The Outlook for Political Civility and Compromise in the Trump Age

              Distinguished Lecture Series
Michael Wolf: The Outlook for Political Civility & Compromise in the Trump Age

[Michael Wolf]: So the title here, The Outlook for Political Civility & Compromise in the Trump Age, not good, OK? (Laughter) Done. Interestingly though, the issue at hand is that - I really want to personify - is we in the American political side of a political life over concentrate on individuals. We over concentrate on the presidency, when in fact the lead-up to this has been decades long and the rollout of this does not end with Donald Trump no matter what happens. So, whether you like the current politics or not this is where we are at and there’s no easy way out. Secondly, this is not for those who are pro-Trump or anti-Trump on either side of this divide. Just know you are going to be unhappy with what I say. It’s good when both sides are unhappy. We’re in a deep division right now, and the division here is not new. It didn’t start in 2016. Donald Trump didn’t create this. These are not Trump voters, contrary to what we’ve heard, and anti-Trump voters. These are voters that have been out there for decades and have been percolating to this point. 

[Slide]: “2016 Narrative: Trump brought out new voters”
1)	Dealmaker needed b/c no compromise
2)	Negative tone - incivility
3)	Threat to America: Islam/Immigration 
4)	Political correctness has got to go

[Michael Wolf]: So the narrative here is that this dealmaker comes in and for a broken Washington. Washington is broken, there is no compromise. Some people don’t want compromise that’s the thing. And compromise sometimes in American history is really really bad. So we, for one, the normative component of what we say with that we have to be extremely careful. The negative tone incivility is at high points. We’ve had it, as we’ll see here, in the past. This is not new it’s different as we’ll see. That doesn’t mean it’s good or okay. This notion, as well, had resonance in 2016 has been around for a while too. That there is a threat to America and that this threat is aimed both ways. The threat that Trump projected about Islam, about immigration is not new. He did not create that. We have data going way back on that. In turn, the people on the other side of the fold here believe such talk is itself a threat. So the threat felt is genuine on both sides. It’s not a gut-level thing either. This isn’t where we are overly caricaturing the other side and saying well they are simple people or something. As we’ll see these are the most engaged partisans on either sides of this. This is not something we can teach it out of people. This has been taught in for decades. So there’s no easy way out and we now need to look at political correctness too - which is something that certainly came up in the campaign - as something deeper than what we kind of talk about here on campus. That political correctness in fact is a very deep concept and it means different things to different people. This didn’t come out of 2016, again, this comes out of research that I’ve done with some colleagues for a while. Okay. How does political change in the US happen historically? Our models really in political science particularly on party politics have been that America is a pretty stable place. Which is good. Our constitutional system remains kind of intact over history. We have kind of some interruptions at moments in time called critical realignments. Where the American public kind of goes crazy, right? Luckily for us the American public goes crazy on the party system, and for many scholars this is great because it protects our Constitution from populism. We are kind of like the Kool-Aid pitcher come crashing through a wall, but it’s a wall of our party system not of our Constitution. On the other side though, some political scholars say this is actually a very good thing. Our Constitution isn’t alive enough to allow enough democracy, and so what happens is this built up frustration occurs and boom these are finally moments of democracy. Whatever your view is, historically we’ve kind of viewed American political change as punctuated equilibrium as it’s called. These large moments of change and then stability for a long time afterward. For about, if you do your math here, about thirty years. We were supposed to have one in the 1960s if you believe the thirty year tradition. All my students in here, like Matthew, know this. I see others shaking their heads, they know this. It’s been beat into them all the time. It didn’t happen. Political scientists were looking, all the indicators were there that it should happen. We have political assassinations, third party challenges, all this other stuff occurring and it didn’t happen. The party scholars were looking side to side and in fact missed a lot of trends that did happen that we’re going to be talking about today. That we were waiting for like the tornado to hit and in fact it was a slow change, what we refer to here as a secular realignment. A slow, rolling out of partisan change and shift of the “who” made up the Republican Party and Democratic Party over time. This shift occurred surrounding a lot of unresolved issues that normally would have been resolved in one kind of massive election and downfall of one party did not happen that way. It did not happen that way for some good explainable reasons. We did have big elections in 1960s, but they slowly led to changes to where we are today that took about a 40-year rollout to really come to full fruition to be where we’re at today. What happened? In 1964, a horrible year for Republicans for the presidential level except for was a big moment of change. Right, so you have a presidential candidate who was outside of the mainstream of his own party and he gets smoked everywhere except for he wins the South, dramatically and uncommonly. The lesson learned, in fact Goldwater was proving this, he thought the Republican Party was too northeastern. He was really upset with Richard Nixon in 1964 for going northeastern. So he (Goldwater) gets killed in the 1964 election. Democrats think happy days are here again, passing civil rights legislation which then set off a change within their own party. Southern conservative whites - no matter whether you think its racism or what - the racial issue is more important in the way we study it. This was a political issue for them as well. Their political survival was on the line, because you’ve opened up the doors to people whose long history then has been a political control by not allowing African-Americans in. A big moment to be sure. In 1968 we see this moment kind of come through with a third party run that wins the Deep South. George Wallace went to the Deep South, and we always talked about it being part of Civil Rights era. Wallace was an interesting guy if you think about these issues that I’m pointing out here.  

