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- [00:00]
Christy
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- [00:30]
Olivia
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- [01:02]
Peter Loewen
to the New Books Network.
- [01:15]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Welcome to Democracy Dialogues, a podcast from the Cornell center on Democracy. This podcast brings cutting edge research on democracy to a broad audience, including practitioners, journalists, students, and citizens who care about the future of democratic government. In each episode, we ask about new books, research and reports, discussing what they reveal about the challenges that democracy are facing today and the opportunities for citizens to contribute to democracy's deepening. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedel and today we're talking with Peter Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University and a preeminent political scientist as we speak on the 250th anniversary of US independence and the founding of US democracy. Welcome Peter.
- [01:59]
Peter Loewen
Thanks for having me.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
I'm so glad to be able to talk with you today, Peter, in particular, as we are celebrating and reflecting on the 250 years of democracy in the United States, the signing of the Declaration of Independence and what it means for democracy today and around the world, and democracy's future. So in thinking about the legacies of America's unique founding and how that has shaped democratic institutions and the practice practice of democracy, what strikes you and your reflections as particularly important? Either because it's a distinct feature of the United States or because it's a model that's been replicated elsewhere, that has had global influence and varied trajectories.
- [02:44]
Peter Loewen
Yeah, I think it's a great question, and I think it's a good moment to reflect on it and to ask what the significance of that set of moments were 250 years ago and in the decade or so that followed as they moved towards designing and ratifying a constitution for the United States and then what it means today. And I think it's just for myself, as a person who does some work in American politics but is not a scholar of American history, I've actually found it quite enjoyable, but also really enlightening to think about the American founding and to do some reading about it over the last number of weeks, including spending time on the 4th of July reading the declaration of Independence. As a Canadian, that one of the things that gets noted in there was that the British were already using, essentially British North America as a test run for what they wanted to do in America in terms of reducing the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera, and increasing King George's tyranny and all that stuff. But more seriously, when you read through that Declaration and then you kind of read about the struggles they went through for the Constitution afterwards, you get a sense of the richness of the vision that the Founders had for Americ democracy. Elections were a part of it, a wide enfranchisement of people where ordinary people and common people would have a role in that democracy. Representation that would be as local as possible. It would not be arbitrary parts of it. But there's much, much more. And you read through the particular complaints that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had, and you get a sense of they had a very, very rich sense of what a just and democratic society would look like. And it's not a surprise that the things that animated that, things like habeas corpus or certain notions of due process or notions of the relationship between rights and property, those things that still animate debate in the United States today in terms of exactly how they will matter. For democracy really mattered then. So it was a very rich vision that they had for how America should be governed. Of course, it didn't come out of whole cloth. It came out of principles that were already enshrined in everyday practice, that were captured in the mechanics, Magna Carta and elements of English common law. And that shouldn't be forgotten. But it is just remarkable of how rich of a sense they had of what schedule of rights Americans should have. And what the features of a really democratic society would look like. I had the good fortune. I just read recently a wonderful chapter, in my view, a wonderful chapter written by Gordon Wood. I'm not sure it's the last thing Gordon Wood wrote, but certainly one of the last things he wrote before passing recently. And the American Enterprise Institute did a series on American democracy at the 250th, and there was an introductory essay written by Gordon Wood. And I thought I might just share with you the first paragraph and the last paragraph. I read all of them, but I'll share with you the first one and the last one because I think they really capture the significance of that moment. So in the first paragraph, in his chapter titled A New Kind of Democracy, Wood writes, democracy has many meanings. For some, it may merely suggest a government in which all adults can vote. For others, it may mean simply majority rule, or it may denote a system of government that protects minorities of all sorts, the assumption being that majorities can take care of themselves. For still others, democracy may signify the protection of individual rights and liberties and signify that without these protections, voting and participation in government are meaningless. Finally, for many Americans, democracy may mean much more than all these political mechanisms and principles, all the voting and all the rights. It may transcend systems of government and become a shorthand term that encompasses everything valuable about society and culture, its freedom, its equality, and its respect for common, ordinary people. All of these meanings of democracy have relevance today. And the American Revolution created or enhanced all of them. And then this is the final thing that he writes. And he writes this sort of from the perspective of democracy in about 1820, as folks are looking back at that time. And he says it's on the final page, on page 35. He says, despite the many examples of racial injustice, the persistence of slavery in the undemocratic south, and the great disparities of wealth in this society. Despite all that, within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States laid claim to being the most democratic and egalitarian nation in history. It was already by then a unique nation dominated by ordinary bible toting people, violent and obsessed with consuming alcohol and making money, vulgar and vibrant, barbarous and boisterous, the only great democracy in a world of monarchies and one that awed and frightened some of its own citizens and many Europeans. It seemed to represent the future for all of humanity. I found that profound when I read it, and I found it profound for a couple of reasons. One is that Wood doesn't get caught up in it. Caught up in really particularistic debates about what elements are democratic or not democratic. I think we can do that often as political scientists and be really concerned about the exact schedule of rights and non rights that a state has and its exact configurations, and get into nonsense debates about whether some electoral systems are more democratic than others, et cetera, et cetera. He just says, look, it's a whole welter of things, there's lots of meanings about it, but at the core of it is an intuition about the role of the people in choosing who governs them. And the second is that he really captures the paradox of American democracy, that it's not perfect, that it just has glaring shortcomings, but at every moment in its history, it probably captures, at least in some of its elements, the greatest democratic hopes of any place on earth. And it certainly did in those early years. So it's a long way of saying that it's been 250 years, it's a good run and it's been a long time. But when you go right back to the core, core of it, the things that made American democracy awesome, worthy of
