This episode marks the first time that all five of our hosts (Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Cyanne Loyle, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle) are together on one episode. It's also the first time we've all been together since the election. We take some time to reflect on changes in America's political party, the decline of liberal democracy in the U.S., and how to harness the good from social media amid growing extremism and misinformation.
Along the way, you'll hear from some of the guests who've appeared on the show this year:
From the entire Democracy Works team, best wishes for a happy holiday season! We'll see you in 2025.
This article is sourced from the Democracy Works podcast. Listen or subscribe below.
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Scroll below for transcripts of this episode.
Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.
Chris Beem
I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith
Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This is our last episode of 2024 and I think the first time when all now, five of us are together. So that's exciting. Good to be with you all to end the year, and good to be with our audience as we reflect on some of what we've talked about, and also, I think maybe start to grapple with what the political reality will be in 2025 and a second Trump administration, and some of the things that are going to come with that, and some of the ways that our parties and The way we think about liberalism, some of the media the perennial topics that we talk about on this show.
Jenna Spinelle
We're gonna break this down into a couple of sections, and the first one is going to be about America's political parties. So we're going to hear first from Joe Wright, who's a professor of political science at Penn State. He had a conversation with Michael earlier this year about his book on personalist parties and how they impact democracy. And then we'll hear from Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a former White House staffer and very much involved in the January 6, the Congressional investigations. We talked about that, but we're going to hear from her talking a little bit about the Republican and Democratic parties. So let's queue up both of those clips.
Joe Wright
Yeah. So personal party. The main feature of the party, sort of conceptually, is that the leader controls the party, and the elites have less ability to constrain the behavior of the leader in the party, and the reason for that, oftentimes, is simply because these are parties where the leader himself or herself are more likely to have created the party as their own personal vehicle to get elected in the first place. That is, there is no party to rise up through. They just create a party, a new party. Sometimes they call it after themselves, give it their give it their own names. And as a result, the elites that they that they gather around them to help them run the show, if they do get elected, tend to be people who are beholden to that individual leader and not to set a program, a program, programmatic policies that the leader necessarily espouses. And so the internal sort of power structure of the party is quite different, and the leaders tend not to have sort of worked their way up the party, even in part because they oftentimes have created them.
Cassidy Hutchinson
But if we're going to come out from underneath of this, we have to, at some point, welcome people back, and we can't blame the people who have been artificially seduced by Donald Trump. They need a home, too, and we need, we need to keep them involved in civics and in politics, but also find a way to adequately educate them. And that happens through conversation, that happens when we are able to talk to each other, and I think when we can keep that in mind, and it's, you know, it's easier said than done, you know, I think about the power that we have, and the power that Democrats also have, too, to welcome people like Liz Cheney, like myself, like Alyssa, Farah, Adam, Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, Republicans who they might not agree with, but are willing to work with to help overcome this moment.
Jenna Spinelle
So Michael, I want to start with you. You did that interview with Joe over the summer. I wonder how you were thinking about it now, and you know what Joe had to say about personalist parties. He sort of alluded to the Republican Party several times in that conversation. I wonder if you think that it is perhaps now closer to being a personalist party than it was when you had that conversation with Joe, or even at the beginning of this year.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, I'm glad we're starting. We're starting here because I learned a lot from my colleague in that discussion. And of course, Joe is a comparativist, so he's studying countries around the globe over extended period of time, some very different types of political systems than United States. But the this concept of a personalist party is increasingly relevant to the United States, I think. And more and more I hear people in the American context talk about the Republican Party and personalist terms, I think to understand why it's important to get away from the terminology a little bit. You know, the key components of a personalist party, as I understood it from Joe is, first of all that the members of the. Party are are really given their loyalty to the leader of the party and not really to the program of the party itself. And so in some senses, there is increasingly within the Republican Party, people that are loyal to President Trump and but there are also still some long time people serving in the Republican Party who predate Trump and who really don't think of themselves in those terms. But you know, as you look at the kinds of appointments that he's talking about and the way that he's speaking with potential appointees, there seems to be almost a loyalty test to Trump himself about whether or not candidates for various positions accept the 2020, election outcome. Now, the other part of the personalist party that I think is particularly important in understanding the contemporary Republican Party is that personalist parties don't really constrain the leader of the party in any meaningful way, because in a non personalist party, in a programmatic party, the incentives and the needs of the members of the party are not necessarily tied up in the leader. They have their own program that they want to promote. They have their own policies. They have their own political futures. But I think you're seeing a party that is increasingly just about Donald Trump, and even to the extent to where other branches of government are just sort of giving themselves over to the President.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and, you know, Cyanne, I know you and Joe work, work closely together, and I wonder if, given your experience studying other countries and comparative politics, if you could maybe tell us a little bit about where this road might lead, or where you know how, looking some examples from other countries about what happens if this personalist party trend were to continue?
