Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

EPISODE SUMMARYThe internet is so commonplace that we rarely step back and think about how completely different today’s information climate is than even 30 years ago. News travels in seconds and oftentimes percolates even beforehand in the millions of tiny online communities that live on their own websites or within larger social media platforms like Facebook. Even elementary school children know how to easily sift through the world’s knowledge.But as much as things have changed, things have also remained the same. Humans are still finite beings who don’t know everything, despite what you might hear on Reddit or Twitter.Because our limitations still remain even as our technology has improved, there is the challenge of misinformation and disinformation, but are those even the right words to describe what we're talking about? Is it possible to make algorithmic distinctions between innocuous errors and harmful delusions? Are content recommendation algorithms biased, and is it even possible to have unbiased ones? These are among the many critical questions that are now being asked by people across the political spectrum.People are right to be concerned about the moderation choices made by giant platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Unfortunately, however, many of the most prominent voices in the discussion, including Twitter owner Elon Musk, appear to be acting out of partisan motives rather than concern about intellectual hygiene. This is a complex and fraught subject, one that is just as much about epistemology as it is about technology.Joining the show to discuss all this is Renée DiResta, she is the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that focuses on internet content and moderation.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.GUEST INFORenée DiResta's official site: http://www.reneediresta.com/ On Mastodon: @Noupside@saturation.social Stanford Internet Observatory profile: https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/renee-diresta "Mediating Consent" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/12/17/mediating-consent/ "The New Media Goliaths" https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths/ Discussion with Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/310-social-media-public-trust ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a new kind of left-wing pundit, one whose audience consists almost entirely of right-wingers. And there is a good reason for that. Almost every one of these people do nothing but criticize Democrats, despite calling themselves progressives or liberal.There's a long history of this on the political left, and this phenomenon exists in other countries as well, like the UK and Canada.What motivates people who started off with some sort of leftish politics to gravitate toward right wing fans?There are many reasons, as it turns out. Some of them originate in the intersections of libertarianism with other political ideologies. Other such commentators seem to have financial or emotional reasons for seeking Republican audiences. And still others seem to have a poorly developed understanding of how to build political change, which leads them to seek unproductive alliances.In this episode, I’m joined by David Masciotra, a writer and author who recently wrote a piece in the New Republic entitled “Who Are These Supposed Lefties Who Love Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?” that we’ll be discussing. Also interestingly and relevant to this conversation, he had a libertarian phase as well.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.This is a free episode of Theory of Change, but in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access!Substack:https://theoryofchange.substack.com/Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/discoverfluxIf you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal:https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/theorychangeIf you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet. Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChange Matthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield Matthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

(This episode first premiered August 28, 2021.)A lot of people know about the “Southern Strategy,” the multi-year plan of 20th century Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to get white voters in the South to stop voting for Democrats. But what isn’t widely known is that the GOP itself was changed by the electoral coalition that it attracted.While lingering support for racial segregation played an important role in flipping the South toward the Republican Party, the voters who changed their partisanship and the ones who followed them have views that do not reduce to simple racism.In her book “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics,” Angie Maxwell, a professor at the University of Arkansas, takes a deep look at how conservative politics was changed in both policy and style as Republicans reconfigured their entire concept of outreach around appealing to white fundamentalist Protestants.In this episode of Theory of Change, Maxwell discusses how the loss of the Civil War and negative media coverage of the John Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee were some of the reasons that many white Southerners felt aggrieved from the rest of the country, and how this set the stage for a politics that pandered to this resentment. Some white Protestants went to Republicans because the party decided to actively court supporters of racial segregation, others because the GOP rebranded itself into a party for fundamentalist Christians, and finally, still other party switchers went to the GOP because it stopped supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and other policies they believed to be violations of traditional roles for women.As Maxwell notes, those choices by GOP elites and voters ultimately led to the rise of Donald Trump, an event which many political observers couldn’t anticipate. The idea that voters constantly concerned with cosmic and earthly battles with Satan would support a thrice-married serial adulterer who owned strip clubs and casinos didn’t make sense.But, as Maxwell argues in the discussion, the white evangelical bargain with Republicans was never about shared ideals, so much as it was about politicians obeying and genuflecting to the ideas and the culture.VideoTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: This is Theory of Change. I’m Matthew Sheffield.A lot of people have heard of the “Southern Strategy,” the long-term political plan of early American conservatives to win presidential elections by getting the votes of white people who lived in the southeast. Many historians and political scientists have written about the Southern strategy over the years. But what still isn’t widely known is how the Republican Party itself changed as it focused so heavily on winning over white Southern Protestants.From its very beginnings, the Republican Party up until that point was a northern Yankee party for city dwellers, industrial workers and university professors and farm workers. But that’s not who votes for Republicans nowadays, the huge influence of Southern Protestant culture played a big role in how the GOP changed.What’s interesting also is how American Christianity itself has at least in many ways, been remade in the image of Southern white evangelicalism. So joining me today to talk about all this is Angie Maxwell. She’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. And she’s also the author of the Long Southern Strategy, How Chasing White Voters in the South changed American Politics. Thanks so much for being with me today. Angie.ANGIE MAXWELL: Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right, well, so there’s a lot to cover here. Your book is really kind of, I think, groundbreaking in a lot of ways, because it looks at the Southern strategy from kind of the opposite direction. So a lot of people have written about the Southern strategy. But they haven’t written about this aspect that you did in yours. Why do you think that that is the case?MAXWELL: Well, I guess the best way to explain it is to say I feel like many people have written about what I would call like the short Southern strategy. So there’s, there’s two answers to this. First, is this, the short Southern strategy. So it’s kind of the story we have in our heads that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 60s, tried to capitalize on Southern white voters who were frustrated with the direction of their National Democratic Party, particularly on issues related to civil rights, and with some effort by Republicans could be brought into the Republican fold. And then of course, we say, well, Nixon wins the South. And there we have it, right, the short Southern strategy, playing to these kind of aggrieved Southern whites.But I started to think about what a longer game it has been. Because even though Nixon wins the South in ’68, and ’72, the South completely goes back to blue for Native Son, Jimmy Carter, 10 of 11 states, and Republicans have to figure out once again, do they continue to try to make those investments? Was it a temporary gain? Or was it something that was going to kind of be the future of their party and a new base? And that kind of back and forth actually happens over the course of about 40 years. And so it’s a two steps forward kind of one step back dynamic.And so I wanted to see the Southern strategy in this longer perspective, right. That’s the first way that it’s different. And secondly, is I was looking at not just the policy positions that Republicans took to win the Southern white voters, but also the style of politics that they adopted, the one party political system that had dominated the south for most of its history, gave rise to a really distinct type of politics. And in order to really convert those diehard Southern Democrats to the Republican Party, you are going to have to do more than just take certain policy positions, you are going to have to kind of embrace that white Southernness. And so the book’s about both aspects of that effort.SHEFFIELD: And a lot of it, as you said, you were talking about aggrieved Southerners–aggrieved in many cases about, not only, but this idea there was this idea, very common in the south after the Civil War, that became a term the “Lost Cause.” How much of that do you think was playing a role in in white Southern politics before the Southern strategy?MAXWELL: Sure. Well, the Lost Cause kind of mentality is, I guess the best way that I always think of it personally, is, it was kind of an alibi. It was kind of a story that white Southerners told themselves after the war to deal with their grief and to deal with their resentment over reconstruction and to make somehow the failed effort seem somewhat noble and maybe not as much about maintaining slavery, right?So it’s a little bit of a coded kind of mask for what was really going on. And kind of speaking in those kind of coded terms was definitely part of the Southern strategy and something that white Southerners would have been used to–the famous examples about, like law and order, right, under Nixon?That phrase, meaning one thing, kind of to white Southern audiences, while not being explicitly direct about what it’s about, right? And so we see sometimes just the need to tell a story that things are okay, or we’ve moved past racism or structural racism isn’t still a problem, or the war effort was about heritage, right? And protecting a way of life, that kind of that kind of those stories are something that’s very common in Southern white culture.