I Think We Should Talk
The historic church, about eight miles from Swarthmore’s campus, is where Reeves attends services each Sunday. King’s storied victories for civil rights permeate his thoughts about the future.
But politics in the U.S. today — and the lack of progress on criminal justice issues — have him worried.
“The stakes could not be higher,” says Reeves, who directs the Urban Inequality and Incarceration program at the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility.
Part of his work explores why the once thriving community of Chester, which nurtured both him and King, now sends many of its residents to jail.
“I’ve uncovered remarkable insights into how this happened and what this might portend for how other communities might tackle the issue of mass incarceration,” says Reeves, who is in the midst of writing a book on the topic.
“It would never have dawned on me we would have a presidential candidate, much less a political party, that would denigrate the fundamental pillars of American democracy itself, such as the rule of law and the right to free elections,” says Reeves, who has taught a course on crime and punishment at a men’s prison for decades and recently began to offer the class at a women’s prison.
“My hope is there is a groundswell of folks across the political spectrum who will say that racism, sexism, and classism have no place in American politics,” says Reeves, who believes that racial and cultural issues could play a decisive role in the outcome of the November election.
To bind the nation’s wounds, Reeves says that regardless of who wins, the nation needs not just “a unifying inaugural address, but a unifying 100 days of reaching out across every sector of American life economically, politically, culturally, and racially.”
“From the Civil War to Jim Crow-era racial lynchings and backlash to civil rights activism in the 1960s, political violence has played a central role in American political development since the early days of the republic,” says Schwarz. “Viewing things from a historical perspective can help us recognize recurring patterns.”
Schwarz emphasizes such context in her Swarthmore courses, which center on U.S. politics and public policy, helping students to see how current events fit in the continuum of political history.
“Beginning with the early republic, we’ve seen several periods of stark polarization,” says Schwarz, who designed a course on the legacy of slavery and is developing a book that investigates how states exploited prison labor to boost public finance in the postbellum American South. “Through the antebellum years, debates around slavery and abolition intensified and ultimately culminated in the American Civil War,” she says.
There have been moments when Congress was relatively unpolarized, namely the Great Society era of the 1950s and 1960s, says Schwarz, and using that time period as a reference point makes the current era feel hyper-polarized.
“Very partisan 24/7 news channels increasingly create echo chambers. Now people can select the content they want to see, which just reaffirms their preexisting views,” says Schwarz. “But if you look at it in the aggregate, as soon as Americans actually talk to each other, they are not that different. There are extreme elements in any society, but the vast majority of Americans still tack to the center on many issues.”
Another area in which Schwarz sees historical parallel is the erosion of civil liberties and voting rights. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and concerted efforts to curtail voting in contested states has many feeling shell-shocked. But it’s more rule than exception, she says.
“The push and pull where periods of relative liberalization and rights expansion are followed by counter-mobilization is a common theme in American politics,” she says.
Schwarz points to the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, when the U.S. moved toward a racially inclusive democracy for the first time as Black men were granted voting rights. But across the American South, these rights were soon reversed, and once again, African Americans would become almost entirely disenfranchised during Jim Crow.
“In no other Western democracy was an entire group of constituents granted political rights, only to have those rights almost immediately taken away again,” says Schwarz. “That’s a uniquely American experience.”
Behind the landmark decisions like Dobbs, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, or Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 case in which the court backtracked on voting rights, Snead explains there is a long history of lesser-known decisions that quietly laid their foundations.
Take the Voting Rights Act, a law passed in 1965. Part of that statute requires states to obtain approval from the federal government before changing their voting laws, so the alterations could be vetted for racial discrimination. In 2013, the Supreme Court held in Shelby County that this placed an unreasonable burden upon the states.
“The Supreme Court basically says, you’re not allowed to do that, because [the Court contends] racism is not the problem it once was,” says Snead, an assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore. “It’s an infringement on state authority, it’s unconstitutional.”
But Shelby County, Snead argues, did not represent a single blow. Behind it stood a history, stretching back to the 1970s, in which voting rights have been eroded more gradually. It’s a history Snead characterizes as “death by a thousand cuts.”
There are many examples. In a 1976 case called Beer v. United States, the court said that states are allowed to perpetuate discrimination in their voting policies — they are just not allowed to make discrimination any worse. The court, Snead says, chose to narrow the application of the law — a decision which, over time, led to further erosion.
“Pretty early on, the court’s interpretation shaped the potential for what the Voting Rights Act would later become,” says Snead.
Given the court’s current conservative composition, Snead expects this pattern to continue — and it will do so in a political atmosphere in which Americans are increasingly suspicious of the court’s claims to political neutrality. The court, says Snead, is swiftly losing credibility in the eyes of large numbers of people.
In June, considering a case relating to former President Donald Trump’s being criminally charged with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, the court ruled that former presidents enjoyed broad immunity from prosecution. Two weeks later, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas over their failures to disclose conflicts of interest — a highly unusual move that reflects, says Snead, “a public frustration with the court.”
The roots of this anger, for Snead, lie in the fact that the ideological composition of the court does not reflect consistent electoral outcomes.
