Democracy’s fatal flaw: citizens struggle with its complexity. As elite influence wanes, populism surges. Is democracy devouring itself in the digital age?
Is democracy eating itself alive?
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, UC Irvine professor Shawn Rosenberg argues that it is.
In this conversation, Rosenberg — whose research focuses on political psychology, populism, deliberative democracy, and ideology — reveals why he believes democracy has a fatal flaw: Most citizens lack the cognitive resources to navigate its complexities.
As the flow of information in the internet age becomes increasingly “egalitarian” — e.g., the rise of social media — this weakness is exposed, making simplistic populist alternatives more appealing and potentially destructive to democracy itself.
Rosenberg explains how the erosion of elite influence, once a buffer against democracy’s inherent fragilities, may be accelerating its decline.
From the complexity of modern governance to the rise of right-wing populism, Rosenberg’s analysis challenges our fundamental assumptions about democracy, human nature, and the role of elites in society.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In 2019, at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychologists, a paper was presented that sent shock waves through the academic community.
It’s thesis, that democracy was devouring itself. That in well-established democracies like the United States, Democratic governance would continue its inexorable decline and eventually fail. It wasn’t some fringe theorist. This was my guest today, Shawn Rosenberg, a respected professor of political science and psychology at UC Irvine.
His arguments go beyond the usual concerns about polarization, misinformation, or foreign interference. Instead, Rosenberg posits that democracy has a fundamental structural weakness, one that’s become more pronounced, the more democratic, and the more complex a society becomes.
At the core of his thesis is the idea that most citizens lack the cognitive and emotional capacities required for effective democratic citizenship. As a result, they’re left confused and frightened by the political reality they can’t fully comprehend, making them susceptible to simpler, more emotionally satisfying populist alternatives.
This echoes concerns that have existed since the founding when the framers, suspicious of direct democracy, established a representative government to mitigate these very risks. Historically, the much-maligned elites have played a crucial role in managing this weakness, providing simplified interpretations of democratic principles and guiding citizen participation.
However, as societies become more democratic and egalitarian, as we’ve seen the decline of belief and expertise, the authority of these elites is eroded. The very success of democracy, particularly in the internet age, in flattening hierarchies and empowering individuals, may be setting the stage for its own demise.
What’s more, radical changes to this system could have dire consequences. This analysis is supported by historical examples of failed anti-elite revolutions, underscoring the dangers of dismantling democratic institutions in favor of populist alternatives.
To many, this is a deeply unsettling idea, one that challenges our basic assumptions about democracy, human nature, and the role of elites in society. In any era of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, extreme populism, and growing distrust of established institutions, it’s an argument we can’t afford to ignore.
Shawn Rosenberg is a professor of political science and psychological science at the University of California Irvine. He holds degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard. His research focuses on political psychology, populism, deliberative democracy, and ideology. And it is my pleasure to welcome Professor Shawn Rosenberg here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us.
Shawn Rosenberg: Jeff, it is my pleasure. And thank you for a very good summary of the position that I have taken.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you so much. We have seen many waves of populism in this country. We’ve seen them in Europe at various points, and yet through all of those democracy has survived, and in some cases, even prospered afterwards. Is there something fundamentally different about this period that we’re in right now that makes you more concerned for the impact of populism?
Shawn: Yes. In those other periods that you talk about, although there was various bases for social and political discontent, at the same time we had a highly structured society. And there were a set of elites, cultural, educational, political, and economic, who, although they were somewhat divided among themselves, they were generally supportive of liberal democratic principles.
And in even the face of questioning of liberal democratic government, they were able to exert their power and contain whatever effects this social unrest might have created. People, in the end, viewed those authority figures as legitimate and were willing to listen and subordinate their concerns and understandings to that of the political and social elites in their societies. That is less the case today.
Jeff: And is there a point that we can look to when this situation started to change, when lack of trust and control and knowledge by the elites really started to wane in a way that makes us concerned for democracy?
Shawn: Well, if we focus on the American case, you could argue that this is something that began in a very limited way in the 1960s and grew, particularly in the ’90s, as there was a questioning of traditional, political, and social authority.
You refer to it in your discussion, that we have democratized further and further. That we live in a culture, on the one hand, that tells us that we as individuals are all equal, we have equal capacity to know and judge our social and political circumstances. And in that equality, we need not defer to anyone.
