Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime media executive, and now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

If you’ve listened to this podcast more than once, you’ve likely heard a recurring question: What would it take to get Americans over their political alienation? Would it help to clean up and diversify our media diets? Would it help to understand where the other side is coming from?

Today’s guest thinks the answer might be to emphasize all we have in common as Americans, as neighbors, as friends. More important than the theory, perhaps, is that he actually tested this hypothesis in the field. Matthew Lewandusky is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Our Common Bonds. Through a series of experiments described in the book, he tested whether reminding us of what we have in common, friendships,

Sports teams, patriotism, can reduce the instinct to demonize fellow citizens. Some approaches work well, others hardly at all. His findings are especially interesting to me because they’re closely related to an Alliance for Trust project in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, exploring whether shared local history can help bridge political divides. So today, as we brace for the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

Let’s dive into the power of our common bonds…

Transcript

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.25)
Matt Lewandowski, welcome to In Reality.

Matt (00:04.576)
Thanks for having me.

Eric Schurenberg (00:06.432)
It is great to have you here. One of the things about your career that is significant is that you’ve done an awful lot of deep study about political polarization. You and your research helped solidify an observation that has now basically received wisdom, namely that liberal and conservative Americans sort themselves into Democratic and Republican camps in a way that really didn’t happen before in history. So I I’d like to start just by asking

How worried we ought to be about this trend. You could say if you look for polarization in American history, you can easily find it, and not just over slavery, the Vietnam War, civil rights, various red scares in the 20s and 50s. You could conclude that polarization is just the norm in a diverse democracy, or is this version more destructive?

 

Matt (01:02.368)
So polarization is in some ways and should be understood as a a kind of constant throughout most of American history. Indeed, you know, there’s really only two periods in American history where we don’t have it, right? One is the very strange era of good feelings early in our politics, which really isn’t replicable. That was a a very different set of political arrangements, a different economy, very different country. and then the the kind of post-war, like let’s call it like the

late forties through you know roughly the early sixties, when there was this other sort of stable low polarization era, right? But that the second era of low polarization is really driven by the fact that the parties collude to keep the polarizing issues off the table, right? The most obvious one being the question of civil rights for black Americans, right? So both Democrats and Republicans work to not address those issues, right? So we shouldn’t understand that as sort of there was

You know, kind of a pro-Civil Rights and an anti-civil rights party. No, both parties contained both of those factions, right? And you know, an important part of the story is that the parties then begin to sort themselves out with those changes. You can see that starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1957, then obviously getting stronger throughout the nineteen sixties, right? And then you know, continuing on to the path that that we know today. And in thinking about whether or not this is more or less dangerous, I’m less worried about what

ordinary people do and more worried about what political elites do. Right. So that you know, I I think when I look at polarization in the public, right, there’s a dance, right, where that both is a cause and an effect of what happens at the elite level. And so when I say elites, I mean, you know, kind of elected politicians, party leaders, interest groups, like those those sorts of things. I’m much more worried about that level.

Right, and the sense of of kind of division and polarization there, because ultimately that’s the the much more damaging one, right? In part, and we can get into this later, ordinary people like yes, they are more divided now than they used to be. Yes, partisanship is more strongly associated with ideology, and that has important consequences.

Matt (03:20.469)
But people also exaggerate the extent of polarization in the mass public. It’s a phenomenon known as false polarization or perceived polarization. Right. And there’s a number of studies that show that if you correct that, right, then people actually sort of like those from the other side more than we they might otherwise do. Right? But sure.

Eric Schurenberg (03:40.205)
Well, let’s let’s dig deep deeper on that, because that is the the focus of a lot of your book, your fascinating book, Our Common Bonds, which I guess was centers around the hypothesis that a lot of this polarization is false polarization, that it’s founded on misperceptions of what people on the other side of the political divide really believe and what they are really like. This happens to be a recurring theme on this show in reality.

Where Braver Angels and more uncommon, and politicians who are sort of divide bridges like Rob Sand, running now at this at the moment we record for governor of Iowa, have all been guests. So let’s talk about our common bonds, where you experimented with a handful of ways to get people to look beyond political differences and recognize common interests, common bonds.

Well briefly, what were the bonds you sought to examine in those experiments and and how did you test them?

Matt (04:47.231)
Sure. so I think just taking a step back, like the the kind of overall premise of the book is is similar to what I just said that, you know, we can think about not all polarization is false polarization or you know, perceived polarization. There are real important differences and we should come back to that at the end. But part of that is, you know, let’s call it misperceived polarization, false polarization, use whatever term you’d like. and so we can say like, well, where does that come from?

