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The Roots of Political Violence and How We Prevent It
01:01:02
What's causing the rise in political violence in America? Can we overcome it? And if not, what’s in store for our democracy? Dr. Lilly Mason, a professor of political science at Johnny Hopkins and expert on political violence, joins the show to give context to this moment — and offer some hope for what comes next. She talks to Tommy about what Charlie Kirk’s assassination means in our deeply polarized political climate, President Trump’s crackdown on late-night comedians and left-wing organizations, and why Americans — on both sides of the aisle — are increasingly struggling to recognize the humanity in their neighbors.
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- [00:00]
Pod Save America Host
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- [02:31]
Tommy Vietor
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Tommy Vitor. It's been A weird, unsettling couple of weeks. On the day this episode comes out, mourners will gather in Arizona for Charlie Kirk's memorial service. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Trump administration is busily working on new ways to punish its political enemies, silence critics, and is reportedly even preparing to label entire groups of American citizens as terrorists. And more broadly, people are just on edge. The political conversation feels ominous. Elected officials and even people who just report on or talk about politics for a living, myself included, are thinking about and worrying about whether it's safe to say what we believe. And so the questions I want to answer today are, is the threat of political violence actually worse now than in the past, or is that just a feeling? Is this a partisan problem? What role does rhetoric play? And what can we learn from our history, from international examples, and most importantly, how do we take the temperature down? My guest today is Dr. Liliana Mason. She is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the co author of a book called Radical American Mapping Violent History, Its Causes and the Consequences for Our Democracy and Uncivil How Politics Became Our Identity. Couldn't think of anyone better to have this conversation with. Here it is. Dr. Mason, welcome to Pod Save America.
- [03:51]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Thanks for having me.
- [03:52]
Tommy Vietor
It is great to talk with you. So, look, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, a lot of people in politics and people in media, they're worried about some sort of reprisal, violence. They're worried about things maybe spiraling out of control. And there's this feeling. I hear it in my own life, in conversations I have with friends. I see it in the media. I read. There's this sense that America and our political discourse is more violent now and more scary than it was before. But that's a feeling. I know you gather, like, actual data on this stuff. What does the data tell you about the level of violence in the United States? Political violence compared to the past?
- [04:28]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah. So the. I mean, first of all, it's not. We don't have, like, an epidemic of political violence. I think it's important to note that there certainly is a lot more violent rhetoric coming out of our political leaders, in particular Trump and people adjacent to him.
- [04:44]
Tommy Vietor
I've noticed that.
- [04:45]
Dr. Liliana Mason
And I wonder. And rhetoric doesn't cause violence. Right. It can encourage it and it can direct it. But we have seen these sort of very visceral, intense, individual events that have seemed to be happening more frequently in the last year. Let's say it's not. We're a nation of 300 million people. These are still a Very small number of violent events. And the question is for some of these is, are they political violence or are they violence? I would say we're a country with a violence problem and a political problem and sometimes those overlap and we don't always know whether they're overlapping. So, for example, when someone famous who is political is attacked, is it because of their politics or is it because the person who's attacking them wants to be famous? Is it because of their fame or their politics? So these things can be difficult to interpret and we don't always know exactly how to capture categorize them. I think it's fair to say that we have had a couple of very high profile violent events over the last year. That's sort of more than we're used to. But I wouldn't think of it as like a terrifying epidemic.
- [05:54]
Tommy Vietor
Got it. That's nice to hear. I want to dig into this question of like kind of the connection between rhetoric and political violence in a minute. But first, I mean, Vice President J.D. vance says this is a liberal or a left problem. As evidence in this live stream he did, he cited, I think, one online YouGov poll showing that very liberal respondents were more likely than very conservative respondents to say political violence can be justified. I don't know that making declarations based off of one online poll quite meets the gold standard for data science. But what is the totality of the data that you look at? What does it tell you about where if there's a partisan split or not when it comes to justifying or accepting violence?
- [06:36]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, so I haven't actually seen the numbers from that Yuga poll that he was citing. And I'm kind of curious what they are, but. So my co author, Nathan Calmo and I have been collecting data on approval of political violence in the American election electorate since 2017 multiple times a year, and we're still collecting that data. So the question we would ask is very similar to the one that you just said. It's to what extent is it acceptable to use violence to achieve your political goals? And what we just measure is the percentage of people who say anything other than never. Right. So it's like never, sometimes, always. We're only interested in how many people say anything besides never. And that in 2017 was only 7% of Democrats and Republicans by 20, by, let's just say like last summer is one of the most recent times we asked that question. It's gone up and it's, you know, tends to be between like 15 and 20% now for both Democrats And Republicans, sometimes Democrats are higher than Republicans, sometimes Republicans are higher than Democrats. It just, but usually it's by like 3 percentage points difference. Like it's never very far apart and it's never very like consistently one party is more approving of violence than the other. But overall. Right. We still have 80 to 90% of Americans saying it's never acceptable. And that 10 to 20% is saying something that's either a little bit or somewhat or a lot.
- [08:01]
Tommy Vietor
Got it. And they're very represented on social media, it seems. I saw you tell the New Yorker that like you just told us very few people support violence. But that can change. If you say, well, the other side started at first. Can you, can you talk about those sort of respondents? Because on the one hand, like it's kind of obvious on an individual level, like if someone punches you, you're going to punch back. That doesn't make you a violent person. But these people are saying, if you punch my team, I will punch you back. Like, it seems a little different.