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I think we all know where it ends, right? So I think the consolidation around a single leader has a couple of interesting next steps. Was actually talking to my to my son in the car the other day, he said to me, well, at least Trump only has four more years. And I had to explain to him that that yes, according to the American Constitution, Trump only can serve for one more term, and so he has four more years. But one of the first things that a personalist ruler would do would be to look to change some of those rules to allow that person to stay in power longer. We've got examples in Uganda, the Constitution has been revised three or four times to allow musveni to stay both beyond term limits, but also beyond age limits. He actually aged out of being President, but he extended that deadline as well. And so these are the types of policies we should expect to see. I think Michael was right. We should expect to see loyalists, family members right, ethnic co patriots, being placed in positions of power. And we should expect to see the weakening of institutions that constrain the executive, which we certainly saw during the first Trump administration, and we should expect to see again, in terms of kind of how it ends. I think we're going to talk a little bit later in the show about ways to push back against illiberal movements. And so how it ends is going to depend a lot, I think, in how US Civil Society and American institutions kind of respond to this increasing personalistic or authoritarian trend.
Chris Beem
Well, there's also, you know, biology, right? I mean, once this personalist leader dies, it's, it's often difficult to sustain that movement, right? And, I mean, with Peron, his wife, kind of tried to do that, and then after that, it was kind of, they tried to do it with other people, and it's just not as sustainable. And you know, how old is Trump now, I mean, he's, he's 7078 I think 78 that's what I thought. So, you know, clock is ticking one way or the other.
Cyanne Loyle
Chris is that he decimated the Republican Party, right? And so that, I think is a real is a real wild card. And so in many of the examples that you're giving, right, when we think about kind of personalist leaders, there's a lot of other viable political parties, and there just isn't in the US point.
Candis Watts Smith
The other thing about, you know, the biology issue is that is like that to me that matters less than the norms and the rules that are going to be changed or could be changed. So, you know, in the case of North Carolina, before Roy Cooper became governor, there were a number of powers that were stripped from the governor. And now you know, we're going to have another Democratic governor, and the Republican super majority is changing the rules again. Has stripped powers away from the governor. So, you know, in the case that we ever get a Republican governor in North Carolina, as long as you know, we have a gerrymandered state where Republicans will kind of lift up whatever it is that agenda might be, they can run roughshod so like they've done enough, taking powers and shifting norms and institutions that it doesn't really matter who's in power those roles are now, you know, sending us down a different path that we would not have otherwise.
Jenna Spinelle
Let's talk a little bit about the Cassidy Hutchinson clip. You know, she really both in this interview and when she visited campus, made the the point that the Democratic Party needed to do more to embrace people like her, people who might have been associated with Trump at some point, but had since changed their minds. Or this is also some echoes of the Never Trump movement, which has been around since Trump entered the race the first time in the 2016 election, and Candace. You know, it seems like the Harris campaign tried some of what Cassidy described. Vice President Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney. I know that Adam Kinzinger and other Republicans, or former Republicans, spoke at the the DNC, and it seems to have backfired. Either, I don't know, maybe the independent voters they were hoping to get, or some of those voters, maybe there aren't as many Cassie Hutchinson's out there in the world is as we would all like to believe. Or maybe it cost them votes from from Democrats who were turned off by some of that. I guess. I wonder, you know what, what you make of that? And I guess is there is this, is what Cassie described, maybe just even though she's very young, from a bygone era in in American politics, something that we as a country have moved past, for better or for worse?