[Slide]: “Worldview Divide: Other Side a Threat” 
	Law & Order Worldview 		Anti-authoritarian Worldview
- cultural tradition			- Change to status quo = good
	- physical security			- Individual Liberty > order
	- visceral right & wrong		- Law & Order can = injustice

	Issues					Divide is heightened as:
		Abortion			       Southern conservatives
		Affirmative Action		       Democrats → Republicans
		Iraq	
		Terrorism			       Northeastern liberals
		Immigrations			       Republicans → Democrats
		Gay Rights

[Michael Wolf]: Law & Order, the US role in the world. These were dividing the two parties. The race issues clearly was, Vietnam was. These are not issues distinctive themselves, they’re broader issues. The role of race, but that’s not a new issue that was around in the founding and continues to be. Our role in the world, Vietnam was one component of that but still there’s much more than that. The role of the American federal government relative to this. We missed some of those issues in 1968, because we concentrated on Wallace and segregation. But Wallace’s running man, anyone know who Wallace’s running man was? Curtis LeMay. The guy that told Kennedy to hit the button and just take care of Cuba. Yeah, we’ll lose the eastern seaboard but hey. (Sarcasm) That is a hawkish view that was very… this is part of these worldviews as we’ll see, that were shifting. In 1972 Richard Nixon was not gonna lose the South and as Goldwater had told him “You should go hunting where the ducks are. You should go to the South where the Conservatives are.” And he did. And forever this has changed. Jimmy Carter won some southern states, Bill Clinton won one or two, but forever we have seen the Republicans dominate the South. They did not dominate the South in congressional elections, because you had incumbents. We know incumbents served for twenty or thirty years. It took a long time. They did not change. They were conservative southern Democrats that till the 1990s to be replaced by southern conservative Republicans. As this occurred, the Republican Party appeal changed with Ronald Reagan along many of these issues. Conservatism and Social Conservatism and also obviously as we talk about with the military etc. Reagan was central casting for the final win in the South. But this appeal as one Conservative Party scholar from the Northeast has mentioned, when parties make strategic decisions there’s payoffs that are negative as well. And what happened is about a ten year lag behind winning the South, finally through this slow process for the Republicans, there is a rebound effect of losing the Northeast to the Democrats. That same democratic or republican divide between the Rockefellers, between the George HW Bush’s, and Ronald Reagan’s due to economic kind of thing. That comes back by the 1990s and 2000s. What we see is a kind of slow change that occurs to get us to the point where we have these differences. Now, if you look at the U.S. Congress there’s a kind of debate that we have going in American politics about whether or not - by the way, how polarized is the American public? If you watch the news we’re totally polarized, but other scholars say we’re not that much. What we have is a distinction, we have elites that are extremely polarized. The American public is not. We’re confusing this kind of polarization of the elites with the American public. In fact, the story is that there’s a disconnect between the people and their leaders, and these moderate people want you know more moderation. The moderation then, the disconnect is the story. That there, in fact, not very - this is not a better story no matter how it works out here as we will see. That “we are polarized and never to be friends again” or we have “the elites are polarized and out of step with us”. This is a deep debate that goes on, as my students can tell you. At the elite lever there’s no doubt. This is the U.S. Congressional distribution between 1970s and now, and what you see is there are no crossovers anymore.

[Slide]: “In Congress as Well as Public, the Center Increasingly Cannot Hold”

[Michael Wolf]: So that’s the elite level to be sure, so what about the American public? How divided is the American public? We are divided as we’ll see, but what we’re divided by is not simply this ideological component and that’s important in what we’re talking about in the Trump age now. Because it is a separation on worldview, an outlook that is a little different as we’ll see. That these issues that we talked about and we’ll talk about again. The inability to deal with the race issue. The inability to deal with gender issue. The inability to find what America’s role in the world should be.  We never came up with answers to it, instead we beat each other over the head. As that happened and we slowly changed and kind of took a worldview out of one party and put it in the other, another worldview and putting in the other party we’ve left ourselves enormously divided based on party identification, that it’s not very ideological not necessarily. We call it ideological, but it’s not tax cuts and other kind of things. What is this worldview divide? This is by a couple scholars, Marc Hetherington and Willard, and their discussion is at the end of this slow realignment that I’ve talked about when northeasterners became the Liberal Democrats rather than Liberal Republicans and Southerners went from Conservative Democrats to Conservative Republicans. What you’ve seen is this divide occur on what they talked about on worldviews. Now I called it “Law nor Worldview”, this is in their terms authoritarianism. I don’t like the term it’s an old literature (term) however. I’m sure my psychology friends and sociology friends know this literature, it goes way back Authoritarianism is kind of a pejorative term so I don’t really use that. If you think of the core here it is people who believe in the need for social order, believe in law and order, believe that the social status quo. There’s nothing wrong with it, don’t go shaking it up. In fact that disrupts American society and disrupts who we are. In turn, and the story that never gets told are those on the other side here the anti-authoritarian      worldview. It’s often set off that authoritarians, in this case law and order let’s put it this way, that don’t believe that social change is necessarily good. That it could be threatening to the American Way of life and who we are. That a breakdown in the social order is not good, that we should let Authority run and order is good for society first and foremost. There’s an opposing view, and we don’t often think that opposing views points back and is itself a worldview. It’s not a kind of catch-all category. Is itself a political view that we see in action, we don’t often think about it. That for the White House after Supreme Court decision making gay marriage constitutional that lights up the White House in the color palette. That is a worldview on display that many of us probably don’t think of it, but to somebody viewing from another worldview is like, “What are you doing?” That is an important kind of challenge here. So it’s not the story’s always about law and order, it’s not. It’s a two-way street here and these are deep-set and they are now deeply in our party system. They have evolved with other issues, especially over the last few decades. Abortion, Affirmative Action - remember the race issue, we cannot let that go. Iraq. Terrorism. What do you do with a terrorist? Do you torture them? Or is that not who we are? They start to kind of be a deeper division. We’ve looked at them on their own, but they are not in the sense of this worldview that now is part of the two-party system. This slow change has led us to a point where we in fact have what is referred to as a negative partisanship. This is really where my colleague Dan Shea at Colby College and Cherise Tran at Central Michigan (University) is where our research jumped in. We kind of jumped in a little earlier then some of this had gotten finalized, but this negative partisanship there’s new literature coming out. We kind of were out a little bit in front of it, but really the story about party identification these days and strength of party identification is more a story of disliking the other side more than liking your own party.