Right. And so it comes from the fact that when we think about who’s in the other side, right, we don’t tend to think about ordinary people who are on the other side of the aisle from us. Right. We tend to think about political activists, we think about the kinds of people we see talking about politics on social media, who tend to be among the most extreme, right? There’s you know good work about from Q and others, right? That you know, a huge share of political content online is produced by a very small segment.

Of the public, and it’s the segment of the public that happens to be the most extreme, right? And we think about you know professional politicians, right? People we see talked about in the media, we think about activists, the people who attend rallies, right? These are typically the most politically engaged, the most politically extreme, the most politically divided people. So we tend to misestimate that.

In part because if you and I just met in a normal conversation, right? You don’t normally say to me like, are you a Democrat? Are you a Republican? Right. That’s just not something that tends to come up, right? Now, it might come up more today than it used to because more things have come to be associated with partisanship, right? But those stereotypes aren’t perfect, right? There’s still a lot of, you know, even if we get the kind of average, right, there’s still a lot of heterogeneity in those

know, types of stereotypes that we might have, right? About, you know, Democrats and and and Republicans. So what we tried to what I tried to do in our common bonds was work through a couple of these, you know, ways we might overcome this, right? Aren’t certainly not the only ways, but just a couple of them. So one is thinking about a sports fandom, perhaps as a a bridging divide. One is thinking about friendships from the other party, and about eight in ten people do have those.

Matt (07:04.066)
and then the the last one, which is the the most effective, but also the you know the kind of the most involved and most difficult to scale is bringing people together for cross partisan conversations.

Eric Schurenberg (07:14.316)
Hmm. how about questions about the national identity? The sort of we’re all American.

Matt (07:21.385)
yes, sorry. That’s the was the last one. Sorry, I forgot to bring that one up. Yeah, I mean this one’s really interesting because I think this is one where the effect is sort of changed. So the the data in the book is largely from the Obama era. I’d initially publish that work in 2018. so it’s based on some data that Annenberg collected in 2008, looking at both the effect of the 4th of July and the 2008 Olympics.

As you know, kind of we can think of them as kind of increases. you know, if you want to use the language of social science, they’re an exogenous shock to national identity, right? Those are times when your kind of American identity gets primed. And the idea is that if you think about this American identity as opposed to being Democrats versus Republicans, right, it’s a so-called superordinate identity that is it envelopes both Democrats and Republicans, right? So that’s an identity that can kind of bridge between the two sides.

And so when I had done those earlier experiments during the Obama administration, I found that that worked quite well. Then I came back to it in the summer of 2020 and I found that it worked less well. And a few other folks have tried to replicate it since then, and they’ve found that it doesn’t work nearly as well anymore. And I think part of the reason why is that if you think about why the national identity primes would work, right? Or a patriotism primes, sort of going.

closely related, right? It’s bringing together these sort of apolitical symbols, right? So if you look at why people are proud to be Americans, right? It’s things like, I’m really proud of the Constitution. I’m proud of the idea of America as a land of opportunity. I’m proud of one I wouldn’t have predicted, but actually turns out to be something a lot of people are proud of is like our national parks and American beauty and you know all lots of these sorts of things that aren’t

If they’re political, right, they’re not, we don’t think of them as like partisan, right? So if we think about the constitution and having a history of stable democracy, right, that’s not Democrat or Republican. But you can kind of think about, right, the the sort of stuff that President Trump is doing around the July 4th celebration. I always get the name of these two things wrong, right? One is America 250 and one is like America the Beautiful or something. I can’t remember. right, but there are these two kind of different competing groups.

Matt (09:42.868)
Right. And he’s sort of turning what’s happening on July fourth at the White House into what you know you could think of as sort of a Trump rally. Think about what he did in 2020 at Mount Rushmore, and then with you know the military parades, right? And so it’s just it’s not so much this sort of, hey, let’s watch some fireworks and you know celebrate what makes America great, right? It’s bringing in these sorts of things that are going to problematize that, right? So it’s not that July fourth is some sort of magic wand you get to wave over.

you know, these sorts of things, it’s this idea of a kind of shared purpose and shared identity that’s doing the bridging work. And to the extent that you, you know, don’t have that, right, that’s when those the sort of bonds break down as a a way of kind of bridging these divides.