Candis Watts Smith
Well, I mean, one thing that I think that we need to leave room for is a change, a possibility for change. I mean, parties realign. It takes a long time, and maybe that's where we're heading. I read an article, and now I can't remember where, but the question that that I had to ask myself was, am I conservative? Am I a conservative now, insofar as the Democratic Party is now the party about maintaining institutions and lauding democracy and suggesting that, well, maybe things aren't perfect, but the institutions that we have we need to maintain. And the Republican Party under Trump is anti all of those things. And so I thought to myself, like, oh yeah. Like, that used to be how we understood the Republican Party, as the party as a conservative party, as a status quo party and other things. Like, there are other dimensions of difference. But on this one, you know, it made me think about the extent to which the Democratic Party's brand is changing. The Democratic Party's demographics are changing. It's becoming more educated. It's becoming, you know, there's more white folks, you know, that are highly educated in the party, and similarly, at least under this last election, that the Republican Party is slightly changing. And so, you know, I guess the question, I don't, I don't know if I would use the term backfire, but I do think that there might be it might be necessary for us to take us a beat to see what the trend will look like over the next couple of elections, to See if folks like Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson. Cassidy, yeah, Cassidy Hutchinson and those kinds of people say the Republican Party is not for me just as well as you know, lower educated people of color might say the Democratic Party is not for me either. So I think that's, that's probably my initial Take, take on that.
Chris Beem
I just want to say I agree about the question about whether that it's just too early to say this backfired. It did not work. And you know, it would be very interesting to know why. You know, did, what did Republicans hear this argument, you know? Or were they already convinced that if Trump doesn't like Liz Cheney, that's enough for me? I don't care what she does, right? I kind of think that's probably right, but it's also true that, you know, we don't know what's going to happen and if it. Turns out that everything goes south, or if it turns out that tomorrow, Donald Trump throws an aneurysm, there's going to be a a moment of what the future of the Republican Party is going to be. And the people who have identified themselves as an alternative to this, this Trumpian vision are are going to have an opportunity that other people may not so I just, I just think it's just too early to say for sure,
Jenna Spinelle
Chris, it is a rare day that you are the voice of optimism on this show .
Chris Beem
I had a nap.
Jenna Spinelle
Maybe Are you setting your 2025, resolutions thinking they are sending some positive vibes?
Chris Beem
The show is young. I'll come up with something, believe me.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, let's stick with this idea of populism and bring in liberalism. We had a couple of episodes. I mean, we talked about liberalism a lot, but this, this year, we had Chris, who did an interview with Alex Lefebvre, who is a political theorist in Australia. I believe that the University of Sydney, but don't quote me on that. I don't have that in my notes here. And then also with, we talked with Matthew Rhodes Purdy, who talked about the origins of discontent. And so let's just revisit these two episodes and then talk a little bit about the balance between liberalism and democracy and what that might look like moving forward.
Alex Lefebvre
What I see in the world today when I look around at all the kind of challengers and critics of liberal democracy is that I don't see them as undemocratic. I see them as illiberal. And in particular, what I see them doing is putting a crowbar or rising apart democracy on the one hand and then liberalism on the other hand. And for me, that makes a lot of I'm not saying that's normatively good, but I think that that's descriptively kind of accurate that it, I don't think it's if you see democracy in narrow terms, like sovereignty of the people and majority decision, then the wolves pig example, is democratic, right? It is a domination of a minority by majority but by but by majority rule. And that might be what's going on in many parts of the world today, that majorities are happy to assert themselves without too many scruples over minorities, and it can still be democratic in the sense of popular sovereignty, and kind of numerically majority will the majority, but it's not liberal democratic. So I would be, I think it's, I think it's analytically important to call a country like right now, like Hungary, or India or turkey or Russia. I think that it's important to call those democracies, but I think it's very important to call them illiberal democracies. And so it's that prizing apart that I think is very important.