[Slide]: “Negative Partisanship”

Differing worldviews lead to DISLIKE of other party more than liking your own party.
Second Layer of party division.
Head & Heart mobilize you against > for party
       - well structure & more engaged
Worldview means other are threat, not loyal    opposition or legitimate bargaining partner.

[Michael Wolf]: We call this a second layer. We can think of the head part of ideology and being different. This is the hard part. We often think though this gut level stuff is just for people that don’t pay attention to politics. To the contrary it’s actually the people most engaged in politics who have the most gut level feeling towards this. So, we’re not going to teach this out of people, we’re not going to “kumbaya” this one. This is deep and genuine and for those that are scared by this, political scientists are, if you read your textbook the same textbook I have my students read right now, if you read that thirty years ago they were saying, “I wish we could have parties that made a difference.” Right? Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Will Rogers stuff. We just wish we had parties, well now we got them. Be careful what you wish for. But, the question is where do we stand with this? The issue is that these issues unresolved lay out there and end up choosing each other off worse and worse as we go on. This is the important part here. What does this come through? I want to put up these, these are actually from the senior seminar I helped a student do, Sarah Bailey was in psychology. Some of my psychology colleagues here. She does first Senior Seminar. These are thermometer ratings, how well do you like your party? This is over overtime. 

[Slide]: “Democrat Thermometer” (Multi-line Graph)

[Michael Wolf]: So as I said, this slow roll between the two parties. What you see here is no one likes their party any more than ever, they like them less. Even the strongest partisans like their party less than they used to, but they really don’t like the other party. Thermometering how warm do you feel towards it, you see they’re just dropping off. Over half of the positive feeling toward the other party is just completely dropped off entirely. And it’s not just the Democrats that Republicans hate it’s the same on the other story. Those early (19)70s by the way that’s just Watergate. Who thought Watergate would lead to anything good? But, apparently made people like the other party a little bit. What I’m saying here is that very much this Trump age and Trump voters aren’t really a new thing. The Trump voter has been there and ready to go, and the opponents to the Trump voters have been there ready to go as well. So where we’re at is where we have been making ourselves for a long time, but here from my research makes compromise less likely, civility less likely, and it drives a cycle towards “there’s no off-ramp” on this set of divisions here. Let’s start with one area promised to be talked about today in political compromise. Now the division here on political compromise we kind of have a normative sense that we need political compromise.

[Slide]: “Trump Age & Trump Voters Aren’t New”
Different worldviews & negative partisanship
- Makes compromises less likely
- Makes civility less likely & incivility more mobilizing
- Drives cycle of viewing the other side as un-American - threat to the American way of life

[Michael Wolf]: The political compromise is in fact that which refines the will of the people and brings better outcomes. Win-win situations. There’s no win-win situation, our game theory and other people that do this, there’s very difficult to come up with win-wins. So we should not fool ourselves, but this social desirability as we will see has become less and less over time. People might state it a little bit at the beginning, but in actuality there’s a view of a lot of compromising as a selling out. And this is a view that’s not equally shared between the two parties, but as we’ll see compromise can in fact be viewed as something that is dangerous. Also here, the ways out of it, how do you get people to compromise and in a system that’s not working, get them to deliberate? We’ll see how that works in a couple minutes. Let’s look at the party divisions. These are from 2010 surveys that we did, national surveys. 2012 national surveys that happened after the election. 

[Slide]: “Which do you think is more important in a politician: the ability to compromise to get things done, or a willingness to stand firm in support of principles? (Percentage chart)

[Michael Wolf]: So kind of cooling off, maybe a mandate had occurred. Republicans are much less willing to compromise. In the 2010 election you can see where the out party, you know the other parties got the majority, so maybe it’s a conditional thing. A PEW has done this study since the early 1980s and in fact Republicans are always less willing to compromise and Democrats are always much more willing. That’s probably a condition of Democrats coming from a coalitional party that had to bargain with itself anyway, but regardless the feelings here are very different and probably heightened though by Republicans feeling they’re out of power now. I wonder if we had this survey - I keep looking at PEW - when you going to field this to see what’s it like now with Democrats out in the cold? Regardless here, what you see is that there’s very different views on uncompromised based on party. What heightens this further though is that this is when you’re asking, do you want politicians who stand firm or compromise? We asked the secondary question, how about yourself? When would you compromise on set of issues? We fielded these issues the deficit healthcare, immigration, abortion, social policy. The social policy did say like gay marriage so it gave an example. We see here is not surprising as you go from the more kind of easier budget based issues you move to where the Democrats don’t want to compromise either. I don’t want to compromise with someone on these deeper set of issues. In practice, then again, it’s complicated by the reality of politics and about how these issues go as well. It’s a little too simple to just put in those terms so we also asked people their own view of politics. We had an open-ended question and this was an automated survey so we could record their and so we are actually going to play a couple. We asked people, what do you think of compromise? What does it mean to you? What we see here is that some people just out now reject compromise as bad. Some views negotiates, but the real thing here is that there’s a partisan difference about what it means. And someone’s effect might have been in the condition of the time, to be sure, 2012 Barack Obama just won. These differences are pretty fundamental. Here is a view of compromised something functional.

[Video Clip # 1]: “Political Compromise is getting shit done. Whether it’s good for your party or not, more whether it’s good for the United States.” 

[Michael Wolf]: Extremely functional that one. Here’s another one, this is very common. 

[Video Clip # 2]: “Political compromise, to me, means what do you think? We work together to get something done in real life even if it’s something you don’t like. That’s good I like that.”

[Michael Wolf]: Then there is others that kind of view this as a tactic. Here.

[Video Clip # 3]: “Compromise is having other people do what you want them to do politically.”