For most of American history, politics moved much more slowly than it does today. A single party tended to dominate for decades, allowing a Supreme Court to reflect the views of who was in the White House. This system of government, Snead says, was not designed for today’s rapid “partisan see-saw” between the parties — “a situation where ideological control of the Supreme Court is tied to presidential elections where the winner might not have won the popular vote,” says Snead, “or to Senate control that hinges on one or two seats, or when Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg pass away. It’s a coin flip that is only loosely related to electoral patterns.”
Americans increasingly see the Supreme Court as political — and this year, the court raised the stakes of politics. By ruling that presidents enjoy broad immunity from prosecution, Snead says, the Supreme Court made the question of who would become the 47th president even more pivotal.
“I think the [potential] election outcome is much more important because of that decision,” he says.
Participate in Democracy
“They’re in a bubble in a lot of really important ways,” says Laurison, who argues that this distance from everyday people can cause campaigns to use outdated strategies and fail to question conventional wisdom.
For example, political parties spend millions of dollars on advertising, but “there’s very little evidence that seeing an ad on TV changes anybody’s mind in either direction,” he says.
Laurison’s current research focuses on “how poor and working-class [Pennsylvanians] think about, understand, and relate to politics.”
His research team, which included three Swarthmore students this summer, has interviewed over 250 people throughout Pennsylvania since 2018. To be eligible, interviewees had to earn less than $45,000 a year or have a job that does not require a college degree.
Many respondents said that politicians don’t care about them, Laurison says. Comments including “politics is for other people” and “I look around my neighborhood and nothing has changed” highlight the disconnect between politicians’ promises and what low-income Pennsylvanians see on the ground.
Though Laurison understands why working-class Pennsylvania voters may feel disillusioned, he encourages voter engagement, not apathy.
“If a substantial portion of the people — who might otherwise be volunteering, rallying their friends, or giving money — have just given up, then the chances of [their side] winning get lower,” he says.
Laurison coordinates an initiative called the Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy (HEARD) Initiative, which fosters faculty-student collaboration on projects related to U.S. democracy at Swarthmore. The program welcomed its first cohort of fellows this fall, consisting of 18 student researchers working with five faculty members.
Laurison hopes that by convening the student researchers together with faculty, they will be able to support each other and develop an understanding of how faculty collaboration works.
“The goal is to bring together faculty and student research assistants doing work on how to make democracy more healthy, equitable, and responsive.”
Can we agree to disagree?
“We have a public sphere that doesn’t do a good job of encouraging people to argue well,” he says.
It’s a fact that bodes ill for democracy. When Perrin, now a professor and chair of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, published American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter (Polity, 2014), he argued democracy was less about rules and institutions than about culture.
Yes, voting and the structure of the courts are crucial — but democracy, at its root, has more to do with common practices that “allow us to share society with people who are different from us,” he says.
A decade after his book, that shared culture is in rough shape, Perrin says.
“Our media and social media environments encourage people to interact only with others who are like them,” he says.
At the same time, democratic institutions have been shaken by an insurrection fanned by a president who denied the results of an election. In hindsight, Perrin admits, “those institutions are a crucial infrastructure for maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic environment. I think the past decade has taught us not to take them for granted, but they are far from enough without the culture to sustain them.”
The core of the problem is a lack of productive disagreement. In Perrin’s next book, currently in progress, he places much of the blame on a rhetorical technique he calls the “superfact.”
When we argue, we tend to go looking for a superfact — “that one piece of indisputable information that shows that your opponent is not just incorrect, but morally wrong,” says Perrin. But superfacts don’t actually exist, and searching for them in order to crush an opponent mostly makes us feel superior to our opponents. It rarely persuades; a better approach would be to listen carefully to the reasons others offer for their beliefs — particularly when they seem strange or wrong — and to lay out our own reasons carefully.
Isn’t listening and responding to arguments that are strange, wrong, or plainly offensive ceding the moral high ground? “No!” says Perrin. “We deal with the public sphere that exists, not the public sphere we wish existed. And the real-world public sphere contains a lot of people who have actual power who disagree with things we think are clear.”
Arguing well rarely comes naturally. But an important part of college is to teach students how to disagree — to listen carefully and build arguments that respond to others instead of simply taking a position.
“You have to learn calculus before you do the physics based on it,” says Perrin. “And you have to learn how to argue well also before you can do it well. I learned a lot of that at Swarthmore, and I hope today’s students are learning it, too.”
A better culture of argument, he says, wouldn’t necessarily reduce the amount of disagreement.
“But it would make that disagreement more productive,” he says, “and that would make us all more democratic.”
“But most of us want to avoid repeating the past,” he adds.
Episodes such as the assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump might seem unusual to the younger people, but older Americans (and students of history) will recall many others. Still, these have generally been the work of unstable individuals, says Berger, who feels more alarmed by the threat of broadly rooted political violence.
Over the past decade, Americans from across the political spectrum have reported greater openness to violence as a response to what they consider unacceptable political outcomes.