Matthew Rhodes-Purdy
You know, you talk about the role of social media and you talk about the role of private media, I think the polarizing effect of media is enabled by the fact that people are not in organizations that can kind of inoculate them against some of those negative aspects. But again, it's just it makes it easier for people to be divided and for people's very legitimate grievances against what's been going on in the economy and in politics, it makes it easy to redirect those against people who aren't really responsible or, you know, it's not, sort of not profitable way of redirecting this. It's, you know, if, if you're upset about the economy and Wall Street and the political class not listening to you, how does, you know, bashing on immigrants or asylum seekers do anything positive to it doesn't but it's easy to redirect that with people when they're they're not in more, you know, when they're not in environments where they can be given better solutions and better ways to use those negative feelings to motivate them to to achieve, uh, sort of positive change.
Jenna Spinelle
So Chris, since you did that interview with Alex, how are you thinking about what they said in light of the election? Are you seeing that perhaps the results signal a decline in support for liberal democracy, and can liberalism survive without the institutions that Matthew talked about to remind people of its value.
Chris Beem
What I would want to say, I mean, Alex is very impressive theorist, and his book is really good, but I just, I kind of chafe at this notion that, you know, democracy without liberalism is morally bereft, you know. And I think it's important for people who care about democracy to push back on that, you know, if we are stipulating that democracy means that everybody's vote counts the same, then there's a conception of equality of. Each individual that is just kind of part of the fabric, right? And and that gets you a long way towards a moral conception. And so I feel like you know that is something that I would want to insist upon, that that democracy is a moral condition, moral conception as well.
Chris Beem
So if we're talking about, you know, Hungary or India, or, you know, whatever the the machinations of the incoming administration here are going to do, you know, let's just say, if we're talking about Hungary, if we're talking about undermining or constraining or controlling a free and independent press. You can call that illiberal. But if you are discriminating against if you are undermining some particular group, whether it be you know, immigrants in Hungary or trans people just about everywhere or Muslims in India, that's not merely a liberal that's undemocratic because you are treating a group of people unequally. And so, you know, I just, I think it's important that we, that we, that we make that that we make that point. Then it's not merely semantics, but it's how you defend democracy and how you argue for you know what it means to be a democratic society. So anyway, that's what I would say. I think there are all kinds of possibilities with respect to what's going to happen, and whether it's whether we can talk about whether it's going to be illiberal or undemocratic, but either way, it undermines our democracy, and it's going to be it's going to require some defense.
Michael Berkman
Well, certainly people think about democracy along these two dimensions. And we've been polling for years out of the mood of the nation poll, and asking people what democracy means to them. And what we see, which is not inconsistent with what world value surveys and all the comparative work that's done on this is that people tend to see democracy in terms of these two dimensions, one having to do with popular rule, and the other having to do with rights and constraints on power. And for some people, and I think that you can draw interesting conclusions about subgroups within the population on this but for some people, what the most important aspect of democracy is, to them, is the idea of popular rule and political equality. And for other people, what's most important to them about democracy is the protection of rights, the fragmentation of power and the protection against majority tyranny. And so certainly in the American case, we're talking about a liberal democracy. Absolutely, that's how people think about it. Is along those, along those two dimensions.
Jenna Spinelle
And I wonder, Michael, how those two dimensions you just described might map on to the party realignment that we were discussing earlier.
Michael Berkman
Well, we see overwhelmingly that Republicans tend to speak in terms of freedom and rights, and Democrats tend to speak in terms of voice and political equality. But I think there are important generational differences that might that might also speak to some of the kind of realignment issues that Candace was talking about. But I think there are generational differences in what's most valued, as well as some partisan differences in terms
Cyanne Loyle
But I don't know, Michael, I think in the last campaign, I saw this differently, right?
Michael Berkman
Yes, and I want to say that too, because you saw Democrats talking about freedom
Cyanne Loyle
Well, but and core to that concept of freedom was the very liberal notion of rights. So when you think about immigration, when you think about trans rights and things like that, it's the idea that we should care about other people and that other people matter.