- [09:01]
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- [09:03]
Peter Loewen
were there from the founding and their logic took a long time to play out, hence a long time until every citizen got the right to vote and every person could really be considered an equal member of the society. But the seeds of that were there from the beginning. So I don't know if it answers the question, but I've spent a lot of time in the last weeks really reflecting as a non resident, non voting alien of the United States about just what is special and magical about this country and one might hope, what's special about this moment.
- [09:36]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Thank you so much for sharing that. It really resonates with some of the survey work that's coming out across the United States, but also globally about what people think of when they think of valuing democracy in the United States. This is new work out by the Metropolitan group the United States. The three words that rise to the top, no matter what partisan affiliation or background, you know, economic condition, etc. Across individuals, our freedom, fairness, encapsulating so much about rule of law, but also that we should be treated fairly, equally with justice. And then thirdly is fearlessness, which I think that the passage that you read also really resonates with a dream or a vision that is the paradox of American democracy. Imperfect but willing to be fought for, willing to be practiced, which is not easy, that the practice of democracy itself is hard and that we can do hard things, and that that history of American innovation in democratic practice. I think really resonates with what you were reflecting on.
- [10:53]
Peter Loewen
Yeah. And I think that's all really, really fair and sort of. And it's on point that asking people how they understand democracy is probably as good as any sort of definition. Right. And it's not to say that it's perfect. And I think you have to recognize that this history of the United States is one of democratic rights receding for periods of time. It's not been a linear process and it's been one in which the country has gone through, you know, independent of, or at least in parallel with its democratic struggles, very, very serious moments of social upheaval. Right. Certainly, obviously the Civil War stands chief among them, but the period of Reconstruction afterwards was a long period of figuring out how the country was going to reckon with its new future in some ways. Right. And there was just a lot of two steps forward, one step, one step back. And it's only 70 years after that that the country really struggles with the Depression, really wrestles internally with how it's going to think about fascism and whether democracy is going to be fit for purpose to sort of meet the demands of the time through the Great Depression and its aftermath. And arguably we're going through an interesting period of time now. I don't think we're out of it. I think it's probably likely that it's going to get harder, not easier, as technology upends our lives. But we're going through a moment of pretty serious social upheaval which is in some ways affecting a couple of things, affecting our estimates of the future, our senses of our prospects for the future. That kind of goes to fearlessness and hope and those sort of future oriented things. And it has to do with how we're going to live with each other. And in some parts, I think that really actually sort of reflects important contours of those earlier upheavals. Right. The Civil War is largely about. About a better understanding of what the social contract in the United States was going to be. Who's American? Who are we in it with? Right. What's our future together? And certainly the reorientation of the American welfare state and the economy after the Great Depression is also largely a story of who's owed support from the state. Right. How are we going to provide it to them? And what's the basis of social and political organization going to be? So I think this moment they're in right now is actually, it's an interesting one. Right. And shouldn't make too much of kind of 80 year cycles but there's something to it there. Right. And I think we should, you know, we should sort of be willing to think about this moment as one that's like those other ones, right? Very, very seriously disrupted and one in which, foundationally, things probably won't look the same, even at the level of party politics and coalitions, after this moment, than they will before. The really important thing to note about those two moments is that the forces that won out, in some sense, won out democratically. For me, one of the mostly powerful, one of the most powerful things that I learned early on was William Riker's notion of the hair aesthetic. The idea that some politicians win not through persuasion by rhetoric, which is to say, making a better argument about things that everyone agrees that you're arguing over, but the hair aesthetic, which is the introduction of a new dimension of debate or competition that reorders the political system. And that was Lincoln's great innovation to introduce the issue of slavery in a way that broke up the Democratic coalition of Northern industrialists and Southern agrarians. And it was in large part both what FDR did and what Nixon does after him in reorienting the parties towards economics and then race. So it's only to say that this moment that we're now, and those were democratic things, whether we liked them or not, and this moment that we're now is one in which you start to see the outlines of it, right? As people push back against technology and as more generational divides and voting emerge, differences emerge between those who own assets and those who don't. And there are sort of differing views of the future. So it's only to say that during these moments of great consternation and upheaval and disruption, when there's been reordering, reordering has been Democratic, which has been a remark small D, which has been a remarkable feature of American resilience, right? Without revolution for these 250 years, without doing what France does where you are now, I guess, which is write a new constitution every 10 years, right. Or it's not quite every 10 years, but to not far from that. Right. Or other. Other places. So there's something pretty. There's something pretty interesting about and magical about that, too.