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and we’ll get into more of that later in the discussion here. But so so basically, just to set the timeframe that we’re talking about here, American conservatism is a pretty young phenomenon in the historical sense and political sense. It was a collection of loosely organized people that were kind of affiliated with industrialists who decided they didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt.That’s where it kind of grew out of in the beginning and–as a political movement at least–and then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they were going to be Republicans. And, so let’s do you want to talk about that a little bit? What are some of the other party strategies that people explored in the very early beginnings?MAXWELL: Well, I guess I would say that, I don’t know if American conservatism is, is relatively young. I think maybe American conservatism was kind of default and American progressivism is what was young. And when progressivism or kind of modern American presidents like Roosevelt that start to make that job, the executive so much larger, expand its scope and capacity, expand the role of government, when that happens, there is a need to kind of define what the objection to that is, right? What is the objection to government creating all of the social programs and the infrastructure that it created to try to put a basically put a floor underneath the economy during and after the Great Depression.And that could have gone in a couple of different ways. If FDR’s efforts had–if he had not been a four-term or three-and-a-little-bit term president, perhaps it would have been kind of an anomaly, right? This big government effort was for the purpose of getting us out of the Great Depression.But it becomes something that in the south financially, the region becomes very highly dependent on that kind of federal income. And that sets up a really different relationship between the states and the federal government. I think conservatism was started to embrace this concept of state autonomy and define itself that way. And that just kind of happened to work perfectly in terms of protecting Jim Crow. Does that make sense? It’s not always what state right state rights was about, but it dovetailed pretty nicely with kind of a growing American conservatism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but as a just purely party phenomenon. We had–MAXWELL: –sureSHEFFIELD: You could argue that the Democratic Party before Roosevelt was more conservative than the RepublicanMAXWELL: Oh, absolutely.SHEFFIELD: So and, and like in the early days of conservatism, American conservatism, mid 20th century, there were a lot of people who they identified as Democrats more and they were conservative, and they were not going to be Republican and then there were other parties, too.MAXWELL: Yeah, I was talking–I’m glad you say that. Because when I said that, I felt like American conservatism is not that young, it’s kind of been the default, I don’t, I don’t tie it to one party historically. I think Southern Democrats were as conservative as you–as you come. Their national party, under FDR and then under Truman started to shift. The national party under those presidents. Southern Democrats were not shifting.In fact, they were not shifting. They were so staunch in that conservative American conservatism that they left, you know, in 1948, and walked out and decided to run their own candidate, and that for president in the form of Strom Thurmond. So what we didn’t know in the 1950s, you look at middle of the 20th century, like you said, is we didn’t know which party was going to go which way. So if you look at the platforms in the 50s, from the national parties on things like civil rights, they’re almost identical.And  you kind of didn’t know, but the national Democratic Party seemed like it was moving in a little baby steps in a pro-civil rights direction. But the Southern Democratic Party was the opposite. The national Republican Party was also–had been, at least rhetorically, kind of pro civil rights. But there was a growing conservatism that was kind of anti-labor, Midwestern, rural America that was starting to push back in that party. And what’s what’s hard, I think, as I look back on it, with the vantage of hindsight is, it’s a shame that one party, that the parties had to go in opposite directions on these issues, right? Who says one party has to be the champion of civil rights in the 60s and 70s? And one has to be the party is effectively at times trying to limit some of the some of that change. It’s a shame that we couldn’t have debated over like the best way, right, to deal with structural inequities based on race or racial uplift. Because there’s definitely tons of debate you have on what policies do work and help, right? It’s shame we couldn’t have done that, as opposed to really making it a polarized partisan issue. And I think there were a lot of people in both parties that disagreed with the way their party went, we know that to be sure,to be true.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the conservatives eventually decided that they were going to try to take over the Republican Party, but it was a–actually, to some degree, not that difficult for them because they were so well organized. National Review was founded in 1955. And Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination not even 10 years after that. And of course, National Review wasn’t the only the only aspect of American conservatism. But that’s, that’s a pretty rapid ascent within one party. And one of the interesting things about that is that they, the early conservatives, actually, a lot of them were former communists themselves. And they actually copied a lot of Stalinist political tactics, that’s something that isn’t widely known and used them as a way of organizing within the Republican Party. So like they would send people into Republican meetings, and then they would have different–they’d have like, a group of people who would pretend not to know each other, and then they would cheer each other on.MAXWELL: Well, that is definitely a book that you should write, I was not aware of that.I will say this, the conservative impulse within the Republican Party was really strong, going into the 1950s. It just it just, it had trouble, kind of breaking apart with kind of establishment east and west coast Republicans, but it did not like big government, it was very concerned about labor. Right? Did not, you know, it was a big–did not like unions, was really concerned about communist infiltration. And in that, and then and then, you know, and this is interesting, but conservatives in the Republican Party really, really didn’t want [Dwight] Eisenhower on the ticket.SHEFFIELD: That’s true.MAXWELL: They did not they really wanted Taft, they really did, from Ohio. And they were devastated because Eisenhower kind of came on late in the convention. And they felt tricked. They felt like it was kind of unfair how it happened. And that really motivated them to get organized. Taft, unfortunately, died of cancer, like a year or two later. And so his part of the story kind of fades, but they’re so angry that he gets robbed of the nomination in ’52 that they really do start organizing and they start form–and they start looking for, how can we grow this conservative part of the part of the Republican Party? How do we do it? And they start clubs throughout the south, where they start trying to recruit people, they look at [Orval] Faubus actually, Clarence Manion looks at Faubus after 1956, the governor who–SHEFFIELD: Do you want to, do you want to talk about both who Clarence Manion was in and Orval Faubus for those who don’t know who they are?MAXWELL: Sure, it [Manion] was just a Republican operative. And a–he was very involved in kind of strategizing for the party,SHEFFIELD: And a talk radio host.MAXWELL: And a radio host. So he had access to audiences, which is actually a really important point. And they just, they know their numbers. They know they do not have enough. So how can they grow that base within the Republican Party? They start seeing, do they have some alliances with some very upset white Southerners who, (not all white Southerners, it’s never all) who really feel kind of in a partisan purgatory when the national Democratic Party starts really moving in the kind of a more pro-civil rights direction. They think can we be–can we build kind of an alliance here?And they look at Faubus, like I said, as this like pro-states rights governor, but then Barry Goldwater, who takes a really hard stand against labor unions and organizing criticizes Eisenhower for it. And he’s this young senator who’s very charismatic, they feel like is it a kind of abandon the Faubus idea, and they really start looking at Goldwater. They wanted him to run in, in ’60. But some of those conservatives–but that he, he refuses, just thinks it’s not a good idea. And of course, they finally secure, like you said, you know, kind of a 10 year process to get their party’s nomination, and that is a heated convention in 64, with about half the Republican Party being very upset that Goldwater’s the nominee and the other half, having organized for 10 years being overjoyed.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there were some echoes of that, of that moment in the 2016, Republican National Convention–MAXWELL: Sure.SHEFFIELD: –with Donald Trump, where there were just a lot of Republicans who didn’t want him, people were claiming they were going to try to stage a walkout strategy.MAXWELL: Sure, and you know, it’s a really important point, because it’s always important to remember that nominees, especially in contested years are rarely unanimous. So when we talk about this strategy, we sometimes say, while the Republicans all decided to go play up the anti-civil rights thing, actually a fraction of the Republican Party that were pushing for a nominee for a lot of different reasons, and some strategists thought Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, could maybe win them over some voters in the south and break the Democratic stronghold there, the electoral map. That does not mean that everyone that supported Goldwater in the Republican Party, were supporting him for that same reason. Does that make sense? So it’s like, it’s always important to me to remember, it’s easy for us to see it in hindsight. But on the ground Goldwater meant different things to different people. And there were conservatives, conservatism didn’t equal just anti-civil rights, right, in any way, shape, or form.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: And I never want to make it sound like that. Because it don’t that don’t think that to be true.