And in that context, the status of so-called experts or the legitimacy of authoritative voices has been undermined. And that is something relatively new in the American context. And it has been dramatically expanded. And in part, this is a function of technological changes as well.
Because of course, what we have introduced in the ’80s and ’90s is, first of all, a proliferation of TV channels, each of which began to have a particular focus with the advent of cable TV, et cetera. And all of this was magnified and accelerated by the birth of the internet and social media, which did two things at the same time.
First of all, it provided people with a myriad of different sources of information and judgment, and a kind of variety that was not available before, and at the same time encouraged them to express themselves in this context.
And so, we entered a world where a Harvard professor of politics or economics may have his or her opinion, and at the same time, somebody from rural Texas, again, has whatever opinion they might want to voice. And in some sense, they are of equal value, and deserve to be heard and will be heard almost equally.
Jeff: And talk about the ways in which populism as a form is so effective at exploiting this point that we’ve gotten to.
Shawn: Well, the point of departure for this is to understand– In a way, as you mentioned, the founders of American democracy appreciated that liberal democracy constructs a very complicated system of politics.
In order to understand liberal democracy, you have to understand that there’s, underlying it, a view of society and political relationships, which understands that we are a diverse population with varying backgrounds, opinions, and interests. And there is an attempt to coordinate our activity and coordinate we must because we’re ultimately dependent on one another.
To coordinate it according to abstract principles of fairness, the integrity of persons, and the rule of law. And all of that is complicated. And it is something that is difficult for people to understand, both the complexity of the system and the notion that they live in a world of such diversity.
And along comes populism. The point to be made here is, it’s difficult to understand. And as it is difficult to understand, it’s somewhat emotionally unsettling. It is a little bit frightening to live in a society or a world that doesn’t make clear sense to you.
And in this context, along comes populism and says, “You know what? That world that the liberal Democrats are trying to sell you with all of its complexity and abstraction and diversity, you know what, it really does not make sense. And it is not the world as it really is.
And populism offers a much simpler and ultimately more satisfying vision where, all of a sudden, America is not this diversity of people, but we are somehow a community that shares common beliefs and practices. We are all the same. And insofar as we are all the same, we share common aspirations and a common desire for where America should be going.
And we are confronted by other people who are not really the same as us. They’re, in some sense, fundamentally alien because they don’t seem to share the same beliefs and practices. They may not even look like us. And they are a source of threat. They’re a source of corruption. They’re undermining the homogeneity and harmony of the American community. And so that’s part of what they offer.
And the other part they offer is, they said, this whole notion of governance where you have people constantly talking and negotiating in the Congress and the Congress has to, in some sense, coordinate relative to the president. And all of this is somehow overseen by a supreme court.
This is a complicated structure of power that doesn’t seem to get anything done. And from a populous perspective, that’s not surprising. If you are going to get things done, you need somebody who can lead. Now, that person leads in the name of the people and reflects their interests, but that person needs to be able to act.
And the other political institutions really have to give way to the power of executive authority in that way. And so what we have is a much simpler view of the world. We’re all the same. We all want the same thing. People who don’t want what we want are alien and threatening.
And in terms of how to govern, you need essentially top-down governance like the CEO of a corporation or the general of the army, who, in the name of the people, can act and others will follow and things will get done
Jeff: In this regard, when we look at this danger, is there a difference between right-wing versus left-wing populism and the danger it poses?
Shawn: That’s an interesting question. Because when I first started doing this work, and you mentioned that paper in 2019, and that was my first effort in this regard, it was in the context of a situation in the Western industrialized democracies, North America, Japan, and Europe, where the most of the power and presence of populism was on the right. And so I was focusing mostly on right-wing populism.
Now, it is certainly the case in Latin America, populism tends to be left-wing. Well, at that time already you had Syriza in Greece, which was a left-wing populist party that had come to power. And around that time also, you had the emergence of a left-wing populist party in Spain called Podemos.
And I believe both constitute threats to liberal democracy. The way they are typically differentiated is that right-wing populism, when they talk about we the people, tends to focus on the ethnicity, particular practices, and race of the domestic population. So you exclude minorities, you exclude immigrants, you are suspicious of foreigners.