- [15:39]
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- [16:08]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
I think it's so important that you look back on these real moments of structural change that are both global in nature. So you mentioning kind of the Depression as well as this current moment of technological change and real social transformation that is creating challenges for democratic societies across the world.
- [16:29]
Peter Loewen
Yes.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
And then thinking about how that translates to changing social relations, changing opportunities for labor organization, changing opportunities for young people, et cetera, and both what that means for the potential for new coalitions, but also for democratic practice to win out. Right. That however society will transform, the key question is whether it does through so through the boundedness of democratic competition and rule of law and ideas and debates, or whether it does so through anti system revolution, violence, civil war, et cetera. And so, you know, as you're looking ahead and you think about the strengths that American democracy has baked in from these founding moments, but also the challenges that this current structural moment tens, what do you think it beholds for democracy's practice and endurance?
- [17:28]
Peter Loewen
Yeah, I suspect that this is a bit of an anacurity and a problem where every unhappy democracy is unhappy in its own way. So I think it's an interesting question about whether the particular structural challenges are more similar across democracies or they're more different. So that's sort of one observation. Right. And I know you know African politics very, very well. Right. And if we talk about the nature of democratic challenges in Africa over the next 30 years versus the ones in Western Europe and the United States, North America, for example, immediately I would just put on the table that massive differences in demographic profiles probably make those challenges different. Right. Where you are in terms of kind of the growth profile of your economy probably makes those things very, very different. But there's the third sort of thing here, you know, you've noted there's kind of we've got our sort of our set of democracies, we've got our set of, you know, of kind of dictatorships in a sense. Or actually you didn't put it in those terms. You sort of put it in terms, I guess, of people who are anti system but are kind of within democracies, I guess is a better way of putting it. But then there is this set of, I think dictatorship is the wrong word, though it describes them. But there are these set of countries which have decided they're decidedly undemocratic and there's a dimension of them there. I mean, at one end let's just take the ones that are functional in a sense, right? So leave aside Russia and I don't know, whoever else you want to put in there, Belarus or something, but let's leave them out for a second. But think about China, one part of that dimension, then move it farther and think about Singapore countries, which I think you can. China is obviously a communist country. I think it's also very well described as technocratic, as autocratic, but as actually quite attuned to what people want. So the underlying logic of Chinese governance is not ruled by kind of authoritarian force alone. It is ruled through technical competence and through a close listening to what people are saying that they want and a desire to respond to that in as non corrupt a way as possible. I think that's a very steel manned account of how you might characterize China. And then Singapore is something of a version of that. And I only say that because those things are competing models for democracies about how you're going to deal with things in the future. And if you look at the way those countries have dealt with recent crises, Covid have they dealt with it much worse or much better than democracies on average? Probably about the same. That's sort of been the mix. If you look at how they're dealing with things like economic development for the poorest and their populations, they've done pretty well. Over a 50 year time horizon. They've done remarkably, remarkably well. So I think those are, you know, I think that's, that's the element that probably has changed in the last sort of 30 or 40 years that there has been not a huge set. Right. But it represents a huge part of the population set of countries which through technocratic rule have actually done pretty well. Right. And that comes up against democracy. So if you look at something like, you know, the United States, let's ask a really simple question here, which is no easy answer, but it's how do you expect that democratic politics, small D is going to solve the issue of the insolvency of Social Security in the United States? How does that happen? And if I wanted to articulate to you why it's a challenge, I guess I should because I've raised it is I would say look at the demographics of this country, look at the age of who gets elected. Ask yourself what are the social programs that really work well in the United States? And Social Security is the one that really works well, if you get it. So a lot of other stuff doesn't work that well. Healthcare works well, if you're insured. Not so well if you're not, or if you're forced into kind of a mandatory plan of some sort. Local education, it's a mixed bag, depending on where you are. So much of it is localized. But at the national level, what works well, Social Security works really well. It's an incredibly rich public pension. And of course it can be rich. Everybody pays into it, so that then the people who are currently of age can draw down on it. Well, the math on that isn't working anymore. But what's the political path that's going to fix that fundamental problem? And it's not going to be one in which old politicians continually get elected by old people, which is increasingly described the gerontocracy of American electoral democracy. Right Now, I think that if I look at that, that's a particularist problem to the United States, but it's not one that suggests that there's an obvious democratic answer to that, because no political party has an incentive to actually be the one that's going to break on the current consensus and tell the truth about the solvency of Social Security. It is solvable, but it requires probably custom benefits and raises in rates, and who wants to pay that? Right.
