Overdoing Democracy

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When Kay was growing up, her grandfather often told her that when he was serving on a Navy ship during World War II, there were two things he and his fellow sailors never talked about, religion and politics. In the present age, we're apt to think that leaving politics off the table like that is an authentic, or worse, a sign of being an insufficiently engaged citizen. We're apt to think the more we do politics, the better the health of our politics.

My guests would say the opposite is true. His name is Robert Talise, and he's professor of political philosophy and the author of Overdoing Democracy, while he must put politics in its place. Today on the show, Bob and I discuss how democracy isn't just a system of government, but a moral ideal. How the fact that it's an ideal gives it a tendency to extend its reach, and how the particular circumstances of modern times have extended that reach into all of our lifestyle choices, from the car we drive to where we shop.

But, Bob argues, there can be too much of a good thing. He says the way politics has saturated everything in our lives creates some negative effects, turning politics into something that parties can market like toothpaste and making each individual's views more extreme, so that we ultimately get to the point that we can't see our political opponents as people who have an equal say in our democracy. The solution, Bob says, is not to build bridges of dialogue with our political opponents as is so often advised, but to engage with people in spaces, places, and activities where doing politics isn't the point.

and you don't even know the political views of the people with whom you interact. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aewim.is over doing democracy.

All right, Robert, at least welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Brad. I'm really happy to be talking to you. A few years ago, you published a book called Overdoing Democracy. This book started from a conversation you had with a friend a few years ago about dreading Thanksgiving dinner with their family. How did that conversation about dreading Thanksgiving led to a book called Overdoing Democracy?

Well, so, you know, she was hosting her first Thanksgiving dinner at her home for her family. Her family is politically divided. And so she just mentioned that she was experiencing all of the anxiety about Thanksgiving because the various people who would be coming over, you know, were likely to get into arguments about at the time, you know, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and that kind of thing.

And she was wondering how she was going to navigate the sort of hostilities that were likely to emerge over Thanksgiving dinner. And she alerted me to this fact before this conversation. I just hadn't realized that major news outlets and magazines regularly publish around this time of the year, you know, October, early November op-eds and columns about how to survive Thanksgiving, given that

family members get into, you know, political disagreements and that can often get pretty hostile. And she described this general genre of advice giving to me and she said, you know, all of these columns, you know, recommend all of this obvious stuff, like try to change the conversation topic, don't yell, don't be condescending, remain calm, you know, be pleasant.

And she said, you know, it's so obvious. It just doesn't seem to me like these strategies can really work.

And I recommended to her, I said, well, does any column this in this genre just recommend that, you know, maybe just send an email to everybody you're inviting for Thanksgiving, telling them, reminding them even that Thanksgiving is a time when family and friends get together and that may not see each other regularly to talk about, you know, reconnect after a year where they might not have even seen each other or interacted much.

and that that's the purpose of the gathering. And the purpose of the gathering is not to try to convince one another about who to vote for or about which politician is better than the other. Said, why don't you just send an email saying, you know, remember what Thanksgiving's about. It's not for politics. You don't have to pretend that you don't disagree, but you know, just remember that we're getting together for something else. And she said, oh, that'll never work. And I thought to myself, you know, I said,

Wow, the idea that there could be a gathering of adults for the purpose, let's face it, of just eating good food, that there couldn't be a gathering of adults that wasn't, if not organized around politics, at least inviting

political interaction or interactions organized around politics. That's a strange thought that there couldn't just be a family gathering where everybody understood

that the point of the activity was something else. And so I got the idea of, you know, I started thinking more seriously as a philosopher about this, that, you know, the idea that politics and the wrangles of politics and the divisions of politics and differences among our partisan affiliations and identities, you know, struck me, who started to strike me as I started thinking about it, sort of saturated.

the entirety of social life, such that nearly every social interaction is in some way coded with or expressive of partisan conflicts or allegiances or political friendships or opposition. And the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that, although some might see the inescapability

of the political dimension of our interactions. They might see that inescapability as sort of a sign of the health of democracy, to people taking the politics seriously after all. And the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as like, no, this is democratically very unhealthy.

that we see everything as implicated in our politics, that it's bad for our politics to see everything as everything we do as an expression of our political commitments. That makes us worse at democracy. So that's what the book is about. It's called Overdoing Democracy, Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place. And it runs in opposition. The argument of the book is just that if we want to do democratic politics well,

We can't lose sight of the fact that there's a time and a place for politics, and there's an error in thinking that the way to serve democratic politics, the way to be a responsible citizen, is to see your political allegiance as expressed in everything that you do. How does that sound to you, by the way? Some of these people find this very counterintuitive.