- [08:29]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Well, so I mean, it's important to note that this question isn't do you want to do violence? It's do you think that it's okay for some people to use it to achieve your political goals? And the vast majority of people who say even are like, yeah, violence is great. Most of them will never commit political violence. So it's really about what are the norms in the places where we might have volatile people. Right. Like are 20% of the people around volatile young man saying violence is okay? That changes the way that that person thinks about where to aim their violence. So we asked people a follow up question which was, what if the other side starts it? And then we get actually pretty terrible numbers, like 50 sometimes. Last summer it was 60% of both Democrats and Republicans said it would be.
- [09:14]
Tommy Vietor
And that's, I mean, and that's pretty scary because that's kind of what you're hearing out of Republicans right now, which is like, you shot at Trump, they, you know, killed Charlie Kirk, therefore we need to act. I mean, I think that is kind of what is contributing to Climate affair, or at least making me feel like this is different and new and worse.
- [09:32]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, well, and also, I mean, I think what makes me the most worried is that, I mean you can easily see like the logical progression from if they started it, then I'm willing to keep going and then they're going to want to attack back and then we're going to want to attack back. And so the risk is that we end up in this sort of vicious cycle where one side starts it, the other side fights back, and we can end up with situations. Think about the Middle east, where it's like, there's no good guys and no bad guys. It's just been fighting back and forth, and nobody can stop it because whoever started it loses control of the situation. And that's a situation that we really, really want to avoid, because once it starts, it's hard to stop. And so having politicians use rhetoric that's encouraging this type of cycle to start is really, really irresponsible.
- [10:21]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. I also saw there was a recent Wall Street Journal poll that found 93% of baby boomers and 86% of Gen X say political violence is never acceptable. But those numbers drop significantly among younger Americans. Just 71% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z. Function of all of us kind of maturing with age. Is this something we need to worry about? Like, how do you think about those numbers?
- [10:43]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, young people tend to approve of violence more than older people, like, throughout time. I think most people. I mean, there's a reason that when we see mass. Mass violent events, no matter whether they're political or not, that it tends to be young people who are. Who are perpetrating them. We tend to. You know, our brains don't mature perfectly by the time we're even just in our early 20s. And so all of our risk assessments and our ideas about what's socially responsible and what our values are, that stuff isn't hardwired yet until we're 25. And so it doesn't surprise me to find that young people generally are more comfortable with violence.
- [11:25]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. And even just the minute you have kids. I was talking to a friend yesterday. I used to get on planes and have turbulence and be like, oh, this is fun. No concern about anything. Now you're like, oh, no. What would I leave behind? Not to be especially dark here.
- [11:38]
Dr. Liliana Mason
I'm just getting on a plane tomorrow.
- [11:41]
Tommy Vietor
I should tell the listeners you're recording this in Austria. So no dark history of political violence there to speak of. We'll just kind of ignore that. So look, for me, like, figuring out how to cover this, to talk about it and be responsible is kind of challenging because I don't want to hype the threat. I don't want to make everybody more anxious for the reasons we just talked about. Like, I don't want people on edge that, like, the other side's coming for them. I also don't want to have a terrible two weeks of sleep. Like, I Just had, because I wake up thinking about this shit. But also, we can't ignore what's happening in the world. Like, how do you think the media strikes the right balance here?
- [12:15]
Dr. Liliana Mason
It's really, really hard because the incentives are off. What we know in terms of just like journalism, we've been saying this forever, right? If it bleeds, it leads. People pay more attention to the media when it's about scary things. And we are more willing to click on a story if it's telling us that there's a big fight going on. We're much more likely to pay attention to two people not getting along, for example, than two people having a pleasant conversation. This is like an evolutionary thing where we have to pay attention to danger because it might hurt us. And a beautiful garden we can come back to later. That's not an emergency for us. So our brains are drawn to conflict and negativity and violence. And so for the news media, they're really in a bind because they want attention and clicks and they want to sell ads and they mostly don't want to encourage a wave of escalating violence that's impossible to stop. But those are incentives that are really at odds with each other. And I understand it's a difficult situation, but I think that the most important thing, whenever I talk to journalists, I try to remind them that this is. It's a delicate situation. And if people have the perception that everything is spiraling out of control already, they're more willing to engage in risky and chaotic behavior because it already feels like chaos everywhere. And if it's not chaos everywhere yet, then let's not try to tell people that it is, because then they're going to behave in ways that are undesirable.
- [13:51]
Tommy Vietor
And that's so hard these days. I mean, look, I live in Los Angeles. There were weeks and weeks of coverage about Donald Trump sending the troops here to put down protests that, like, literally I had not seen, no one I knew had seen, because they existed within like a three block area downtown and were quickly stopped by a local curfew. But everyone I knew outside of LA was like, are you guys okay? Is your house okay? What are you talking about?
- [14:16]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you wouldn't hear that story coming, right? Coming from the White House though, right? That it's in their interest to make it feel like they are like this mass force taking over major political cities and that there's a battle going on. And they were doing this even during the campaign last year. Right. The American cities are full of crime and it's impossible to walk down the street without getting hurt and mugged, and it's terrifying to be on the subway. All of these things are false. And anybody who lives in any of these cities knows that that's just not what it's like to live there. But it is. But, you know, we're. Unfortunately, we have a situation where we are actually polarized by place. And so rural areas are much more Republican, urban areas are much more liberal. And so it's, you know, it's in the right's interest to say all those liberal places are super dangerous.