Eric Schurenberg (10:28.096)
Okay. Well, how about some of those softer bonds, softer identities like support for the same sports team? are are those more effective? I I one one thought I had about them as I as I read your book was that they seem kind of circumstantial. That, you know, after cheering for the Yankees from the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, then you go home to your liberal suburb or your

Matt (10:37.982)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (10:56.556)
You know, or your conservative neighborhood and polarization sets in again. D do those feelings disappear once the game is over?

Matt (11:05.587)
I mean they certainly they certainly dissipate, right? And this is one of the the real challenges that we can think of this as a kind of like the you know, think of as the bridging space or the polarization reduction space has faced, is that you can show that lots of these treatments work right in the the moment, right? And the the more you repeat them, the more they would work, right? But they’re not. there’s no no way that you kind of just

You know, wish away all these things. Like no treatment is going to get rid of all of those things. Right. So when I think about this, what I tell people is we’re working on the margins. And I think the goal of all these things, and you know, when I talk to groups and I teach a class on this, the what I tell the students is I want to help you think about how to disagree better, right? Because disagreement is just

Part of living in a diverse liberal democracy, right? People aren’t going to have the same ideas, right? And so part of the idea of politics and partisanship, there’s some you know political science work that talks about this as high partisanship, right? The idea is the goal of that is to sort of say, like, this is what we believe, this is what you believe. They’re not the same thing, right? But we kind of understand the basis for those things, and we can compete right respectfully.

For the, you know, the kind of way to move forward in in society. Right. So when I tell people about this, I don’t think the goal of a lot of these things, as I’ve sort of continued to work through them, I’m less convinced the goal is like, we’re going to really reduce polarization. The goal is to help people better understand the other side’s point of view and the reasons and rationales for their arguments.

Eric Schurenberg (12:49.536)
Okay. All right. Good. Well let’s let’s double down on on that, the sort of cross party dialogue, dialogue across disagreements. There are some organizations that that do try to facilitate those kinds of conversations, Braver Angels, More Uncommon, Civity. Do you consider those efforts successful? And yeah, I guess I could also ask about the the after effect that you’ve observed among your students who

who take a class on constructive conversations, are there ways to have these conversations that are not uncomfortable?

Matt (13:23.167)
Yeah. I mean I think it

Matt (13:27.661)
There’s always going to be a little bit of discomfort. And this was actually so I taught it was actually the the my favorite class I’ve ever taught. this past fall I taught Penn has this new initiative around first-year seminars. And so I’d done this as part of I teach a senior seminar on polarization. And I thought, you know, this would be fun to expand out into a a first-year seminar. And I I did it you know, this fall, and it was just a great group of of students and

You know, sometimes when I hear all these things about how bad college students are, you know, I I find it really healthy to be in the classroom and and working with really smart and engaged students because they give me a very different perspective than we we hear a lot of that. You know, so I had 15 students in the class and and we really engaged, you know, closely each week with a set of readings and and ideas, and we had a lot of discussions about, you know, not just how you you do this,

But you know, we actually went and did it and then you know we taught some other first year students. that was their final product. We did an event for other first year students about how to do this. I think you know worked well. but look, I think it depends on thinking about what your goal for those things is, right? there’s no I again, we’re you know, I don’t think the solution is to get like everyone into a Braver Angels workshop or something. I mean that’d be great if we could do it, but like I don’t think that’s a a very realistic goal. I think

The way of thinking about this is like, you know, I have to go to the gym if I want to stay in shape, right? I might not always like to do that, right? But it’s something I have to do, right? If I I want to be able to live a healthy life, right? In much the same way, you have to kind of practice these skills of, you know, negotiation and difference and dialogue. And so I think it’s about helping people learn how to do those things and have.

conversations in their their everyday life, right? Because we’re just never going to agree with everyone in our lives, right? America’s too too big, too pluralistic, too diverse of a country for that to be the case. Right. And it would be frankly really boring if we all agreed on the same things. I mean I think part of what makes it interesting is that that we are this big, you know, diverse multiracial democracy. so I I think the success of those things is less like, are a lot of people doing it and more like, you know,

Matt (15:48.54)
If you go and do those things, do you feel more comfortable having those sorts of conversations in your life, knowing that they are going to be a little bit different difficult and awkward, right? But feeling like maybe that you can sit with that difference and discomfort a little bit and use it to kind of move that forward.

Eric Schurenberg (16:08.49)
Well that’s such a worthy and constructive way of thinking about it. Are there tactics that that you can briefly describe for having those kind of conversations? That the sort of classic Thanksgiving table argument with your crazy uncle. how do you how do you have those conversations with with people whose beliefs maybe

Kind of intolerable or at least mysterious to you.