Left-wing populism was, as far as the national community was concerned, more inclusive. So minorities were part of the people as they defined it. That said, these two populism share two features which are very threatening to liberal democracy.
Both believe that there is the appropriate and correct vision that reflects the needs and aspirations of the people, and those who disagree with it are, in some sense, alien and enemies of the people. For the right-wing, that might be other ethnicities and minority groups, but it’s also those who politically disagree.
And for the left-wing, it tends to be those who politically disagree. And there is a great suspicion of foreigners, of cosmopolitan influences, of national alliances in the same way that the right-wing is suspicious. So they both tend to be intolerant of disagreement. And what they target is the source of that disagreement varies somewhat.
They also share a second feature, and that feature is their kind of authoritarian rejection of the constraints and limitations of liberal democratic politics. Liberal Democratic politics has always revolved around a suspicion of governmental power and a recognition that it needs to be constrained. And it’s constrained partly by the division of powers in the United States between the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary and it’s constrained by the rule of law.
Both the left and the right are unhappy with that arrangement. They find it merely a way of subverting the power of an executive that is acting on behalf of the people. And so, both are willing to undermine restraining institutions and to undermine the rule of law in the name of achieving so-called good goals.
Jeff: You talked about the role of immigration, the role of economics. One of the other things is the role of globalism in all of this, and a shrinking world made smaller by virtue of technology that we talked about before. Talk about the nexus between populism, nationalism, and the reality of globalism today.
Shawn: It is a close relationship. Part of what motivates this move to populism is not just that I don’t understand this world, but the world is confusing and threatening. And populism on the one hand validates that view. It says, “Yes. You know what? There is a lot of threat out there, but we are going to deal with it.
And we’re going to help you because we’re going to clearly identify who the threat is and its outsiders and we will be strong and defend you against it.” And in this context, globalization is incredibly confusing potentially for people and potentially threatening.
They see, all of a sudden we, economically, and how we conduct our everyday lives and what kind of work is available and how well we are doing economically seems to be dependent on all these other countries. We have to worry about China or Europe or the global economy. We’ve lost control of that in ways that weaken us.
And there are all of these peoples who have concerns, who are voicing hostile attitudes toward us, whether it be the Russians or the Chinese or the people in Gaza or the people in Venezuela. And these are strange peoples we know very little about, who seem to be threatening.
And so in the context of that, you circle the wagons. What we know is our nation. And we as Americans have to band together and defend against all of these external threats and influences. And so the globalization has added to the complexity and confusion in which people are forced to live. It’s hard to escape.
And populism is attractive because it acknowledges the confusion, it acknowledges the fears and sense of threat, and says, “Yes, you’re right to believe that and we are going to solve the problem for you.” The Liberal Democratic alternative is a less easy sell.
Because it’s saying, “You know what? Yes, we live in a complicated world, and there are differences of interest and differences of understanding, but it requires mutual accommodation, it requires constructive communication, mutual respect. And that’s much harder to understand and much harder to execute.
And you can understand why people find it difficult. If these other people are embracing values that I find alien, strange, or just wrong, why do I have to respect them? Why do I have to accommodate? It makes more sense to either get rid of them or defend against them. And hence, the relative attractiveness of these populisms and the difficulty liberal democracy has in selling its vision in this context.
Jeff: Which brings it around to this idea that you talk about of liberal democracy devouring itself. And it really begs the question of whether liberal democracy is compatible with the kind of society that we live in today, with all of its complexity, with all of its technology, with all of the shrinking of the globe.
Shawn: It’s a good question, and I would argue it is. That’s why I worry about these issues. Because denying the complexity does not eliminate it. The world is complex, whether you want to believe it is or not. And so if your understanding of the world really is inconsistent with the way the world is, you’re going to behave in a lot of other destructive and self-destructive ways.
So it’s precisely because we’re in a complicated world. It’s precisely because, in the US, we are the home for great diversity that we have to develop as individuals and as a people such that we can come to terms with that diversity and understand it as it is and adapt accordingly.
I’ve argued that a good deal of the problem here is cognitive. People, for the most part, not everybody, but for the most part, tend to think in relatively cognitively simple terms. In terms of simple categories, simple hierarchies, simple cause and effect.
And all of that is consistent with the populist vision. But it doesn’t mean we have to think that way. It means that a critical attempt has to be made to change, to help people develop in how they think of themselves and the world around them, so that this complexity is appreciated, is better understood, and as a result, is far less threatening.