It is. It's very counterintuitive. I think when people talk about, well, what's causing the the rancor and the divisiveness and the gridlock and the polarization in our politics, they never say, well, we just we've let democratic politics consume our life. They never say that. What are the common reasons that people give for the issue? And why do you think why do you think those reasons fall short?

Most typically, and I think this is rather telling actually and ultimately works in favor of my hypothesis, but you know on whatever end of the political spectrum or whatever region of the political spectrum you occupy

I'm willing to bet that your diagnosis of the toxicity of contemporary politics in America involves some claim about the depravity of your political foes, right? So that we tend to, well, let me put it this way, across the political spectrum,

Americans seem to agree that politics has become too toxic and divisive and filled with animosity and anxiety and anger. So we all agree politics is too angry.

But then, in the polling at least, when you ask people, how has politics become so toxic? They almost always point to their political opponents as the perpetrators, as the causes of the toxicity.

people will say, well, the reason why politics has gotten so toxic is because filling the name of the party you oppose or the name of the coalition you oppose, because so and so, those people over there, those people on the other side, those people across the aisle have become so depraved.

And that's the standard explanation. Now, it strikes me that garden variety, political disagreement, and even political rancor is not new to democratic politics, certainly not new to democratic politics in the United States. Something else is happening here.

that the toxicity and the rancor is increasingly being driven, I argue, by something other than actual disagreements over policy. Let me put it this way.

The data show the following surprising thing. Well, it's surprising to people when they first hear it and then you think a little bit about it and maybe it doesn't seem so surprising anymore. Forgetting about for the moment, political leaders, major office holders, highly visible spokespersons for the two major parties in the US, holding aside party documents and agendas and all the rest. Let's put the elites to the side for a second.

American citizens rank and file partisan affiliates, the Republican voter, the Democratic voter across the country. We're as a citizenry, no more divided over policy questions than we were in the 1990s.

In fact, rank and file Republicans and Democrats have actually agree more about policy than they did in the 80s and 90s. So a lot of the actual divisions over questions about what the government should be doing. Those divides are no more severe than they were 30 years ago. And in fact, with respect to certain kinds of policy questions, the division among Democratic and Republican voters

over certain kinds of policy questions has actually shrunk. What's expanded though at the same time is the impression among rank and file voters that the divisions have gotten more severe. That's the thing that needs explaining. It's not the ranker. It's the escalation of the ranker in the absence of any similar or commensurate escalation of the divisions over policy.

Okay, I want to flesh that out what's going the process is going on. But before we do, like you said, this idea that we're overdoing democracy is counterintuitive because people think, well, democracy is a good thing. How can you overdo a good thing? But before we get to that argument, I think it's important to note how you're defining democracy.

Because you make the case that when most people think of democracy, they're thinking of things like elections, campaigns, rules, offices, institutions, the mechanics of government. But you're talking about democracy as an ideal.

And you make the case that we emphasize the mechanisms of government, like elections, as an attempt to realize this moral ideal. And I think what the argument you make is because democratic politics isn't just institutions or voting. It's instead an ideal because it's this ideal that leads to democratic politics to sort of expanding its reach. Because we think it's an ideal. It's like a good. Right.

Right, right, right. So yeah, and I'm a proponent of the idea that democracy isn't just elections and democracy isn't just a form of government. It's a mode of society. It's an ideal for a certain kind of community among our fellow citizens.

And as you put it, it seems to me that you put it well, there's a hazard, we might say, a tendency. Once you adopt that more expanded view of what democracy is, not just a form of government, but a kind of ideal for a mode of society, a way of organizing society, then once you adopt that ideal, then it looks like democracy is going to be not just the thing that happens on election day.