- [22:26]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
So this actually takes us to a key arena of your research that I'd like to dive into a little bit more in terms of thinking about the nature of representation and whose policy priorities, demographic considerations, get taken in through the channel of representation of elected politicians. So if you could tell us a little bit more about your takeaways from your research on the nature of representation by politicians who are elected. What do you think about how representative or unrepresentative our system is in the United States, and what factors are shaping the degree of representation?
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Peter Loewen
Yeah, thanks for asking. So, just to give people just a little bit of background, So I started out when I was starting my academic career studying voters, basically studying public opinion and vote choice. And then not long after I started doing my work, I became more interested in studying politicians because I was always interested in the stuff of politics. And it's show business for ugly people. It's really fun to watch and to be a part of. So colleagues and I started basically interviewing politicians the way we would interview voters, that is to say, doing it at a large scale, so hundreds at a time doing it with experiments embedded in our surveys so we could have some kind of insight into causal linkages between things. And in the course of doing that, sort of obsessed with the question of, are politicians just like us, the rest of us as humans or are they somehow different? And the answer is both. So how are politicians different than the average person? There are some personality differences that on average show up a little bit more extroverted, a little more cynical, a little more dark triad though, not too much, right. A little less self reflective in many cases, but for the most part looked a lot like normal people. And where they really looked like them were that there are all these sort of cognitive limits that we have because we're just humans with brains and they lead us to make systematically anomalous decisions away from what we should do sort of rationally in the very economic understanding of how you should make policy or make a choice. So human beings, we chase sunk costs. So once we've spent money on something, we're more likely to support it than another choice. Even if they're equal at that point in time. We escalate commitments, right? If we've committed to do something and there's a loss, we commit more. We think about risk differently depending on whether we're thinking about gains or losses. And we discount the future very, very sharply. All of those things are an obstacle to good policy making. For example. And when we studied this among politicians and one of the first big papers we did, and we studied politicians in Canada, Israel and Belgium, kind of a weird set, but national level politicians with real respons responsibilities, some of them in office for decades, they were no better than citizens at making the rational choices that they should be making. They look just like the rest of us. So this really got me thinking a lot about, you know, more about how are politicians different or similar to us? And I'll tell you why it's important that we, that they be different. But so what we concluded over a whole series of papers is, you know, where are they the same? They're sort of the same in that they have the same cognitive limits that all of us have. Where are they different? They bargain a bit differently. So they're a bit more attuned to kind of what fair bargains are. They drive harder bargains, they bargain differently with politicians than they do with citizens. So they've got some kind of. They think differently in different arenas. They're probably better, they're probably better at knowing what issues people care about. That's a really important political skill to know when you read a newspaper and you see a story in it that you know it's going to matter to your voters or not, but they're not actually a lot better than people are at knowing what people want them to do. And then finally, they have a different view of politics than we do. So if you look at what the average person believes about politics, they would think, for example, that if you ask, do voters vote according to partisanship or according to policy? They'd say, well, voters vote according to policy. They care about good policy. Politicians, no, no, no. Voters care about partisanship. Are voters kind of fair or unfair in how they attribute blame for things? Voters would say, oh, voters are fair. We're very rational politicians, they're unfair. So politicians are much more likely to have a realist view of voters and it shapes their behavior. And voters have a very kind of folk, theoretic, rosy view of themselves. So those are important differences. So it's a long wind up to your answer to your question. But let me give you a short answer to it, which is that for the most part, these politicians look like us. And that's probably what we want, because we want them at the top of these huge bureaucratic systems where there's all sorts of infrastructure for bringing decisions to them and helping them solve problems. We want them to represent people at the top end of it and represent our intuitions and our desires and to bring that voice of what people would want into that discussion that is otherwise unnecessarily technocratic and kind of dominated by bureaucrats and lobbyists and experts, et cetera, et cetera. So they're human, and their humanity is really important to their doing the job. But there's a trade off to that, right, that they're not obviously experts at making good policy choices. They're experts at making good political choices. And I'll just say one more thing, because this is something I've been thinking a lot about and thinking about in the context of being in a