- [15:08]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. I want to ask you about this. This regional polarization question, because I thought it was really interesting. I was reading something you'd written about it. On this question of the connection between rhetoric and violence. I mean, I'm wondering how you think, where do we draw the line? Because, like, there's historical examples of clear, direct incitement to violence, Right? Like the Rwandan genocide, for example, was precipitated by months of this, like, dehumanizing rhetoric about the Tutsi minority and barely disguise calls to. To kill them. But, you know, there's more nebulous version. Like, Democrats said that Trump's January 6th rhetoric led the mob to attack the Capitol. I happen to think that's true, but a lot of people dispute it. Republicans are now saying that Democrats even using the word fascist or fascism is contributing to violence or led to the attack on Charlie Kirk. How do you think. How do you think about where to draw the line?
- [16:01]
Dr. Liliana Mason
I mean, it's hard, right? Especially if we're talking about, like, a legal line. A friend was just telling me the story about during the. During the trials after the Rwandan genocide, the people who are running the media channels that were sort of spreading dehumanizing language, they were on trial, and the lawyer asked a witness, like, they never touched a machete. Right. Why are they supposed. What did they do? They didn't actually kill anybody. And the witness said, no, but they sprinkled petrol all over the ground everywhere they could, so that when one person dropped a match, everything caught on fire. So there is this idea that I didn't actually do anything violent. I just made people ready to start being violent as soon as. As soon as I told them to. Right. Or as soon as anything went wrong. And that's a realistic narrative, I think. But it also. I think it's important to think about the other end of it, which is that our leaders can make us less violent, too. And I've run experiments where we sort of have people just read either a quote from Joe Biden, a quote from Donald Trump, or nothing at all. And the quotes are sort of saying, don't be violent. Basically, it's a short little sentence. It's a very simple test. And what we find is that the people who read the quote from either Biden or Trump are much less supportive of violence than the people who read nothing. And it doesn't matter which leader said it. It doesn't matter whether it was their leader or the other party's leader. It's just hearing from elected people and leaders that makes people step back. And it's so easy to do that. Right. We just had them read one sentence from one of these guys. And so the bigger problem, I mean, it is a big problem to have violent rhetoric going on, but it's also a problem to not have discouraging messages of just saying, we don't do this. Please don't do this. Don't do this on my behalf. I'll disavow you if you engage in this type of behavior on my behalf. It's pretty simple to knock it back. And the fact that we don't see the people in the White House right now actively trying to do that, that's also pretty worrying.
- [18:11]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. The Rwanda example, I mean, the radio hosts were calling the two T's, you know, cockroaches and telling, talking about how we need to go chop down the trees, which was their code for, like, go attack them with machete. So again, you have quite overt.
- [18:32]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Pod.
- [18:33]
Pod Save America Host
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- [19:35]
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- [20:10]
Tommy Vietor
But it was interesting after the, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I thought it was great to see like basically every former president come out and condemn it. Obviously, Donald Trump has not, you know, turned down the press, turned down the heat at all. Like how, how impactful do you think it would be were he to say, political violence is bad? I condemn it. Don't do this in my name. Given the research you have that shows that like sort of any president condemning violence or turning down the temperature tends to have an impact as well.
- [20:43]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah. So I mean, I think part of the reason though, that any president has, has influence is that we tend to overestimate the degree to which the other side is violent. So we are always thinking that people on the other side are more violent than they actually are. And so to hear the leader of the other side condemn violence actually is like, surprising, interesting. And so we kind of feel less threatened by them. And then we don't have to, then we don't have to advocate for violence either. And so it would be against type if he did that. Right. I think it would be, I think it would be surprising for a lot of people and I think it would be pretty refreshing to hear that kind of message come from him. I think the good thing is that it doesn't have, doesn't have to be him. It would be great if it was him, but it doesn't have to be him. As long as we have like sustained condemnation from other people. That does help also.
- [21:29]
Tommy Vietor
That's good to hear. Unfortunately, there are some other arts in this out there. I mean, about a week ago there was this huge rally in London organized by a far right activist named Tobi Robinson, who's just a Hooligan Elon Musk video conference into it. He said, quote, whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. He said the left is the party of murder. He also talked about the Great Replacement Theory. Where do those comments by our buddy Elon sort of rank in the incitement meter? And how worried are you about kind of the meta narratives, the conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory when it comes to inciting people?
- [22:09]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, he's really losing it. I don't know what this is like. Even for Elon Musk, this is pretty remarkable. I mean, it's very bad to the extent that he still has people. You know, he's famous for having like a bunch of fanboys even before he became involved in politics. Like, he just has these like very loyal supporters and they tend to be young men, which is the group of people that tends to be the most violent and the most inclined towards violence. So it's not great to hear him kind of using this existential language and really threatening language too. Right. It's like you can't escape. Escape it. What he's basically narrating is like, the time has come and that's absolutely not true. Right. We are not in a national war. This is not happening on the streets. And what he's doing is it's honestly making it more likely that somebody else uses violence. Because, I mean, I think about, as I was sort of saying before, like these young men, often these, you know, we have a lot of volatile young men and they have very easy access to guns and some of them kind of are kind of ready to do something violent anyway. What language like that does is it tells them where to point their violence. And so it points them in a political direction. It aims them at elected officials or just liberals in the neighborhood. I don't actually know. We don't know how the violence exactly comes out, but. But by connecting these violent impulses directly to politics and to an entire political group or category of people, which is half of the political people in the country. It's just extremely irresponsible and I really hope it doesn't actually end up hurting somebody.
- [23:53]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, me too. You've sort of taken a look at the broader structural challenges in our politics and how partisan affiliation has evolved over time to become about our identity more than just sort of a bucket of policy views. Can you talk about that evolution and how it factors into this nastier kind of zero sum brand of politics we're all now living with?