[Michael Wolf]: Alright, that’s Machiavelli right there. Then we get to some of the views as this being a threat.

[Video Clip # 4]: “Political compromise is not giving African-Americans free handouts.”  

[Michael Wolf]: Whoa. There’s more to come. I hope you cam ready, because there’s a lot of love in the room. 

[Video Clip # 5]: “I think compromise is giving in, is not standing up for your principles. I do not like compromise.”

[Michael Wolf]: Right, there’s more.

[Video Clip # 6]: “Compromise is deadly. We need to stand firm on principle. We need to return to what our founding fathers brought to this country, principles. Principles from the Bible. This country is on a slippery slope.” 

[Michael Wolf]: Couple more here. These are deep felt, hear the emotion? 

[Video Clip # 7]: “Compromise is very important, but Obama wants everything his way and his way is the wrong way. He is an idiot. He will not compromise or do things the way he wants. He wants to have the illegal aliens come in and treat them right and let them have our jobs. He wants to ship all our jobs to China. He wants to shut down the coal mines.”

[Michael Wolf]: This goes on. 

[Video Clip # 8]: “Compromise to me politically now meaning Republicans caving to Democrats, because it certainly never goes the other way around. The Republicans historically are the ones that need to be having to shed principles.”

[Michael Wolf]: They are not alone, here, this is a two-way street as I mentioned.

[Video Clip # 9]: “That means Republicans not obstructing every each and everything that comes along and trying to work with somebody rather than being pigheaded about it.”

[Michael Wolf]: I think, what’s visible here is there’s a sense that it’s not necessarily good. That it can be extremely negative to be sure, and when we talk about this - if you want civility to occur it’s a little easier if you have power to be sure, but these are different views of why we should even have compromise and pretty well stated why they think it’s selling out. This is a real attitude, a real view here. Now, how do you get over it? Classic deliberate. And the literature on deliberation by the way is tremendous. If you talk to somebody who you disagree with you become smarter and more empathetic to their position and we come up with better decisions. There’s deep literature in political science, so of course, I beg to have the questions put in about how often you disagree with somebody? As it turns out the stories not always good. As Democrats talk more with people who they disagree with they become less willing to compromise. So there’s people who want to compromise and some who “I don’t want to compromise.” Now Republicans, the more they - this is the story - the more they did talk to people with whom they disagreed they did get more willing to compromise, but in fact in the higher order models when we put in all the controls in deep, really bang the data, what we came out with is: Republicans became less likely to totally not want to compromise. It’s not money to compromise more. So this idea of deliberation, the stuff I spent a lot of time in my research life going after to improve American political life, it’s not necessarily an easy key over. Compromise already wasn’t doing well, let’s say before 2016 to be sure. How about civility? This is where we actually started this research project, and civility. Political science has looked at it differently, increasingly. That it’s more of a tactic than it should be viewed as a kind of just manners. Miss Manners or something.

[Slide]: “Civility”
Political Tactic & works w/this partisan environment
    - not bad manners
    - not changing American values
Who’s to blame?
    - someone else
    - Not Trump or Tea Party - growing partisan antipathy    
Trump voter mobilized by incivility?
    - many already mobilized
    - others demobilized
	- cannot simply say tone turns off voters

[Michael Wolf]: What we find here is that the increasing lack of civility is blamed not, we don’t find a good place to blame here. And it didn’t come along with Donald Trump, it didn’t come along with the Tea Party, it’s been brewing ever since we started with this slow roll. Let’s take a look at some of the civility here. Who’s to blame for, in 2010, the growing incivility in the United States? As you see here the blame just simply goes to other actors. 

[Slide]: “Among Those Who Think That Politics Have Become Less Civil Since Obama Took Office: Who’s Responsible?” (Chart with percentages)

[Michael Wolf]: No one takes any ownership of their role here. That shouldn’t be a surprise that we have that, but how is this historically and where do we sit? One of my colleagues did a study where they did a google search of books and when they discussed certain set of terms, nasty politics, rude politics - remember those moments of realignment that we talked about - so interestingly, you probably can’t see that well, but books came out about 10 years after major realignments. 

[Slide]: “Composite of Search Results for ‘Mean Politics,’ ‘Bitter Politics,’ ‘Hateful Politics,’ ‘Filthy Politics,’ and ‘Nasty Politics’” (Four line graphs)             

[Michael Wolf]: They had a lot of negative words in them, “nasty politics,” “dirty politics,” and all this other stuff. So these spikes (referring to slide) in words and books describing nasty politics come at these moments of realignments. We should expect explosions of political activity. What’s interesting is if you note down here this slow roll out, as we said, of the real life slow realignment has ratcheted up incivility at least as it appears in political books. What we know is that this political incivility matches what we’ve seen other times, it’s just slower right now and probably more of an ache than an immediate pain. But the question is that, we’ve always said a book on civility turns people off right? Not so. And to some people, were surprised this year with how responsive some of Trump voters were to him. These voters have been there as we’ll see. In 2010 we asked people, if you note the question here, these are people that said that 2010 was the nastiest campaign they’d ever seen. Took them and then we asked them, is this good for democracy? They said no. These people said 2010 was bad for democracy, nastiest. Did it mobilize you? You would think, bad for democracy I’m not mobilized by that. Look down here (referring to slide) if you see, Democrats were turned off all right, wasn’t a good year for them to be sure.

