David Moscrop - The Pandemic Possibility for Social Change

spk_0:   0:00
Oh, this is the on conflict podcast. Deep conversations that will transform your relationship with conflict. Season to a focus on leadership. And now your hosts, Julia Minard and Gordon White. I'm good. Oh, hello and Julia.

spk_1:   0:25
Today, our guest is David Moscow. David is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, a columnist with The Washington Post, a writer with McLane's magazine and the author of Two Dumped for Democracy. Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones.

spk_0:   0:42
David Hosts Open to Debate a long form current affairs podcast. He's also a political commentator for print for radio and television news. David lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Welcome, David.

spk_2:   0:56
Thanks for having me.

spk_1:   0:57
And would you like to say anything more about yourself?

spk_2:   1:00
Well, I'm joining you, uh, on day. I don't know, 17 or 18 of self isolation. And I am working on all of the projects that I said that one day I would get to. So I am. I may add guitarist that list soon. Novelist. Um fine art connoisseur that that pretty much captures that

spk_1:   1:28
I think Well, that that sounds great there. Lots of people have lists of things they'd like to do in their lives that they never get to. So sounds like you're doing okay. Well,

spk_2:   1:37
this this, you know, it's funny. This moment has revealed are a couple of things about myself. One is the privilege of being able to be at home with no dependence and have a steady enough position for the moment anyway, with cash from a Post stock, because they just give you cash and not a lot. But, you know, I'm not worried about losing it. It's giving me a chance to reflect on how weaken be precarious but privileged, which has been interesting. So I'm trying to make the most that for the for the short run. And then, of course, when the Post doc ends in August, I'll have a new challenge. But I couldn't figure that out. Then

spk_0:   2:17
you'll have your guitarist career ready.

spk_2:   2:19
Oh, yeah, I think so. I mean, it's interesting that we are are witnessing the emergence of a new kind of economy of freelancing of gig ification, uh, also a huge creative boom podcast like this, for instance, at a time when people are also trying to figure out how they can become economically stable. And that's all happening in the midst of the cove ID, tragedy, crisis and critical juncture. So I've been saying that this is a tragedy that nobody asked for. It's also a critical juncture where weaken we actually have no choice but to make a decision about how we wanted to politics now and then in the future. So it's been something I've been thinking about a lot, and and, I mean for the purposes of this broadcast to think about not just what sort of politics we want but also how we want to do them. Because it is different options. As I like to say to politicians and audiences, there's the easy way or the hard way and the easy ways better. You don't want the hard way. I used to joke about you teens and 17 89 and these days I look around say, Well, I'm not saying that I bet on it, but we ought not to think that we're beyond institutional breakdown in revolution, and we should be awfully careful about how we go forward because those things aren't off the table and I might be I'm a market socialist, but I don't. I'm not a revolution. I don't prefer upheavals on the revolutionary variety because I think they tend to eat their own and make an awful mess. But if I start thinking about things like this about ways of doing politics, because I think there are better or worse ways to get the things you want in those ways actually make a big difference.

spk_1:   4:14
And I presume that you write about that and to your book too dumb for democracy?

spk_2:   4:19
I do. I mean, s o, you know, just by a way of people who might listen,

spk_1:   4:24
I'm just gonna always her. You guys. Sorry about this, but I forgot to turn the radiator off here. And it is tables in the back around.

spk_0:   4:30
Okay, hold the thought. We were about to shift into the context for our listeners, I think.

spk_2:   4:38
Yeah. So for people who are listening and wondering what where I'm coming from, I mean, as I mentioned, I'm a market socialist, a civic Republican and deliberated a Democrat, which we could spend lots of episodes talking what that means. But the big takeaway there's the deliberative Democrat. I mean, for our purposes and I argue about this? Argue this in my book that one way of doing politics is through deliberation, through sitting down in recognizing the person across from you as a a co equal in in governance and in self rule and trading reasons. With that person back and four foreign against different preferences and ultimately coming to some sort of conclusion with which all parties can live even if there's not unanimous consent, it's our unanimous agreement consent. You do want agreeing that you don't need. So I don't think that needs to be all of our politics. You're going tohave bits that are less civil or less deliberative. They're gonna be more antagonistic. But I'm making an argument that we can. We can pursue our politics in a deliberative way that is constructive, even though we face both personal psychological impediments to that, our own psychologies full of forces that are pushing back against good deliberation, good thinking, an institutional challenges that also incentivize a nastier, often stupider kind of politics and that the book was a call to deliberative. Democracy as a form not exclusively because of political system, has all kinds of different things that aren't deliberative but as one way to get to get things done

spk_1:   6:21
in relationship to what you're saying, David, How did Paul text in the West, particularly United States and Canada becomes so adversarial? I think lots of us are aware of that, but we're not really sure how it happened.

spk_2:   6:33
Well, I think it's all they've always been out of her cereal, and part of it is is a recency bias