Matt (16:40.531)
Yeah, so I I always like to begin with the caveat that, you know, it’s totally fine to just not have them at an event like Thanksgiving, right? It’s totally fine to say, you know what, we’re just not gonna talk about politics and we’re gonna enjoy each other’s you know, company, right? And that’s a totally, you know, fine way to proceed. There’s no like you’re not like a bad person if you, you know, do that. Right. But if you’re going to go down that road, I think one thing

That we worked a lot on in the class, I think is important, is just sort of establishing some some ground rules about you know what this looks like and how we’re going to engage. And so I like to think about three things that I give to people, right? Or that I, you know, when we did in the class, we we kind of worked on a couple of things. So one it that I would think about is thinking carefully about what civility means. So a lot of people mistake civility as a synonym for polytess. It’s not, right? Civility is actually something much deeper.

It means that we treat each other as if we have legitimate bases for our political opinions, right? And so that that means I come in with an open mind and about you, and I’m going to listen and think critically and ask careful questions about your beliefs. And I’m going to expect you to do the same. Right. And so I think that actually sets up a nice set of boundaries for like when these conversations work and when they don’t, right?

And so I think you know, when you find that people aren’t respecting the other side’s point of view and beliefs, I think that’s a good time to sort of say, you know what, maybe this isn’t such a productive conversation. Let’s you know switch gears and do something else. Second, and this is very hard for an academic because you can hear in these answers, I like to talk, right? You can’t become an academic if you don’t like the sound of your own voice. You’re literally paid to stand up and do that several times a week to a classroom of students. but

You know, listening more than you speak is really important, right? So there’s a a great coalition group called Listen First that I think just really nicely encapsulates that idea. And the third thing, and then I promise I’ll stop for a minute, is thinking about how to ask probing rather than you know provocative questions. So what I mean by the difference is if I’m a a Democrat and you’re a Republican, and we come into this conversation and I say to you,

Matt (19:00.393)
Why won’t you just admit that Trump lied about losing the 2020 election? He obviously lost. And why do you persist on continuing to spread this misinformation that there was vote fraud? That’s just gonna get your kind of defensive mechanisms up, right? And it’s not going to really yield anything productive, right? Because all of a sudden I’ve kind of triggered your defensive rationale around your partisan identity. Instead, if I say, you know, start with something like,

What’s something that your party did that really disappointed you, right? Where you you sort of you know wish they had done it, you know, differently, right? Then it’s kind of opening up a different sort of space for conversation, right? So those are, I think, some some different, you know, maybe ways of approaching this. But again, totally fine if you decide, you know what, this just is something where and especially there are gonna some topics, right, that maybe just feel like, you know what, I’m just not ready to to kind of have a conversation about this.

Right, it’s too it’s too personal, it’s too raw that maybe you kind of set those off the table.

Eric Schurenberg (20:01.184)
Okay, great. those are three kind of easy to remember touch points. That you start with the assumption that your counterparty has a reasonable basis for the belief. You listen more than you talk, and that you ask questions that are not provocative, but rather probing and open-ended. so that’s a a a kind of handbook or rule book or playbook for the

for us ordinary citizens dealing with polarization. But you mentioned at the top of our conversation that what really worries you is the polarization among elites, or at least their tendency to promote polarization because it serves their particular narrow interests. What what are are the mechanisms for changing incentives among elites? And

you mentioned political activists or or the politically engaged social media influencers. you might also throw in some institutional media as well. How do you how do you change their incentive so that it changes the temperature of the you know, of the national debate?

Matt (21:19.747)
sorry, I was laughing there just because this is the question everyone asks, and there isn’t really a good answer. right. No one has it, like I it’s not like we’re like hiding the answer from people. Like a lot of people have like worked on this and basically like and it’s just it’s a very hard question, right? The system is kind of set up in this way, right? I think a lot of people thought that you know, maybe primary reform would do it, but the evidence for that is actually pretty weak.

Eric Schurenberg (21:25.804)
No

Eric Schurenberg (21:30.926)
Ha

Matt (21:45.674)
Right, people were like, well what if we did stuff on social media? Right, there’s this big meta study in twenty twenty that actually suggests those effects are pretty weak. So there’s a collaboration between a bunch of researchers and meta to to do a bunch of interventions before the twenty twenty election that have been published and and lots of great journals and and the results are really quite small. you know, lots of things that people ha have tried to do and and just don’t really seem to move the needle very much.