[Slide]: “Those Who Believe that the Tone of the 2010 Campaign was the Mist Negative Ever: How Did That Affect Respondent’s Interest in Getting Involved in the Election by Should Politicians ‘Compromise to get Things Done’ vs. ‘Standing Firm on Principle’” 

[Michael Wolf]: If you look up here those that wanted politicians to stand firm that were Republicans, sixty percent of them said yeah it’s bad for democracy. Yes, it was an awful year for it, but it turned me on. It got me jacked up. This is where we are at. If you look at negative partisanship and view the second layer, this is not a surprise that people would be more driven and that people would turn out to vote and that people will be turn out to vote against the other side. This is important then if we look at 2016. Two candidates that might not have that popular, certainly weren’t, didn’t mean it was any less mobilized. They were just mobilized in the opposite direction. This the key here. Now we’ll talk about civility in that in a minute, but I want to talk about one additional area of polarization here. This was an accident of history to be sure, but probably tell something about 2016. 2016 certainly we have a candidate who highlighted fear of Islam, the fear of immigration a way that earlier candidates of his own party did not to be sure. How did this mobilize? Remember Jeb Bush at one of those first debates saying, “really Donald?” “All Muslims?” “Really?” What happened to Jeb Bush, right? He was visiting us instead of running (laughter). This is a deep set thing, it didn’t happen with Donald Trump. These, as part of the worldview that has slowly been developing, and we have evidence already of it or that we happened to catch six years earlier. So in 2010 you might have remembered the “9/11 Mosque.” The cultural center that was going to be put near “Ground Zero,” and the controversy that surrounded that. We ended up in a natural experiment. My colleague Dan in our September survey that year said, “Hey you know what with this ‘9/11’ let’s put a question in there asking people if they think it’s appropriate or not for political commentators to say negative things about Muslim Americans.” Now for the social scientists out there you’re like that is the worst question ever. It’s double-barreled, it’s asking you fifty different things, it’s true. But that’s my friend Dan he likes to just get stuff out there, right? When they (survey) came back, as we will see in a minute, came back extremely partisan the results to that. The Republicans are very much saying it’s appropriate, but the question is so what? I mean freedom of speech right? We didn’t have a why. For the wave right before the election we did voice captures like we did here with open-ended responses. We asked them if they said it’s okay to say negative things, why is it okay? We’ll hear some of those in a minute, but right beforehand, right before we hit the field is when Juan Williams went - commentator for NPR - went on the O’Reilly show and said that he was scared to be on airplanes with people dressed in Muslim garb. Then a whole furor over whether he should have been fired by NPR for freedom of speech hits. So, of course we’re ruined right? Because we’ve treated the whole American public, that we’re about to ask with a set of quite the questions, freedom of speech right? So there’s no way we can really get to the bottom, as we’ll see, we still got to the bottom of what people’s attitudes were and we’re telling here. What we found okay. So party identification, clearly Republicans thought it was more appropriate than anyone else to saying that political commentators to say negative things. Not a big deal.

[Slide]: “Socio-demographic Characteristics and Whether it is Appropriate to Say Negative Things about Muslim-Americans” (Percentage and Statistics).

[Michael Wolf]: Because you can say that’s for freedom of speech or whatever. Democrats very much thought it was inappropriate here. Now, what’s driving this? Is this some “gut level” thing of people that don’t know anything about Islam or something like this? In fact, we are double checked by how attentive they are to politics.

[Slide]: “Attentiveness to Politics Lead to Greater Worldview Polarization”
“Figure 1: Appropriateness of Negativity of Muslims-Americans by How Closely People Follow Politics” (Three Bar Graphs in one Figure)

[Michael Wolf]: Those people that very closely follow politics were actually much more likely to say it is appropriate if they were Republicans and it’s less appropriate if they’re Democrats. So this isn’t some people you know, not watching and not paying attention, are not attentive to politics. These are the most attentive people. Where this divide is the greatest. So this worldview thing, again, it’s not some simple kind of aspect. So, we coded those I will let you listen to some in a minute. The open-ended responses had all the measures of intrical reliability, everything and this is what we found is that we kind of have two political correctness answers. One was a very first amendment oriented, you know shouldn’t be putting politically correct shackles on anybody with freedom of speech.

[Slide]: 				“Primary Content Categories”
First Amendment	Anti-Political Correctness	9/11 USA at War	Muslims are Threat

       23% (66)			46% (139)		        24% (74)  	         39% (118)

					“Secondary Content Categories”
Destroy Muslims	Juan Williams		Sharia Law	        Obama		Christian

          2% (6)		      5% (16)		  4% (12)	        2% (7)		10% (29)

[Michael Wolf]: We had a second anti-political correctness point here that is extremely important. We had obviously - we’re at war, huge percentage of people and Muslims are a threat. I’ll let you listen to those as different than the political correctness one. This political correctness issue then kind of enlightened something: political correctness in the way for instance, Donald Trump talked about it during this election doesn’t mean political correctness in kind of free speech or campus free speech or this kind of thing. It is a notion that any type of political correctness is actually a threat to the United States, because it’s shrouding the real dangers that we’re facing today. That is the biggest answer. The response we got were, we shouldn’t be doing this because it’s politically correct but - not again for the First Amendment - but because we are kind of missing the danger. You’re shutting us up when we’re warning you about how dangerous this is. So, I’ll play a couple of these, again be warned there’s no dirty words in this one but these are kind of vivid let’s put it that way. 

[Video Clip # 1]: Anybody can say whatever they want, it’s the freedom of speech. 

[Michael Wolf]: That’s the freedom of speech type, there’s another one of these here. 

[Video Clip # 2]: Free Speech.

[Michael Wolf]: Boom, done. Now these are the threats. These can get a little edgy so.

[Video Clip # 3]: Because, you idiot, we’re under attack from the Muslim religion and anybody that can’t figure that out has rocks in their head. 

[Video Clip # 4]: Ah, because I don’t trust any of the Muslims anymore. I wouldn’t be comfortable around them, even the ones who have professed to be Christians. They were born and bred on…

[Michael Wolf]: Hold on.

[Video Clip # 5]: There’s a percentage of the Muslim population that are definitely antagonistic towards us and it is unfortunately war we have to fight and have to be aware of the combatants.          