spk_1:   6:40
that we

spk_2:   6:40
look and say, Well, boy politics seems nasty today compared to the 19 sixties. Two things on that the first thing to ask is who was included and who wasn't included in the 19 sixties. And very quickly you start to see Oh, the pro. For many communities, politics of have been violent and full of nastiness. They've been racist. They've been violent four for years and years and years. We just I didn't pay attention to it in the mainstream, and the other thing is Donald Trump and say you take Donald Trump's that we don't like his style. We could talk substance in a different but just the way he approaches politics, we find offensive that I would agree that's that's obviously true. And yet the Andrew Jackson, American president, was was probably worse. There have been bullies for for centuries. Ditto Canadian politics. The House of Commons is probably Maur, you know, quote unquote, well behaved or civil today than it was 100 years ago. I mean, John A. MacDonald. I'm fairly sure you fought somebody who wanted to fight somebody in the House of Commons floor. So the history of our politics are antagonistic. I think one of the the big changes that has been having special United States in the last 30 40 years is the rise of partisanship as an identity, which takes on a particularly strange and sort of a toxic form. Partisanship isn't just how you vote or what you believe. It's how you see the world. That's who you are. It becomes a new identity in the lens and your inclination to defend that identity or to or to try to maintain that lens as as the way you see the world needs you to all kinds of strange behaviors, nasty behaviors but also bizarre behaviors and take the current Corona virus as an example. Americans, perception of the threat of the virus, the seriousness of the virus very based on partisan identity. Republicans think it's less serious. Democrats think it's more and you might say, Oh, they're just sorting into parties based on that prior beliefs. But it's not true. If you were to switch the president's, that would probably flip. There was a study in the U. S. A couple years ago I talked about in the book that found that one's assessment of the economy was filtered through partisan through a partisan lens. So if a Democrat was in the White House, it would change how you saw the economy versus a Republican. So that is setting up sort of blue eyes versus brown eyes. We soared into groups and then we'll let people bash on each other. And it's also happening the time we're democratic. Institutions in the U. S. And beyond are under siege and are decaying in some cases. So politics has always been nasty. But now we're getting a deep identity based partisanship, which is which is sort of new, and we're also getting the decline of liberal democracy, which we didn't think of 40 years ago. I think quite as much as we do now, and that is creating a situation. I think that's that's new for us, an unprecedented I don't know what what comes of that.

spk_1:   10:06
So I'm very interested in this notion that people's identity have become Maur invested in their political orientation. And you have any sense of what the social conditions have been that have invited people into that sort of psychological change because it does involve, you know, an internal psychological shift. I think what you're describing.

spk_2:   10:30
Yeah, well, so we all have identities, you know, we don't always. We aren't always aware of them. But we do have identities. And we think of ourselves as parents, as sisters, as brothers, as as Ben, as women, as non binary, as older, as younger as wealthy is not wealthy. Whatever on these overlapping identities form who we are, and sometimes they're in conflict with one another and create cognitive dissonance that we have to manage. But one of the ways you try to resist identities becoming toxic is through social, economic and political equality that if you see yourself as as being treated fairly, if you see yourself is in a common endeavor with other people who are like you, if you see yourself not as as in battle with someone who disagrees with you and seeing that person's a threat to you. Well, then you're gonna behave very differently than if you you see it as a zero sum game, war of all against all. And I think especially American context, the decline of quality, both formal equality and informal calling economic equality instead of symbolic equality is is extraordinarily dangerous because it's going to encourage that that battle. So it in Canada, it's not quite as bad. Kenny institutions are better. I mean, I've got lots of critiques of Canadian institutions, but they're better. And so I do think you know part of the question of how you address the challenges of partisanship is a toxic identity is how you create inclusive institutions, including economic institutions. That part one really quickly Part two is, uh, elites need to behave themselves. You know people are going to follow a lead cues. There was a study recently in Canada by the Samara Foundation Center for Democracy, and they said, to the extent that populism exists in Canada, it's elite lead politicians air stirring up these passions, that trying to mobilize these feelings because they wanna win, but they're they're really creating Frankenstein's monster that that ultimately they're not gonna be able to control right. This is the classic political hubris of over. He could control the impulses we can control these passions. We can control these monsters that we're creating. But history shows us time and time again that politicians Oh, I can almost never control these monsters that they create. So part of it is about creating inclusive institutions. And part of it is about elites behaving themselves and not making deals with the devil.

spk_1:   13:14
I'm interested in this because if you're one of the reasons is, if you can look at social conditions and say in this kind of context, we're gonna have people investing their indemnities in certain you know, world views or alliances with difference subgroups, then we're gonna be able to predict amore adversarial kind of conflicts rising in society.

spk_2:   13:40
Cleavage politics to is what you get, right. I mean, it is, you know, it's funny is you can have a partisan system that is toxic. You have a partisan system that's not toxic, the dangers you of partisans system that is toxic, that encourages elites to create cleavages and to exacerbate them. Tow win. I mean, this is wedge politics is that you can find an issue to wedge and two supports to cleave supporters from one another. Then you exploit that, I mean, just today, in fact, or yesterday, France's president Trump said, Well, the Democrats are trying to sneak in a bunch of laws that would help more Americans vote. But if that happens, Republicans will never win again. If you if you start from a position that we don't want people voting because they were gonna lose, then then what you do want to do is get your turnout up, get their turnout down and cleave people off as you go, rather than saying OK, why one's gonna vote? And we need to find ways to appeal to everyone and create broad coalitions which would de emphasize and d incentivize identity based cleavage politics. And what would offer opportunity for solidarity instead of what we're seeing now is sort of picking off, you know, and politicians will turn around and say everyone ought to vote. They don't believe that I read about this, my book. They don't want everyone to vote. They want their supporters to vote. You know what? Their opponents to stay home. One of the arguments in favor of mandatory voting again, That's the the incentives of the system. And, ah, Zeb lot. Levitsky wrote a book called How Democracies Die in the Point. They keep hammering on this book. I think it's a critical point is four. Barents is extraordinarily popular. There are things that politicians, elites can do but shouldn't do. And when they do it, it creates trouble. So you know what we need is four Barents, because when people to the things that they can do but shouldn't d'oh, it becomes very, very quickly enough in a race to the bottom, which I think we're in now, certainly in America, to some extent in Canada too, and in the UK as well. And in Hungary today, the news that you know the news that of hungry currently is that hungry has effectively, as of today, become probably what you would call a dictatorship. Yeah, you know, authoritarian, extraordinary punitive measures for certain laws. Parliament has been suspended and it's ruled by decree. So you you know these things. So you wake up one day and all of a sudden the unthinkable has happened. It's a reminder that democracy and institutions of the liberal democratic society have to be renewed and respected with every generation, right? I mean, it's a it's not a process of sedative. Forget it.