Michael Berkman
Yes, I agree. And in fact, I think that what was so interesting about this election or one thing. So let's take the 2024 Republican convention. Okay, the Democratic 2024 Democratic Convention looked more like Mitt Romney's convention than the Republican Convention looked like because the Democrats are all talking about freedom, and Republicans have kind of given it up a bit, because this sort of Christian nationalist view of the world is not really one that's premised on freedom. Mitt Romney was all about, you know, the freedom of small businesses to do what they want, and the bushes as well. But that's all kind of shifted, and I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, Josh Shapiro's really brilliant ability to talk in terms of positive freedom, as opposed to kind of more negative conceptions of freedom. But go ahead, Cyanne.
Cyanne Loyle
Even election interference. Right? So, so notions of election interference are predicated on the idea, the Democratic idea, that everybody's vote should count, and that the kind of greatest sin is that votes are being counted incorrectly, or there's corruption in that process. And so in many ways, I think it flips the script on that party alignment.
Candis Watts Smith
So I don't have this fully articulated. I think this might dovetail with what cyan is saying. Is one of the things that stands out to me, especially about the kind of protection of minority rights, is almost like the Republican Party has used that for themselves. Like, you know, there's a moment in which we have this idea that, you know, demographics are destiny, and that the Republican Party is actually starting to represent a group that is becoming a minority of sorts, and By that I just mean white Americans and conservative Christian white Americans and so like the notion about election integrity is not about election integrity. It's about making sure that their votes count and that the increasing size of a different group counts less that there's a, there is a use of this kind of, you know, we need to make sure that abortion is not on the table because, you know, the values of people like me, of white, you know, Christian fundamentalists are being trampled on, or we need to have prayers in school to amplify what is a, you know, not a dominant, numerically dominant group anymore, But maybe that's just me being conspiratorial.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and so, um, we it's easy to kind of talk about this as a purely academic discussion, which we certainly love to do around here. But, um, you know the to bring it more into the real world. I mean, we have seen, and I think we'll continue to see it, even just from some of the discussion around cabinet appointees, people who are more illiberal certainly have different views on institutions, on, you know, institutions and expertise, and maybe value those things less than previous administrations had. And so, I mean, I think, and I think you all would agree, please speak up if you don't that, you know we are going to continue to move in a more illiberal direction and cyan, I want to ask you a little bit about the consequences of that, like, what does it look like, and are there any examples of countries that have gone in a more illiberal direction, but then brought it back around.
Cyanne Loyle
Yeah. I mean, Jenna, I think that one of the things that I'm increasingly wrapping my head around is that we don't have a lot of great examples. So all of us grew up at a time where there were more democracies in the world than there were autocracies. That will not be the case for my children, right? So my children will grow up in a world in which autocracy or autocratic rule is more dominant, and we just don't know exactly what that looks like. I think we're starting to see already the kind of turning in on each other in different countries, right? So there's going to be new regulations for Americans traveling abroad into the UK and the European Union, right? Just and again, to candace's point, there are many people in the United States that will not notice that or be affected by those changes at all. Other people will when we talk about the tariffs and rising prices on certain goods, many of those goods will impact a higher demographic than than other people, right? I am worried about the price of avocados, but I don't know that that's keeping many other people up at night, right? And that's a demographic indicator, right? Of Yeah, what I what I eat in my house on the weekends, in terms of kind of countries you tasked me, Jenna, with thinking about countries that have successfully made some of these transitions, and we don't have a lot of great examples. So Freedom House had a report out a couple of months ago that highlighted Fiji and the Gambia as great success stories that were moving towards illiberalism, but did an about face.
Cyanne Loyle
These are certainly not the kind of large, powerful countries that we would like to be using as examples, and both of those countries had strong influence from the international community that supported local civil society movements with Democratic intentions or more liberal. Intentions we I think we'd be hard pressed to think through the kind of global power that would be strong enough to support, for example, civil society movements in the United States against the US government. And so they're not great examples, but I do want to highlight as even though we're talking about democratic backsliding kind of so consistently that there are countries where we're not seeing those patterns, right? So even in places like Norway and Denmark, where there's been the rise of more populist parties, those populist parties have not been sweepingly successful. There's been a lot of public discussion around immigration in Scandinavia, for example, but that's been resolved in ways that are, that are different than what we're seeing in the United States, you know, Uruguay, New Zealand, Costa Rica. I mean, these are, there are many countries that are still maintaining their Freedom House rankings, and so I don't want to suggest that. I think we need to be careful when we talk about kind of this major illiberal turn. I think that it's globally different, but it's also not everywhere. And so I think the lessons from an academic perspective that we should be focusing on is the countries that aren't falling prey to some of these trends in the way that we're seeing in the United States and other places.