That, I think, is the social and political challenge. The alternative is to return to pre-World War II Europe where you have the emergence of very destructive nationalisms based on a notion that we are a homogeneous people in a threatening world and basically, you have internal cleansing.
The most extreme example being, of course, Nazi Germany, and necessary conflict with neighbors. And so, I think the alternative to not trying to do something about our citizenry and improving their capacities to deal in this complex world, I think the alternative is a very scary and unhappy one.
Jeff: Isn’t one of the other forces, though, that is working against this? Is that people’s lives, citizens’ lives, individual lives have become in and of themselves infinitely more complex because of the nature of the world that they live in, the work world they live in, the personal world they live in.
There’s just more complexity to everything. So that looking for simplicity in politics and in governance becomes even more attractive.
Shawn: Yes. But I think they’re looking for simplicity everywhere. So they want to simplify social relationships. I mean, you see a lot of that, for example, in some of the social and moral platform of the right. Saying, “You know what? Life’s gotten way too complicated. People have too many choices.”
There are simple rules whereby people should live with one another. Rules about how husbands should be with wives and wives should be with the husband, what marriage is or isn’t, what parents can and can’t do. And it’s trying to address that complexity that they feel in their personal lives as well.
So that the political agenda is not only addressing the complexities of policy-making, it’s also trying to address what they see as strange and difficult in their personal lives as well. So I think it tries to do both at the same time.
Jeff: What is the message, as you see it or as you imagine it, that might begin to turn this around, if anything?
Shawn: It’s interesting. I’m writing a book on this topic finally. I’ve written a couple of articles, but I, for a variety of reasons, have been hesitant to write a book. And my potential editor at Princeton was saying, “You know, the book has to end on a positive note. How are you going to solve this problem? You can’t end on a negative note.”
And I felt like I am writing an academic book or screenplay in a Hollywood movie? I think there are two possible trajectories here. One is that we continue along the road that we are now going, where these essentially anti-liberal democratic visions acquire more and more followers, power, and eventually government.
As is the case, for example, in Hungary. It seems to be increasingly the case in Israel. It’s also the case and Italy with Meloni. There are a variety of examples. And essentially, what happens is there’s a kind of recognition, implicit, that the people cannot govern.
And if you let them do so, it just goes wild. And what we need is a more authoritarian form of governance, more control. That’s one path. I find that a kind of unhappy path. The other path is to say, “Look, the problem here really is the people. It’s not Donald Trump or whatever variation on more far right leaders one appeals to or far left, because they don’t create this.
They are a reflection of what’s already there.” So what we have to do is essentially acknowledge that we are badly prepared– Americans, in our case, European citizens in their case– We have badly prepared them for the realities of contemporary liberal democracy.
And that’s in part a function of the failure of the educational system. Teaching them a civics course in high school is clearly not doing the trick. And even the kinds of political practices that we encourage in adulthood, like voting is the primary one, that is not producing the desired benefits either.
And we really need to fundamentally rethink how we’re educating people and do so in a direction where they can understand that both the world at large and their personal world is complicated. And it requires both greater reflection on their part and a greater capacity to constructively communicate with people that they disagree with.
And that we have to foster that K to 12. And I would argue we’re failing largely at the university level as well. And then for adults, we have to begin to think of alternative ways that we can involve adults in the political community that fosters the development of these communicative skills, this reflection, this willing to step back and say, “Well, there is complication here and how do we effectively deal with it?”
I think we need to think that through as well, and voting just doesn’t do that. I mean, voting is important, but a very simple act. I mean, my children, when they’re eight or nine, had a clear idea of who they wanted to vote for president. And if given the opportunity, would have gone to the ballot box and voted. I’m not sure if that’s enough.
Jeff: Do we need to be thinking about impossible, though it may be, systemic changes in the way that we govern ourselves? That liberal democracy as an operating system certainly in the US right now, simply doesn’t work. That it has passed its sell-by date. That we need to come up with systemic changes as well.
Shawn: Yes. That, I guess in part perhaps too abstractly was what I was alluding to a moment ago. So this notion that you rely on voting to pick representatives who do then all of the work of politics and governance is clearly not working.