spk_0:   16:35
You know, You know, as I'm listening to this, both of you speaking and I'm thinking about our listeners as well. And for me, I'm trying to ground this conversation in I'm starting to feel helpless and hopeless. This is a theme for me. It does come up in other podcasts. And it came up with Elizabeth May as well as we start talking about these big picture concepts and what's happening in terms of the erosion of our democratic system and elites needing to behave themselves and the idea of inclusive institutions. And David, I'd like to hear your thinking around. How does that affect me? I'm you know, I'm not a president. I'm Joe. Julia, Whomever? Yeah, help me.

spk_2:   17:17
Well, my book is divided into three, and the first part is sort of. Here's who we want to be here. So we'd like to think we are who we probably should be. Here's why we fall short of all that That's part two of three in part three of three. It's years. How weaken, Get back to where we want to be or get to where we want to be. There are sort of two streams. There's the the individual stream of sort of self improvement and self practice about how you could sort of think about these things cognitively. How to avoid cognitive bias, how to be open to reasons how to give reasons. You know how to think about others as interlocutors, not opponents and so on. So there's

spk_0:   18:00
an individual to jump into that. That part's definitely what we're familiar with, you know, in terms of conflict engagement,

spk_2:   18:07
yeah, and itself work. I mean, part of it is, we need to accept that if we're going to do something that we need to do some self work on how we think what we know, what we're open to hearing. Why, when we hear something, we cringe or get our backs up or want to attack rather than listen, to think and reflect if and is the self work is Avenue one. So the first thing I say to someone is, if you're serious about wanting to do something. Start with working on yourself to be a better thinker, to be a better Reasoner, To be a better citizen, to be a better and Jill Ocular, you have to start with yourself. And you know I'm constantly doing the self work of of asking myself. Why don't want to lash out? Why do I feel vindictive? Why did that make me angry? Why is my impulse to make fun of someone and sort of try to understand them? Why? Because you know we all get these impulses. No. One. There are very few people who don't get them. The people who are remarkable to me and to many are those who control those things. It's not that they have. The absence of these very human emotions is that they know how to recognize them and control them and to focused them in a more productive direction. Bucket to is institutional changes that support civic action, civic health and weaken debate. What those are? I think they're inclusive political and economic institutions, eh? So you got a basic qualities that everyone can live with dignity and be an effective citizen and interlocutor there. And then there are participatory institutions whether it's a deliberative assembly where you get ordinary citizens who come together and trade reasons back and forth four against some policy or whether it's participatory budgeting, exercise or process where ordinary citizens air given a part of the budget and they get to talk about how they want to allocate it and then ultimately allocate it. These are things that are done around the world, including in Canada, in some cases.

spk_0:   20:04
Okay, thank you. Because I could I ask a little bit more about that institutional bucket.

spk_2:   20:08
Yeah.

spk_0:   20:09
So either when you were writing the book or now from the, you know, from the perch that you're sitting in as we read your book, what did he like? What are you thinking? I'm just curious. Are you thinking that a politician will pick this up and make a change or you hoping average citizens that are, you know, the ones that are working on ourselves that will, we will advocate somehow or there'll be a you know, 100 monkey. I Theo our

spk_2:   20:35
both. What I was training with the book was some things on the register on the mainstream register that maybe weren't there or were there, but needed to be amplified, so I didn't invent anything in that book. I don't think I'm trying. Think of whether I have some things I sort of I might have come up with on my own. And I can remember what was what When it wasn't me, I indicated whose idea it waas. And if it was me transforming idea, I indicated how as transforming it. But But largely this book came from my dissertation. My dissertation was putting pieces together that were already there. And so the project of the book was to say, Here's what we think we are. Here's all the reasons why we're not that according to cognitive science and so on. And here are some institutional practices that we can adopt to get there, and I laid a bit of a path out based on all the stuff that was out there, because people have been doing this work on the ground for a long time. I mean, Dave Meslin, who is a friend of mine and and wrote a book about the same time about democracy called Tear Down and has been on activist, has been busting his hump on the ground for years doing work that I have not done, you know, the door to door of work and has been profoundly successful, transformative. And my goal was to sort of think about people like that who were doing that work in sexually or who were doing it physically or both, and amplify and put it together in some sort of coherent package. And I thought that could both put it on there on the agenda for people. It could also get people thinking about it. So a lot of people didn't know what delivery of democracy was. They read my book and they did and then get to some policymakers to. And that third thing was I had two routes. One was over it, Mama Subtle. The overt one was, You know, Elizabeth May reviewed the book in the Literary Review of Canada, Right? Elizabeth May has been a great booster of of the book and a lot of the concepts in arguments I've made. She was a booster, that stuff before, but But she was at going in during the book, and the second thing was the quiet route, which it was me talking to people privately. So the book allows you to have a conversation both publicly and privately. And so I spoke to a lot of politicians, a lot of policymakers over coffee's over direct messages over beers about this stuff. And that's that's part of the the full court press is that you stumped for publicly, but also privately. And when these books happen, it looks like, you know, there's all this activity on the surface, but there's tons of activity beneath the surface.