But democracy is a way of life, right? It's the ethos of the society is that we are perpetually 24 seven citizens. And so the tendency is to think that

because we're co-equal citizens of a self-governing community. And because self-government is a real important good, again, I accept that, that therefore everything we do together is an act of citizenship, is an expression of our commitment to self-government, is itself, to put it this way, that everything we do together is itself politics,

That's what I think is a dangerous thought for democracy. The thought that everything is politics is, I think, a thought that might be promoted by the idea that democracy is a way of life and not merely a form of government. But I think that ultimately the idea that everything is politics is dangerous for democracy, that gets degenerative for democracy.

Well, you do a good job of flushing this out, how democracy can expand and scope, site, and reach in our lives. And so I think like the scope is, you know, it's beyond institutions, beyond voting, right? The scope can also be like, you're doing democracy when you're reading the news, because like, well, I got to be in order for me to be a good voter.

I got to know what's going on in the news and that you pay attention to that. The site of democracy can expand. It used to be, well, it's just like if you hold elective office or you go to the voting booth, that's where democracy happens. But now it's like, well, I can also express or take part in democracy at work. And there's a period where like, no, that wasn't good. You couldn't do that sort of like a faux pas, but now you're saying that that expansion is continuing to take over. Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that we've seen occur in the US, but not only in the US, this is its prevalence, perhaps most prevalent in the US, but other democracies as well, is, you know, what I say in the book is expanding the reach, right? So I think that we can think of views about democracy or theories of democracy as composed of a sort of a view about

the scope of democracy, which is a view about the duties of the citizen. What kinds of things are citizens required to do as citizens? And Brett, you just said, you know, they have to be informed. They have to follow the news. They've got to pay attention. They have to, you know, read newspapers or, you know, think a little bit about foreign policy, these kinds of things.

In addition, a theory of democracy establishes views about where the office of citizen is exercised, right? Where we as citizens are acting as citizens. And I think that you're right that the voting booth on election day or the town hall when there's a meeting of the city council, these are sort of stock and trade places of where democracy happens.

And I think that you can categorize different conceptions of democracy by thinking of democracy's reach as the kind of combination of that, right? The more extensive a view of democracies reach is, the more stuff gets built into the duties of citizenship, right? And the more places count as sites for enacting democratic citizenship.

Now, what we've seen happen since the late 80s, 90s is that in the United States and elsewhere, the reach of democracy has been expanding, which is to say we today see more and more of what we do as an act of citizenship. And we see more and more of the spaces we inhabit in our day to day lives as places for political activity.

One way this manifests is with what I call in the book political saturation. Here's a staggering statistic. Since the late 80s, the United States demographically has become a much more diverse society along a range of demographic.

metrics, ethnicity, languages spoken at home, religious, racial diversity, we've become a much more diverse society in the past 40 and 50 years. However, the spaces, the environments, the atmospheres that we inhabit in our day-to-day lives have become more politically homogeneous in that same period.

So, we've got this macro-level diversity, but in our day-to-day lives, the chances of us having a chance unplanned interaction with somebody who's politically unlike ourselves has been dwindling.

So one way to think about this is just to note the following kinds of trends, which again, when I talk about this stuff, people initially say, wow, is that true? And then the more you think about it, the more it seems like, oh, yeah, that is true. So grocery stores are heavily partisan segregated.

If you live in a place where there's whole foods, if you shop at a whole food store, if that's where you get your groceries, the chance of the chance that the person standing behind you to check out on the grocery line at Whole Foods, the chance of that person being conservative or voting conservative.

is vanishingly small, tiny, liberals get groceries at Whole Foods. If you buy coffee, if you're a coffee drinker, as I am, and if you have the choice between buying your coffee at Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, if you go to Dunkin' Donuts for your coffee,

The chances that the other people in the Dunkin' Donuts coffee shop are liberal. They're really slight. Dunkin' Donuts skews heavily conservative. Starbucks on the other hand skews heavily liberal. And by the way, you can see this even in the construction of the interior of the shops. Starbucks is selling coffee.

to people who think of themselves as cosmopolitan, world-traveling folks who like to imagine themselves being able to speak in many different foreign languages, and that's why the names of the drinks sound like they're Italian and French, whereas Dunkin' Donuts is not trying to give you the momentary illusion of being somewhere else in the world.

The Dunkin' Donuts, maybe Brett, you know, what's the Dunkin' Donuts advertising slogan? America drives on Delken or something like that. America runs on Dunkin'.