really disrupted time. So here's a proposition or a claim. If you watch the Departed, the great Martin Scorsese movie about organized crime in Boston, it starts out with the Whitey Bulger character Frank Costello saying, I decided I wanted my environment to be a product of me. I didn't want to be a product of my environment. And I've always thought that that is the definition of political leadership, that a political leader is one who shapes their environment and is not shaped by it. So that's proposition one. And then the claim is going to be that at any given time in most political systems, the number of true political leaders is probably zero. The number of people who are actually shaping the environment consistently rather than being shaped by it is probably zero. Which is to say that there's all this structure in our politics that makes democracy work. There's budgets and there's calendars, legislative calendars. There's political parties that have ideologies that are well known that everyone organizes around. There's party apparatuses that make elections work. There's all these electoral management bodies that actually run elections. There's legislative bodies and staff to make it work. The whole system can tickle off and everybody can just sort of take, not take orders, but just take their role in the system and sort of execute out what they're doing. If you're setting a budget, your finance minister, there was a budget the year before, and your party's got ideology and you reconcile those two things and you have a budget. Right. You don't have to do any leadership to actually get there. Right. And that's kind of the secret of the system. The system works without there actually being any need for really true leadership in it. Right. But if you think about a lot of our theory in political science about how change happens, punctuated equilibrium in policy, that policy moves along at some equilibrium for a period of time, and then something comes into the system that totally changes the policy and the policy goes to a new equilibrium and stays there. Think about things like party system change. The system is in equilibrium for a long time and then some change happens and now we have a new configuration of parties. Or think about every political biography that gets written. How many political biographies have been written about Rutherford B. Hayes or Franklin Pierce? Right? No, I bet less than a dozen. There's been like thousands written about Abraham Lincoln. So we think about politics and we think about democracy in terms of these leaders who are really system changers, who set the environment rather than being set by it. But most of the time the system is not run by leaders, it's just run by politicians who get delegated into the roles. They look like us and they're doing this kind of full time job, but they're doing it as real humans. So that's a really long, long way of saying that democracy exists in two states, maybe one in which it's sort of in stasis and it's just working along. And the people in those roles are just people who like to represent other people. They're out in their communities, they want to make change, but they're in the system and they're of the system. And they don't have to be geniuses and they don't have to be a lot different than the rest of us. They just have to be really committed to it and work at it and then at sometimes the system gets very, very disrupted, either internally or externally, by a leader who comes in and really starts to shape the environment. And they're just look at what's going on in the United States right now and ask yourself, if you set aside whatever your views are of the current president and you ask yourself, is he an environment shaper or is he shaped by the environment? And he's an environment shaper and that's why it's so disruptive, because he can just continually change the terms of the debate and, and all the rules that we're used to playing by, they just go out the window, right. Because he's constantly changing the basis. So that's a long wind up, to answer your question. But the short answer of it is that what we know about representation, we really know about, I think from my work and my work with my colleagues and I, from kind of normal time politics. And in normal time politics, everyday people can represent other people pretty well. But a lot of what we're interested in politics is the abnormal times when there's huge change going on under the system. And that's two different states of political science. Right. And we should think about them very, very differently. I think.
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Rachel Beatty Riedel
You know, Peter, it's interesting because we, in, in the scope of that answer, we think both about, we've been talking about some of the structural changes in our environments, demographic changes or technological changes, but then we're also thinking about individuals and their sets of characteristics, whether they're shaped by their environment or whether they are indeed environment shapers. And, and so in transferring that to thinking about the university and its role in society, part of what we do is shape the whole host of the next generation of citizens who are informed, who are scientific reasoners, who have critical thinking and who practice a set of democratic values of engagement and contributing to the public square. And that can bring those practices and values to whatever they might do in the private sphere, in the corporate industry, or however they may contribute. And so in thinking about shaping both the vast majority of everyday politicians who are just like us, the vast set of citizens who will never be elected representatives, but also maybe those once in a lifetime or those very few set of environment shapers, what do you think about the formation of the next generation of young people? What do they need as inputs in order to be dynamic democratic citizens?