- [24:17]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, so I call this social Sorting basically after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, a bunch of conservative white Southern Democrats were very, very, very upset with their own party before passing civil rights legislation. And the thing is, then there's no way they were going to call themselves Republicans, right? Because like in the south, the Republicans were the aggressors in the Civil War. They absolutely despised them. And so it took like a generation for white conservative Southerners to switch parties completely. Basically, their kids had to, had to switch party affiliation. So that was like over, you know, 20 or 30 years of realignment. And then at the same time, the Democratic Party became clearly the party of civil rights. And so people who were into civil rights became Democrats. And then in the 70s and 80s, we had the Christian Coalition emerge, which was basically evangelical churches deciding to leave their prior position of just sort of leaving public life altogether. Like they just didn't want anything to do with the secular world until the 70s and 80s when they started to be courted by the Republican Party and realized that they had a lot of potential political power. Now we have racial identities lined up with our party identity, and religious identities lined up with our party identity. Then in the 80s and 90s, we saw this emerging segregation of partisanship by geographic area. People in rural areas, like I said, were increasingly Republican. People in urban areas were increasingly Democratic. And so we just sort of like piled identity on top of identity on top of identity. And one thing that we know from social psychology about social identities is that we're really, really strongly motivated to want our groups to win. And it feels really good when they win, and it feels really bad when they lose. And so what this sort of stacking of identities did is it made it so that our elections were not just about which government policies we wanted enacted. It was about like, is my party a winner? Is my racial group a winner? Is my religious group a winner? Right. Like, is my whole cultural identity going to be a loser after this thing? And so the stakes of elections grew, not because of specific policies, but because they just took up more of our kind of emotional and psychological space. When we think about our status in the world where we belong, like, are we accepted to people like us? And so that period, sort of, I think I would say it culminated in the early 2000s. And we're pretty much totally sorted by now. There's fewer cross cutting identities, so we don't know as many people from the other party. And it just makes it easier to hate each other because we barely know each other at all. It's harder to hate somebody when you meet them at church once a week.
- [27:09]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, that is true. Well, can you tell us a little more about the. I heard you talk about status threat and the social identity theory and sort of the roots of it and how. How the evolution of the theory and sort of who came up with it? Because I think it was an important. It was helpful for me to understand kind of where this came from.
- [27:25]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, thank you for asking that. No one ever. I'm like, I can talk about the science. So there's a guy named Henri Tajwel who was. He was a chemistry PhD student in France right before World War II, but he had grown up in Poland, and he was Jewish. He went to France. He didn't really like studying chemistry. He was super into learning French, though. So he learned French really, really well. Had a perfect accent. And then the war broke out. He decided to join the armed forces and fight the Nazis. And he was not very good at fighting Nazis. And he was immediately captured by the Nazis and put in a prison camp. And he stayed in that prison camp for six years. While he was there, he lied to the guards and told them that they knew he was Jewish, but they didn't know he was Polish. And he told him he was a French Jew, which kept him alive. He believes that that's the reason he lived through the entire prison camp experience, because he saw Polish people being murdered in the camp. He got out, the war was over. Most of his family was dead, had been killed, and he was thinking about, like, what do I do? Do I go back and, like, get my chemistry degree? And instead he. He decided to start studying intergroup conflict. Like, what makes people hate each other? Because it was just so amazing to him that the fact that he had lied about which group he belonged in kept him alive. Like it was a matter of life or death whether he was French or Polish. And it clearly, you know, the. The difference wasn't real because, like, he. They couldn't tell by looking at him, and that's why he survived. So he decided to study this. And the first step that he took was to say, all right, so we know about groups hating each other, but I want to know when that starts, like, how much competition or conflict between the groups has to exist for them to start being prejudiced against each other. So he started. He was like, I'm going to start with a baseline test where I'm going to use an identity that no one ever had or heard about before. I'm going to assign an identity to people randomly. They're definitely not part of this group. Because he said, I want you to look at a page of dots and estimate the number of dots you see. Okay, thank you. You're an overestimator. Some people are underestimators, but you're an overestimator. Brand new identity, never heard of it. And then at the end of the study he said, we're going to do a money allocation task so you can decide how to allocate this little pot of money that I given you. And this is a simplification, but basically saying you can either. And we're going to use the overestimator, underestimator thing just for convenience, like don't worry about it, we just have to make groups. You can either give $5 to everyone in the whole study, just every single person who took this study gets $5, or the overestimators, your guys can get $4 and the underestimators can get 3. So you're literally sacrificing the well being of your group in order to win, in order to be better than the other guys. You've never met the other guys. You've never met your guys. You're just alone in a lab, right? So there's no incentive. Normally, rationally, there's no incentive to take the less, the lower amount of money. But this is what people kept doing. This is one of these experiments that's been replicated hundreds of times. People always choose the condition where they get less money, but the other group gets even less than them. And so Tajfeld was like, what is happening? I don't understand. Like he was like, this is supposed to be the baseline, right? So like there's something going on here that's like really deeply rooted in the psyche. And he developed social identity theory which basically says that our identities form our sense of self esteem and there's almost nothing more important to us than our sense of ourselves and in the world.
- [31:20]
Tommy Vietor
Which seems to undercut every single political theory you hear from progressives, which is like, look, we're going to lift all boats and we're going to make schools better for everybody and we're going to give everybody health care and all the wages are going to go up. And in reality everyone's just like, no, you, I don't like that guy over there or that group over there.
- [31:46]
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- [32:46]
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- [33:21]
Tommy Vietor
That feels like an unfixable problem to me.