Now, no, just think about the difference in that just sort of marketing strategy, right? Starbucks is a world thing. It's a cosmopolitan thing. Dunkin' Donuts is they're not selling the illusion of cosmopolitanism. They're selling coffee and carbohydrates to people who are on their way to work. So I can go on like this, but what's happened in the US over the past 30 or 40 years is that

ordinary spaces that we inhabit have become more politically homogeneous. And because of that, what happens in those spaces, buying organic rather than just going to the shop right and just buying the vegetables that happen to be on the shelf, going to a place that specializes in organic vegetables, is not only a way of enacting your values,

that maybe your liberal values or your environmental values, environmentalist values. It's become a way of signaling to others what your values are. And this is also one trend in the US at least, is the number of tote bags you own positively correlates with how liberal your politics are. The more tote bags, the more likely you vote liberal. And note, tote bags often have political messaging on them. Tote bags are a way of showing to others who might be strangers

where your political allegiances lie. Roughly in the same way, I live in Tennessee, maybe things aren't different where you live, Brett, wearing camouflage attire is also a way of signaling to others where your political allegiances lie. Driving a hybrid car is a signal to others of what your politics are like. Driving a Ford F-150 highly correlates with being a conservative voter. We can go on like this.

The point is that we're living in a social context now in which everything that we do, the products that we buy, the way we dress, the kinds of activities we engage in on the weekends, how we vacation. Turns out that our social spaces are segregated according to our partisan allegiances. Now that means two things.

One is that more and more of what we do has become a way of expressing and communicating and signaling our partisan allegiances. But secondly, and I think this is more obviously where the problem lies, more and more of our conception of the reliable coworker, the responsible parent, the decent neighbor,

the considerate person in the parking lot more and more of our conception of strangers and their virtues

have become tethered to contexts where we can be sure that the strangers we interact with are co-partisans. So we start thinking that conscientious, sincere, friendly, responsible, considerate people are always our political allies and that our political foes are always the opposite, have the opposite traits. That's the problem. We're going to take a quick break for you, words from our sponsors.

and now back to the show. So how did it happen? Okay, so like in the 1950s, I imagine democracy was an idea, like a social good. But people didn't, like their consumer choices, I don't think, I mean, at least how I understand it, didn't, like if you hunted, it didn't say you were Democrat or Republican, like a lot of people hunted back in the 50s. Like I know my grandfather would hunt with people just from all, it was just like something you did, if you were a guy in the 1950s. So how did it go from,

that to where now even our consumer choices reflect our politics. What process are we going on there? Well, I guess it's no longer a $100,000 question. That's pretty cheap. This is a central question. Now, one thing I'll just say to start.

is that when we're talking about complex social phenomena and especially when we're talking about relatively recent, although not instantaneous, processes of social change, we're not going to be able easily to point to a single factor that explains the shift. So let me just talk about one factor that I think is close to the center of the explanatory story we ultimately want to tell.

about how things became segregated, how social space became saturated with politics, and then segregated according to partisan allegiance. Part of that story, I think, is a story about technology. Now, there's a certain bit of the story that the explanatory account that I think is true that will probably be familiar and intuitive to a lot of our listeners.

You know, social media, right? That is that one thing that happens, you know, in the past 20 years or so is, you know, we get this expansion due to some certain kinds of technological advancement that now we are as citizens.

more and more able to access and choose how we access and what we access by way of political information or just information about the world. So it's up to us now where to get at the news. We don't have to rely on Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite, right? Now we can get all of our news from Rachel Maddow if we want.

or Amy Goodman, if we want, or Breitbart, if we want, right? So part of the story is the story of how social media and communications and internet technology has made it possible for us to be more selective

and choosy about how we consume, when we consume political information, and what kinds of information we consume. But that's just, I think, the tight end of the wedge. I think there's a much broader story to be told along those same lines. I think that the thing that's happened over the past 30 years, maybe the past 40 years, maybe since the mid 80s or so,

is that particularly Americans, but not only Americans, and particularly because of technology, but not only computer technology. We have a lot more latitude over the conditions under which we live in our day-to-day lives than our grandparents could ever have dreamed of. More and more of how we live is up to us.