spk_0:   23:28
Oh, no, I just really want to emphasize in amplify what you just said, David, because it's reminding me a victim, Stein and this idea that, you know, unless we have the vocabulary, unless we have the language to be able to express concepts and ideas, in a sense they don't exist for us. So you're a great salesman because I'm thinking, Oh my God, the limits

spk_2:   23:47
of my language are the limits of my world, right? Yes, it is that if you can. And William Connelly talks about this of political philosopher talks about putting things on the register. Yeah, right it Now it's on the agenda. And, you know, sometimes you have these sort of Inco it notions or feelings or or impulses. We don't understand them. We don't know that they're not quite formed. And then all of a sudden things will come together. And there it issued at this moment. That's what that is. Yeah, you can name it. And it, I think, you know, this is what I say to organize their friends who you know, especially those who are despondent. I paraphrase Picasso. You know that by way of Christopher Pratt, the Newfoundland artist who once said to me, You know, when opportunity finds you, it should find you at work. Is that we do all this work? Not because we think it'll get picked up tomorrow by our efforts alone, but but because there'll be a point in which there's an opportunity that Weaken sees to establish some of this stuff. And then we take that opportunity right? You don't know what's gonna happen, but when it does come up, you should be ready. You should have the vocabulary. You should have the program. You should have the ideas. And and in fact, it might be happening right now because of the krone fire. I mean, my argument has been again that this is a critical juncture We've got a decision to make All of the things that people have been thinking about talking about, especially the last for a long time all of a sudden might become extraordinarily relevant, powerful, even around, given example universal basic income where there, in fact, has been, I think, an emerging consensus on both the right and the left. Now, at least a crisis you be I could be useful for this moment. Can Vosen cool? Who's not? Ah, leftist. Agree with Jug. Meet Singh, who is right? You saw Ah Harper conservative and ah, sing than the new Democrat overlap on you, be I That's what happens in critical junctures. You get these weird overlap ings and then you take your moment. But but that doesn't happen by accident. You gotta do a lot of work to get

spk_0:   26:11
when you say you take your moment. What do you mean? Oh, you mean that that was an opportunity for the left and right to come together into principles that you believe in? I think we share, but that what you mean take him along?

spk_2:   26:22
I mean, the But whatever your preferences or your institution solutions, maybe there comes a time where I and I talked about this in the book as well. Institutions and practices, social norms, whatever you might call them, so to stay the same until they don't and they

spk_0:   26:43
stay the

spk_2:   26:43
same for lots of reasons. But path dependency is one of them. It's just it's what you do. Why don't I get up

spk_1:   26:48
in the

spk_2:   26:48
morning? And I was like, Well, that's what you do. Yeah, And the book I used the example of imagine You land yourself on a desert island and you gotta make your way inland. What do you do? Oh, you have yourself a path. And while the next day you're not gonna get up and go hack another path, you're gonna take the same path because it's easier. You know, we take the path of least resistance, and if it works good enough, we just keep on it

spk_0:   27:10
and a narrow pathways. Work is, you know exactly what you

spk_2:   27:14
know. No Rose that fire together wire together, and that's true of institutions is truth habits. It's true of synaptic connections this trip, but it's also true that sometimes you reach a fork in the road, and for whatever reason, you can't do things the same way you used to, and now you've got to pick a new way of doing things, mends the black death. You know, ASA, Mogul and Robinson wrote one of my favorite books called Um Well, now I'm spacing on the name. It's one of the why nations fail, and they talk about this a lot. And in one of the cases they cite is the is the black death of the 14th century in Europe that decimates Europe and but also decimates the feudal system that hop dependency. The feudal system started to break down, or at least broke down much faster in the aftermath of the black death and what rose to replace it. Marketing that the collapse of labor had some extent empowered. The laboring class who came back and said, Well, now we've got some leverage, and we're gonna use it to extract institutional changes and rights and so on and so you can trace the sum of the origin, some of the consequence of the rise of European democracy, especially first in England to the black death. It's a critical juncture.

spk_0:   28:37
Can you see? Do you have that crystal ball? Can you go forward with us, David, and look back at this time period and see politically, What is it that might be collapsing and emerging here possible?

spk_2:   28:47
I could, I could hypothesize. But the fact is, nobody knows. And

spk_0:   28:53
I know because

spk_2:   28:54
they're complex emergence systems, right is that we always been sort of do is is hypothesize and work for the things that we prefer. But I I do think there's an opportunity for us to look at this and say liberal democracy is crumbling. The market system is we practice, it is flawed. And if we're going to hold this all together, we're going to need structural changes, and that could take different all kinds of different forms. The the argument that I'm advancing is for democratized economy. People disagreed with that, which is fine and a deliberative, inclusive, participatory politics to compliment representative democracies. So it's not just that you elect people to make decisions for you if that you also play a greater role in self government, through citizens assemblies and through participatory budgeting and through mechanisms like that, that we can say this is what we want and we want a belief that for democracy to survive. Our civic institutions are political institution. Our economic institutions need to be thicker because you can't really be a full citizen if you don't have the means and the opportunity to be a full citizen. So we're going to talk about ensuring that everyone has basic needs met. Right now. My critique of liberal democracy is that's too thin. It asks nothing of you, right, Michael way ask. Very little of people, actually obey the law more or less, pay her taxes more or less, maybe serve on a jury. But you probably won't ever do that. And we don't ask anything else of citizens. I think we should ask more of them men in throughout anymore. We also build capacity through practice, a za compliment that we make sure that people can actually exercise those those rights because they have a place to live. They have extensive health care, mental health care. They have a living wage. They have all this stuff. So I mean, this is my This is my leftism. I mean, this is these air contestable points, but it's coming from a place of a vision for a democracy that is thicker, more inclusive. That is based on the fact that that the right to be a citizen and to participate in civic life is dependent on all kinds of needs that we don't take his rights, that we might have to going forward.