- [33:23]
Dr. Liliana Mason
It kills me because the Democrats are constantly, like, if we just told you how much we were helping you, like, if we just told you all the facts about the things that you are really interested in, then you would love us, right? And it's just not how people process information. It's not about the specific hard facts. It's more about how people feel and whether they feel like they're losing or winning. And that's when they're gonna chase the win every single time. And I don't know if you remember in 2016. Of course you remember in 2016. Trump was just like, he used the word winning constantly, right? He was like, you're gonna be so tired of winning by the time I'm done. You're gonna be like, please, let's stop winning. Like he used the word. And it's not because he knows about social identity theory, but like he, I think he does have an instinct for this type of kind of psychological dynamic that we all have where we're, we're chasing the high status feeling and it's so deeply hardwired in us that we do things that make absolutely no sense in order to get that feeling.
- [34:21]
Tommy Vietor
And look, part of the sort of zero sum political fight problem we have in the United States comes from our history of slavery and Jim Crow and racial segregation against black people. I think the sort of modern iteration that Trump is using to divide us has come from immigration. And that's not, you know, unique to the United States. Right. I mean, the MAGA folks have demagogued immigration. Viktor Orban in Hungary is demagogued immigration. The AfD party has risen on the back of anti immigrant sentiment. The FP party in Austria, where you're at currently, do they have the Prime Minister? They were close. Right. Anyway, super far right, scary party running things. How does immigration factor into partisan splits and discord and potential violence, in your view?
- [35:10]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, and you're right that like immigration is one of these things that just sort of works to turn immigrants into a scapegoat basically anywhere. It is also racist though, right? Because it's like it's not the white immigrants that they're really about in those places. What Trump really did, I think, in taking advantage of this in the 2016 election was effectively to say, everything sucks, we're all losers, America's a loser. But the reason for it is those people. And if we could just get rid of those people, then we would be winners again. And that is basically a way of saying, I know you're not feeling great, but the reason you're not feeling great is because of this group. And this is a tried and tested method of authoritarians everywhere, populists everywhere, to identify a minority, make them the scapegoat, and then make people so angry at them that they forget about the things they really need. And so instead of thinking about, do we really want a billionaire in charge of a populist party? None of those things had to be thought about. Or do we really want someone who's going to get rid of our health care? They didn't have to think about those things because there was this very vivid example of some people who were taking stuff away from you. And it's very simple, it's very emotional, it's easy to understand, and it feels like the solution is easy too. And those types of stories just land. They always land. And meanwhile, the Democrats are over here being like, I want whatever Hillary was doing, like Alaska for America. Plan, like, trust me, when you hear about this policy, you're going to love it. And like, here's all the details.
- [36:51]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. We're reading all the white papers here in America.
- [36:54]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, yeah. And meanwhile, Trump is just like, those people are the reason that you don't feel good right now. And so we should go get them together.
- [37:01]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. Well, let me channel my inner Bernie for a second, which is to say, like, I could also probably argue, and you tell me if this is right, that political violence is more likely when people feel like the system that we have to solve problems is intractable and broken. Right. I mean, politics is what we do to avoid going to war with each other. Shorthand, basically. And when the politics part isn't working, it's going to lead us to war. So aren't these wonky, lame, good government Democrats talking about their programs that benefit everyone? Isn't that part of, isn't that necessary maybe to avoid violent outcomes?
- [37:40]
Dr. Liliana Mason
I mean, I think doing those policies is right. But this is, it's like, it's like describing an antidepressant to somebody instead of giving them the antidepressant. Right. Like, it's, it isn't the way that these things work.
- [37:54]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah.
- [37:54]
Dr. Liliana Mason
And you, you have to get them involved and emotional and like, be part, they need to be part of the story that you're telling about America and about the future and about the things that we could have together. But it, but you also have to deliver the things. Right. So it's, it's having relief, but it's also knowing actually who's to blame for your suffering. Right. We've convinced rural America has become convinced that Democrats are taking money away from rural America. And that's just absolutely not the case. Right. The people that have disinvested in rural America have pretty consistently been Republicans. I mean, I think you can point to Bill Clinton for nafta. And that is the entire explanation that rural America needs to blame Democrats for everything that's hurting them. But especially in red states. Right. Like, the state governments have just completely de. Invested in rural areas. They don't help them at all. And it's not because the Democrats are evil pedophiles. Right. It's because the state governments have decided that they don't want to tax their people and so they don't want to spend money to help the people who are suffering. And that's like, that's a story where you understand who is to blame for the thing that's really hurting you. But it has to have, like, stories need Protagonists, and they need good guys and bad guys, and you have to be able to explain things to people so that they. They connect their feelings to whatever it is that you're talking about.
- [39:14]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. I mean, we learned this the hard way after the Affordable Care act passed and a bunch of Republican states rejected free Medicaid money to give more people health care in their states. So is what you're getting at that Democrats need an enemy in this story and need to tell a more coherent story that includes, I don't know, the billionaires, the oligarchs? Like, is that kind of mess the solution, in your view?
- [39:35]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Sure, sure. It can be. I mean, it almost doesn't matter. Right. Like, this is what we learned from the Republican Party. They just pick somebody.
- [39:43]
Tommy Vietor
Pick one.
- [39:43]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah. And usually it's somebody they hate. Right. But. And so it's convenient for them. It works really well because it's like, we wanted to get rid of those guys anyway. But it's. I think it's more. It's. There is a game that the Republicans are playing that Democrats are just constantly being fooled into playing along with them. And so it's like, Trump's immigration platform is super popular, so Democrats can never say immigration is good. Right. Like, let's never get on the wrong side of that. And this whole popularist argument, which makes me crazy, which is like, whatever the public opinion is, you gotta do that instead of, like, admitting that you have leadership agency.