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Peter Loewen
Yeah, it's a great question and it's an occupational hazard as a dean to answer those kinds of questions, but I'll share with you my intuitions. I think if we Tell. So the College of Arts and Sciences. We're one of the colleges of Cornell. We're the biggest. We have about a quarter of students at Cornell are in the college, give or take. And they're amazing students, as any student at Cornell is, as any student at great American universities are. These are kids who work so hard on average to get here, and they're so smart and they have such ambition. They have such ambition for themselves to live lives of tremendous consequence. The kids are all right, but. But the question is, what do we owe them in some sense, right? And I think Cornell, where we both are, right, Cornell's has a wonderful founding, if people don't know it. It's founded in the weeks after the Civil War. It's found that it's the only ivy with an English motto that I would found, Ezra Cornell speaking. That I would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study. And that he said later on to do the greatest good with the treasure he'd assembled, he thought he could give it to the university, to found the university and to have that radical democratic vision that you'd have a university that wasn't making decisions on admissions based on gender, on race, on religion, or on sectarian commitment within a religion, but instead would say that anybody could come and any of those people can study Anything that we offer is. It was a radical, radical, radical vision. So I think for Cornellians, we sort of have to ask, what does that mean? And I think that what it means to me, importantly, is that it's a very democratic vision of the world. It's one that says that we don't assume that anyone is destined to any future, particularly because of who they are or where they come from, but that any person can find any future for themselves. So that's the one thing that we want to do, right, is open the aperture as wide as possible for our students, to give them as good of a look in as possible into all the different things they could do with their lives and to choose the one that's right for them. So that's the student level. And then there's a question about what do they owe each other? And I think I'm really concerned about two things about our students. One is that I'm really concerned that they're not developing interests of sufficient depth, that maybe nothing is magical, or fewer things are magical anymore the way they would have been before because everything's available to them. They kind of live in a world of zero informational scarcity. And that's hard if you want to discover or realize the magic of discovery, of going into a library and just finding something you didn't know existed and then reading about it for that reason. So I think that there is. So I really hope that they'll be interesting, but I hope that more than anything else, that they're interested in other people and that they realize that the most interesting person in the world is the one who's sitting right next to them. That's a very democratic view of the world, that the people around you are who matters and who you should be interested in. And I think that there's a combination of two things that we ask of really ambitious young people these days. We ask them to be really focused on themselves and on their own outcomes and their own careers. And to the extent that they do things in their communities, it's because they want to check a box or jump through a hoop. And that happens here as well as at other places. So that's one thing that we ask them that's really not really very fair. And then we tell them, even just through the way we behave and model things for them, but also just by not speaking out against it, that their life is in technology rather than in the people around them. So what I hope, and this ties into creating democratic people, is that our universe, universities can really figure out how we create a community for young people for a three or four year period that really gives them a chance to develop deep interests, to become themselves, and to understand deeply within themselves what things interest them, what they believe and why they believe it, and what they want to do with their lives and what they think about the great issues and the great questions and what they love about small little trivial things that become the things that are interesting to them. And also that they would look back and say, I met the most interesting people when I was in college and I just love them because each of them was an individual worthy of interest, different from me. And I wanted to get to know so many of them as best I could. So to me, if we can inculcate those values of coming here, to really just become yourself and figure out what you want to be for your whole life, and then figure out what all these other people want to be and why that makes them interesting, that will make people ready for democracy. Because what we want is people who genuinely respect others deeply. That's just a core feature. And respect ordinary people, not just people who are of a certain echelon. So I think those things are very. We're both interested in kind of democratic education I'm interested in teaching disagreement, how we can do that. Well, you're very interested in teaching how people find public purpose. That's kind of high level stuff.
- [39:30]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Stuff.
- [39:31]
Peter Loewen
Right. But underneath that is we just have to create people who are interested in themselves, interested in things and interested in other people. I think that goes a long way to creating a society that's less polarized, that's less characterized by vilification and by disrespect for other people.
- [39:54]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
I think that's so powerful when we think about talking to the person who's next to you, you and that university communities are actually uniquely adapted to be able to create very heterogeneous possibilities for communication just by who happens to be sitting next to you in a classroom setting or who might be in your dormitory or whatnot.
- [40:18]
Peter Loewen
So thinking, I mean, we have to be at least as good of a. Take the old, the old, you know, the old. Who wrote the book on coffee shops
- [40:28]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
in Wisconsin, Kathy Kramer.