And what you need is to involve people more directly in political decision-making. And there are movements of this kind afoot. I mean, there’s something called deliberative democracy. And people who’ve advocated for this have said that the problem with voting is you don’t really get a voice.
People who vote for Donald Trump, I mean, some of them are voting for him because he will pick Supreme Court justices who favor religion. Some of them are voting for him because he’ll cut taxes. Some of them are voting for him because he’s aggressive in foreign policy.
But people would like to take into consideration other things besides that one factor that led to the vote. And deliberative Democrats are saying, well, you know what, you’ve got to get people, rather than just voting for a representative or a president, you have to have them face at least at a local level the problems in their community.
If you live in a city or a town and it has problem with homelessness, it has problem with crime, it has problem with generating sufficient levels of economic activity, those are things that are very close to home, and you might be able to involve citizens who are working together to try to address these problems, to make the community they live in a better place.
And political scientists have advocated for this. And interestingly, there have been literally hundreds of experiments in various cities across the country to either make decisions about the running of the school system or making master plans for city development.
Something like this, I think, has to be more regularly part of American political life. You can think of it as political juries. The same way we have a jury system, juries who bring together people who adjudicate whether something happened or it didn’t, you bring people together to decide what the problems in their community are and what are the best way to address it.
And in that context, you have people in very different backgrounds necessarily who are all of a sudden put in a position where they have to work together to figure out solutions to problems that they all pretty well agree exist. If I live in southern California, there’s probably not anyone in all of Southern California who believes that we do not have a traffic and transportation problem.
And so that’s something that you can bring citizens together and have them address, what the nature of the problem is and how we might deal with it. And I think that has all kinds of beneficial results in terms of forcing citizens to deal with the complexity of problems, the different perspectives they bring to each other.
And because they’re working in a cooperative environment, there is a tendency to be respectful, to listen, and to be mutually accommodating in a way that I think helps people grow both socially and cognitively.
Jeff: Is there a danger in that, that it leads to too much democracy, that you have at the extreme something like the initiative process that we have here in California?
Shawn: I think one of the concerns is people can turn around and say, “Who has the time for all of this?” I think if people were involved, I think, in general, the results would be beneficial. Both for the policies they propose and for their own sense as citizen of having been involved, having contributed, having discovered other people in their community that were absolute strangers to them.
Who, despite the fact that they’re a little odd and different, they’re human like they are. They have families, they have work situations. They talk more or less the way we talk and all of that is kind of civilizing in good ways. So I think that the results in general are beneficial.
How you institutionalize it and do it in a way that recognizes that people have limited time, that’s a problem. Will they make crazy decisions? I don’t think so. In these various experiments, the general result reported by people who study this stuff is that kind of radical, crazy solutions are in fact very, very rare.
That when you bring a diverse group of people together, the terms in which they can cooperate and the kinds of things that they can agree upon tend to reflect more consensus understandings of how the world works and what is valuable. So in that sense, I don’t think it will be upending or destructive.
Jeff: I guess the next part of that then is how something like that can be scaled up to a state level and then ultimately on a national level.
Shawn: Again, a very good question. There have been attempts at this. There’s a very famous case in Brazil where a city of a couple of million decides its city budget each year in this way. And the way they scale it is they tend to have very local deliberations, hundreds of them in various parts of the city.
And then as a thump, after these deliberations are over representatives, I think two from each of these deliberative groups, then come together at some higher level. And in light of what their individual groups have talked about and understand, they begin to then explore the problem and finally come to a collective solution. That’s the way they do it.
And it’s alternative that, for example, has been tried in Canada, in two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, what they did is they picked citizen parliaments. And it involved getting a diverse group of people who essentially met as a collective of 200 and discussed.
In both cases, they were discussing changing the voting system in those provinces and they didn’t trust the members of parliament to do it, the local members of parliament. So they invoked the citizen parliaments and they ran for about a year. They had funding, they could call expert witnesses, et cetera. And they tried it that way.
Ultimately whatever policy recommendations they made was then put to public referendum. So they had a vote in Ontario and a vote in British Columbia, whether to accept or reject the recommendations of the citizen parliament.
So there are different ways to try it, but I do acknowledge that it is a difficult scaling process and it does require sort of basic rethinking of how to get governance done given the realities of the complicated demanding world in which we live.
