American Politics Has A Respect Crisis
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In one of our focus groups, a bunch of young people in North Carolina, mostly probably like Marco Rubio voters, as they were walking out of the focus group, one of the guys looked at me and said, well, I play guitar in a rock band, and he shrugged his shoulders. Like, I'm the conservative in the rock band, and so I have to learn to respect these people. Hello, and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke.

How much do you respect people who hold different political views from you? It's a question that underpins much of the discord in our current politics. Political polarization has been on the rise for decades in the US, and people are feeling those effects in their everyday lives. A Pew study last year found that two-thirds of Americans always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, and a majority, 55%, feel angry.

In that same study, 84% of adults said political debate has become less respectful. And just a couple weeks ago on this podcast, we spoke about a rise in political violence in America and threats to lawmakers. 43% of state legislators had said they'd experienced threats of political violence.

We've had a pretty monumental last month of news, and we wanted to zoom out for a second and talk about a wider trend in our politics. And also to that point, the point about having so much news over the past month, if everything is going to plan, I am on vacation right now. And this was recorded last week, just in case I miss a newsy reference. And I'm also knocking on wood right now as I say that. So.

Our guests today have some clues about how we got here. Jeff Spinner-Halev is a political science professor at UNC Chapel Hill, and Elizabeth Theis-Morse is a political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. They co-authored a book called Respect and Loathing in American Democracy, which explores how respect is both lacking and vital in modern politics. Jeff and Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks. Glad to be here.

In the introduction of your book, you wrote that tolerance has frequently been studied by political scientists, but not respect. So let's start by defining our terms here. What's the difference and why haven't folks been studying respect?

So I'll start by talking a little bit about tolerance, since I know that area well. And in political science, tolerance is really defined as our willingness to give groups we really hate their basic civil liberties rights. So right to free speech, right to assemble, that kind of stuff, right? It's very basic. I can just dislike them so much and talk negatively about them and do whatever I want, but I need to be willing to give them their basic rights.

And respect is different. In a very generic sense, respect is more robust than toleration, which is that I respect you as a fellow human being and I recognize you as a fellow human being and the dignity that comes along with that. So in the philosophy literature, that's called recognition respect because it's about recognizing you. There's also a further political notion of respect called

which we are defining as civic respect, which is, I don't just respect you as a fellow human being, but I recognize that you have different views than I do. And in general, with some exceptions, I ought to respect the different views that people hold around me as well. So we live in a diverse world marked by pluralism. And if we accept that, then we ought to respect the other views that are running around our political and social lives.

I have to imagine that some listeners in their heads are already thinking, well, what about this view? What about that view? What about this view that I don't tolerate, that I don't respect? You know, what are the outer bounds of respect, which I do want to get to. But first, from your view, what is the state of respect in American political life right now? And in fact,

We love this. You approach this from an empirical angle, which is trying to measure respect. What did you find? So we did focus groups and that was stunning. I mean, the expressions of disrespect that people had for opposing partisans were

was visceral. I mean, it was visceral. We also did surveys, and in those surveys, we measured both recognition and civic respect and really tried to get at this idea that in a democratic system, not only is there this general principle that we should abstractly respect fellow human beings, but also, do you respect people?

opposing partisans? Do you respect people in the other party or people who voted for Donald Trump or for Hillary Clinton at the time? And so we were getting at it empirically, both through surveys and through focus groups. And we found that people overwhelmingly struggle with respect, especially liberals believe strongly in the idea of respect, and they have such a hard time giving it to Republicans.

I mean, give me a number here. What are we talking about? Like, what percentage of Americans manage to respect their oppositional partisans? We can say it's about 60% of Democrats that in some of our measures are having a hard time respecting Republicans. And the reverse is also true. Having said that, there are more measures on which Democrats don't respect Republicans than the reverse. I do want to note that I

Our studies are already from a few years ago, right? So the data is not, it's not like polling that we have in America where you pull someone tomorrow, the next day, and then three days later, we have the numbers out.

Let me be a little more precise, which is that when we ask people why they think the other side votes the way they do, a vast majority say, and this is around 60%, maybe even a little higher, from both parties say that the other side votes the way they do because they're ignorant or misled by the media.

And what's important about that is that what that means is if people were not ignorant or misled by the media, then you think they would vote like you do. There's a fundamental inability to respect the idea that other people simply have different views than you do. So we are looking at around 60% of the population, maybe a little more, who actually have a hard time respecting the diversity of viewpoints in the world today.

You said there are other measures as well that maybe liberals or Democrats perform worse on when it comes to the measure of respect. What other kinds of questions are you asking people? Yeah. So we asked people when they thought of opposing partisans, if you think they're racist or sexist.