- [40:23]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Dr. Liliana Mason
You're supposed to be the leader. Right. Like, you, as the leader, are supposed to explain your side of the story instead of constantly taking the losing side of somebody else's story. They're just not. I mean, what's driving me crazy about the Democrats right now is they're just not taking advantage of any of their opportunities to actually, like, scream right now. Like, things are really bad, you guys. Like, this is really scary. And listen, this is what we need to do. Right? This is who's hurting you. This is what we need to do. Let's say it's the billionaire oligarchs. Great. It's a great opportunity to do that because they just turned their backs on Democrats. Right. I actually think that might have been a tactical error. They were donating to Democrats before, and Democrats kind of let them off the hook. Now they're not. So it just feels like they need to have a better sense of their job as leaders.
- [41:13]
Tommy Vietor
I disagree. I think our leadership is perfect and everything is going great. No, I'm totally with the hardest thing. A couple hard things as a politician, these Days one is figuring out when you are trying to shape public opinion and lead people versus be responsive to the people who voted for you. Right. Like, that's a perennial challenge. But you're right. I think we're. The balance is off big time. But then also, you know, the Democrats who are saying the right things, who are screaming as loud as they can, actually reaching the voters these days in a algorithmic driven, Elon Musk world is a real bummer. I've heard you talk about the political divisions and partisan divides and the way they've become more geographic. It's not just like red states and blue states. It's like cities and areas within cities that are more Republican and Democrat. And honestly, like, I used to roll my eyes when I would hear liberals be like, I could never live in a red state because I was like, fucking get over yourself. But now the DoB decision happened and it's like, okay. Actually, the risks are quite obvious, right? Like, my wife and I had a lot of pregnancy challenges. If she had a miscarriage, would she be able to get that care? Like, that's a very real scary thing for me. This week you're seeing, you know, Florida, they just got rid of their, you know, vaccine mandate for schools. Now you're seeing a push for, like, Louisiana and Texas to follow suit. And I worry about those stories for a lot of reasons, like, I don't want a bunch of kids to get the measles. But also, like, when the stakes go up like that, am I wrong to fear that this could supercharge these divisions that you've written about?
- [42:36]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, I mean, I think it's. It also calls into question, like, what is a nation, right? I mean, if. If you're. If your physical rights as a human being change as you drive across a highway, are you in one country the whole time? You know what I mean? Like, it's. It changes. Like, it's a very strange. A strange way to think about one country as sort of depending on which state you're in, you might die or you might not die if you have a miscarriage, or you might die, or you might not die if your kid is in school and gets whooping cough or whatever. And so I think it not only supercharges the way that we think about ourselves in terms of being Democrats and Republicans, because now we have different rights, whether we're a Democrat living in one state or another, but it makes us feel more disconnected from each other also. Right. It's just like, I just don't understand what it's like to live there. And that's a situation in which it's really, really hard. It gets harder and harder and harder for us to understand each other and to sort of think of each other with compassion. Because we start we're having these, like, really difficult conversations about, like, you know, do I want to be alive? Do I want to be able to survive a miscarriage if I'm on a car trip? And both, I think I would probably say that Democrats are furious about the idea that they can't just drive in a straight line across the country if they want to. And Republicans are furious because they believe that they don't want people to murder babies in their state. It's like the stakes are so high and we're having these very vicious fights. And the idea that what this court has done, what the Supreme Court has done is remove federal protections kind of one by one, which makes our states more and more and more different from each other in terms of the rights they provide to their citizens. It's just making this country more and more fractured.
- [44:26]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, it's very scary. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but in case you missed it, Alex Wagner is officially joining Crooked Media. She is a Positive America contributor. You're gonna hear her doing these episodes on Sunday very soon. And she's the host of a brand new podcast. She is also joined the latest episode of our exclusive Friends of the Pod show Terminally Online. It's our loosest, funniest, most unscripted conversation with hosts and staff about the joys, chaos and absurdity of being way too online while producing the shows you love. To get access to Terminally Online and much more, go to crooked.com friends.
- [45:07]
Pod Save America Host
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- [46:10]
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- [46:45]
Tommy Vietor
When you look internationally at examples, maybe in history of other countries that kind of things went bad. You know, they devolved into ethnic or political violence. Like, you know, you always hear people talk about before the breakup of Yugoslavia, like people lived as neighbors and then one day they were battling each other and they just like could not fathom how they got there. Are there like triggers? Are there warning signs? Are there things like that you look for?
- [47:13]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Well, there's one political science paper that looked at 112 countries and found that unfortunately, countries where the political divide is lined up along racial, ethnic or religious divides are 12 times more likely to fall into civil war.
- [47:28]
Tommy Vietor
Cool.
- [47:29]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, but it's not inevitable. And, and I. And so, you know, one of the biggest challenges for us right now, I think as a country is that I don't think that there's been. I think that there's maybe like a couple teeny tiny places that are exceptions to this. But basically there's been no country where the ethnic majority has become a minority in a peaceful and democratic fashion. Right. And that's happening in the US by 2045. So we have maybe 15 to 20 years before. I think it's kind of a beautiful thing. There will be no racial majority. Right. Everyone will be minorities in the United States in 20 years. But that process has never occurred peacefully anywhere because people obviously don't want to give up power. And when you start seeing that kind of change, one thing that happens is that democracy breaks down because the majority sees their electoral advantage disappearing and they therefore don't like democracy. Anymore. And that, I think is a symptom of what we're seeing in the Republican Party right now is people basically being like, we can't win elections. We're losing the people battle. And to the extent that we can rig them, we're going to have to do that to set things up for the future when we won't have enough people to vote for our party anymore.