Eric Schurenberg (21:45.742)
Mm.

Matt (22:14.453)
I mean, I wish I had some some great strategy to tell you, but but I don’t. And frankly, I I haven’t heard anyone else articulate one. I mean, I think part of it is we’re in a very unstable political equilibrium right now, right? So if you go all the way back you have to go all the way back to nineteen ninety before nineteen ninety two, before either party really had a kind of stable governing

majority, right? Things have really swung back and forth, right? For for my adult life, basically. well I I guess it was in middle school in nineteen ninety two since I’ve really adopted for for most of my life, let’s say. right, but that’s not the norm in American politics, right? The norm was that these periods were pretty brief, right? And then there was this kind of longer, stable governing coalition, right? in a in fact in order to get to one where there was this sort of long period of kind of flipping back and forth, right?

you have to go back to the late 19th century, right? Between the compromise of you know the run compromise of 1876, right, and then kind of 1896, you know, kind of kind of roughly. Right. And now we’re actually probably even we’re even a little bit longer that than that. Right. And so I I think it’s just we’re in this moment where everything’s very unsettled, right? Things are on a knife edge, right? I think that’s why we’re seeing these things like, let’s redistrict to get these couple of additional seats, right? From

you know from Texas and let’s try see if we can do it in Virginia or in California, right? Because these very tiny little swings are gonna push us one way or the other. And so I think in that world it’s just gonna be very, very hard, right? Because these very small shifts on the margin are gonna have big consequences for for policy, right? So you know imagine that you know 44,000 voters had switched

Right, and you know, Hillary Clinton had become the you know president in twenty sixteen, right? Then you have a very different Supreme Court, right? You probably get a different Senate as a result, right? The the equilibrium path just veers in this very different direction. So I think neither party, right, really has much of an incentive in this current moment to think about how to maybe behave better and more constructively, right? Because they’re very focused on like, no, no, no, we have to take back power so we can

Matt (24:35.241)
you know, advance our agenda and block the other party’s agenda. But I think what’s the other the way you see this is that if you look at both Trump’s strategy in 2024 and Kamala Harris’s strategy in 2024, it was basically to win like 51% of the vote, right? That they both were kind of like, no no no I’m gonna tip like just enough people into my camp so that I can can win. Right?

Eric Schurenberg (25:00.782)
Uh-huh.

Matt (25:01.321)
That no one was thinking about like how do I make this big appeal to like a broader swath of Americans, right? And so I think that’s why you see so many Americans, like if you see there’s just you know kind of poll after poll showing, you know, how politically frustrated people are, they feel that politics isn’t working, right? And I think it’s because this is like we’re just stuck in this bad equilibrium, and in a way, kind of until we get out of that, it it’s just really hard to know to move forward.

Eric Schurenberg (25:29.15)
interesting. given my background as a journalist, I’m kind of hyper-aware of the role that media has played, professional journalism and not just social media influencers on on the the tenor of political discourse. So focusing for a second on media, how can media

be part of the solution and not an intensifier of the problem.

Matt (26:00.531)
Yeah, I mean, this is a a great question. that I think part of this is is thinking about, you know, what it is that we want to to convey, right? And and one of the challenges is that politics is a story that, you know, if you go back and look at the old literature on like, well, what makes a story newsworthy, right? Conflict is front and center. And so politics is basically all about conflict. But I think there there’s some nice work that people like Francis Lee and others have done on kind of like media coverage of.

Congress, right? And what does it emphasizes? it emphasis is like, well, there’s this bill, and Republicans say and like Democrats say that, right? And the incentive is to think about framing that conflict, but we don’t hear about a lot of the kind of behind-the-scenes cooperation that kind of govern that actually like works with a lot of these things. So I think thinking about giving people incentives around this, or to cover you know, some more of this more kind of low-key.

sort of stuff that Congress does, what you Mataglacius and others have called kind of secret Congress, right? Kevin Kosar has another name, you know, for I think he calls it the hidden Congress, right? This idea of where things actually work, a lot of times on these smaller, more low-key things. And I think you know, the other thing that I I don’t have a solution to, but you know, one thing that has really changed dramatically in the media landscape is the disappearance of state and local coverage. And so that means that everything then moves up into this national frame.