It's a matter of our selection and our choice. I'll just give one very quick example. Listeners might be able to tell that although I live in Nashville, Tennessee, I am not originally from Tennessee. I'm originally from New Jersey. I grew up in Northern Jersey right by the Lincoln Tunnel. And so when my wife and I moved from New Jersey to Nashville in 2001,

We expected Nashville to be different in all kinds of respects and it was different. In a lot of the respects we expected, it wasn't as different in many cases and some of the differences were a lot more pleasant than we realized they would be. However, just the difference between the year 2000 and 2001 and the year 2022, in Nashville, which is a growing city, there are four Ethiopian restaurants in Nashville now.

When we moved to Nashville in 2001, there weren't Ethiopian restaurants in Nashville. If we wanted Ethiopian food, we were out of luck. We had to wait until we visited Manhattan to get Ethiopian food again. There's a foreign cinema, independent cinema that shows foreign films.

in Nashville. My wife said film buff. We first moved to Nashville. Our view is that we weren't going to be able to see foreign movies any longer. Now we can. And so it looks as if one of the sociological changes due to various kinds of technology is that we're no longer quite as constrained by

contingent features of the environment in our life choices. Amazon can get you the ingredients to make Ethiopian food almost anywhere you live. Amazon can deliver you the ingredients in a day.

as more and more of the conditions under which we live have become matters of choice for us. And by the way, I'm not saying this is a bad thing just yet. In fact, this so far is all good, it seems to me. More and more of the conditions under which we live have become up to us. Well, one predictable, and again, not yet problematic, it seems to me, upshot of that expanded latitude

is that we each get to make our local environment in our own image, right? We get to choose the goods that we consume, the part of the city in which we live, the way we spend our weekends. More and more is up to us and we get to choose it. And so more and more of those choices reflect the kinds of preferences that we have. This is all natural and should be expected.

Here's what's happened, though, that makes this politically a side of dysfunction for democracy. Perhaps seizing on this cultural and technological shift, political parties have come to understand their objectives more in terms of capturing lifestyles, representing lifestyles than changing anybody's mind about what the government should be doing.

Remember, as I mentioned earlier, the US electorate is no more divided over the questions of what the government should be doing than it was in the late 80s. In fact, it's moderated. Partisan divisions have become all the more toxic and hostile. Why? Because politics has become, as part of this cultural shift, politics and partisan affiliation in particular, has become more and more

intertwined with, tethered to, lifestyle choices, such that now, here's another feature that is sound surprising at first, but might not be surprising upon reflection, Brad. The average conservative in Maryland has a lot more in common lifestyle-wise with

the conservative voter in Wyoming than the conservative voter in Maryland has in common with the person who lives three miles away who's a liberal. Think about that for a second. So geographical differences have given way to lifestyle differences. And now our politics are at the center of our conception of our lifestyles.

Part is an affiliation has become the center of our understanding of who we are. That's what's changed. I think technology is part of that. I think that the idea that politics in a democracy and especially in a technologically advanced democracy, politics becomes a lot like, if not identical to marketing.

In the same way that you might sell peanut butter or toothpaste or a car we sell candidates and often the same firms that sell us toothpaste and cars sell us the candidates. The merging of the commercial and the political has sort of led there to be a political advantage to parties and political candidates in trying to brand the politics in the way that they might brand.

a model of a kind of car or a brand of some commercial product.

Okay, so let me just make sure I'm clear. I'm on the same page. So what you're saying is that the reason this expansion is a hindrance to democracy. The reason why overdoing democracy is bad for democracy. Democracy subsumes all over life is that instead of taking part in this, I think, democratic ideal we have in our heads that we learned in like civics class, you know, when you're elementary school, like where you're, you go to a place and you have these, you know, logical debates, they're impassioned, et cetera, et cetera. And then you, the goal is to change people's minds.

Instead of that, we're just like, well, if you drive this truck or shop at this thing, that's your politics. There's no more deliberation. There's no more that deliberative democracy going on. Let me add one detail. It's not little.

You know, a huge part of the book and a large section of my work is devoted to exploring the political and philosophical implications of a certain cognitive phenomenon that's not restricted to politics. It's just baked into our cognitive makeup as the kinds of creatures that we are. This is what's called belief polarization. Now, we talk about polarization often as a certain kind of metric of the divide between opposed political groups.

So when people talk about polarization, they're often talking about how Republicans and Democrats are so far apart, they can't cooperate or communicate. That might be a polarization understood in that way, might be a problem for democracy. I'm talking about something slightly different.