And so Democrats think Republicans are racist or sexist by almost 60%, but the reverse isn't true. It's more like 20% or 22% of Republicans on intolerance. Almost 70% of Democrats think Republicans are intolerant. Around 50% go the other way. Democrats think that Republicans are not open to new ideas. 60, 60% think that. When it comes to Republicans, only 48% think that, which is still, of course,

pretty high. And then unintelligent, almost half of Democrats think Trump voters are unintelligent. And only 31% of Republican voters think Clinton voters are unintelligent. So on our measures, in general, with the two exceptions that I mentioned, Democrats have a dimmer view of Republicans than the reverse.

Why? How did I mean, I'm sure folks may have their own preconceived notions of why Democrats or Republicans may feel that way. But what did you conclude? So I would say that one of the interesting findings is that some of this is propelled in part, not all by young conservatives, younger conservatives, say, under the age of 40 or 45.

if they went to college, are surrounded by Democrats and liberals. Many of them have made their peace with liberals. So in one of our focus groups, a bunch of young people in North Carolina, mostly probably like Marco Rubio voters.

As they were walking out of the focus group, one of the guys looked at me and said, "Well, I play guitar in a rock band." And he shrugged his shoulders. Like, I'm the conservative in the rock band, and so I have to learn to respect these people. And the reverse isn't as true, partly because they're the minority, but people sometimes use the language to us of coming out to their friends as conservatives. Like some of them hide or partially hide their views.

So it's that you think that conservatives spend more time in liberal spaces than liberals spend in conservative spaces? Educated conservatives. I think that would be true. Yeah, I would add to that that I think what's underlying all of this, and it's true for both Democrats and Republicans, but it plays out a little differently, is that Democrats and Republicans have different worldviews and they moralize those worldviews. So Democrats tend to have a social justice worldview.

Republicans tend to have a national solidarity worldview. I think that younger Republicans who are educated Republicans are surrounded by this social justice worldview a lot. They confront that all the time. And it is not...

as maybe frightening to them or as off-putting to them as it might be to older conservatives. So I think this idea that the two sides have moralized their worldviews really drives the disrespect because anybody who disagrees with them is evil by definition because it's moralized. Right. Okay. Can you just explain a little bit more what we mean by those two worldviews, social justice and national unity?

Yeah, so the social justice worldview is the view of the world. So it's how the world works, where you see a lot of things in terms of

oppressed groups who have to, we as a society, have to deal with that history and that oppression and bring people up to be equal. We have to make sure everybody is treated equally, including changing the structures, you know, structural injustice and all that kind of stuff. And they see this not just as a policy option. They see this as in a moral world,

we would treat everyone as equal and we would ensure that our structures and our institutions are all treating everybody equally. On the conservative side, there's a national solidarity worldview that says, what makes our society good and strong and long lasting is if we all hang together strongly as a united group.

to fight any enemies, right? So we need to be united as a country. And that means we shouldn't be making distinctions among people by social groups. We just need to be Americans. And that's what makes us strong. And they moralize that. So what we have is two worldviews that are really at odds with each other in major ways. And they both are moralized. So anybody who disagrees is evil if they're on the other side.

And is this different than the way things once were?

Yeah, so we don't have time series data to show this, but we strongly suspect they were, that Democrats and Republicans often argued, but it was budgetary matters, for example, which you could imagine are part of compromise and negotiation, and you disagree, but not necessarily in a completely moralistic way. And then this whole idea of

we are all responsible for social injustice. It's certainly kind of a new thing, both in the literature that we read in political theory, political philosophy, and in liberal circles today. So that's maybe 20 years old, 25 years old. We can also see it with climate change, right? And the choices people make with climate change. So

We ask people a question like, what do you think of someone driving a Hummer? And so I can't imagine 40 years ago, if you ask someone, well, what you think someone drive a big car, people would say, oh my God, that person is killing us by their automobile choices. But today that's what we heard in our focus groups.

Oh, but I mean, there have always been people destroying society. If you think of 40 years ago, it could be communists or socialists. It could be, you know, anything you might think of. There's always been an enemy to society that, you know, if given the opportunity, would bring us down. So how is today different?

I would say that a big difference today is that the parties have sorted themselves. So it used to be that the Democratic Party was made up of all sorts of different people, including conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northern Democrats. The Republican Party was not quite as divided, but it included all sorts of people, including Southerners, Northerners, Westerners.