Sustaining democracy, says Berger, requires unwritten norms of cooperation and compromise. But with historically high levels of affective polarization — extremely negative attitudes toward whichever leaders and citizens are perceived as the “opposition” — too many Americans are rationalizing or tolerating norm violations when undertaken by their “side.”
Much of the problem involves declining levels of trust, he says, in institutions, and in each other.
“Trust in government is lower now than after the Watergate scandal,” says Berger. “That’s a big problem, because when trust breaks down, unwritten norms of cooperation and participation break down as well.”
Since the mid-1960s, trust has declined such that almost one quarter of Americans now believe it may soon be necessary to take up arms against the government, other institutions, or simply fellow citizens [according to the 2023 American Values Survey, conducted by Public Research Religion Institute in partnership with the Brookings Institution].
“Some fragmentation has been due to the unanticipated consequences of technological change,” says Berger. “The internet and social media amplify confirmation bias, feeding us information that supports what we already believe by using algorithms that detect what we like,” he says. “But as Bob Putnam points out, there are also economic causes — a concentration of economic and political power at the very top, and the prospect of downward mobility for many others.”
History tells us that when many citizens despair of economic flourishing or even keeping up, they can become more open to illiberal, undemocratic ideas and measures, says Berger. While working to distribute power more fairly, it is essential to shore up norms which can put a stop to interminable cycles of resentment and revenge.
“No parallel is ever perfect, so history can’t tell us what’s coming next or exactly what we should do,” says Berger.
“But often it can suggest what not to do — what has gone disastrously wrong pretty much any time that people have tried it. For example, we shouldn’t abandon pluralism for purity. Demanding that a candidate, party, or institution advocate everything that you want — thinking that you can get everything that you want from politics, period — has worked out badly, not just in this country, but everywhere.”
The alternative is a long period of tit for tat that neither side wants, Berger says, each faction pushing their total agenda while temporarily at the helm. No one wins for very long.
“We have to create the spaces to have uncomfortable conversations,” he says, “if we are going to move forward together.”
defining the 2024 election
“Some of these phenomena — including the appeal of right-wing authoritarian leaders and rising ethno-nationalism — are trends in evidence elsewhere, so it is important to look for causes that go beyond particular nations and individual candidates.” If the gild is off the lily of democracy in so many places, says Nackenoff, perhaps it is because democratic elections don’t usually solve big problems like rising inequality.
“In the U.S., the rise of more cohesive parties in Congress (despite the House Freedom Caucus) and close national elections has meant that neither party has been able to dominate the executive and/or legislative branches for extended periods. This increases incentives to restrict (or expand) the right to vote, alter election rules, and to entrench policy preferences via federal courts. Since 1968, three-quarters of Supreme Court appointees were nominated by Republican presidents. Republican appointees have been drawn from increasingly conservative circles in recent years, and have shown their willingness to overturn a number of precedents that affect not only how we understand rights but also how government works.”
two separate worlds
As someone whose job is to talk about politics, Moore says “there are many times since 2016 where I’ve just found myself trying to avoid the news.”
He says he never could have imagined events such as the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or the broader erosion of democratic norms.
“Increasingly, Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on what the real problems are,” Moore says. “People feel like they’re living in two separate worlds.”
“Social media has gotten a lot of the blame,” he says. “I think we were moving down that road even before with really polarized cable news and talk radio shows.”
Though there have been other periods of political turbulence in our nation’s history, Moore views the current moment as singular because many people are experiencing this for the first time.
There was a long period of very stable, even “boring” U.S. politics, going back to the post-World War II period and certainly since the Vietnam War, he says, and the vast majority of Americans have never experienced “this feeling of a political system that seems unstable.”
Reducing the incentive of political actors to drive polarization would require major structural changes, he says, such as rethinking the filibuster or the Electoral College.
A Fragile Union
“Democracy in America is not pre-ordained,” says Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University whose research focuses on instability in politics and society. One of the drivers of the current instability in the U.S., says Katzenstein, is a hollowing out of institutions, citing as an example the recent Supreme Court decision granting unprecedented immunity to the president: “Whether it is upheld in future decisions remains to be seen, but it basically says the president can do no wrong.”
In addition, Katzenstein points to structural weaknesses that are increasingly pivotal. “There are only five or six states which matter [in a presidential election], and in the Senate, Wyoming, with about half a million people, gets as much weight as California, which has almost 40 million people. That is one form of minority rule.”
The chief culprit in the increasing national unrest is the economic decline of the working class, he says. “I live in upstate New York. When I came in the early 1970s, there was a large Corona typewriter factory in Cortland. IBM had manufacturing facilities in Binghamton. All of that disappeared within about 25 years,” he says. “People were abandoned, not just by the Republicans. They were abandoned by both parties.”
Education is one key to turning the situation around, says Katzenstein, particularly in STEM fields, in part to capitalize on the global task of taking on climate change. “Among my students, there’s only one issue. It’s the environment, and the greatest job generator is going to be responding to the environmental crisis.”
The notion that democracy could not fully perish in the United States, says Katzenstein, was prevalent even among experts — until recently. “Many people believed it. I certainly believed it, but it was a thoughtless belief,” he says. “Each generation has to fight for reestablishing the democratic norms. And that is where we are.”