Belief polarization is a cognitive phenomenon. It's the phenomenon and the regularity with which, when we surround ourselves with people who think like us, when we surround ourselves with people with whom we agree,

we turn into more extreme versions of ourselves. That is, interaction among like-minded people turns those people into more radical versions of themselves. They come to believe more radical versions of their commitments. They come to be more confident in the truth of their view. And crucially, they become more dismissive and distrustful of anybody who doesn't share the views of their like-minded group.

That's where you start seeing the real democratic dysfunction. It's not simply that because politics is a lifestyle. I now see people who don't drive the same kind of car as I do or don't shop at the same kind of grocery store as I do as aliens. It's not only that, although that's part of it, Brett. It's also that the more and more our political worlds are isolated and segregated into like-minded enclaves.

the less able we are to see those who are not members of our group as deserving of an equal political saying. That's the problem of belief polarization. As we become more extreme because we're hives together, we're siloed together with our like-minded group,

We thereby become more and more distrustful, less and less able to see those outside the group as reasonable, rational, intelligent people. They come to look to us as incompetent.

Irrational, benighted, and dangerous. Democracy is, again, as the ideal we talked about a little while ago. Democracy is this fundamental commitment to political equality. The commitment to political equality is in part the commitment to seeing our fellow citizens.

not merely as people who get an equal say. We have to see them as people who are entitled to an equal say. That's the equality part. Belief polarization erodes our capacity to treat those with whom we politically disagree, as nonetheless are political equals. That's the problem for democracy. That's the fundamental anti-democratic upshot

of this sort of combination of partisan sorting and the centering of politics in our lives and belief polarization. It erodes our capacity to regard our political opponents as nonetheless our fellow democratic citizens. So the idea, and no, you know, I'm a political philosopher. So maybe this irked me a little bit more than it would have otherwise. Maybe it irked me more than it should have. I'll even grant that.

But that in the last election, the two major candidates, Biden and Trump, had nearly identical campaign slogans, was very troubling to me. Do you remember the two slogans? I don't even, I mean, I can't remember. Okay. You've mentally blocked the reason for that. Here are the two slogans, right? Save America. And we're in a battle for the soul of America.

The first was Trump's, the second was Biden's. Now think for a moment about why I might say that those are nearly identical. I mean, they're not semantically identical. They're different words, maybe not entirely different words. They both have the word American. But they're identical in the message. The message of both parties, main candidates campaign slogan is, the other guy wins America's over.

Now, again, wait a minute, can that be a democratic message if the other guy wins, democracy's done? Okay, so what you're saying is whenever democracy becomes saturated in our lives, politics basically just becomes about a competition of lifestyle choices rather than debate over policy issues. And that whenever we start separating ourselves,

into these isolated political lifestyle groups, we start to become more extreme versions of ourselves. Then we start to see other people on the other side of the aisle as not being worthy of our political equals. We don't see them as political equals anymore and not worthy of having an equal say in our democracy.

And one of the results of this that you talk about in the book is that our politics just becomes divisive and we can't get stuff done. And all we get is this this rancor and then people just defining themselves in opposition to the other side. That's it. That's what's sometimes called negative partisanship. It's the idea that

under certain conditions like the conditions that we live in America today where we have highly belief polarized political coalitions and a totally saturated culture that everything is about politics and we're heavily segregated so we're heavily belief polarized. You know, this condition

No matter what Joe Biden might have said in his inaugural address about the toxicity of politics and we need to see each other again and unity, you know, as good as all that may sound. You know, part of me thinks that when politicians lament the polarized state of American democracy and how toxic our politics are, you know, it's not entirely genuine.

The reason is this, a heavily belief polarized and partisan segregated electorate is strategically very, very good news for any national political candidate. If you can count on your likely voter to also shop at Kroger, drive a pickup truck, live in a certain kind of neighborhood, work a certain kind of profession,

a lot of strategic choices about how to campaign become very easy to make. When the electorate is more politically heterogeneous, when their partisan affiliation is not so tightly tethered, tied to their lifestyles, campaigning becomes much more complicated.