I think the parties having sorted themselves, and there's a lot of evidence in political science that this is true, make it more extreme. It used to be that we had common enemies, I would say, and now the two sides have different enemies in a way, right? And so it ends up really just dividing people because of how the parties have sorted. Yeah, I think one of the striking things about our book is how many people have lost friendships or cut off family members because of politics.

And 30 or 40 years ago when there were conservative Democrats, Southern Democrats and liberal Republicans, that was less likely to happen. So we do find that people who have friendships across parties are more likely to be more respectful of other people.

We also find that some people, they've pulled away from those friendships. They've chosen to leave those friendships, and I'm not sure the chicken and the egg problem here, and are also less respectful. And we think that was less likely to happen 30 or 40 years ago. To that end, what does the data show about sort of the percentages of Republicans who have Democratic or liberal friends and the percentage of Democrats who have Republican or conservative friends?

We asked people basically what proportion of their friends and family and coworkers were of their own party or of the other party.

And among so so most people, a lot of people said very few or none. So among Clinton voters, 42 percent said they have very few or none of opposing partisans in their network. And among Trump voters, it was 36 percent.

OK, so not that much different. But where it becomes different is when we get to the larger proportions. So among people who said about three quarters or all or just about all, there's not very many in either group. But people who said about half among Democrats, it was only 22 percent. And among Republicans, it was 32 percent.

So among Republicans, there just is more likelihood that you will run into people from the other party than was true for Democrats. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

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You mentioned earlier on that there are some caveats here, that living in an open democratic society requires respect from opposing partisans to a degree. I maybe have some idea of what those limitations are, but what are they as far as you're concerned as political scientists? Yeah, so we do want to distinguish between granting civic respect to a person and granting civic respect to a belief, right?

there are some beliefs that don't necessarily deserve civic respect. And they are, as you might imagine, those that are the kinds of beliefs that undermine democracy or are, you know, crazy conspiratorial beliefs. If you run into someone who believes that Jewish space lasers are attacking California, there's nothing that demands that you need to respect that belief. Also, if you run into someone who believes that

without any evidence that the elections are fraudulent, you don't have to respect that belief. But we also want to be careful to say that because someone has a belief that doesn't deserve civic respect, it doesn't mean that all their beliefs don't deserve civic respect, right? And so

This is where I think it becomes very easy to withhold civic respect from people because of one or two of their beliefs. And then people engage in what we call political stereotyping that, oh, because you have this one belief, all your beliefs are crazy. And we want people to understand that because someone has one or two beliefs,

Beliefs that don't deserve respect, it doesn't mean all of them do. But beliefs that undermine democracy in a wide sense are beliefs that we don't think deserve civic respect. And that's true for civic respect. For recognition respect, we argue that it's universal. It doesn't matter what people believe or say. They deserve recognition respect.

In fact, you wrote in your book that part of the reason you went down this path doing all of this research was that after the 2016 election, a friend said, quote, I believe in equality and the importance of respecting my fellow citizens, but I cannot respect anyone who voted for Donald Trump. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, that was a quote a friend of mine said at lunch. And what struck me is this abstract belief in respect, but yet the desire and ability to withhold it from almost half of your fellow citizens. And so that's very dangerous in a democracy when you believe that almost half of your fellow citizens don't deserve respect.

There's all kinds of ways to understand why people voted for Donald Trump, and some of them might not deserve respect, but some of those beliefs do deserve respect.

So what do you do if you conclude that some of those views don't deserve respect? I mean, you were just talking about how Democrats focus on social justice, and so they may view the beliefs of the right as being racist or sexist. And if they conclude that somebody is racist or sexist, then they would choose not to respect them. Or maybe it's a choice, maybe it's a gut reaction, whatnot. How would you assess that way of civic behavior? I think it's really important to emphasize that,

But for civic respect, we're just talking about listening to and engaging with the other side's opinions. We're not saying anywhere along the way that you have to agree with them. So to me, civic respect is just saying, I want to try to understand where you're coming from.

At the end of that conversation, I might disagree with you even more than when I started. And that's perfectly fine. I think this idea of civic respect is just about being willing to give the other side a chance to be heard. And that's all. Many of our liberal focus group respondents did say that also.

all Trump voters were racist and sexist, all Trump voters. And, you know, that's a very sweeping claim. And we talked to the Trump voters about this, and it was very clear to many of them that many of them do believe that there is something called social injustice, that there is structural injustice. And they believe the way to change that is through individual behavior, changing individual attitudes, which is not true for many liberals and Democrats. And while it's a view that

I disagree with, it's also a view I can respect and understand. I think if we would just pause a little bit and not label each other in these terrible ways and try to understand people, then we can respect them more often, even if we don't agree with their views. You know, the second thing is, is that we can also understand the contradiction in our own lives. So one of my favorite quotations is, you know, we ask both liberals and conservatives, what do they think when they see someone driving a Hummer?