spk_0:   31:32
OK, Gordon, will you let me think? And just tiny bit

spk_1:   31:35
longer? Yeah, I've got two lines of thought. A

spk_0:   31:39
tiny 70 tight. Okay, one is. I just wanted to respond this idea of expecting more of citizens. So for a long time, I've done community work. I helped start a food security group in my neighborhood, then connected together and doing collective action around climate change. I mean, there's all kinds of things that I've connected with others in my neighborhood to create citizenship things that are beneficial for the whole community. And I've often thought how in these traditional, you know, life, balance, wheels or whatever, there isn't a spot really for community investment. So we know said that that was like thing. Ding ding and I lived in Japan for a year, which was a complete this off. So there's that there was that that's very helpful to hear in that notion of thick and thin. The other thing, though, while you're in the crystal ball phase and then Gordon is gonna bring you somewhere else. But you had said in the book why nations failed. There had been this glimpse into, um, that the collapse of the current system empowered the labor class. Is there a sense of I'm sort of getting What you're saying is one hypothesis for a collapse and potential rise in vision, which is related to the vision that you talk about in the book. What's your sense of what classes being empowered. Can you see that, too? As a possibility?

spk_2:   32:54
Oh, yeah. I mean, the I am talking about concept creation, and in the aftermath of 2008 in the global financial crisis, we had the 1% of 99% okay, we didn't think that way before. And then afterwards we did, and heart of of this moment might be, you know, wage workers, front line workers, people who are stocking grocery shelves, people who are cleaning the streets, people who are who are doing work that all of a sudden is well, first of all, it was always critical, But all of a sudden we see it as critical are having a class consciousness moment, and I don't mean that in people here class consciousness and think of marks. I just mean the sense that we pretend Canada is or in America are classless societies, but they're not. And part of the process of of, for instance, deciding who ought to earn a $1,000,000 who ought to earn $15 an hour is is trying to understand how we all fit together in this system. And we tell ourselves these stories about will, about determination, about hard work, about rest, taking or so on. And those stories underwrite our belief in the market system. And this might be a moment where he will say, Actually, that doesn't seem to make sense. What does the C E O make 100 times with their workers make? And then all of a sudden, those folks who identify his wage workers or precarious workers or gig workers might say, OK, we want something different. We want something better. We want whatever basic income we want. Ah, higher tax bracket, you know, 90% bracket we want Whatever might be him is different ways to do it, and that's that's 0.1 and point to his community. I I'm not touching this earlier, but I think a lot of the crises, that of liberal democracy, of capitalism, of different things, our crises of community. This is in fact, a very conservative point. I mean, this is, you know, this is a communitarian old school right wing point that I very, very strongly believe in that we we don't respect or protect or emphasize community enough community building that might be through civic action. But it might just be through spending time with your families and your friends, your family, your friends. That a lot of our pathology is is due to the fact that our communities air strained that we don't have those connections. Some of that is because of the market. If you can't afford to live in a neighborhood, if you can't afford to live in the city Bank. I lived in Vancouver a long time. That's a good example. We see that the market sometimes terrorist communities apart if you have to work 15 hour of the day. You know, I grew up. My mom worked a couple of jobs at a time. We never saw her we would be my brother sort of were initially raised by but my mind, my mother, but also our grandparent's little bit. And later we sort of raised each other because we had to make ends meet. It's hard. Have a stable family. Under those conditions, it's hard to maintain community under those conditions. Well, now we're seeing people separated from communities and we see how how traumatic that isn't how, how, how hard that is hurtful, that is an alienating. And we say what? We want that back. You want community backs, We want to be able to sit beside people. We want to be able to hug people, gonna touch him if you want. You know we want we want to be the same room is them Digital's not the same. We miss being out among other people in the community and, well, boy, we want that and we're gonna We're gonna go back, we're gonna reclaim it. And so there's also an opportunity to put a re center on community as well. So hopefully we continue to forefront that as we move through this crisis and its aftermath, I

spk_1:   36:56
just wonder I I just want to comment on listening to speak you. In my experience, you speak very fluidly and articulately about what you think. It's really a pleasure to listen to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, I'm thinking about our listener ship, and there's quite a few things you said that I could ask questions about. So I have to make some kind of choice here. Well, first off, I just want to comment on the kind of vision that you're speaking about for changes in individual participation and institutional changes. And I'm kind of assuming. Or maybe you could fill in the blank around how that's going to affect the kind of conflict that's existing in social structures and social students. I'm kind of had this idea that in the trend, the transitional phase will be quite a bit of conflict. And then is it moved into sort of a new direction that it would become less but really interesting. Your comment on that? Great. What kind of conflicts were heading into a four heading into a phase transition?

spk_2:   37:53
Yeah. I mean, who knows? On the one hand, I want antagonist IQ tension. I want there to be always sort of some conflict now. Productive conflict. We're not productive columns like I did productive, toxic, not toxic. I've preferred to be not toxic. I think democracy is a democratic system, so parts of it will be partisan parts that will be deliberative. Parts of it will be conflict Shewell, and that's that's gonna be normal. And I'm always a little bit nervous of for this tone policing because a lot of calls for civility often they're extraordinarily useful and constructive. But sometimes that's used as a way to try their marginalized or silence communities. So, you know, one of the the concerns that I have is that there will be, in fact, be a lot of toxic conflict that emerged emerges from this moment that would institutions break down. It's extraordinarily difficult to manage that breakdown in a way that doesn't become conflictual or even violent, because breakdown is creates all kind of uncertainty creates chaos again. It creates anxiety, you know?