Right, you know, I’m all for, you know, I think it’s it’s great, you know, what organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal have done, right? But they’re gonna cover this very narrow slice of politics, right? Largely kind of the let’s call it politics a spectacle of Washington, DC. And it’s gonna miss a lot of these sorts of things that are you know members are doing, you know, for their district, on these smaller, you know, kinds of things, right?

And and that really just never there’s no mechanism to convey that to people, right? The last kind of mechanism is sort of, you know, press releases from members that they post on their website, right? But even as someone who who probably is the ninety eighth or ninety ninth percentile of political interest, I have to admit that’s not something I’m gonna really going and digging into, right? The one time I do that is like before I go and teach this to like students when I teach intro to American politics, right? I’m like, let’s go, or like we we show like some of that and we talk about like like how this doesn’t get

Matt (28:27.305)
paid, but you know, even for me that’s roughly the the extent to when I go

Eric Schurenberg (28:32.536)
Yeah, definitely I’m with you on that. I just looking at the media question from the other side of the information transaction on the from the demand side, are there media consumption practices that readers of news can use to counteraffect the polarizing tendencies of a conflict obsessed press?

Matt (28:57.021)
Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, you know, there there’s the the media shift has been this very much this two-edged sword, right? If you are interested in avoiding political news, it has never been easier, right? Because the world it like every in some ways, right? Every time I go to read a political story, my competition in some ways, if I go to like the New York Times, my competition is in other stories in the New York Times or other newspapers, it’s, you know.

social media, it’s YouTube, it’s Netflix, it’s, you know, a WhatsApp message from a friend, right? It’s all those sorts of things. So I think if you are interested in avoiding some of this conflict frame, right, you can kind of just seek out other coverage, right? for so there are, you know, places you can go that I think will will do, you know, more of that, right? So you can go and

You know, now especially with things like Substack, right? There’s a lot of great Substacks. You know, one of my favorites is you know Kevin Kosar’s, which for anyone who’s you know interested in Congress, he has tons of great information, lots of it that’s really useful for teaching. you know, lots of other, you know, political and and and social writers who write there, right? So I think now you can work to also then kind of curate different types of of information flows, right?

And and the other thing you know you can even do is try to get news from you know different perspectives, right? So, you know, I try to look both at kind of US and some overseas sources, right? Take a look at some more kind of let’s call that mainstream, probably center to center left sources, right? And then also some you know, sort of center right sort of sources to to kind of look at and see, you know, what kind of because part of it isn’t just they’re covering the same things from a different lens.

But also they’re covering different stories as well. And it kind of hint is showing shows you like, okay, maybe there’s this broader set of things, some of which right I might not see if I’m not kind of doing a bit more of this kind of coverage selection.

Eric Schurenberg (30:48.664)
Yes.

Eric Schurenberg (31:01.246)
I’d I’d like to wrap up by

Pushing back on in in a in a in a mild way with the the notion that there’s nothing that can be done to persuade the elites to be to behave in a more constructive and and non-polarized way. You mentioned that things like primary reform or rank choice voting or other things like that have not proved effective. But wouldn’t you agree that in many ways the elites

Politicians, media, influencers are responding to the desires of their audience. And so, in a way, sort of a movement among all of us can affect things in a way that is perhaps more powerful than we believe. And just to support that notion, I’d like to read you the final statement in your book on Uncommon Bonds. It ends with this statement.

If we the people accept that there are things we can do to build bridges and a common future, we can rise to the challenge. Working together, there is no doubt that ordinary citizens can do just that. Do you believe that?

Matt (32:21.821)
Yeah, I look, I I mean I think again, like I I think that ordinary people can can move these things on the margin, right? that’s certainly certainly possible and very much a goal, you know, kind of worth worth pursuing. the elite piece is harder, but I don’t think harder should be taken to mean, you know, impossible, right? Lots of things seem impossible until they happen, right? And so I can I can think about ways you might do this. It’s just the system is set up very much to reinforce.

Eric Schurenberg (32:44.076)
Mm-hmm.

Matt (32:51.117)
all of these sorts of incentives from everything about, you know, campaign finance, right, to media coverage to all of this, right? It’s just that’s a very big and very hard challenge without a lot of obvious solutions.

Eric Schurenberg (33:08.928)
All right. Well, let’s leave on a hopeful note, and your the stirring f final paragraph of your book. And Matt, thank you very much for joining us on In Reality. It was great talking to you.

Matt (33:22.751)
Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Schurenberg (33:26.528)
All right. That that was excellent. Thank you so much.

Matt (33:30.9)
Great, thanks for having me.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jul 7 2026

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