And so as a national candidate or even a statewide candidate, being able to count on your core voter, not only having a set of political ideas, but be committed to a certain kind of lifestyle, it's a real benefit to campaign strategists and political operatives. And that's why I don't think that

the problem of our divisive, toxic politics can come from an elected official. They benefit from the way things are. Okay, so your solution to this is we need to put democracy in its place. What does that mean? Does that mean you not engage in politics? What does putting democracy in its place look like? Good. So I don't think that the solution comes from the institutions or from the leaders or from the parties. They benefit.

So where can a solution or a remedy or an intervention, a mitigation, which is really what I think we're talking about here? Because no, on the analysis that I'm giving, the problem of overdoing democracy is not the problem of some anti-democratic

tendency sort of taking over the population. We overdue democracy because we're concerned about being responsible citizens. That is that this is an autoimmune disorder, not a malady that's sort of infiltrated from the outside. Overdoing democracy is a problem that emerges because we take politics seriously. So I think that the remedy, the mitigation

has to come from us as citizens. And what I recommend is that we need to figure out ways and reclaim spaces for cooperative interactions with others where we just don't know what their politics are.

Now, that's different from saying that, well, we need to build bridges, invite the local, if you're a liberal, invite your conservative neighbors over for coffee. Maybe you should do that. Maybe you should go join a bipartisan softball league or something. I don't know. I mean, maybe those things aren't bad. That's not the proposal that I'm making. The proposal for putting politics in its place is finding ways to do more things together in which

We simply don't know what the other participants' politics are like, not because we've agreed to suppress our political differences, but rather because we've agreed that the point of the activity we're engaging in is not politics. It's something else.

Here's the kind of thing I mean. Even before sort of writing the book and thinking through the issues, I like music. I'm a very amateur musician. And so, you know, when I moved to Nashville and after getting situated in the city or whatever, I discovered that, you know, there's a really interesting bluegrass venue in town.

called the Station Inn. This is not a genre that I listen to. I don't know a lot about bluegrass. In fact, when I first started attending performances at the Station Inn, I had no idea really what I was getting myself into. So anyway, bluegrass is not my, I don't know any bluegrass records.

But on occasion, I go to this venue to listen to the music because it's very, very high quality bluegrass music. So of its kind, it's really high quality. I wouldn't even call myself a fan of bluegrass music. However, one thing that I think has been politically impactful in going to the station is having conversations with other people who show up at the open mic night at the station and Sunday nights or something and just talking to them about the music.

Now, the political philosopher in me can predict somewhat reliably that often when I'm attending performances at the station end, the person sitting at the table next to me.

probably has political views that don't align very closely with mine. That seems to me to be likely to be true. However, go to the station and talk to the guy at the next table about the music and discover. Well, here's a guy who really understands this genre. This is a person who's got a very keen aesthetic sense of what's going on.

in this genre. I'm learning things from this guy about who wrote this particular song or about how the upright bass player is doing something interesting that's borrowing from a different kind of subgenre within bluegrass.

And so I can no longer see the guy at the next table who I'm having, you know, sometimes extended conversation with, learning a whole lot from, can no longer see this guy as a failed depraved human being. I can see him as a human being who, regardless of his political affiliation, undeniably has

a command and an aesthetic appreciation and a grasp of this aesthetic form that is just that I don't, that he has a sensitivity that I don't have. And that leads me to not be able. I can't demonize him now.

I can think he's politically wrong, right? If we ever do this particular person I'm thinking of, if we ever do get into a political discussion, we haven't, by the way, in years of running into this guy occasionally at this venue, never get into a discussion about politics, not because we're biting our tongues either, but because we're talking about something else. It's like if we ever did get into a political discussion, I would still think perhaps, if he's got the views that I suspect he may, I would still think he's wrong.

I would think that his political views are in a serious way off on the wrong foot, even. So it's not even that I could see him as, well, maybe he's got a point or maybe his political views aren't as bad as I thought they were. I might still see his political views as bad as I thought they were, but I can't see him as a failed person any longer.

That's the kind of venue. That's the kind of interaction. That's the kind of setting that I think we have to build again for our democracy to thrive, a setting in which we can see one another's virtues outside of seeing them as partisan affiliates.

Yeah, well, how do you do that? Because we were just talking about a lot of the things that we do, like the tote bags, we carry the cars, we drive, the hobbies we have, the place of the restaurants. We are tinged with politics. So how do you find those areas of life? You can't find them. That's the thing. You've got to build them, right? So going to the bluegrass venue became for me, right? Again, I still don't count myself as a fan of this music. I mean, I can appreciate it now.

as somebody who understands things about music, I can appreciate. I don't own any of the records, right? I go to the venue to have that kind of interaction because it is a place where I can interact in a cooperative, pro-social way with another person in which I don't know what the political affiliation is. I can guess, I think I can guess pretty reliably, but the interaction is about this music.