spk_1:   39:15
Yeah, yeah, now this may be a little bit outside your field, but for leadership in those kind of situations, Or maybe in a more mini version, you know, like, say someone who's kind of ah, maybe executive director level of Ah Oven institution and it's going through something that might be a little bit parallel. Because society is changing, the institution starts to change. And then these conflicts inside the organization, they're startinto, you know, occur. Any advice for someone like that? Well,

spk_2:   39:40
you know, it's funny. When my dad died, fi six years ago this month March I was I was doing my PhD at the time. I moved home to help my family manage from Vancouver to be a bro. And so you get sick. He dies for that quickly. And I'm the executor. I went for a power of attorney for property and care to executor, and I was studying democratic deliberation of the time for our family. It was a time of crisis and chaos, and they were quite a few of us. And we had all the old family pathologies that you have, and we had all the family alliances. You have it, all of it. And I decided to adopt what some call authoritarian deliberation someone tongue in cheek. But in fact, what I did was say, Okay, we're in Ah, a stage of crisis. We're in a stage of externally difficult extraordinary difficulty received a break down. To some extent, this isn't the time for someone to being authoritarian, to seize power and tell people what to do. But there is a time where we need to make decisions. We need to make them quickly, and they need to be. People need to be accountable for them. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a serious of meetings where we're going to sit down and deliberate either in person or remotely quick, and we're gonna talk about we want we're in exchange reasons, and then I'm gonna make a decision because, you know, now isn't really the moment Thio put it to a vote. And what I found was I was able to build consensus. I was able to get by in, and I was able to execute decisions that in being productive now I'm not arguing for authoritarianism. What I'm arguing for is is the fact that in a managerial structure in the time of democracy, I'm time with managerial structures. There are people who need to be accountable. There are people who need to make a decision. They can do that in a way that brings people on board and creates buy in and understanding are way that does them. And my argument from a managerial perspective is that you ought to be bringing people in listening to them, meaningfully listening to them, explaining what you're deciding and why you're deciding at giving reasons and then being accountable for those decisions and leaving them to what extent it's possible open for revision so that you could come back and say, I made a mistake. Here's why I made a mistake. Here's how I recognize that. Here's how we're going to correct it. And I have found that and lots of people, as you well know who study this will have found that people will respect that. They don't expect you to be perfect. They expect you to recognize shortcomings, to recognize error into and to recover. That's the managerial side. On the democracy side, we can do something broadly similar by bring your men together and deliberating and creating institutional buy in, although that's ultimately gonna have to come down to a vote in a different way than, say, a managerial decision comes down. But the principle is comes back to deliberation about listening, including not just in a formal stance been a substantive sense. And for this moment, that's the point. I want a hammer on the most is that the inclusion, the enabling of parts of participation needs to be substantive. It's gotta count. You've got to be able to feed yourself. You've got to be able to pay your rent. You've got to be able to see your friends. When politicians ask you something, you've got to believe that they actually want to hear your answer and listen, I'm gonna do something about it. If that's substantive feeling of not just, oh, I got called up where I I was I was listen to what? I was taken seriously and I was regarded as unequal and I'm part of this and and I find that when that happens, you can build trust institutions and we need that now more than ever, because it's at the very least gonna serve as a cushion as these things, uh, you know, start to fall a CZ they start to follow me, started fall with them, and then it may also form the basis of of new institutions that emerged after this.

spk_1:   43:51
I want to capture a couple of things that you said here in Julia may. Also, here's part of what I heard is that if you consult meaningful E that, then you can make a decision and people respected. You know that there's a little more to it cause you talked about explaining right and what you're doing and why you're doing it. But I think leaders are sometimes concerned about consulting because they feel like if they consult, they'll have to go with what the people that console with are saying right. And I don't think that's what you're saying. You don't get meaningful listening right, really caring and listening and then using your best wisdom that you have to make the best decision you can and being willing to explain it and then also take responsibility for it right and and a willingness to revisit it if it's possible. Yeah, turns out to be not right. It's kind of a combination of those things. That's

spk_2:   44:45
your that's leadership for me. Leadership isn't saying I'm gonna go pole my constituents and do whatever they say it isn't. I'm going to do whatever is popular today because with popular today, it might not be what's party there tomorrow and what's popular today might not suggest. And leadership is saying I have authority to make a decision. I have capacity to exercise judgment. I have responsibility to the people on whose behalf of making decision. I'm going to think I'm going to consult, and then I'm going to judge but make a judgment call and do something, and then I'm gonna be held accountable. And, you know, we think of democracy often as about being responsive to the electorate, which is good. But what's equally as important to be accountable because sometimes you can change people's minds, right? You know, this is if we if politicians just did what citizens wanted at that moment, well, first of all, people might not change their minds because leaders wouldn't change those minds. But second, you would get all kinds of garbage because people often say things that they haven't thought about. I don't believe you could pull someone on on anything, and you get all kinds of nonsense that most people don't have them in. The literature tells us this don't have stable, coherent ideological preferences. People just trying to get through the day. That doesn't mean they don't have capacity doesn't mean they're dumb. People aren't too dumb for democracy. People are are, are smartly of capacity. But you've got to give him a chance to think about things, right. I mean, they've gotta learn the same way that you learn how to fix a car, learn how to cook a recipe. It's a learning process is a skill process. So you've got to find a way to engage people and produce outcomes that are coherent and then stand accountable for them and give you a little bit of credit. And and I think part of the failure of leadership is when politicians buy into their own cynicism and think that people are cynical as they are, anything all big failure of political leadership is when politicians believe that the general population is a cynical, as politicians and staffers are, and I get why politicians and staffers or cynical. They live in the trenches all day. Every day they go there, they have to deal with so much nonsense. So much abuse, those steaks air Hi, you're constantly being scrutinized, and that's a rough way to live. But the vast majority of people I think are far more reasonable and thoughtful than we give them credit for, so you bring them in. You listen to them. You take them seriously. You make a call, you explain it, and you leave that call open to revision in the future. And you live with the consequences of what you've done instead of trying to play nonsense. When politicians try to run from that, you can tell right you can tell when people are when they're trying. When they're bull, they're fallible because they start first. They look incoherent. They look nervous, they look silly and people detect that hypocrisy. And people really don't like hypocrites. They'll forgive a lot of things, but hypocrisy is not one of them. Most

spk_1:   47:56
of the time I read one of your article stated, I guess I was co authored with Mark Warren

spk_2:   48:02
when my real articles this year you

spk_1:   48:07
get. It's called when this deliberation Democratic and we'll probably listed on on the website. For others that may be interested. But one of the concepts that you speak about in there is distinguishing between quality and equity, and this seems like a really fundamental kind of principle of politics that you're kind of underlies quite a bit of what you're saying.