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I mean, and even before, though, that Goldwater had secured the nomination, there were a few different Republican consultants and conservative election advisors who were talking about this idea that, that there are votes to be had among white Southerners. And, and they had written some books about that and white papers. Did you want to talk briefly about just some of those people like Kevin Phillips or–MAXWELL: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Kevin Phillips writes after Goldwater’s campaign, the most famous book kind of “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Now, this seems so common-sense to us in 2021. But you have to recognize what a bloc the South had been for the Democratic Party. I mean, Republicans had such a narrow path to electoral victory, they did not have, well, we might flip Georgia or North Carolina or Texas, it was just Democrat, right?And so it really limited your your, your your choices when you’re putting together an electoral strategy. So what happens is when the National Democratic party starts kind of embracing this more pro-civil rights stance, there are strategists, one of the other famous ones is Lee Atwater, who realizes the South is ripe for some two-party competition because there was enough disaffected people.And he also knew, and this is very important, that they did not have a two-party infrastructure in most places in the South. And that building from the bottom up, was going to be really difficult. If they could get Southerners to at least split ticket and vote for a Republican conservative presidential candidate, even if they did not have a strong robust Republican Party, they could launch having a–growing a Republican Party in the cell. Tried to–they tried to get Southerners to say, look, you have no choice in this one. Goldwater’s the only one that voted against the Civil Rights Act that’s running. If you vote for, you know, Lyndon Johnson, you will get the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You will enfranchise you know, African Americans in pockets of the south for for whom, and for many white leaders that was very threatening based on the numbers, right, so they really tried to sound like it was a one off. They were building something.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: So Lee Atwater, that strategy he really pushed. And he’s going to train a whole bunch of people. Strom Thurmond, just so you know, Lee Atwater worked in South Carolina politics and Strom Thurmond was the first Southern politician in 1964. He immediately switched parties. So not just supported Goldwater and stumped for him, which he did, but switched his official label from Democrat to Republican. That’s how definitive and influential that kind of South Carolina contingency of all of this was.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there were other people out there like Morton Blackwell, he’s another example, who was who was very big on that. And then briefly, and he’s not mentioned a lot in your book, but William F. Buckley, he was the son of Texas oil barron, and they moved to Connecticut. People nowadays aren’t remembering him for his more Southern roots. But he was somebody who not only was his family was from the south, but he also practiced a Southern mode of politics, rhetorical style, that was very pugilistic. There was, in fact, one famous moment where he threatened to punch Gore Vidal, the left-wing author in the face and called him offensive term for a gay man. And that’s, in many ways, he sort of set the template for a lot of what came afterwards, even though he himself kind of calmed down as he got older.So what we’ve talked about so far, that’s–these are some things that a lot of people know. But there are other aspects about the Southern strategy. And that’s what a huge part of your book is about. And so not just race or partisanship, but also a lot of what happened to the Southern white vote had to do with opposing feminism and women’s rights. And so let’s maybe talk about that. I think the key figure there is a Phyllis Schlafly, who was not a Southerner.MAXWELL: She was not. Well, I guess the best place to kind of start with that is just to say, that  after 1976 election, when Jimmy Carter, of course, Native Son, the South goes back to blue. Republican strategists at that point are doing a post mortem on elections. What did we do wrong? Have we lost the South because of Watergate? After Nixon, was that a fluke? Do we double down on these efforts, do we not? And the Republican Party has always been very advanced in terms of its polling early on, and not just horse race polling who will win, but kind of deep psychological dives.And Reagan, one of Reagan’s pollsters and strategists, Richard Wirthlin, does a big poll of American women, like 40,000 American women, because women were starting to turn out in higher and higher numbers in election cycles, and he says–categorizes these women into 64 types, and gives them names like Helens and Bettys, and he’s trying to just do an analysis like what motivates them to vote. And he finds a strong contingency of these anti-equal rights amendments, supportive of traditional gender roles, white women, particularly in the south. And so if they’re going to make inroads in the south, they’re going to restore, repave, those inroads they’d made with Nixon and Goldwater. They felt like adding that, particularly in a moment when–it’s not that race, racial issues are always significant in elections. But the urgency and intensity right after in the middle of the civil rights movement is just a very different phenomenon than when you’re kind of a decade beyond that, right? And so, the Equal Rights Amendment and its passage was the hot topic, the anti-ERA movement, which Schlafly is seen as the figurehead of and really long work, right?SHEFFIELD: And we’re talking in the 1970s here.MAXWELL: Right, yeah, so the Equal Rights–the first 12 months of the Equal Rights Amendment, it was ratified by over 30 states, it just looks like a done deal. It’s just going to–and then all of a sudden, it really stops in its tracks. And Phyllis Schlafly organizes this anti-ERA movement, which tells women that if the ERA is ratified, that it’s going to force them to work. It tells them it’s going to force them put their children in government daycare. It says that men won’t have to pay child support anymore.SHEFFIELD: And says men can use women’s restrooms.MAXWELL: Yeah, yes. And it says that, it also told stay at home women, or homemakers, that feminists judge them and that feminism was not choice. Feminism was you must adopt the lifestyle of a working woman.And Schlafly also partnered with religious organizations. Most notably, she worked with some counterparts in the Mormon Church. To help kill the amendment in Utah, specifically, she worked with Lottie Beth Hobbs, who was a woman who is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, kind of a leader there and an author to help organize women in the Southern Baptist Church to kind of rally against the Equal Rights Amendment. A lot of times in the south, even though Schlafly is national organization didn’t say this. But a lot of times in the south, these anti-ERA campaigns, kind of dovetailed with anti-civil rights and anti-integration efforts. So in Georgia, for example, there were demonstrations where women shouted, we don’t want to de-sex-igrate, right? Kind of merging the two things and saying there’s too much change too fast.So it does, the era, the anti-ERA campaign has a pretty has a pretty big influence on politicizing Southern white women and getting them to the polls. Now, this what’s important to note is in 1980, when Ronald Reagan gets the Republican nomination, the Republican Party then drops the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform. For the first time in 40 years, they were actually the party that had it on their platform first. And this was to the great devastation of a lot of Republican feminists who just had no idea the party was going to kind of would abandon their efforts. That’s how powerful Schlafly’s organizing was. It’s important to note too, that that ERA fails in in the south and really loses its momentum. Because of a lot of those defeats.There was also the infamous 1977 National Women’s convention in Houston, which Phyllis Schlafly organized a counter convention. And the reason that’s important and there’s, there’s a great book on it called Divided We Stand by Marjorie Spruill, that just came out a few years ago. But the reason it’s important is because there were Republican politicians paying attention to that convention, because there were so many American women that went, and Phyllis Schlafly started using the slogan, “family values.” And there were Republican strategists who go, ‘Whoa, that’s hitting a nerve that’s tapping into something that’s really important.’ We know from polling data after the 1980 election, how significant the anti-ERA stance of the Republican Party and feeling and those sentiments was a major driver for Southern white women who voted for Reagan. He increased his share among them in 1984, too. So that helps the Republicans recapture the South.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that meme, the “family values” idea, that is, even now, it’s something that you see in Republican messaging. In fact, there’s a large conference of Religious Right people every year called the Values Voters Conference, and it all goes back to that particular moment.And actually, that’s, that’s a kind of a good segue to the next aspect of what we’re talking about here, the aspect of religion. And the introduction of your book starts off with a quote, which I think is is very illustrative. It’s from a historian named Glenn Feldman, he said, “the South did not become Republican, so much as the Republican Party became Southern.” And that was, I thought, that was a great way to start off your book. And a lot of that does come into religion and the aspect of anti-feminism hooks into that also, because in the south, the local Protestant churches are–and even to a large degree now–but certainly much more in the mid 20th century and earlier, they were the hub of the community, right?MAXWELL: They absolutely were. So in parts of rural and particularly small towns, the church was kind of the central organizing institution of the community. Much in the same way the African American church would do the same in the south, among that among that community.And so there was something there’s something very specific about, just like Jim Crow was such an institution for so long in the south. Segregation, the church, if anything could rival it in its defining the region and its kind of way of life, it would be it would be the church.And so if you really want to kind of knock-out punch of those Southern voters is find a way to reach them at the pews. Which exactly what the Republican Party did, I mean, after Reagan, and then of course, George HW Bush, another native son of the South Bill Clinton came along. He does not carry the whole south. It’s not like a reversal the way it happened with Carter. But he does win several Southern states and he starts to pick up some gains, and others and, and even among, among religious voters in the beginning, the Republican Party, really strategically trying to look at what what part of the Southern electorate doesn’t kind of show up.And there were evangelicals, particularly white evangelicals in the south that did not concern themselves with kind of worldly affairs, particularly Southern evangelical white women, they kind of left that to the politicians and so on. So it’s convincing those people that they, they have kind of a moral obligation to participate in and to vote and that’s an effort that starts in the 80s, and continues even to this day. So I would say it’s pretty solidified now. Churches passed out voter guides, Republican politicians started attending, like the Southern Baptist Convention, or sending a message and a note, and really started going to some of these large gatherings, Southern evangelicals. And that combination of hitting kind of white racial angst, which manifests in different ways in different decades, and traditional kind of gender roles, and evangelical kind of Christian nationalism. Those components, they do not get you all Southern voters. But they get you enough to win.