Jenna Spinelle
So let's close here by talking about social media and community a little bit, it's actually a nice segue from what you were just saying, Cyan, about civil society and things and kind of organizing locally. We had two guests on at the beginning of the year who are really looking at this issue in different ways. The first that we'll hear from is Cynthia Miller Idris, who is a professor at American University and does a lot of work around political extremism, and more importantly, how to combat political extremism. And so we're going to hear her talk about some of the ways that people become radicalized online, and then how people, kind of bad actors, are able to capitalize on that to encourage further radicalization. And then we're going to hear kind of the flip side of that.
Jenna Spinelle
So if Cynthia is the bad of social media, we're going to hear a little bit about some of the more positive aspects from V Spehar, who is a creator on tick tock. Um, putting aside, you know what? What may happen with tick tock in in the new administration, I know V's been working a lot behind the scenes to make sure that it doesn't get banned in the US, but I think the the point that they make is is bigger than just tick tock. It's about the ability for people who maybe don't have a lot of folks around them who share their values, share their interests, can find communities, whether on Tiktok or on other platforms. So let's take a listen to Cynthia and to V.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
You know, one of the pieces of advice we give to parents and our parenting guides and tools and trainings is to think about fostering a healthy sense of connection and belonging and identity. Like a lot of teenagers who go looking for this kind of stuff, both on the Islamist ISIS related recruitment and on domestic violent extremist groups here are actually looking for some way to belong, to have meaning, to have purpose, to contribute to something that they think is bigger and better than themselves. It's a major set of vulnerabilities. This is a generation of young people that's more isolated than any generation in previous, you know, record, and yet they are connected online. Often they don't that doesn't make them feel less isolated, right? They have fewer people who they count as friends. They have fewer people who they think they can ask for a favor or rely on for help, and so those are all things that create vulnerabilities, and it's one of the reasons why we saw such a surge in both the circulation of online propaganda and in weird kinds of radicalization during the pandemic like QAnon.
V Spehar
I actually think social media is the remedy, in many ways to the lack of third place. It's just that third place is in the metasphere, right? It's in the online now. So I think we've developed these social media spaces, and a lot of what I've seen is that it has caught a lot of people from despair. If you're a queer kid down in Northwest Arkansas, you may not see yourself anywhere, but you go on Tiktok and you're everywhere, and you have power, and you're cool, and you can talk to other people and you don't feel alone. So I don't think social media is the cause of loneliness. I think it's the lack of stability. IRL, if you will, for comfort, reflection and bringing people together in a way that's not cringe or awkward or expensive.
Jenna Spinelle
All right. So as I said, before we listen to the clips, I think this represents kind of the best and the worst of what social media and online media can be. And I guess I want to just pose this question to all of you, do you think that it is possible to strike a balance here, maybe get more of what we. Is talking about with less of what Cynthia is talking about, or are we perhaps already too far down the path of extremism, disinformation, all of those sorts of things.
Michael Berkman
I thought a lot about this Miller-Idriss interview, actually, during the campaign, because I didn't know a lot about what she was talking about, and all these spaces on all these online spaces that seem to be innocent enough, that are actually sort of hotbeds of extremism. And while, when Donald Trump during the campaign, was hitting one podcast after another, my students were helping me understand what what was going on. I didn't know where he was or what he was doing, but, but they did, especially, a lot of the guys in the class were well familiar with some of these podcasts, and judging from other things that they were saying, that might be where they're getting all their news and information from where some of these other podcasts, and I don't know, I mean, it seems to me like it's a bit of a double edged sword, in the sense that, sure, a lot of people are finding community like V talks about on these online spaces, and sometimes these communities are pretty nasty, undemocratic places that are not really very good for us.