spk_2:   48:28
Yeah. So this is again. One of my critiques of liberalism is that liberalism is obsessed with quality, less obsessed with or were even aware of equity. So imagine it this way. Imagine a platform with three different heights and imagine three people of three different three people are different heights themselves. I mean, a quality, you would say. Okay, well, we just level the platform and everyone stands up. And so you've got one person is tall, one person short, one person shortest may say, Well, that's a That's a quality. The platforms level. Everyone just stands summer taller summer, shorter summer sort of stuff. Equity is saying we're gonna put the tall person on the on the short end of the platform, the second tallest on the second shortest. And then the shortest person stands on the on the tallest. And then everyone is, uh, the same height. In terms of the platform, equity is is concerned with the just distribution, not of the same just distribution. So, in the article, I use an example of imagine a community needs to run a highway through a neighborhood, and we say, Okay, Well, we want a quality in the deliberations about what to do. So we're gonna let everyone have a say and then we're gonna vote and whoever gets the most votes wins. So everyone in the town shows up and they decide that they want the highway. So everyone puts their hands up and they run the highway through this community. That's the equality approach. The equity approaches, saying, Well, everyone might have some preference or even some stake in this highway. But the people who live there, it's gonna affect them differently. It's gonna affect them more. So the equity consideration says, Okay, we're gonna dig closer into this community, and we're gonna privilege this community a little bit over the general population because from an equity perspective, they've got more skin in the game, and we ought to consult them in a deeper in different way. So equity sometimes leads to different sorts of outcomes in different sorts of consideration, in different sorts of engagement, in ways that are necessarily equal. But they're proportioned according to need or buying or whatever it might be. And you might say,

spk_1:   50:49
in fact, in this case,

spk_2:   50:50
exactly, exactly so you might say that. Say you drive on this highway once a year. You're affected by the highway. Yes or no. But not in the same way that someone who lives next door this right. So you know you could You imagine, like Cottagers versus people who live in rural communities, right? Conners have an interest. They spend two months of the year there. People who live there, 12 months of you have a different interest and we ought not to steamroll the rights of the minority with a majority vote. Right? And that is the ultimate thing is that from an equity lens, democracy isn't just about everyone having the exact same boat or the exact same share or the exact same theoretical opportunity. It's about regarding the fact that there are differences built into realities and communities and whatever and issues that need to be respected and that sometimes people need a little more. Sometimes you need a little less. You adjust accordingly, equities harder because you've got to make it's not one size fits all. You've got to make judgment calls you gotta just as you go quality set it and forget it. And then you say, Well, some will win. Some people lose. What you gonna do? Everyone's equal. Reality isn't like that at all, right? We don't start from the same places. We don't have the same skills. We don't have the same parents we don't have. We don't come from the same cities. So equity allows us to re balance according to need. It's more difficult, but it's also more just

spk_1:   52:13
yeah. Another example you gave was gender politics to make certain kinds of good decisions. You might need you if you were thinking equal equality, that you'd have equal numbers of men and women, right? You're saying in certain contexts Thio, give women of voice. You might actually have toe disproportionally increase the number of women. And we're going to get a good decision.

spk_2:   52:32
One of my favorite, one of my favorite examples from political sciences from a book a couple years ago by Tally Mendel Berg and Chris Carp. What's called the silent sex. And they studied deliberation, the dynamics of deliberation, and they found the sort of like a golden ratio of women to men in a deliberation to get quality deliberation, nonsexist celebration so on and you might say, Oh, that must be 1 to 1. Not true if you have too many men compared to women, the men misbehave because they are bullies and their their show. You know they're louder. They regret what, But if you have too few men, the men try to peacock and they misbehave. So there's a sort of golden ratio of slightly more than lights. I came in with these. I'd like one point something happen to him, but it's reflective of a rally that we have. You know, these socially pattern types of behaviors and realities that that when you apply the equality lens, you get worse outcomes. And if you applied the equity lens right is that, you know, we just need to get over this idea. That fairness is that equality and fairness are the same thing intact. Often that's the case that equity is this fair and equality is not fair, right, And that's something you need to deal with.

