracy. Democracy first and foremost
• 6:09
  is an ethical vision about the reconstitution of our public life, oriented toward the
• 6:19
  flourishing of more and more people. This was the whole idea. At the
• 6:24
  time of the Founding, there was a monarchy, there was an aristocracy,
• 6:31
  an extremely powerful religious establishment, and it was all biased toward the complete control
• 6:42
  of those in power. That power, through democracy was extended to the people
• 6:48
  themselves. But isn't it important to note, professor, that the Founders steered
• 6:55
  us away from democracy into a constitutional republic. I would argue that, I
• 7:01
  mean, but see, I guess I would say that's a buzzword to me
• 7:06
  because the left side of the political spectrum and growing numbers of the right side
• 7:11
  of the political spectrum are anchoring on this word democracy, democracy, democracy,
• 7:16
  democracies destroy and our founders knew it, well, there are different forms of
• 7:24
  democracy, and a republican form of democracy is still a democracy. There is
• 7:29
  directed democracy, and that's what the founders were trying to avoid. Correct.
• 7:36
  Yeah, so a republic is still a democracy, but it's representative in its
• 7:43
  character. The you know, one other important element of this ethical vision was
• 7:53
  that it was an agreement that we don't kill each other over our differences,
• 8:01
  but we talk those differences through. Part of what this story I tell is
• 8:05
  about is the cultural resources. I want to look at the cultural infrastructure,
• 8:11
  the things that provided the very foundations of our political system, and those cultural
• 8:20
  resources have largely vanished, They've unraveled. They are no longer resources that we
• 8:28
  draw upon. So, you know, we're going to have a presidential debate
• 8:33
  in a couple of weeks. Don't imagine for a moment that it's going to
• 8:37
  be real debate. These are highly scripted. They are all about accusation counter
• 8:46
  accusation. It is it's not a serious substantive engagement with the issues. It's
• 8:54
  about making the other person look bad. It's the form of democratic debate,
• 9:00
  but the substance is no longer there, and it hasn't been for quite some
• 9:05
  time. The book is Democracy and Solidarity, on the cultural roots of America's
• 9:11
  political crisis. There is no doubt we have one that's like as obvious as
• 9:18
  anything can be. We've discussed it. The speed in which it's accelerated is
• 9:24
  a little alarming. Professor James Hunter, the author with me. Professor,
• 9:28
  if I were to ask you, what do you think is the single greatest
• 9:33
  contributing factor to what's happened and is accelerating over the last forty five to fifty
• 9:39
  years, what would you point to? Well, I don't think there is
• 9:45
  a single factor. I do think that I make a distinction when I speak
• 9:52
  of culture between the weather and the climate. We tend to focus on the
• 9:58
  weather because it's so obvious. Most of what has brought us to this moment
• 10:03
  is climatological. Culturally speaking, it has taken a long time to get us
• 10:09
  to this point. And I would say that you know from the speaking about
• 10:16
  the right, Donald Trump is a symptom of that rather than the cause of
• 10:22
  it. As the left would say on the right hand side of the political
• 10:28
  spectrum, wokeism, cancel culture. It is a symptom. It is not
• 10:35
  the cause itself. I do. I would argue, however, that the
• 10:41
  new technologies of communication, the new communications technologies have really accelerated. They have.
• 10:52
  They haven't caused it, but it represents kerosene on a fire, and
• 11:00
  and certainly that's a major part of the problem right now. If we could
• 11:07
  simply contain the effects of these technologies and the algorithms that accentuate polarization, it
• 11:16
  would certainly tone down a lot of the of the polarization problem. Isn't no
• 11:24
  go ahead, go ahead. I was just going to say that the problem,
• 11:30
  because this is a historical study at a sociological study that brings things to
• 11:35
  the present. The problem isn't polarization per se. The problem is that we
• 11:39
  lack the cultural resources to work through our differences. How would you how would
• 11:46
  you define those resources? Well, again, culture is a way of understanding
• 11:56
  the world, interpreting the world, and so on. We no longer share
• 12:01
  any kind of ethical agreements. We no longer share uh any understanding of what
• 12:09
  makes something truthful or untruthful. It's often said that we live in a post
• 12:15
  truth world. A post truth democracy is a contradiction in terms, you can't
• 12:22
  run a country. I agree, and and but the same is true in
• 12:26
  our ethics. There's there is simply this grand canyon of a divide uh.