[Video Clip # 6]: Because many of the teachings of Muslims in the Koran and in the Hadith are things that I strongly disagree with and that would take our Constitution and our Bill of Rights and make them nothing but happy memories. And if Muslims are on a plane dressed as Muslims you can be sure they are in favor of Sharia Law, and Sharia Law would remove all of your protections under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and what I recommend to the people who made this survey; if you disagree with that statement than what you should do for yourselves is read the Koran and the Hadith like I did and study Sharia Law in some of these countries where it is being practiced, and you would realize what a threat this is to America and it’s something that we really truly need to address soon.

[Michael Wolf]: This is not somebody that is not just was like oh, this is a well thought out and well-structured attitude. This is somebody who’s thought about this.

[Video Clip # 7]: Well it’s a shame, but if you got extreme Muslims that their goal is everybody’s going to Muslim or they’re going to be dead and once they get that goal then they’re going to instill their extreme Muslim beliefs. I don’t think as a free world or a free country we should be under that threat. So, saying that the Muslims are a threat to the world economy, the world as we know it, and they are a threat and they need to be dealt with. And the Muslims that don’t feel that way need to stand up and join us and then maybe we can have harmony, because we have a common goal. It’s the Muslim extremists that’s getting all the press and they need to be dealt with. They need to be exterminated, their beliefs…

[Michael Wolf]: These are different. These are threat based ones. Now, listen to the political correctness ones. They’re threat based but this is a discussion of political threat correctness, different than what you heard about First Amendment. 

[Video Clip # 8]: Because we are American, and every American if they wanted to speak their heart instead of what’s politically correct would say that when they get on an airplane they too are scared of people in Muslim garb. And that is speaking honestly not some color coded what is politically correct. Thank you. 

[Video Clip # 9]: Surrender, you’re telling the truth. Obama did kill over three thousand people. They’re telling people all over the United States not all Muslims are bad, but let them say the truth what’s going on. It’s not anyone else but Muslims, even now they send out twenty bombs to kill us. 

[Video Clip # 10]: Because I think that it’s that we call a spade a spade and tell things as they are. I don’t think we have to worry about constantly being, I don’t think we should have to worry about constantly being politically correct. This country has been attacked and will be attacked again, and we’ve been attacked by Muslims and it’s unfortunate if innocent Muslims are offended by comments made by newspaper people and TV people but that’s just how it is.   

[Video Clip # 11]: Because I think ever since Barack Obama and this administration got into the White House they’ve been very extremely soft on Muslims, and, you know, although they are the ones that attacked us on “9/11”. If you need to say Muslim terrorists, which I think is ridiculous, because everybody knows they’re a terrorist why should you have to say that? I just think ridiculous, and no I don’t like them and never will. 

[Michael Wolf]: So the issue here, again, is that when we talk about political correctness this has been part of the separate worldviews for much longer - this was six years ago - and the issue of course aiming the other side is real sense that this is inappropriate, that this is anti-American itself to be questioning people and questioning freedom of religion. And so we have a two-way street here of one side saying your political correctness is threatening me. One of the survey that during the 2016 election showed that, Trump voters - seventy-six percent of them - thought they were under an immediate threat of terrorism, they, themselves, individually. Whereas only like twenty percent of Clinton’s. Despite, if you look at the coast New York City, the support breakdown, these are real thoughts these are real threats. On one side a threat to my way of life, so the opposing side views this as a threat to the American way of life just in same verbal ways you hear that. As we’re doing this is getting the cycle to go deeper. We’re using symbols here as, I mean if you look at how can you sue the Statue of Liberty in both ways? It’s reviewing other set of views as a threat to the way of human life or American Way of life, and a threat underneath. This is no easy way out, right? So where do we end up here for the outlook? It’s not good, I think we started that way. But the real situation here is again we overly personify things. It’s a much nicer story to say Donald Trump and Trump voters when in fact we have been creating and recycling against each other these divisions for forty years. We’ve not resolved the issues that drive them further. We’re likely to see them continue. Obviously, Donald Trump was central casting for this because of his positions to walk in and wipe away his own partisans on these very issues. So this is noteworthy. I mean to remember he won certainly the Republican nomination and the presidency, but he ran against everything that the party stood for in 2004. The last time and the only time they won a majority of the presidency since 1988. He turned Iraq, all this other stuff - I mean just absolutely turned his back on what the party stood for and wiped the floor with them. The low approval ratings, the one other thing that has to do with this worldview separation. There’s deeper set of issues that those voters that are on this more law-and-order, social order, social status quo, they care less about public opinion being reflected in public policy. So, their attentiveness right now as we hear was as low of approval ratings goes on, that doesn’t matter as much to them. That is not what drives them. They have less of a connection between a need for public policy and public officials to necessarily be in the public. So that’s not going to injure him among his own people who still strongly support him by the way, so that’s the way it is. This is a worldview divide in different way than ideological divide. If we want to talk about capital gains taxes we’re missing what the divide is here to be sure. I think as we see people’s views of political correctness and our misunderstanding of how deep and different we talk about it from each other, that again this is a notion that is a threat and a threat to the American Way of life on both sides. One side views what they see is intolerance, anti-accepting of a multicultural society, of a pluralistic society. They view these things as a threat. On the other side they view the pushing of a multicultural society as a threat to the American Way of life and political correctness is shrouding this, and again this didn’t start this year. So the idea here is that both sides feeling threatened by the other side continues to cycle, rips down trust, and the off ramps aren’t easily there. I really thought deliberation and political disagreement were going to be a way out of it, but even that didn’t show up. That’s where we are, good times (laughter). Questions? (Applause). Come up to the mic, ask them if you would. 