So I think that we have to build it. In the book, I say, look, here's something to do, right? Take a moment to think what kind of activity could I engage in with others that I sincerely believe won't just be another mode of expressing my partisan allegiances. And then I say, try it.

And then I say, if you find your partisan allegiance being confirmed in that activity, try something else. Do a different thing. Go someplace else.

to figure out a different activity. If on the other hand, you find in that activity, some conflicting partisan affiliation or allegiance being promoted. Try telling the other participants, that's not what I'm here for. I'm volunteering here. I'm not politicking. I'm picking up litter from the park. If that doesn't work, do something else. Now let me say, just in case I've given the other impression, I don't think of myself as an optimist about this.

Right? I'm perfectly willing to say we might have crossed the Rubicon here. It might be that political saturation and partisan segregation have so taken hold of our communities, of our social environments that there's no turning back. That's possible. But I say,

It's worth trying because it's not clear whether there's no turning back. The way to turn back the, I think, involves not merely trying to make friends with your political opponents. Not everybody can do that. Not everybody ought to do that. Some people are committed to political projects that run so antithetical to my own that there's no way of seeing them as potential friends. I accept all of that.

What I want to suggest is that there are certain kinds of people who might be your political opponents with whom you can engage in some non-political cooperative activity simply for the sake of unsticking your conception of the virtuous human being from your conception of your political ally.

And I guess what this will do by doing that, it helps revitalize democracy because we're kind of mitigating or reducing the heat on that belief polarization where you just see your guys as the good guys, the other guys are the bad guys. That's right. By simply being able to point as I can with this particular human being I'm thinking of right now who is such a connoisseur of bluegrass music, I don't know if he's a political ally or not.

But I do know that he's a decent human being. And saturation and partisan segregation obscure that thought. They make that thought no longer available to us. They tether our conception of the decent human being to our conception of the partisan ally.

That's the thing that needs to be broken. If it can and it's worth trying because democracy is important. And what else it also does by putting democracy in its place, you're reminding people that politics, democratic politics, it's a good, but it's an instrumental good. Like we do this stuff for another thing. It's not a good in and of itself. That's right. So, you know, one of good. Let me make sure that this part of the argument gets in because you've put it very well. You know, you might ask,

What's democracy for? The answer it seems to me can't be more democracy, right? The answer has to be something like, look, when democracy is healthy, it creates the social conditions under which we, as individuals, can build our lives around other kinds of valuable things.

The cultivation of valuable human relationships that aren't structured around the categories of partisan democratic politics. Lives devoted to relationships with others about nurturing and caring and making art. And creative thinking that's not about politics, projects that are not about politics,

When democracy goes well, our lives are free, are open to building those other kinds of pursuits. Now, of course, we are perpetually citizens, so we have to care about democracy. It's not that we set up democracy so that we can then go be musicians, right? It's that we have to do democracy. That's true.

It's just that the point of the exercise can't be more of the exercise. The point of the exercise has to be to create social conditions where we can, on occasion, do something else together.

The prevailing social forces in our democracy have prevented that. They've saturated our social lives with the idea that the point of democracy is more democracy. That just seems to me to be philosophically confused. Well, Bob, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

So there are now two books. So let me say that. So there's a book that I published in 2019 called Overdoing Democracy. That's largely what we've been talking about. A more recent book came out about it, not quite a year ago, is called Sustaining Democracy. They're both published by Oxford University Press and can be found there, or you can look on wherever you might buy books online or otherwise. Both books should be available. But you can find me online.

I'm at the Vanderbilt University Philosophy Department. My email and everything is easily accessible there. And I'm also on Twitter at just my name, Robert Thalese, with no spaces on Twitter. And happy to hear from anybody who has questions. All right. Well, Robert Thalese, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Brett, thank you so much for having me. It's been really nice talking to you. My guest day was Robert Thalese. He's the author of the book, Overdoing Democracy. It's available on Amazon.com. Check it out at show notes at a whim.is slash overdoing democracy. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

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