But I think it’s something that we have to try. It’s time to come up with these ideas and try to implement them, see how they work. In recognition of what we have in place now is not working. And for me, that’s the big stumbling block in all of this because I think we’ve talked about both kind of systemic change and how we govern and I’ve also mentioned the need to fundamentally rethink education.
And to do either of those, you have to begin with the assumption to motivate either of those. You have to begin with the assumption that fundamentally, thus far, we haven’t got it right. It didn’t work and it desperately needs to be reconstructed.
And recognizing that, I think it’s tough. There’s a lot of vested interests that want to keep it the way it is. It leads us off into the wide blue yonder in terms of what do we do as an alternative? And it’s probably expensive.
Jeff: And I guess the other question is, the only way to get us to that point is that it has to get worse before it gets better. Not a happy ending, not a happy story, but may be the only way.
Shawn: I can understand the logic of that. My only concern is, if it gets really worse, it may be hard to reverse. So that if we begin to move in directions where everybody seems to agree that this whole business of having civil conversation in the public sphere and having open debates and a free press, all of that is not working, we don’t need it.
What we really need to do is just defeat the other side. And when we’ve defeated them, we have to exercise power in a way that that other side can never regain control. And you hear, to a certain extent, that fairly loud and clear on the right.
And in much more constrained ways and quiet ways, I don’t know, you hear it increasingly on the left as well. So my concern is, these liberal democratic aspirations for more collaboration, more respect for differences more room for reasonable disagreement, all of that may be politically eliminated as things get worse, both on the left and the right, and the liberal democratic middle I think is shrinking.
So I can give you one example of that actually. In a survey I conducted about a year ago and I’m publishing now, we asked people questions like, do you think the president should be able to violate the law if he believes he’s acting for the good of the people?
Or, given that the 2024 election is so important, is it justified to use violence to make sure your side wins? One final one item. There’s a lot of fake information and fake news. And so the president should be able to exercise more control over the press to make sure that doesn’t happen.
With response to all of those questions, I’m getting about 40 to 45% of Americans who agree, who think that’s right. And then there’s probably another 10% or 15% who are in the middle and are unclear. And then about 40% who are advocates of these normally liberal democratic concern. So I worry about that shrinking 40% who are willing to defend these more liberal democratic principles.
Jeff: And if the solution is not getting worse before it gets better, then one wonders whether any of these approaches that we’re talking about that you’ve laid out have to come from the grassroots or they have to come from charismatic leadership that makes the case.
Shawn: I certainly think it needs the latter. It needs leadership. I think Americans for a very long time were downplaying the problem. And whereas Europeans, partly because of their particular history in World War II, partly because these populous movements gained presence and ascendancy much earlier than they did in the US and in the 1990s and early 200s. We weren’t paying attention.
Actually, I don’t think the Europeans have been any better at solving the problem, but it requires leadership who says, “Yes, you know what? We do have a problem.” We’ve provided these very powerful narratives about the importance of tolerance, the importance of mutual respect, the importance of the rule of law, et cetera.
And yet despite the fact that these are culturally dominant, there’s just a lot of people who are not assimilating them, who don’t accept them. And we need to understand why, and I’m trying to provide one answer to that. And so, we need to move in and change things.
So I think that leadership is important. Somebody who recognizes that problem. And you can’t just say, “These people are deplorables.” That doesn’t work. That’s in some sense adds to the problem. So how do we change things to essentially create the citizenry that liberal democracy needs?
And then at the grassroots level, I do think that it requires this very difficult activism from the middle, which says this world of abstract principles of justice, fairness, equality, these are important and these are worth fighting for directly.
And to recognize that it does require organization at the grassroots level as well. Those would be necessary. And politics in America has gotten very, very bad. We hear endlessly about polarization and the mutual contempt in which 40% of the American public holds the other 40%.
And I think, unfortunately, up until now, the response to that has been things have gone terribly wrong. They’re probably irreversible. I find it depressing and so I’m just going to turn off the news and probably not vote. I have colleagues, political scientists who should be the advocates that I’m talking about who just find the whole thing overwhelming and all they want to do is [unintelligible 00:46:41] find a cabin in a lake and hide. And I find that an unacceptable response.
Jeff: Professor Shawn Rosenberg, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Shawn: Yes, it’s been my pleasure. It’s been interesting for me as well.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