[Audience Member # 1]: We talked about compromise and we talked about how polarized our society is and so on, how can we conceive of compromise without even thinking of information and context that people kind of relate to in order to form their worldviews? How can we consider those as just people without the context of the others? Can you comment on that, because if there should be compromised shouldn’t there also be kind of an addressing off the point new sources or information how these people build their worldviews? Thank you. 

[Michael Wolf]: Yeah, absolutely. When we go back to this this (referring to a previous slide) we ask people where they got their information, and clearly this segmentation of the media market and the internet and everything else furthers this. The anti-Muslim view even the earlier studies that show it, if you watched some of the network TV things in the 24 and stuff like that, I mean they said that this furthered people’s kind of fear and stuff like that. We also are more segmented into our own, and this is part of the political science literature, that we’re sorting ourselves into separate communities based on lifestyle that actually bleeds over into partisan. You kind of know where you are and you know if you fit there is the argument and so we are further separating ourselves. So if you live in Texas and you’re a liberal you go to Austin. If you’re a conservative in Austin I’m going to Dallas man, getting the hell out of here. Orange County versus LA. The research here is disturbing because I keep saying it’s not going to happen and then - I have a couple of friends that do this stuff and they have it down with big data now: to purchasing, how the percentage of Wal-Marts in an area versus Trader Joe’s. I mean things that you’d say no, come on, this can’t be, in fact is there. One thing we need to remember is people are also seeking out. So there’s some agency in the media that they are seeking out. So it’s not just being beamed out and accepted, people are now able to choose it. And one interesting study, difference in twenty years between the 1992 election and the 2012 election in the American National Election study. In 1992 like sixty percent of the American public hated the media system in the United States. In 2012 it had turned around, where they were happy. Why? Because they didn’t have to watch those stupid Network guys being negative to my side, the objective you know more objective news sources. Instead they could go to the side they wanted, was much more satisfying. So there’s a two-way street with that as well right? The context behind it is absolutely… (Inaudible) to be sure, so I agree with you.

[Audience Member # 1]: So where do we go from here, because this is about to implode if it hasn’t already?

[Michael Wolf]: No, exactly where do we go from here? Because I would have said watch the PBS news hour and talk to people you disagree with and maybe you’ll come to something and then I find this and I’m like oh! It’s a bad place. I’m never going to say better objective information is not good and political disagreement engagement is not good. Of course it is. I do think it is the Silver Bullet if we can get it loaded, but it’s a tough thing you know? 

[Audience Member # 2]: The people who judge Islam to be a threat, is there any data that you know or any information, any research out there that says how many of them have children or have themselves or have friends who have been say in Iraq or something and have felt threatened because they were there or their loved ones were at war?

[Michael Wolf]: No, I mean the research is pretty rich on this about people’s experiences in areas we didn’t go in, but the experience that this authoritarian - by the way, the measure for authoritarianism the law-and-order versus those against that is really actually a measure of set of child-rearing things. Is it do you want a child to be well-behaved or you want creativity or something like this? And it’s terrible because that is again one of these examples of the concepts being measured by an indicator that’s maybe not the best but they keep saying that it does. But there’s no conditional thing to what you’re saying I think. There’s no common kind of thing. Finding these divides is not easy. These are well thought out, I think you heard that, what I was trying to show here. We actually got turned down for an article three years ago on this because we weren’t being fair enough to those people that were the political correctness. They were all right with the threat things, but they said we weren’t fair. And we said this is their voice, we didn’t say this, this is their worldview. This is a legitimate worldview. We didn’t make this up. (Mic went out, becomes inaudible, and cuts back to him using a different mic.)

[Michael Wolf]: This worldview is as it is, and if you know would say that we would teach it out of them, educate. They want to do the opposite. The two sides are pushing each other. So we thought well, let’s just send it (article) back to them, the editors, and say well what do you think now? Other questions? Yes.

[Audience Member # 3]: Given the two worldviews it seems to me that this is kind of, at the base of it, a collective subjectivity almost. What do you see - what comes to mind is Hannah Arendt Banality of Evil - what do you see might be a countervailing force in this society, institutionally that would bring some sort of challenge to this worldview divide? 

[Michael Wolf]: One that political scientists talk about is to have a realignment. To have a real out-and-out party stand up and somebody lose on this or not. Now, because in the past obviously we’ve seen large scale issues really not go down easy. Even if we were in a situation like the depression, the 1890s and populism, and the 1860s I mean civil war. These are deep issues then as well. So, we’re not in uncharted territory as far as the depth of the issue, and the argument is one side winning and really breaking apart the party system is the way out for party people. But this divides still there I think and I don’t have an answer to be honest, of how we get out. These are deeply and well-structured attitudes. So I am not sure if there is. I don’t have a very good answer, I’m sorry. The one hope is that a realignment one way or the other will at least set us on a path to be able to debate this and have people have political consequences on one way or the other to this. 

[Audience Member # 4]: Half my life I lived under one party system communist country, and seems like the other half you know living under a two-party system seems to bring that lack of compromise. And you actually did start possible realignment as breaking up the parties into three, four. What’s your thought about, could this really bring that necessary compromise to the future?

[Michael Wolf]: There were some scholars who thought this was going to be a realigning election, because Donald Trump was going to get smoked and that was going to put the end of the Republican Party. They’re on record. I mean think-tank people, these aren’t just you know people shooting from the hip. And obviously didn’t happen like that. There are cases obviously, third parties popping up and running and winning the Republican Party, for instance in 1860 coming from nowhere. Whether or not that’s brewing right now, I mean the other component is we’re not engaging. The two political parties aren’t engaging new voters. The Millennials out here know this. You’ve not been asked, will you support our party? They’re ignoring main issues, and I’m not talking some Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton thing. I’m talking about not trying to get new voters. They’ve gotten it down to a science how to mobilize people, and this stuff works. They haven’t reached out to voters that this stuff might not work so we don’t know. I mean Millennials are all over the place and going to be the biggest modal group in the American electorate soon. They’ve not been asked to participate in American politics yet. They haven’t. They haven’t been approached. They’ve been not targeted purposely. We use to have both parties crawling this campus asking for people to vote. Did you see anyone trying? Students, anyone ask you to vote? Anyone come to campus? In 2004 they were darkening my door all the time looking for it. The hope is maybe, I guess, to break through or to come up with some way to address these divisions. Is mobilizing others? Yeah, probably. 