- [48:49]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. The degree to which ostensibly long held principled positions are just being discarded minute by minute is quite unnerving. I mean, look, I think when it comes to gerrymandering, it is shocking that Donald Trump has demanded that Texas do a mid decade gerrymander just because he wants five seats and he's overt about it and no one seems to care. Like, both, both sides have been terrible on gerrymandering. You know, like, you can look at some pretty ugly maps that are red and blue, but that is new and novel. I have, though, been, I mean, the one that's really shocked me has been, has been this week where like the FCC blatantly intervened and was like, hey, Disney, nice little network you got there. Would be a damn shame if we had to rip the license away from abc. And then they fired Jimmy Kimmel. And you've got a lot of people that ostensibly talked about free speech and cancel culture for their entire lives and careers who are now saying, well, you know, these are just consequences.
- [49:43]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, it's really bad. It's unprecedented. I mean, and it's not cancel culture. Right. It's like government suppression of speech. This is like what, what people used to think of, like what people, people used to say that cancel culture is like a speaker coming to campus and being shouted down. Right. So they were canceled. Or it's a professor says something too conservative and they get fired, which, by the way, has never happened.
- [50:11]
Tommy Vietor
Or an old tweet gets surfaced. Right, sure.
- [50:14]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah. But then every time I talk to people about this, I'm like, do you know anybody who's actually been fired? Like, the number of people actually losing their jobs for the speech that they have made is very, very small. It's prominent. Those stories, those stories are the things that everybody wants to talk about, including the New York Times. They put it all over the place, but it's very rare. This is different than that. This is the government telling our media what they're allowed to say and not say. And the thing that they also, the thing that they punished him for was like, not even really very political. It was just kind of making fun of Trump, talking about Construction instead of expressing compassion. But that wasn't even a very. I don't really think that that was a very political thing to say.
- [51:00]
Tommy Vietor
It was also an objectively weird comment to be like, how are you holding up, sir? Your friend was just murdered. And he's like, check out the construction going on over for my ballroom.
- [51:07]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Looks great. Yeah, look.
- [51:08]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah, Completely bizarre. Yeah, I think that looks the FCC calling over to a network and saying, fire a guy my president doesn't like. Like, that's clear first amendment violation. I think that the cancel culture thing was like, was overstated in a lot of ways. I think what people were talking about was not actions by governments or elected officials or Democrats necessarily. They were like upset about online mobs and people surfacing things from the past that destroyed lives and careers. And I think where they had a point was people were seemingly given no pathway back. Like, there was no way to apologize. There was no grace offered to people. And that is actually a thing I think we did on the left that was uniquely bad and harmful and scary to people. That's been course corrected on, I think, long term, big picture, like, cancel culture has been a both sides thing forever. You think like, gay people haven't been getting canceled by the far right? Like, come on, what are we talking about here?
- [52:07]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah, I mean, it's also just like it. You know, in the 80s it was called political correctness. It's a concept that's been around for a very long time. And a lot of it is people just saying, like, I don't want consequences for saying terrible things. And yeah, we can talk about like, how fair it is, right, for like a social media mob to like attack somebody. And like, that's definitely overwhelming and terrifying. But I think that the. What was happening in the 1980s was coming out of like the aftermath of the civil rights legislation, where people throughout the 60s and 70s were kind of trying to figure out, like, okay, how do we live like this? How do we have a society where we're all in the same neighborhoods and going to the same schools and like, what am I allowed to say? What am I not allowed to say? And that the term political correctness emerged out of that era where it was like, frustration with not understanding the rules anymore because now all of a sudden segregation ended and things looked or not ended, but was being. Was being remediated and things and things felt socially really, really different.
- [53:06]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. So whenever people ask me, like, are we going to survive this? Are we going to make it? I usually think about the 60s and, you know, the JFK assassination and then Martin Luther King's assassinated and RFK's assassinated. And, like, I can't imagine what it was like to be alive during that time. Like, the horror, the fear, the uncertainty, the utter failure of the government to be transparent about what happened. But here it's 2025, right? We're still a country. We're having this conversation right now. We have freedom of speech. We have a democracy. What did they do then to fix things? And what can we do now to calm things down and kind of reduce the risk of political violence or just chill people out a little bit?
- [53:51]
Dr. Liliana Mason
I'm not gonna make you feel better.
- [53:53]
Advertisement Voice
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- [53:56]
Dr. Liliana Mason
The. The difference between the 60s and now is that the violence in the 60s was like. There was a lot of it. It was social chaos. It was related to a number of things that were going on, including the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement. Right. Things that were happening that were like. It was social upheaval. And so things felt very chaotic, and they were very chaotic. But the Democrats and the Republicans were not on two different sides of that violence. It wasn't structured along political lines. Well, it was structured on political lines, but not along partisan lines because the.
- [54:27]
Tommy Vietor
Parties hadn't been sorted yet fully.