spk_0:   53:54
I think that's, you know, again in terms of practical grounding here, another place that might be useful to amplify the idea of disengaging fairness and equality because fairness is certainly something it's embedded, it's encoded in our species. There was a great experiment by forget his name, Frank the wall or something where he showed these different monkeys that in fact, one was so upset because his buddy was getting greats and he threw this rock at the experimenter. Whatever. That fairness is deeply embedded on it in us. But until this conversation, I wouldn't say I had a clear discernment that fairness was not connected, you quality. And for me, I really like the platform example. I thought that was really visual. Bit tricky to explain, but I

spk_2:   54:39
did it really well. But you can imagine that you can imagine three different heights standing on different length of the platform and being equal at the top versus not yeah, and I mean, there are some things where you want simple fairness like a queen toss right. You know, there's a way of making decisions by tossing a coin in the coin toss is fair. And in that case, you might say it's also equal, right? So, you know, say you've got to decide who sits in the front seat. Well, you might say, Well, all things being equal, we're gonna toss a quiet and decide who sits in the front seat, but you wouldn't want to do that. Who was? Ah, uh, infant versus a teenager, Right? There are some circumstances of our coin. Tossing back isn't fair, has its profound unfair you want Would you want to go? In fact, no, we don't. There's very specific ways of how you put an infant in the car, and we're not gonna toss a coin to decide who sits in the front seat. So there are moments when coin tosses working there moments where they tone. Or you might say, In fact, you know I'm a football fan. Used to be that. Okay, say your overtime rules were first team to score wins. You're a toss a coin to decide who gets first possession, you might say, Well, gee, that's not fair because first possession has an extraordinary advantage and it seems actually kind of arbitrary. What would be more fares? Each team gets an opportunity to score, and the first team that doesn't score, if the other one does, is that he no one's right and that we want to adjust. You know, the sort of like blindness rules to account for ripples in reality. And so

spk_1:   56:20
and you're saying ripples in reality, but also the kind of nature of reality. In that context, Reiter, that that particular context

spk_2:   56:27
exactly is that these systems we we set up in the rules we have and the relationships we have are going to create systems were we just have to do things differently. Sometimes you toss a coin, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you put your hand up in majority winds that sometimes you don't right. I mean, we do this with rights. We don't take a majority vote on human rights most of time because we recognize quite rightly, that there's a tyranny of the majority that emerges. And in fact, if you look at the last 2030 years of Canadian social and political rights, the Supreme Court has delivered a series of winds for human rights that have been not Democratic in the way that would they would be through a legislative vote, right? So think of the court on same sex marriage. Think of the court on assisted dying. Think of the court on sex work, for instance. You know the court often comes in and says, Okay, well, here's what you ought to do government because we think the civil rights have not been respected and politicians react after the fact. We're in a world with universal glad that those rights exist. Now I know I am. But but they weren't a product of, ah, hands up vote. They were a product of a system that recognizes that sometimes our democratic principles that are bound up in what we think of as pure quality need to be complimented by these different systems that taken other considerations into account.

spk_0:   57:58
One of the things I'm getting from what you're saying, David overall is that and what this conversation has done for me is that there is. There's a richness. There's a complex ification. There's a discernment that need to be made if we're going to be in a robust democracy, and you know one of the things that's coming up for me. I'm sure you're familiar, but I think in Sweden there been citizen circles where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of citizens had engaged in ongoing conversations about politics and about what is right now. I don't know if you come across that in your research, but it's occurring to me is you're talking that today's conversation for me has been somewhat like that. It's been a conversation about how we want our community, lives or political lives to be and how they can be. It's kind of mimicking, in a way, the three parts of your book, you know, and what we can do.

spk_2:   58:56
Yeah, and I mean, the big takeaway is people have capacity. People can learn to be good citizens. They can learn to deliberate. They can learn to understand when qualities appropriate when equities appropriate, they can empath. I empathize with others. They can build what might seem like unlikely communities. But that involves some personal work, and it also it involves politicians and other elites who have to behave themselves, not exploit cleavages for political gain. And it involves substantive institutional changes that allows there to be the sort of fundamental requirements for people to do that material requirements for people to do that for a formal and informal, legal and materially substantive. You know about the right to participate, but also enough money to pay the rent or to have child care so you can show up. And if we get those things, even get politicians behaving individuals doing self work and institutions, providing means and opportunity for people to engage, that we can create the kind of institutions and the kind of society that can withstand crises in the short term and can stay standing and withstand general decline in the long term. That's a choice that we could make. And we've reached a critical juncture today as we sit here now, as you will listen now, where we can make decisions that are going to affect whether or not those things are possible or not, and we ought to take that opportunity to do it. That's by far the better way to do things because the alternative is declined and the sort of conflict that we don't want. And to me, this is a no brainer.

spk_0:   1:0:48
That's a beautiful rap. We might end up cutting this piece, but the other piece that's occurring to me, David, is that there's an intermediary component or layer between the individual and societal institutional change, and that's community. Yes, deliberate engagement and nurturing of community.

spk_2:   1:1:05
Yes, and I think you know you're never going Thio go broke, betting on community way see time and time again. Communities forming and and responding in response to external pressures. They're resilient. They make us happy. The absence of them make us sad. You know, some people are going to be discovering that at moments like this it's worth remembering that many communities, racialized communities, disable the communities. Indigenous communities have known these things be true for a very long time, and they've been living in that role for a very long time. You know, I wrote about this recently for The Washington Post, about the care monitoring movement and one of things that I learned that process talk knew, but was you know, the these mutual aid and solidarity movements and communities have been around for a long time. The majority might not have been onto it. They might have not not noticed it. They might not been part of these communities, but they've been there. In fact, they've been often ignored and marginalized. And it's not like we've invented mutual aid and solidarity in March and April of this year, they've been there. But we have a chance now to understand them and to and to build new ones and to connect new and old ones in ways that are productive, and we should and this just goes back to what I'm saying is you know, conflict creates tension. Sometimes it creates crisis. It also creates opportunities. And here we are with an opportunity. And we ought to be very careful about what we decide to do now and make sure that if we take this opportunity, we take it to produce something better. That'll that'll service today and in the future. Well

spk_0:   1:2:54
said. Well said, If you love this episode of on conflict, then help us out by subscribing and leaving a review on iTunes, and you can spread these big ideas to by sharing on instagram Twitter, Facebook. Wherever you show up online, I want to know more about us. Check out our website on conflict podcast dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Now go make the world a better place.