And we asked one group and everyone condemned the Hummer driver. And then one young man said, look, all of us, all of us fly all the time. And we fly to Europe regularly, which causes more environmental damage than a Hummer driver. And so it's very easy to be quick to judge other people's behavior. But we also might want to slow down and think about our own behavior and how we would feel if other people were judging us.

What do you see as being at stake here? So respect is fundamental to democracy in the following ways. We need politically to negotiate and compromise with opposing partisans in all kinds of levels, in Congress, in state legislatures, and city councils, and on school boards, not just at the federal level, right? It's at all levels. And if we don't respect opposing partisans, it's going to make it much harder to work with them.

Without respect, we are more apt to dismiss our friends who don't agree with us, and we're more likely to dismiss our relatives who don't agree with us. We think poorly of them or we avoid them. If we're going to accept the fact of diversity, which is a fact of life, we need to learn to respect them. The lack of respect

can be seen in the cancel culture that we see, this unwillingness to listen to people who disagree with us, both one-on-one, but also just across our society. I mean, we just are unwilling to listen to people. And I think it goes even further than that. I mean, if democracy is based on this idea of equality, which I think it is,

Our unwillingness to respect half of the voters in our country means that we disparage their views, that we don't count them as equal citizens in this democracy. And I think that's dangerous. I think it makes it more likely that we would be willing to say, for example, we can take away their vote or we can take away their right to speak. So I think there's all sorts of things that flow from this lack of respect, and we already see some

indications of that in our society today. The answer to the why part was essentially that the parties have become more sorted. But then my question again would be, why? Sort of sorting into two groups with opposing worldviews who view the opposition as flawed to their core and maybe even evil or dangerous to our country. Whose fault is that?

I have an answer without any empirical evidence or numbers behind me, which is that I actually think the fall of the Soviet Union has something to do with polarization and

making each other the enemy as opposed to the outside enemy. The Soviet Union, when I grew up, I'm an old guy. One of the things that united us was that the Soviet Union and the communist bloc was this horrible place. There was a large agreement on foreign policy, which of course is now no longer the case. Not that it's great to have a common enemy, but there is a way in which common enemies do unite people. And I think we've turned inward and found the enemy within our own boundaries as opposed to outside.

We have shifted from policy disagreement, and it might be because of what Jeff just mentioned, to what is now called affective polarization, which is hating the other party. So it used to be that people liked their own party better, but they didn't hate the other party. And now they hate the other party. And I think it's in part because it's not so much

policy-driven. There's not that many differences on policy, actually. There's some, obviously, but there's not as much difference. And so what drives us more is just hating the other side and thinking, and again, I come back to what I said earlier, which is these are moral disagreements. This is something where if you disagree with me on something, then you are evil and my side is good.

All right. Last question here, being constructive. What can people do concretely to build more respect towards opposing partisans? Yeah, that's the hardest part of the book.

You know, we think one of the great problems and challenges is that politicians have an interest in stirring up this kind of thing. The more that politicians stir up fear of the other side, the harder it gets. One of the things we can do in our own minds is think about one of our goals is to try to understand the other side as opposed to just try to demonize them. We right now have this political phenomena of

potentially more Black and Hispanic voters moving over to the Republican Party. I say potentially because as we do this podcast, we're in a moment of political ambiguity right now, shall we say. And so the question is, why is that? So I think if we try to reach for more understanding as opposed to more accusation, then that would be one way to enhance civic respect. I'd also add to that that

If we realize that we're not trying to change other people's opinions, and we are not trying to convince them that they're wrong and that we're right, and instead that we just want to try to understand them, I think that makes discussions a little easier.

I mean, that's certainly what we experienced in our focus groups, just sitting there listening to people and as moderators not being able to jump in and argue our own point of view. It really is a learning experience that fundamentally changes how you view things. But I would also say that, and we say this in the book, it's probably makes some sense for people to

be more willing to put politics aside a bit. I mean, we tend to have for a lot of people, politics is so front and center, and they care about it so much, and they're so passionate about it. Maybe stop paying attention to your social media feeds for a bit about politics. Just

put it aside a bit and kind of interact with people because you both play basketball or because you enjoy walking your dog in the park and maybe not engage everybody in politics all the time.

Yeah, I'll certainly say that one of my favorite parts of my job is that I get to interact with all kinds of different people, particularly when I'm out in the field. And it, you know, helps me better understand the world. But we're gonna leave it there for today. So thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you very much.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

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