- [54:30]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Right. I mean, the. You know, the Democrats and Republicans were on both sides of the civil rights issue. They were on both sides of all of these different things. And so the, you know, we saw huge knots of protest. And, you know, then the 70s, we had these, like, environmentalists, like a violent leftist environmentalist movement. Right. Things were just like. Like chaos. Now the violence is organized. And that's what makes me worried, is that it's organized along partisan lines, and that allows violence to be institutionalized in a way that we really don't want it to be. We don't want it to become part of our party system. We don't want it to become part of the way that we think about elections and voting and governing and legislating and making judgments if you're a judge and deciding on electoral outcomes if you're an election official. And. And these are all things that we really don't want violence to become embedded in. And so that difference makes me a little bit more worried than I didn't live in the 60s. I'm sure it was absolutely terrifying. And our violence right now is not at that level. I think one thing that changed was that in the 60s was that we kind of just settled into some of these new kind of social realities, and we're still dealing this is, I think, part of what we're living through right now is still coming out of that era because we've made really fast social progress in this country. It doesn't feel like it because we're humans and we have certain lifespans. But on a historic level, my mother couldn't get a bank account without her husband's permission until she was 28 years old. Same sex marriage is 10 years old. The Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 were the largest and most racially diverse we've ever, ever had in terms of civil rights protests as a country. Things are changing really fast. And the way that I'm kind of trying to think about this era in my mind is that if I were to 10 years ago, if I were to say to you, okay, so imagine the US or 30 years ago, imagine the US goes through a process where we undo a huge amount of the social hierarchy that we've been forced to live with for hundreds of years. And white Christian men are no longer guaranteed to be given preference and priority in every single job and for every single leadership position. What do you think will happen? Do you think the white Christian men will just sit there politely and say, oh, no, please, madam, go ahead, take my power. Guessing no, that's not how we behave. We don't give away power. And so my prediction would have been, well, there's probably going to be a big backlash and it might be violent. That's what I would have assumed would happen. And so this is like the optimistic take here is that we're in that backlash right now. There's no way for us to go through that process without having some kind of fight from the people who used to have the most power. But what we get to decide now is whether this is a backlash and we get past it or whether it succeeds and the last 40 years are actually the blip, right. That we had 40 years of increasing equality and progress, and then that just turns into like this weird era in American history. But that's sort of empowering, right? It's up to us. We get to decide.
- [57:49]
Tommy Vietor
No, you're right.
- [57:50]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Whether it works.
- [57:51]
Tommy Vietor
You're right. You did not make me feel better. But I guess what you're talking about is, I think, a very smart, reasonable observation on a structural level. I guess what I'm thinking is like, to your point, you just made, we do have agency here, and we as individuals, I do think we can do things. Like, I do think that if you're a progressive or Democrat, posting something about how it was wrong and evil. To assassinate Charlie Kirk is like, a good thing. Like, I. I was in my feelings after it happened. Charlie Kirk has little kids about the same age as my kids. And it really hit me hard. Like, there was this video of his daughter running up to him on the Fox and Friends set. And I just thought, like, that it just really. It, like, was gutting. And so I just texted or emailed a bunch of people I know that are MAGA media types, and I was just like, hey, you know what? I'm so sorry this happened. It is like, evil. It is gutting. Like, I just was thinking of you, and I wanted to say this, and it maybe felt trite and, like, I don't know, I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do, but they were like, thank you for saying that it meant something. Because I also think, because we're living in a moment when everyone is seeing the shittiest people on the planet lifted up algorithmically on social media. And so, like, maybe just a little human interaction could. Could help that.
- [59:05]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Yeah. Because you would have appreciated it if they had sent something like that to you when, you know, Nancy Pelosi's husband was. Was brutally attacked. Right. To just say, like, this is not how I want to be living. I want you to know that this is not how I want to be living. And, you know, I just. It would be nice to have a little bit of less asymmetry in terms of the way that we deal with these terrible, terrible events. And I felt the same way. I saw the same video of his daughter. And it's awful. Right? I mean, nobody wants this. Nobody wants to live like this. And the idea that we have leaders who are encouraging more of this is insane. Right. It's actually so deeply unpopular. It's. Nobody likes this. And so there are, you know, I think that there are real, possibly real opportunities for connecting with other Americans on that sentiment. I think that we all pretty much agree that it's not how we want to live, and it's not how we want to treat each other, and it's not how we want our political figures, you know, to be treated rather than, you know, debated with. It's just not how we want to. To do democracy in this place.
- [60:15]
Tommy Vietor
Yeah. And it's just. I think we all just have to realize it. Like, the Donald Trump doesn't. The Unity product is not on the shelf. You know, you go to that store, you can look forever, you're not going to find it. So all we can do is, like, we have agency as individuals, we can only account for our own actions and influence things ourselves. And so, I don't know, maybe trying is worth it and hopefully we all will.
- [60:38]
Dr. Liliana Mason
Well, actually, we have more agency than that because a lot of these things are norms, right? These are just social norms. And there's no law that you have to be compassionate about the murder of a political figure, right? It's a norm to be compassionate. And one thing that we've been seeing over the last decade is that our social norms have been eroded so fast. Just norms of kind of basic decency, being a human being to each other. These things we've normalized, like really rude and cruel language. We've normalized sort of like laughing at people who are suffering. It's something that is entirely socially constructed. And the only way that social norms are enforced and spread is by us, right? It's by people reminding each other that we would prefer not to be hanging out with someone who's behaving that way. And it's that we've lost a lot of that, right? We've lost a lot of sort of our. Our sense of how we want to behave around each other. It's entirely up to you to be the spreader of social norms in your community and in your society. And every single person has the ability to do that. I think that we've kind of forgotten that we're responsible for those things, too.
- [61:51]
Tommy Vietor
Very well said. Well, Dr. Mason, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for doing this all the way from around the world. I really appreciate it.
- [61:59]
Dr. Liliana Mason
I'm happy to do it. Thank you so much.
- [62:06]
Pod Save America Host
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