• 12:35
  There were always ethical uh arguments and distinctions, But underneath those ethical uh disagreements
• 12:43
  were some shared assumptions about the way the world is, how we determine what
• 12:48
  would be good ah versus evil and so on, we would come together,
• 12:54
  professor would be Would I be crude though in suggesting that one of those presumptions
• 12:58
  was there is a God? Well, historically that was certainly a central part
• 13:11
  of the assumptions, as you say, the assumptive framework. But interestingly are
• 13:20
  the assumption about the nature of God has been transformed over a period of two
• 13:26
  hundred and fifty years. It is, you know, and in part what
• 13:33
  made what was part of the secret sauce was the opacity, the way in
• 13:37
  which our understanding of God was opaque. It allowed Calvinists and Catholics and Jews,
• 13:46
  ultimately Muslims and Buddhists to all affirm God even though their conception of God
• 13:54
  was different. They still nevertheless embraced a notion of transcendence that has largely disappeared,
• 14:01
  especially in our public life. Not so much in private life, but
• 14:05
  in public life. So that that is a useful illustration of this. The
• 14:13
  one other, very quick point here, there's a there are different ways of
• 14:20
  coming together. In one of the ways is through opposition to things that represent
• 14:28
  a threat. The Cold War was one of those threats that whether you were
• 14:33
  on the left or on the right, you agreed it was a threat to
• 14:37
  the American project. When the Cold War came to an end, our animosity
• 14:46
  toward the other turned inward, and it was now the other side that was
• 14:54
  the threat to America. I thought, you know, certainly in nine at
• 14:58
  nine to eleven in two thousand and one, there was a brief moment where
• 15:05
  opposition to radical Islam was a source of our solidarity. It brought us together.
• 15:11
  It was short lived, but it illustrates the point. I was confident
• 15:16
  that when the pandemic started to emerge, that we would unite around this global
• 15:24
  threat. But silly me didn't happen. Even the pandemic, an external threat
• 15:31
  like this was another source of polarization and conflict, and we didn't have the
• 15:41
  resources. Science was no good to us well because science fled to us.
• 15:46
  Science told us that the vaccine could stop a coronavirus, and it can't,
• 15:52
  and so it fundamentally just lied. Well, I think that's a little bit
• 15:58
  too sharp in my opinion. I think there was. But the real point
• 16:06
  here is that we couldn't agree on what science is in the first place,
• 16:11
  what science could do and not do, what its methods, and people who
• 16:17
  are speaking there were people speaking out of the scientific tradition who are saying very
• 16:23
  different, oftentimes opposite things, And again that's a symptom of the fact that
• 16:30
  we no longer have an agreement on what it is that binds us together or
• 16:40
  the means by which we might achieve a coming together. Professor, I'm going
• 16:45
  to leave you with the last word right there. Thank you so very much.
• 16:48
  And this is a topic that's worthy of a lot more time than we've
• 16:51
  got, but hopefully we've wet the appetite of some folks who go pick up
• 16:55
  the book. Thank you, sir, Thank you. Democracy and solid darity
• 17:00
  on the cultural roots of America's political crisis, I could point to personally a
• 17:07
  half dozen things. Media failing in its job, lack of north on the
• 17:11
  moral compass. Most people remember, we elect who we are. We just
• 17:15
  hold up a mirror what we get in Congress. We're mad at it.
• 17:18
  Well, that's who we are, mad at ourselves. Lack of common language.
• 17:25
  I mean, the list goes on and on. Interesting topic. Professor
• 17:30
  James Hunter with us on The Morning Show with Preston Scott