[Audience Member # 5]: I have two questions.  The first one is, what do you think or I think the statistics was a factor in there, for having an African-American elected twice on this cycle that was going and then a female candidate in 2016? We’re looking at your acceleration. And then the second one was right before I came here today I was listening to the Senate Intelligence Committee talk about, they were putting out some facts about the Russians, and apparently this is exactly what they like and are exploiting. So is there any discussion and talk about what that will mean to the natural progression that you political scientists are watching and having an, or is there any precedent for having an outside influence like that?

[Michael Wolf]: To the first part I mean Barack Obama, race and the studies done, there’s a complicated set of things that mobilize people in this election and others, and some of it has to do with this worldview. And the issue of race that we haven’t come to a conclusion about. The literature is deep and it’s a complex things. It’s been too easily, on both sides, thrown away. When in fact, probably the two of the greatest political scientists in the 1990s spent a decade writing these amazing books that took very different views. One side saying that we’re using coded words to kind of mobilize people racially. The other side saying no, these are American values that people think are very important that they think are lacking. We’ve been over this, political scientists are not very exciting and neither are conferences, but if you went to one of those panels. Because you’re talking about people, the greatest political scientists. One from Stanford and one from Michigan, and they are going at it about whether this is a function of American Way of life or some coded racism. And they have the best data in the world and there’s no consensus. Extremely cautious. On the other issue, the thing about this is it gives you license as well as social psychological identifications give you a lot of license. As I tell my students I’m a Detroit Lions fan. I’m still a fan, there’s no objective reason to be a Detroit Lions fan (laughter). We do strange things with our behavior out of identities. And when you identify partially based on real world things you take that social psychological identification and you go further. In this sense, how you can turn, for instance, from on the democratic side wanting a reset with Russia and hey it’s not that bad, not that bad. We’re not going to say anything. When Jeb Bush was here he told my students, the biggest thing about this election how much Russia is messing around with it. The Democrats didn’t say much about that and had been more open. The Republicans are always hard line against the Russians. Now we see everyone taking an opposite - the biggest threat in America is Russia to the Democrats. You know, ten years ago that would have been - Mitt Romney said that they were and people said no, that’s a joke. Are you kidding me? Democrats laughed at him four years ago. They’re not laughing right now. Republicans, when did Vladimir Putin become popular? So in other words, our social psychological identifications drive us towards subjectivity rather than objectivity and further this then, because then we make arguments that aren’t consistent and further upset the other side. 

[Audience Member # 6]: If it does end up - let’s just go to the realm of imagined - imagine that it really is. That there does become something that shows that what they said this morning. Is that not to pass something that might start realigning them?

[Michael Wolf]: It could be, yes. To be sure. To be sure. But, on the other side it’s going to take a long way to get there because the negative partisanship thing. It was still okay, Donald Trump, I’m not criticizing you know one side or the other here, but he hurray for WikiLeaks during the election. People are okay now, much more satisfied with “okay the Russians aren’t that bad, Vladimir Putin.” That is a change right? In that of a long cushion you’ve allowed yourself to move on an issue that has been a part of American life since 1947. A deep divide. I’m not sure whether that will disrupt this or not. Yes. Can we take one more?

[Audience Member # 7]: For those of us who have not lived through protesting and things like that, and see that become more popular. Has your research shown that it’s effective? I mean for those in the room that maybe are participating in protests for the first time, is that something that does make a difference and in fact encourage? As you get people on both sides of that. So I just wondered.

[Michael Wolf]: Protests are extremely effect. Protests sent us along on these issues, because we look at Vietnam, we look at Civil Rights, we look at all of these issues that we say are now unresolved. They started out - these are people that were locked out of power and the protest brought the issue into a saliency that made the elites pay attention. They didn’t resolve them fully, but they paid attention to them. One of the different things that actually the incivility thing, because we’ve actually written about why incivility is good in a lot of occasions. We kind of you know the normatively say well you got to be civil. Civility is really good for those in power. They want to shut out people without power. So it has its role, and it’s extremely important, that’s why protests are extremely important. Some of the differences we have now is that when we looked in the past as this grassroots kind of component and uncivil actions were very important and dates remain so. The difference is that this used to be kind of against elites, or as you know as Jefferson said you know about Shay’s Rebellion and the Tree of Liberty. He said, you know it’s no big deal, yeah that’s whatever, don’t overreact. Pacify them, teach them. This is a political elite saying our job is to, as elites - there as passionate as they are dumb about the issue. He really uses pejorative language about how mistaken Shay’s Rebellion is, but he said it’s okay. You got to teach it out of them. Instead we have elites throwing gas on fires these days. That is the kind of thing that maybe is different. We’ve always had McCartys, and we’ve always had I don’t want to overreact here, but the notion is that it seems useful again incivility is a useful political tool right now. It’s not a personal response. When I had those things up there, there was no, there was you know, we left the whole answer about changing the American Way of life. That’s what you hear on TV, all words. We’re uncivil now because we’re not like the older generations or these people. It has nothing to do with that. And people know where to blame at, it has to do. So that’s the only caution, I’d say is that protest definitely work and there’s very important ways to check power. But what’s weird is how elites have kind of used this instead of again to pacify and teach it out of them, in fact increase it. Which then again continues this cycle on both sides of viewing the other side as a threat.