- [40:30]
Peter Loewen
Kathy Kramer. Coffee shops in Wisconsin at this point are better than universities at inculcating respect for other people. Because you go into these coffee shops, you sit down, go to McDonald's and listen to the old timers talk to each other. You get people from different religious backgrounds, they've got different political views, and they sit and they talk to each other and they respect each other. Other in doing that, right? And so we have to be at least, and I don't mean this facetiously or sarcastically, I mean it sincerely, we have to be at least as good as these other institutions in society at giving people a chance to sit down and learn with each other and respect each other and be interested in each other. You know, so there's a lot to be said for like, you know, or, you know, we watch, you know, you go to, I used to, in my summers, right, you go to a construction, I used to work in construction for my dad and go to construction site and sit down for the, for the coffee, chat with the guys and you know, you have people with different views who respect each other, right. And find a way to do it in an everyday way. We have to be, we really have to be at least as good as that.
- [41:31]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
And exactly on that thread. Then what is it from your research and your experience, what is it that talking to people on the other side brings about? You know, creating those spaces is one thing and, and putting people in them and being willing to be in them, but what is it about talking to people with different views that, that creates democratic potential or fabric for citizens relationships and and potentially can reduce the stakes of polarization.
- [42:05]
Peter Loewen
Yeah. So, you know, kind of cross, cross party discussion, it's going to do, it's going to do a few salubrious, a few good things. One is that it's very good at clarifying what you believe. So understanding why you believe what you believe is easier once you've given reasons for what you believe. And it's good to give. And that's a very democratic thing to have to give reason for why you have the beliefs that you have. And when you recognize that reason follows choices, choices don't follow reasons. In democracy, that's really important. Right. If you've been voting the same way your whole life, you're voting that way because it's a habit and there's nothing wrong with that. Right. But you should come to understand why you can justify it. And reason giving does that. So we discuss politics with other people. So we understand our own choices better. One, two, we understand their choices better. And if we listen to the reasons that they give for the choices that they've made, there's a better chance of us coming to agreement with them. Especially if you and I vote for different parties, we naturally disagree on which party is better. But if I ask you and listen carefully to the reasons why you vote the way you do and you listen to the reasons I vote the way I do, the chances are respect can only go up. Because I see you may have good reasons for what you've done, even though I don't agree with what you've done, or I wouldn't have made the same choice. So it helps us develop respect for other people. And the third thing I think it does is especially when you're in a highly polarized period of time, is that the more you talk, hopefully the more common ground you find. And you realize that actually there is a huge amount of overlap. That's why in most distributions of opinion, there's still a big fat middle. You realize there's a huge amount of overlap in what people think about politics if they think about anything about it at all. So I think just having that thing and then having that practice is important. And then finally, it might be that you don't like the reasons another person's given. It might be that you find that there's no common ground but talking itself, it should be a civil act. So even despite that, if none of those good things come from it, the practice of talking to other people in a way that affords them the respect of you listening to them, and they afford you the respect of listening to you is itself a good democratic act because it says that your views matter somewhat or maybe even as much as mine, and I want to hear them and vice versa.
- [44:25]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
So the recognition of one another's humanity is an important element of democratic existence and practice.
- [44:33]
Peter Loewen
Fundamental.
- [44:34]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just now, thinking ahead to education, higher. Higher ed, and what is the university's role in contributing to democratic society? We've talked about the kind of these spaces around forming democratic system systems, both in terms of content and in terms of making sure they are indeed places where we can talk to people with different views. And so where do you think there is opportunity for growth or expansion or change? And what do you think are some things that we're already doing that are really essential and we should continue to do them?
- [45:12]
Peter Loewen
Yeah. So one of the things that universities are doing well, universities in this country in the United States have been a wellspring of incredible innovation of wealth and of the enhancement of life in the United States and around the world. They are places where the most important medical and scientific advances come from and have come from for a long time. And that's the result of a combination of maintaining academic freedom, of high rate of participation in universities by the public, which has good financial benefits, and an outsized generosity.
- [45:52]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Generosity.
