And the system to some extent is sort of set up that way. To sort of bring us home here, we're really in a time in which what's happened over the last, you know, the last 20 or 30 years is really profoundly affecting our politics. changes that need to happen, that there are representation changes that need to happen, and that we haven't really worked out how, you know, how that all, how that all happens. And it's also at a time in which I think there are some very dangerous and well-organized forces in American politics. So I guess for me, the big takeaways here are about the sort of, like, maybe to broaden the discussion about the threats to American democracy to not just include far-right nationalism or whatever, but also to include the kind of precarity of a democratic project in general, and then to really take seriously some of these psychological features that you've talked about and think about how do we incorporate that into our vision of what democracy can be? So I'll give you the last word and then we'll sign off. Yeah,

well, I mean, this is sort of my current intellectual project is to really think through what seems to be increasingly clear is that the sort of enlightenment idea of a democracy in which citizens are super well-informed and just completely rational is just kind of a fantasy and an increasingly dangerous fantasy, I think, because it doesn't take into account the things that really drive people's political behavior, which sense of belonging, sense of community, sense of identity, sense of being heard. And these are things that I think a lot of political elites have taken for granted and just said, oh, you know, just people will respond to policy. But in some ways, this is just having to rediscover a lot of old truths that political scientists had kind of come to in the 1950s and early 60s. And when during a period in which the more sociological and psychological view of politics was dominant. And then things kind of change in the 70s. There's this behavioral revolution. We start to treat voters as rational. We put policy on one dimension and think that people are trying to maximize this underlying ideological dimension of policy and representation. And basically a neoliberal turn in how we think about politics. Political parties become weaker, politics becomes more individualized, and there's a whole growing business of micro-targeting and polling and campaign targeting and messaging and all of this stuff that kind of takes us away from this fundamental fact that it's just people in communities talking to other people, trying to make sense of how they should vote what it means to support one candidate or another. And I think our failure to take those more sociological and psychological aspects of politics seriously has brought us to a really confusing place in our politics.

And that's, I think, where we will leave our listeners. So we're in a confusing place. And if you want to get more confused, keep listening to us. This has been another episode of Politics in Question. Thanks for tuning in.

Thank you for listening to Politics in Question. This podcast is a joint production between New America and the R Street Institute. Our producer is Sarah Jacob. Our audio engineer is Shannon Lynch. Theme music composed and performed by yours truly. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.