Chris Beem
You know, we've talked for years about how social media and new forms of media are double edged swords. And you know, we can point to examples where, you know, Facebook or WhatsApp were created opportunities for organizing and and instant protests. And, you know, imminently, democratic right? And then we also have, you know, I mean, yeah, what Cynthia was talking about, these kind of, like, literally, people hiding in these games and other media platforms to try to move people to become move young boys and young men to become Nazis and there. It's all out there, and insofar as it's new, it's it always takes culture and policy a long time, if ever, to catch up to these new technologies. And obviously, we got a lot of work to do.
Cyanne Loyle
Jenna, I would say that, you know, if we're going to get out the other end of an illiberal trend, it's going to be through organizing, through community, through through kind of more local grassroots efforts that are that are going to, you know, kind of rally to support institutions and to redefine and realign parties. One of the things that I would like to add, though, is the degree to which the the state and which governments have been actively influencing these processes, I think, you know, Chris, that's one of the things that's different than what we were talking about years ago. In many of the authoritarian regimes I study, those governments have become incredibly proficient in using digital technologies and social media to monitor, to repress and to influence their challengers. And that's new, right? I mean, that's within the last couple of years, there are a lot of movements to target activists, both within national borders and abroad, and we're talking about this in terms of transnational repression and things like that. And so, you know, this is not your social media democracy that it was 10 years ago. I'm having a hard time thinking about how any of these platforms can be used as forces for good anymore.
Candis Watts Smith
I mean, it's funny that you say that, because I just wrote, well, they could be used for good or evil. You know what? Okay, this, this this is gonna be really Pollyannaish and incredibly naive, but there is something about when you walk into a restaurant and you see a family at a table and they are not talking to each other, or you walk into your classroom and people are not talking to each other, they're on their phones or on the bus or whatever. I mean, I always find that scene so unsettling. And so there is, I mean, we talk a lot about what happens online and all of the weird podcasts and chat rooms and how people are using Fortnite and mind like games, and what we do live in a real world where we're all so disconnected, and I don't know, I just it's it's unsettling. It's unsettling to watch, to be in rooms with. Dozens of people and no one talking. I don't I mean, there's something more than just what's happening online. There's something about how we are not connecting with each other when we're sitting right next to each other.
Chris Beem
You know, I want to pick up on what Candis said, because I think there is this, you know it there's good data that people who are politically engaged are happier, right? They have new experiences, they connect with people, they learn new things. But all of this is only, only works if it's face to face and if you're actually engaging with other human beings. And so if you're, you know, if your political engagement means that you listen to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity, or, you know, God help us, oan or whatever else, then that's engagement. But it's Erz. It's not as as as fulfilling. It's feeding this, you know, I called it drug seeking, right? It's giving you dopamine hits, but it's not making you happy.
Chris Beem
And if once you start drug seeking, all you do is seek more drugs. And the only one who wins in that scenario is the is a supplier. And I see, see evidence of that. So, I mean, all I want to say is the Surgeon General has said that loneliness is an epidemic and a health epidemic. And so, you know, I'm all for the the kid in Arkansas using social media to connect to people who are more like them. Nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. But if, if, if we are all just kind of connecting via this digital mechanism, it's it's just not going to work. We're human beings, and that's not going to fill our need politics or whatever else.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and I think that that might actually be a good place to end. Maybe the most oft repeated word of advice for listeners, and it's, I think it's worth repeating here, is to get out and join something in your community. Doesn't necessarily have to be political, and in fact, maybe it's better if it's not. That's maybe a different conversation we could have. But I think you know if, and we're certainly not the only ones saying this, but if you are feeling, perhaps feelings of despair or despondency after everything we've just been talking about, or after, you know, the certainly, all the stories about what's happened and what's to come. I think it's, you know, you can't control a lot of that, in some ways, but you can control how you react to it. So I wanted to thank all of you, Candace, Chris cyan and Michael, for your work this year. Thank you to all of our listeners. Thank you to our partners at WPSU and then the democracy group, Podcast Network for the democracy works team. I'm Jenna Spinelle, happy holidays, and we will see you in 2025.
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