- [45:53]
Peter Loewen
An outsized generosity from the American taxpayer to American universities. No other taxpayers in the world give the same kind of money to the universities as Americans do. It comes through the form of financial aid and Pell Grants, that kind of stuff that underwrites very high tuition rates and then massive amounts of research money through the agencies National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, also Department of Defense, Department of Energy, et cetera, et cetera. It's an incredible success story going all the way back to kind of World War II. World War II on. And it's one that's maybe imperiled now, but you just have to say that it is American taxpayers sending huge amounts of money to American universities. And it's been a real source of American innovation and advantage for a long, long time. And in some ways, the rest of the world is finding out what happens when American universities aren't well funded. Right. Everybody thinks it's to their advantage. It's not because we're the anchor. Right. Or we're the real source of energy in the ecosystem, if you want to put it that way. So American universities have done that very, very well. American universities have been places where families have been able to realize social mobility in a really important way. And social mobility is not perfect. In the United States. And it could be much, much better, but for that smart kid who's the first in their family to go to university and to come and to have their horizons expanded, to have their skills enhanced and to have their life paths open up in a way that they wouldn't have opened up before, to then create opportunity and wealth for generations of their family, that comes afterwards. Universities have been fundamental to that. And the story of the expansion of them through the GI Bill is such an inspiring one. After World War II and what that did to democratize our universities and make them places which could be real engines of social mobility where before they were in many ways kind of the province of the rich in the United States or the advantaged, if you will. So it's done that, it's done that well. And at bottom, American universities create new ideas that can create solutions for this society. Now there's a rub to this though, right? Which is that it's reasonable, I think it's entirely reasonable for the public to ask, are universities working on the problems that we really care about? That's one and two. Are they coming up with solutions that we as the public want and would support democratically? Those are not unreasonable things. If you think that universities should be able to determine entirely what they work on or do it in concert with elites and then send down those answers to the public and the public just has to take those answers. That works in China and other places, right? It worked here during COVID for a little while, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not the game that Americans think they're in with their universities. So I think the one thing we could do better, the one thing we could do better is we could have a better interface between what the public wants for solutions and what universities work on. And we could be better, I think, at actually soliciting from the public in an open minded, open hearted way, you know, asking them what are the big issues you want us to work on and solve? And then we'll work on those and we'll try to go up with the best answers possible and we'll put them out into the open for you. And I'll just be a total homer and plug something about Cornell right now, which is that because we were the land grant university for New York State, so we're public and private, we received when the Morrill act was passed and they gave huge blocks of land in the western United States to allow universities in one university in every state to finance its operations, Cornell got them that land granted In Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, some other places, we've benefited immensely from the material wealth that that land gave us, carries with it really serious obligations. One thing that we did, especially when we started our agriculture college, is we set up an extension office in every county. And if you want to know what are the two groups that really care about Cornell University and think that it's really good for our society. Right. One group is the whole ecosystem of people whose kids are in great high schools, who send them here, and all of our students who come through, and it's an amazing place for those students. But if you're a dairy farmer working in New York State, and you interact regularly with the extension offices at Cornell and the College of Agriculture and Life Science to understand what you can be doing for bovine nutrition, what you can be doing to increase milk production with your cows, or if you're. If you're a vegetable farmer and you're finding out what new soil compounds or new fertilizer compounds are going to help you get a better yield that year, Cornell has been there for you for 100 years. And it's been like every agricultural innovation in this country has Cornell's fingerprints on it. That's a material down to the soil, literal way that we've made huge contributions. And it's a great example because of the interface. Right. Because these extension offices that sit between. At the membrane between Cornell and farmers, people in every county in New York really do listen to what that community needs, and then it produces it within our scientific process, within the context of academic freedom in our university. So what universities will do really well in the future is they'll listen as well as they talk, and they will really go to the public and say, what problems do you really need us to solve for you? And then we'll come up with solutions for those problems, rather than saying, you know, we didn't need to listen to you because we know what. We know what you care about, and we're going to tell you. We're going to tell you what you
- [51:32]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
should do about it, you know, that's such an important element and such an incredibly poignant note to end on, in the sense that that very act of listening and being responsive is a democratic act. It's an act of democratic responsiveness where the institutions and the organizations that are publicly oriented are taking inputs and providing services and resources back to the citizens who, who make up our communities. And I think that's exactly, you know, across the set of fields and particularly when we're thinking about democracy in this context. Of 250 years in the United States and thinking about the state of democracy globally. That's exactly. Also the work, that kind of extension work that we're committed to at Cornell and beyond in terms of listening to what citizens need and providing a set of resources and interfaces that strengthen democratic practice and institutions. So I think that's a perfect tie in to think about the university's functioning and our democratic role in society. Thank you so much for talking with us, Peter.
- [52:47]
Peter Loewen
No, my pleasure. It's really nice to have the chance to chat with this stuff.
- [52:50]
Rachel Beatty Riedel
Truly a pleasure. Take care.
- [52:52]
Peter Loewen
Thanks.
- [52:54]
Olivia
It.