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, let’s maybe circle back the idea that of Christian nationalism, that’s something that wasn’t a thing in the south to some degree after the famous Scopes Monkey Trial.MAXWELL: This is true.SHEFFIELD: A lot of a lot of Southerners decided that, well, you know what, we can’t teach–we can’t stop the idea of evolution in schools. So that reminds us of the idea that Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world. And so let’s take our focus inward, and let’s take our focus on conversion, converting people, and let’s do that. But that changed, and especially with the Southern Baptist Convention, you want to talk about that a little?MAXWELL: Sure. Absolutely. And you get into Scopes, which my book that I wrote before this one, which is called The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority and the Politics of Whiteness, is about moments in the South’s history where there was such intense public criticism of the region. What happens to that community after the fact?SHEFFIELD: Do you want to very briefly just talk about what the Scopes trial was just for those who don’t know?MAXWELL: Absolutely. I’ll try to be super brief. But okay, 1925 scopes trial. The year prior, the Tennessee legislature had passed something called the Butler Act, which bans the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the result of a lot of generational angst about children that were kind of embracing the roaring 20s and kind of throwing off their parents Victorian kind of values, and maybe not leaving and leaving the church. And it’s the growth of higher education. And so they said, ‘this is happening, because they’re going to college’ or ‘this is happening, because they’re starting to teach all this fancy new science,’ right?This is when we get zoology and botany and all these specialties. And so there just becomes kind of a belief that if you’re going to teach things like the theory of evolution, that somehow teaching that is what was causing students or young people to then question a hierarchical, spiritual religious faith. Then parents always the parents get upset about what their kids are being taught sometimes when generations shift.So they when they banned that, the ACLU decided to file a lawsuit they looked for, they advertised for people who wanted to test the law. John Scopes was a football coach and science teacher at Ray County, Dayton, Tennessee. And he–they decided to him alongside with a couple of other businessmen in town decided it’d be great publicity for the town, and that they could turn it into kind of event. They’d make some money off of people coming to watch this great trial. Right?They got a lot more than they bargained for. It was an absolute media circus. It was the first major trial that was covered live on the radio, people could listen to we layed telegraph wire, across the country to be able to do that, the railroads expanded because a number of people coming to Dayton, Tennessee. It was on the front page of the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, it was just everywhere for just days and days and days of the trial. And it’s because the famous, the most famous defense attorney, the in his generation, Clarence Darrow, was representing, he decided to go down there and represent Scopes and William Jennings Bryan, three-time candidate for president and former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.SHEFFIELD: And a Democrat.MAXWELL: And a Democrat decides to show up and help the prosecution. And so you have these two great orators and giants in their respective professions, in this tiny little town, and the whole world paid attention.And Darrow put Bryan right on the stand and started questioning him about his literalist interpretation of the Bible. And through the grueling testimony and questioning, Bryan kind of cracked slightly and kind of admitted that the seven days of creation, those could be time periods, right. And and Darrow jumps on it. And it’s pretty devastating to Bryan, he intended to make a giant closing speech and redeem himself, but Darrow moved for an immediate verdict, which made closing speeches not happen.Two days later, two days later, Bryan dies, just goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up. And so this little thing becomes this giant media event. And what it does is it humiliated fundamentalists, because the media coverage of it was so eviscerating.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the fascinating thing about it that, to me, is that a lot of people saw the trial through the coverage, the media coverage of HL Mencken, who was a columnist, one of the very first syndicated columnist, and the interesting thing about HL Mencken is that he was also a conservative, but he was an atheist conservative. And needless to say, you don’t see a lot of those in the Republican Party anymore. They’re not allowed.MAXWELL: And Mencken had long criticized the south for many things. And he actually leaves Dayton, Tennessee, early because he thinks it’s going to all be a big nothing. Then he’s mad himself, because he’s covering it from afar. But it wasn’t just him, the nation dubbed it Tennessee versus civilization. The New York Times called the people in Dayton cranks and freaks. I mean, it was, it was hostile coverage.So what was the outcome of the case?So the outcome of the case, which we knew this, but Scopes is found guilty, with a little fine. And they wanted that because they wanted to appeal, right? They want to test the constitutionality of the law in the first place, right? But so the actual outcome of the case, without the story, it’s more how it how the narrative changed after that.So the intent, the criticism was so intense of fundamentalists, that they kind of went underground. People that wrote that day, intellectuals and people like Mencken that wrote at that time said, ‘oh, fundamentalism died today.’ It didn’t die when underground, created its own network of private colleges and private universities, one named William Jennings Bryan college that opens five years later, in Dayton, Tennessee. So it says, we can’t–this majoritarianism that we thought we could impose certain things in the public school system, if that doesn’t work, we will just build our own kind of network, focus on our religious space, not worldly concerns. And people who were not paying attention, didn’t see how expansive that world was becoming, and how cohesive and how ripe, it could be in time, for politicization.SHEFFIELD: And it certainly played into the the racial aspect of the Southern strategy later, because a lot of these schools that were established after Scopes, they were racially segregated. And then in the after Brown versus Board of Education was handed down which said that–the Supreme Court case that said that you couldn’t have segregated public schooling, that a lot of white Southern segregationist supporters begin transferring their children into these pre-established Christian day schools.MAXWELL: They did.SHEFFIELD: And then that later, then that later, was a key component in getting some segregation supporters into the Republican Party, because during the Carter administration, you had the the IRS said, if you’re going to have private segregated schools, you’re going to lose your tax exempt status. And that was kind of a really a galvanizing thing for a lot of people like Jerry Falwell, for instance. You want to talk a little bit more about that?MAXWELL: Yeah, I can say, I’ll say this. What’s interesting–I mean, it is all connected in lots of ways. The way I’m sure that the world political world we live in now will look 20 years from now we’ll draw all kinds of connections to things happening now. But the network of kind of private Christian spaces, whether it’s universities, it was K through 12 schools, popular culture, everything, radio stations, television stations eventually build up Christian bookstores. I mean, the whole kind of move–pop culture movement does create a really kind of self-segregating religious space.Now when integration hits the courts, and people are upset about their child being bused into far places, or they are anxious about integration and what it’s going to look like in their community, people sought out private schools. And if those private schools were religious space schools, and they could afford to go there, they did, they also created new schools. And then in some places, like Virginia, they eliminated compulsory school attendance. And so you see the advent of homeschooling, of the homeschool movement, and it really taking off.And some of that were people who were–it’s not the only reason the homeschooling takes off. But that effort does pick up when people are trying to avoid their children attending integrated goals. And so there’s a collision right there of this kind of religious selfs, kind of, I don’t know, withdraw or fundamentalist kind of going underground, and civil rights movements that they come into collision in the schools, right, and then what policies we set up for schools where there’s going to be prayer in school, where they’re going to have tax exempt status, all of those things that are getting debated in the 70s. galvanize that community, dramatically.Those sometimes people are there for different reasons, but those issues affected private schools in ways. And even funding for those–the Supreme Court in that Lemon, in that Lemon versus Kurtzman that Lemon test where they say ‘well, religion has to be out of public schools to a degree that it doesn’t have to be basically micromanaged by the courts.’ So if it’s funding for something that is at a school, at a private school, but is a secular in its purpose–the federal government’s helping with transportation, something like that.But if it’s anything of more depth that the court’s going to have to regulate, then the court says we’re out, and so all of that starts to really shift how these schools are going to financially self-support, and just how strict the government is being about separation of church and state. You see, several decisions have been during Carter’s time.Now, this all dovetails the exact same time as the Southern, I’ll say it quickly, Southern Baptist Convention, really shifts. The Baptist Church, primarily in the south had been a, for most of its history had been very independent, no hierarchy, soul competency, personal relationship with God didn’t need this high church, you know.SHEFFIELD: You could call it anti-clericalism.MAXWELL: Absolutely. And the Southern Baptist Church had split from the Baptist Church nationally over the issue of slavery. It had, it has that history. But the the day to day politics of it were very much not coordinated, to the degree that they’re, that they’re going to become. So in 19, in the early 1970s, two leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention–they’re not really leaders yet, they’re young at that time. But Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, meet and decide that the moderate Baptists need to go, that they are being too passive about all these changes in American life. And so they hatch a plan to get a fundamentalists elected as head of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979.And when I say hatch a plan, they really have walkie talkies, like we’re going to talk to this candidate, because when the members who are chosen by their churches to attend the Southern Baptist Convention, tend–no one ever campaigned, it was kind of like, people just followed their hearts, who they thought would be a good leader. It was not formal policy. And these guys orchestrated that and they are successful. And then you start to see that the president, the fundamentalist president of the SBC appoints fundamentalists to the committee on committees which then appoint fundamentalists to the other committees, and slowly over the next decade, the SBC becomes something very different. Women are kicked out of seminary. It is codified, the doctrine of wifely submission is re-codified into the SBC rulebook per se. And things pretty dramatically change and politicians and political leaders build relationships. And the SBC goes after those relationships to that’s definitely a two way street.SHEFFIELD: Well and they also change the church’s position on abortion.MAXWELL: They do.SHEFFIELD: Were there actual Republican elected, or consultant people that were involved in this takeover?MAXWELL: No, no, no, this was totally an internal phenomenon. But what it does, is that it is because of the changes in the secular world, in the public landscape, that is what upset these young fundamentalists to think that their, their denomination should become more proactive, and take positions on these issues in a really dramatic fashion. And they feel like the moderates in there are just saying, ‘just let everybody do their thing. That’s not our concern.’ And they’re tired of that. They want to be proactive, they don’t– they do. And so that fundamentalist takeover, though, and the fact that the fundamentalist becomes so strict in what the interpretations are, and because they start challenging members to vote, to pass out voter guides to get active and engaged.SHEFFIELD: This is the Christian position on X.MAXWELL: Excactly. To the point of this is who you should vote for guys.SHEFFIELD: If you are a Christian.MAXWELL: Correct. If you are a Christian, if you’re a member of this church, and you did lose a lot of moderate members that left or felt exiled and purged from the organization, but they also started really affecting things at the ballot box. They get so excited, I mean, they become kind of, so enamored with their ability to influence the elections, they think about, maybe they could run their own person, right?And then they run Pat Robertson, and then what they realized was that, because they were really mad at Reagan. They were really mad at Carter, because they thought he was one of them, and then they were like, ‘no, you’re not.’ And then Reagan, they felt like paid a lot of lip service to them. But by the end of his second term, they are frustrated, they just felt like he said a lot, but didn’t do a lot.‘So we’re going to run our own person.’ And then when they realize, this is super important, when they realize that they’re not that big in number to run their own and win a Republican nomination or independent candidate like Pat Robertson, then some of these Southern evangelical leaders say, ‘okay, look, we don’t need a litmus test on the candidate. I don’t care what their personal background is, we just need them to do the things we want them to do.’And that’s so critical. Because I remember, one of the questions I get asked the most when we do all this polling on religious voters is, people are like, ‘well, surely the Southern Baptists are not going to vote for Mitt Romney. He’s a Mormon, they said for years that Mormonism was a cult. And I’m like ‘they’re going to vote for him.’And they’ll go: ‘Surely they will not vote for Donald Trump. You know, he’s been divorced multiple times. Just he doesn’t have a history with the church, different personal choices and scandals.’ Yes, they are.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: And not because, and people are always thinking it’s hypocritical. And it’s fine to look at it that way if they want to. But I’m just telling you, it didn’t start with those two candidates. When evangelical leaders started saying ‘it’s about who does the things we want them to.’ They’re politicos, it’s like, ‘I don’t care if you’re of our faith, whatever, if you’ll do, if you’ll side with us on these things, if you’ll appoint the right people to the bench, if you’ll issue an executive order on this, we got your back.’SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then there was also a big focus among the fundamentalists on missionary work inside the United States. And so you had this rapid expansion of Southern Protestantism outside of the South. So like Southern California was a huge area they focused on, but they focused a lot on on the Midwest, and also did try to encourage people in other denominations to say, ‘look, you may not agree with us on all the particular doctrines here, but let’s realize who our common enemy here and that is religious pluralism and non Christians.’MAXWELL: That’s a super important point, because the cross denominational unity that gets built. I mean, I grew up Catholic in a very Baptist little town in Louisiana. That Catholic versus Baptist thing was serious. And over the course of my lifetime, it just, it just disappeared. It was like an issue. And then it just disappeared.And remember, Catholics had been such a big part of, of course, JFK’s coalition. So one of the things that happens as a result of the organizing over the Equal Rights, the anti-Equal Rights organizing, and the prayer in school issues is that you started to see some cross denominational kind of support, and that you started to see this kind of rise of the Christian Right, which is more than just one denomination.And it’s a pretty, pretty amazing phenomenon, to think about how many denominations kind of come together under this slogan of kind of family values, honestly, it’s under the campaign of George W. Bush, after Clinton kind of starts to pick up some votes in the south. And some of Bush’s strategists say one thing we need to do is we need to put–we need more religious voters, we need to put some stuff on state, we need to put some amendments to state constitutions on the ballot. To get people to come out on particularly the issue of gay marriage and banning gay marriage.So even those pockets of evangelicals that still just kind of hadn’t shown up in the numbers they wanted at the voting booth.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: These issues that were very important to those organizations and those communities to get them to show up. And that really solidified that kind of the Red South over the course of the three issues, like playing the race card, playing towards kind of traditional gender roles, anti-feminism, and playing towards kind of a religious kind of Christian nationalism. That the Republican Party kind of won over the South, the national level, but all that trickled all the way down over those decades as a strong Republican infrastructure is built and then becomes dominant at the state and even local level south, which the Democratic Party had not had to contend with, and is still trying to recover.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well and it changed who the Republican electorate is quite a bit. So before the Southern strategy before it came to its full fruition under George W. Bush, you had people who had post graduate degrees, they for a lifetime actually were Republican. And the same thing was true of Asian-Americans. Actually, a majority of them voted for Republicans. But over time as these different elements of, as you’re talking about, the the idea of traditional gender norms, Christian nationalism, and sort of white, soft, white ethno-nationalism, they kind of drove out a lot of people who were less religious or less Christian, not white. And so that’s kind of what’s happened on the Republican Party became a different party, because of the white conservatives.MAXWELL: And we can measure these things.SHEFFIELD: We can.MAXWELL: And we measure on scales of racial resentment, what people say about their own attitudes about this “modern sexism,” another scale of questions of Christian nationalism scale, we do this, in this book we do. And among white voters falling into one of those three categories, kind of above the norm, accounts for about 95% of Trump’s vote. It’s implied.But I do need to say this, it’s really important. So in the south, there’s a lot, there’s a significant number of white voters who are all three of those things. They test high on all three, they express racial resentment, modern sexism–women too–and kind of Christian nationalism. But most people are two of three or one of three. It’s why it takes all three, it kind of takes hitting at all three. We sometimes assume–particularly critics love to make things worse by going ‘oh, well, they’re all just a bunch of racists, they’re all just a bunch.’ And the truth is, is there are some people who express those feelings. But there’s a lot of people that are one and not the other.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: And that’s one of the reasons that the stances over time and the Republican power–SHEFFIELD: Have to shift.MAXWELL: Yeah, shift and they bring in, yeah, so Western Republicans, they didn’t come in on the issue of segregation and civil rights angst, they came on issues related more to family values. And nuance is important, I think.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And we’re and we’re seeing that in the present day, where you’ve got this kind of emerging contingency of people that were calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web for a while, and they–most of them are not religious. You’ve got Joe Rogan, he says he’s an atheist. You’ve got Dave Rubin, who for a long time was an atheist activist. And you’ve got other people, Brett Weinstein and others who, again, they they have no particular interest in Christian nationalism. But what they do have an interest is, is some of the other things right now.MAXWELL: Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Right now, a big one is anti-feminism and you’re seeing that also with the rise of a lot of far-right Hispanics and evangelical Hispanics. And there is a big effort among a lot of the religious right currently now to try to convert a lot of black Christians and get them into Christian nationalism and use anti-feminism as a, as a tool for them.MAXWELL: Yes, I mean, our highest percentages of people who express modern sexism, and again, that’s what people say about themselves. They say about themselves. It is most–the highest numbers are among white males, higher in the south than outside of the South. Really high among white women, also in the south, and very small among African Americans, they’re a little bit more among men these particular questions, but and among Latinos, it’s not as high as whites. But there’s definitely, among women and men.Those distinctions are significant, because when we have elections that are as close as our elections are, in terms of the states that go this way or that way by a couple points, that’s all that you need. That’s all that matters. That’s all that matters. So sometimes I think sometimes pundits are like ‘oh, how many people could that really be that they’re going to target to do this?’ But you know, a couple of points is a big deal when elections are so close.It’s important to kind of see that not that nuance, but also to realize, yes, Americans did sort themselves over time. And it took time. Republican feminists, for example, they stuck with the Republican Party for a while thinking like ‘this might, like the next administration might change or like how do we,’ they didn’t want to leave their party. They were sad their party left them. They felt like, they felt they could bring it back.So it takes a while. But over time, they do sort and that makes the Republican Party base, a very different, different thing because of those choices to win those Southern voters, the party at large.SHEFFIELD: Well, so we’ve got a live stream question from audience member named Jenise Huffman. And her question is: “How do you think evangelicals’ embrace of Trump will change Christianity in America?” And I would maybe add that one of the other interesting things that we’re seeing is that because a lot of white Americans are leaving fundamentalist religion, that the fundamentalist religions just by default are becoming more minority. And we’re seeing that to some degree with the Southern Baptist Convention recently. Do you want to talk about some of these developments a bit? Like things are pulling in multiple directions currently, it seems like.MAXWELL: There are I mean, Trump’s success with evangelicals did not surprise me, just because of like the history that I said about, ‘will he just simply do the things we’ve asked to do that we want our community wants him to do, we don’t care who the messenger is, who’s the who’s the actor in it.’ So I don’t think that his candidacy or his administration, that way changes Christianity. But I think what Trump has done to kind of the polarization within how intolerable opponents of Trump find him have pushed some churches to kind of a breaking point and feeling like they’ve got to feel like some are going back underground. A little bit like ‘this is a mess, this is dividing our congregation.’I felt like others are doubling down. And in both directions, you’ve seen churches decide to take a stand against Trump and there’s an organization, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, that has really become activated and organized. And then you see others that are organized even more so to kind of a far-right.It’s like he’s thrown, kind of thrown a wrench in it. And we’re going to, I think there’s going to be movement in every single direction: underground, more engaged to the right, and then a rejection of that also at the same time. And I don’t know where it’s going to fall.I mean, the Southern Baptist Convention this year, the most kind of fundamentalist candidate did not win. Nor did the progressive. Turns out when you have a runoff, kind of the guy who was slightly less fundamentalist, just slightly less, is who ended up being successful.And I just wrote a piece about that, because it reminded me of–it’s kind of a warning to me about 2024 because the Republican primaries are, don’t do a runoff. They are winner take most for most of them. So you can get 37 percent if there’s a crowded field, 32 percent of a crowded field, and you can get most of the electors. And in the south, because the Southern states are getting, that tend to go Republican the general election, the Republican Party gives them a ton of bonus delegates to the primaries, bonus delegates for the convention.And because the Southern states put their primaries so early on the calendar, that 30 percent that a Trump-like candidate could win in the south can be enough to not only take most of the delegates in the state, but then to get such a big lead in the delegates in the states for the national convention that it can be it.The only way to beat it is if everyone else gets on the same page behind one candidate, like what happened in the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s like the people who didn’t want the most extreme guy, they got together with–when the slightly more moderate made the run off and said we’ll support him, right?SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MAXWELL: But you don’t have that option in those primary kind of systems. So I think some stuff is changing. I think there’s fractures within the Southern kind of evangelical church. I worry our politics don’t set us up for nuance. Our systems, our voting processes, and that’s what makes me concerned.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, this has been a great discussion. Let me just ask you one last question. And that is, I think there’s a temptation for a lot of people to not be as interested in history because they think it’s over, it doesn’t matter. But I think, and you can tell me whether you agree with this or not, but the idea of we’re seeing so much denial of the Covid-19 pandemic right now, in the south. Lots of people, the majority in many states, are not getting vaccinated. And like when former President Trump had a rally in Alabama the other day, he was booed by the crowd for recommending to them that they get vaccinated. Do you think that this is a manifestation of the things that you were writing about? And shows that it’s continuous?MAXWELL: I will respond in this way. So we did–I didn’t say as much about this. But the kind of long Southern strategy was not just about the positions that strategists within the Republican Party and the candidates that got the nomination took. It was about the style of politics that they embraced. That quotation from Feldman ‘the South didn’t become Republican, the Republican Party became Southern.’ One party politics that dominated the South through most of its history was not a real contest of ideas. It was a contest of personalities, and kind of political entertainment.The region has long had large rallies, the politicians’ tent revival like–an absolute, an absolutism in the political rhetoric, right? You’re either for it or you’re against it, and us versus them kind of culture that existed. I mean, that is, in a sense, what Jim Crow was, us versus them, or one side or the other. All of that dynamic had already been there. It always shows up when you have one party domination which is actually not good for politics at all, because you don’t have a contest of real ideas and policy reform.And so, the Republican Party had to embrace a little bit of that. I mean the large rallies that they had for Goldwater in ’64. When he launched his operation Dixie, it was supposed to be a few campaign stops in the South. They roll out massive rallies with 100 young women in Alabama, in Mobile, in white dresses to greet him a pageantry of sorts. That was the style and it was a ‘you’re either on our team or you’re on the other team.’ And there’s kind of a loyalty or a kind of rivalry dynamic that is set up and it becomes part of people’s identity.And what I see now, I mean there’s always been people that have been distrustful of vaccines, but that was a very small group of people. What I see now is some kind of rivalry and identity issue related to it, which is ‘I have been, I’m on this side. And if I go get vaccinated,’ and this just my opinion, I’ve not, I’ve not polled or done scholarship on this. ‘But if I go get vaccinated, then somehow that is siding with the other team.’ And they’ve so demonized that other team, that they’re just can’t do it.SHEFFIELD: ‘I’m giving in to the atheist liberals.’MAXWELL: ‘Yeah, I am.’ But yeah, they just can’t bring themselves to do it. One thing we do know, some research that people have done shows is that once you know someone close who passed, I know, we always journalists, you know, the stories when someone has lost a loved one and still won’t get vaccinated. But we’ve seen that when people know someone, it does become kind of real at a different place. And we do see vaccination numbers, they have really ticked up in Arkansas. So some things do cut through that. But when it’s an abstraction, when it’s something that isn’t happening to people right around you, you think it’s really hard for those people to break that psychological attachment to the us versus them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it’s hard to appeal outside of that identity politics, because I mean, that’s something that which is kind of interesting. As a dynamic you constantly see Southern Republicans complain about liberals and their identity politics, but their entire political structure is about white Christian identity politics.MAXWELL: It is. I mean would argue that a certain wing of the Republican Party is the one who really launches those identity politics. And they do so right as African American voters flocked to the Democratic Party. ‘That’s your identity’ to white Southern voters. ‘Or is this your identity?’ Right?And the problem we tend to look at, we tend to always go ‘well, they’re so irrational, why are these poor white people voting against their economic self-interest?’ That’s the question always about the South.But they’re, they’re rational identity voters, they’re not rational economic voters. For some people in the south, the economic situation is just really never going to change very much and they don’t look at government as something that’s going to help them, they don’t. And, and there’s, there’s also, because people did not always have means and access in rural parts of the South, there’s a culture of not going to the doctor. There’s not a culture of preventative medicine in certain places. It’s like you go as a last resort. So they don’t have a primary care doctor. And they don’t kind of think about these preventative kind of things. Now they’ll go do vaccinations if they need to, for mandates, because there’s mandates to send their kids to public school.SHEFFIELD: Or their job.MAXWELL: Or their job, they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it, but they did a cross the bridge when they come to it. They don’t go to it, right? That culture has been there a long time. And so when you add that with kind of the identity issues that have been kind of co-opted related to vaccines, it’s kind of a ripe environment for the weaponization of this current public health crisis.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and it’s too bad. And I wish we had more time to talk about all this. This has been a great conversation. I always like talking to you.MAXWELL: I appreciate that.SHEFFIELD: But yeah, we’re going to have to wrap it up.MAXWELL: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: So the guest today has been Angie Maxwell, and she’s an associate professor at the University of Arkansas. She’s on Twitter, her username, I’m going to spell it out for the audio listeners. It’s AngieMaxwell1. So just the number. And you also have your own website, Mason Jar Politics, right?MAXWELL: That’s right.SHEFFIELD: Okay, cool. And then I’m going to just briefly put the book on the screen so everybody can see it.MAXWELL: Thank you, I appreciate that.SHEFFIELD: The full title of the book is The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.I appreciate you being here.MAXWELL: Thank you so much, Matthew. I appreciate it, appreciate a thorough conversation. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: Thanks for listening today, Theory of Change is made possible thanks to people like you. If you liked what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave a nice review. That actually is really helpful.Theory of Change is part of the Flux media network, it’s a new media organization providing in-depth podcasts and articles about politics, religion, media and technology. The website addresses Flux.community.And if you’d like to visit the Theory of Change section, just go to TheoryOfChange.show, and you’ll go right to the episode archives.I’m Matthew Sheffield. Let’s do this again. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode SummarySince the widespread acceptance of the scientific method emerged in the 19th century, most people like to think of their ideas as based on sound reasoning and rational principles. But it’s also the case that many of us also want to believe that there are things that people in olden times figured out. Depending on whom you ask, ancient people had the answers about what a moral life looks like, how to avoid stress, or even how to cure diseases and illnesses.In some cases, old ideas have merit and are worth considering, but in many cases, they are simply old ideas. The age of a concept should have no bearing on its truthfulness. But that’s not a concept that some of us are willing to consider.Where people think about science in their own life, and how they want society to be structured with regard to it, is in fact one of the core questions of this political moment in this country and around the world, how do we deal with people who refuse to believe in science? And is it possible to go too far in that regard as well?How those questions are resolved are kind of mixing and mashing political ideologies on both the left and the right. And we’re especially seeing that in the person of Marianne Williamson, who is basically a yoga self help guru who is now running for the presidential nomination in the Democratic Party for the second time and has a lot of very strange and bizarre ideas.But is she a leftist? It’s a question worth considering. And so joining me today to talk about that, among many other things in this regard, is Matthew Remski.He is the co host of the Conspirituality podcast and also is the co author of a book that he and his co hosts have put out, called Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.One of the topics discussed in this episode (at 19:40) is how political ideologies overlap with each other and should not be understood on a simple left-to-right line. The two charts referenced in the discussion are reproduced below.The first is a graph of political ideologies based on what their adherents believe. The X-axis shows that some ideologies lean more toward preferring the abolition of private property, while others advocate that there should be no restrictions on people with property. The Y-axis indicates where adherents believe knowledge is found, their epistemology. Some people believe that truth is best discerned by individuals, while others believe institutions are best at finding it.The second graph shows how political ideologies prioritize goals. The X-axis shows the how adherents of various ideologies value reason versus tradition, with more “right-wing” ideologies preferring tradition and “left-wing” ones favoring reason. (Whether people are actually advancing traditional or reasonable ideas is not what the graph indicates, only what adherents think they are doing.) The Y-axis in the graph shows whether ideologies value society or the individual more.VideoTranscript (Subscribers Only)MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: All right. So, let’s maybe get started first with your own story. How did you get into these topics here and your interest in all that?MATTHEW REMSKI: Well, my colleagues, Derek Barris and Julian Walker and I all have, I would say, about a combined 40 years plus experience in the yoga and wellness worlds.

Everything we do, think, or feel is based 100 percent on rational thinking. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.The truth, however, is that we humans often act based more on psychological impulse than on intellectual reason. That underlying reality is one of the main reasons why so many Americans who adhere to strict religious belief in their own lives have been willing and even happy to support Donald Trump, a man who is as amoral as he is irreligious.We’ve talked many times here on Theory of Change about the polling and the interest groups behind how and why this happens, but sometimes it’s important to delve to the personal level to further our understanding.And if you ask me, there is almost no one in American political life who exemplifies the radicalization that’s happened among many Christians than Rod Dreher, a veteran conservative writer who for many years wrote a blog for the American Conservative Magazine and is now doing an independent newsletter on Substack. As I hope to show you during this episode, Dreher’s story is an incredibly personal one, but it also says a lot about the American right, and some about the American left as well.Our guide for this episode is Phil Christman. He is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of several books, including most recently How to Be Normal. But most importantly for this conversation, he recently wrote an article for Slate about Dreher’s life and how it’s become an object of fascination for more than a few people on the left wing of Democratic politics.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.GUEST INFOPhil Christman's website: https://philipchristman.com/ On Substack: https://philipchristman.substack.com/ Christman's Slate essay about Dreher:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/rod-dreher-chapo-blog-american-conservative.html ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

With each passing day, Elon Musk is making Twitter worse. He’s done everything from allowing neo-Nazis and trolls to come back after being banned to locking out developers and academics who want to use Twitter’s Application Programing Interface or API to make interesting and important projects.A lot of people have had enough and they’re heading for the exits to places like Spoutible, Substack, and Post. The most popular destination by far, however, has been Mastodon. Just recently, Mastodon hit 10 million users, which is pretty incredible considering that while it has a lot of similarities to Twitter, the technology behind it is very different from centralized social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Anyone can run a Mastodon server or “instance,” which you can use just for yourself or a community.But you can also use your Mastodon instance to connect or “federate” to the larger world through an open protocol called ActivityPub which is so flexible that people have used it to build alternatives— not only to Twitter, but also to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. These servers communicating together are called The Fediverse, as in the universe of federated servers—a network of social media networks.If you’re not a tech person, that concept may seem kind of hard to understand, there is short video made by the YouTuber “Black Indigo” which explains it in a bit more detail.While it may seem like just a thing for computer geeks, the reality is that the Fediverse is a really exciting technology innovation, one that can and already has helped to empower regular people, non-profit organizations, and governments to imagine and operate the internet in a way that isn’t just about putting money in the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.Joining me to discuss all of this in much greater detail are two different guests. Dan Gillmor is a veteran technology writer who is also a professor of journalism at Arizona State University.  Darius Kazemi is programmer and internet artist who also maintains a version of the Mastodon software called Hometown.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theoryofchange.flux.communityEveryone seems to have a podcast nowadays, actors, athletes, comedians, and even politicians. You clearly like them since you’re here right now, and thank you for that. But what do other people think about podcasts? Well, the Pew Research Center just came out with new report about podcasts and how people are listening and watching them.Joining us to talk about that is Elisa Shearer. She is a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, she’s worked there for eight years, and she’s the lead author of this new study.MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSIn order to keep Theory of Change sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for this episode are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Most people aren’t preoccupied with Satan, demons, or the end of the world. But like it or not, many Americans are greatly concerned with these topics. A 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of white evangelical Christian adults surveyed believed that Jesus Christ would return to the earth within the next 40 years. That was significantly higher than any other religious group. Just 32 percent of Catholic respondents agreed, for instance.Speculating about how the world ends is probably as old as humanity itself. It was pivotal to the early formation and growth of Christianity as early leaders of the faith frequently suggested that the Second Coming of Jesus would happening in their lifetimes.But over time as those hundreds of predictions fail to come true, the End Times literary tradition faded away in Christianity. It returned with a vengeance in the mid-20th century after the development of nuclear weapons, however.Interestingly enough, while the evangelical apocalypse tradition is associated with far-right politics today, it was not nearly so politicized in the early 1970s.Featured in this episode is Christopher Douglas, a professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is also the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right.You can view the video of the conversation or read the transcript.(This episode was previously released October 22, 2021, but is such an important one that we’re highlighting it again this week.)MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSThis is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests.ABOUT THE SHOWTheory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChangeMatthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffieldMatthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield  This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theoryofchange.flux.community/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryAmerican politics is becoming increasingly destabilized by far right radicalism. But this escalation is actually the symptom of an even bigger problem: That our two major political parties have been stuck in a trench warfare system for decades.It’s been nearly 40 years since a presidential candidate won more than 55 percent of the national popular vote. It’s been 51 years since someone had more than 60 percent.In all this time, neither party has been able to create a mass movement for their ideas. Republicans haven’t done so because they’ve openly embraced a minoritarian political strategy based on winning rural states with lots of religious White people. But Democrats haven’t built a movement for progressive ideas either, and that’s a critical mistake for people who ostensibly want to protect democracy.So why have Democrats lost interest in mass movements and large coalitions? It’s a very important question and one that my guest on today’s show, Timothy Shenk, attempts to answer in his new book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy.The video of this episode is also available. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryWe’ve been talking a lot here on Theory of Change about artificial intelligence, both the implications of it from a technological standpoint and also how it works.This is something that is going to create a fundamental change in our society, and that’s irrespective of whatever improvements to the technologies will be developed in the future. Regardless of what you think about artificial general intelligence (AGI) or super intelligence, whatever you want to call it, the reality is that the technologies that exist in the here and now are going to have a huge impact on our economy and our individual lives.Because of that, it’s important to consider some of the political implications of artificial intelligence and also to talk about the public opinion implications as well. What do people think about AI and how are they concerned about it? Who’s interested in it?There are a lot of other things to talk about it, especially also in the context of how AI is a product of the technology industry and so-called Big Tech, as people have taken to call it recently. That’s shaping attitudes of public opinion on that as well.So to talk about some of this with me today, we’re bringing in Steven Clermont. He’s the polling director at Change Research, which is a progressive polling organization, and he recently has done a survey about AI and public opinion. I couldn’t think of a better guest to come on and talk about this.VideoTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Stephen.CLERMONT: Thanks Matthew. Thank you for having bring us on, talking about our research and I’m excited for this conversation.SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah. Great to have you. So, we’ll start with the idea of who’s interested in artificial intelligence news.You guys did a, a survey of this and there are some interesting numbers here. So, maybe give us the details on like who was this survey among? And then we’ll get into the table over on the, on the screen there.CLERMONT: Thank you for that. Change research was founded in 2017 to do quality polling online to sort of fill the need of polling, sort of moving beyond phones and the traditional way that polling had been done.So we’re able to go online and do high quality surveys at relatively affordable prices. And part of that allows us to fund our own surveys to really look at a topic in depth like we did for AI and technology. So this is a poll that we’re going to talk about is a poll of 1,300 American voters that was conducted nationally from February 22nd to 24th, and this was all done online.We have a proprietary technology that allows us to send ads to find survey respondents and do it in a way that we’re meeting demographic targets on race, gender, age, ethnicity, and political preference. So what we’re presenting here is reflective of the American electorate overall, and the key findings from this at the beginning is, in terms of just AI is people’s familiarity with it is fairly low.We asked a question about familiarity with ChatGPT and other text-based tools that are available online. Only 7% said they were very familiar with it. 38% familiar at any level, and we sort of asked your interest in it, the chart you have up on the screen about half of Americans are interested in, in AI.It skews a little bit younger. People of color are as interested in it as white people, in fact a little bit more particularly among Hispanic men. And but only 70% say that they’ve used it. And it was interesting in some other research. Found that only 37% are comfortable with government using AI to make important decisions.And I think when we’re sort of thinking about this topic and thinking about sort of the rollout of AI and how it’s going to be perceived is, it’s hard, like over the cross of all the polling that we’ve been doing in swing states in different, different levels of voter engagement. The general public right now is exceedingly negative on the direction of the country on sort of where they feel that whether their income is keeping up with the cost of living.The first question we asked here was just how satisfied are you with the way things are going in America today? 77% are dissatisfied, 31%, which is, it’s a lower number, but still pretty high, are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their life. Every place that we’ve asked just give people the simple choice, is your income going up higher than the cost of living or your income?Yeah. Is it about the same as the cost of living or falling behind the cost of living? About 70% of people, pretty much everywhere in the country, believe that their income has falling behind the cost of living. That’s gone up since since the 2020 election, since the beginning of Covid, but before that it was about 50%.Two thirds of voters don’t feel like they matter in the United States, 38%, only 38% believe they have a fair shot to succeed. And the number that I’ve been surprised by the most is that 68% believe today’s children will grow up worse off than people are now. So it’s sort of like as this technology is being rolled out and it’s the people supporting it are saying how life changing it’s going to be and it’s going to make all this difference and be disruptive, given the level of insecurity people feel generally.You’ll, as you can see in our research, there’s a lot of skepticism about the positive benefits of AI and anything that’s being labeled as disruptive and will change everything. We’ve heard that a lot over the last couple of decades, and the fact is, is like technology has improved our lives a lot.The fact that we’re having this conversation now with me in Northern Virginia and you in California being able to look at each other, it definitely shows that it has. But in our poll, only 39% say that technology in the tech industry has improved the quality of their life. 34% say it’s made life worse and about more than a quarter believe that things have stayed about the same.So there is sort of inherent skepticism about. Technology and like people are seeing the downsides more than the positive benefits. And that is going to be really for the enthusiasts and the people that are talking about this and tweeting about it and writing off ads about how this is going to change everything.That message is not exactly going to resonate in the way that they think it is.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that you looked at is that when you divide it down to interest, just pure interest in AI, that for people who work on a computer, most of their work time, 65% of them say that they’re interested in it, whereas only 35% say they’re not.But for people who do not work on a computer for their work, only 45%, so that’s a, a 20 point gap there. I think that that’s going to be something that’s going to be significant. I think that dichotomy, because, when you look at how a lot of companies are planning to use AI.In many cases, as they currently exist right now they are in applications or jobs where there isn’t a lot of computing done by the human. So, like one example being and this is not I, I necessarily, but it’s automation like, grocery stores that we’ve got the proliferation of, of checkout, self-checkout stands where you can scan your own groceries.And Amazon is trying to go much beyond that and completely eliminate clerks. So they’ve, they’ve had some experimental grocery stores in New York and Seattle and some other places where there are no employees other than stalkers occasionally. And you basically come in and the goal is that you take those stuff off the shelf and then it will automatically bill you when you leave.And that’s definitely AI powered and so, but it does seem like from the research you guys have done and others have done that, I think a lot of people may not be grasping fully what’s in store in the new future.CLERMONT: I would agree with that. And it’s the sense that they do, it’s, again, it’s sort of that level of skepticism.One of the questions that we asked is, do you think companies that are employing. Deploying AI aggressively, do they think they’re doing it mostly to better serve their consumers or to eliminate jobs? And 60% believe eliminate jobs, 21% believe to serve their customers better. And when we ask sort of the impact that AI products and AI software will have on various jobs and professions, most people believe that the impact will be negative.With the exception to computer programmers, people are split on healthcare. But on a lot of other things, it’s just when people are talking about like the benefits for these different industries, people do hear that this will negatively impact jobs. And it’s a few years ago I did some focus groups in Northern Virginia for a client that was looking to develop a progressive narrative.And the thing that stuck out with me the most from that was one person saying because we were talking about growth and sort of like what growth means and sort of positives of it. And she said pretty clearly, it’s just like when I hear growth all I can think about is that means more traffic and it means housing prices will be unaffordable and growth means that essentially I will be trapped.I can sell my house for more money than I paid for it. But where am I going to live? And there’s lots of positive impacts of growth. Growth is one of the things that drives our economy and sort of the measure of when the GDP grows, that’s always viewed and reported as a good thing.But people don’t, with the level of insecurity people have, there’s an overall statistic that I like to show in presentations, right now the percent of income going to the bottom 90% is the lowest that’s been in a century, and I think crossed under 50%. So that level of stress creates the sort of like unstable political environment that we’re in and when in industry or there’s lots of news stories about some new product that’s going to change everything.That’s the reaction people have. It’s just like people are actually seeing, it was like, well, this is going to hurt this. Another question we asked in the poll was, how safe do you feel? Would you feel on, would you feel driving on a road that has on the same road with automated cars and trucks and almost three quarters say that they would feel unsafe in that situation.So it’s the thing, one of the things that I took out from this research if you’re thinking from the perspective of a technology company that’s trying to sell a new product it’s talking about it in ways that’s actually going to help people. Like being up pollster, it’s like the technology industry is saying to political candidates, it’s just like, you don’t even need to, you don’t need consultants, you don’t need people running.You can have, AI will tell you what voters to target, what to say to them and go forward. That would be threatening to me in my job. But if it’s being talked about, like you can process and think through a lot more data, you can look at a thousand responses of people saying why they like someone and be able to summarize that quickly.I think there’s ways you can talk about AI as a tool that’s going to help people and help people do their jobs better and that there will be benefits that come from that in a way that people are not instantly hearing. because 2020 per percent of the people employed in our poll said that they think they will lose their job in the next few years because of AI.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Although it was, yeah, I’m sorry it was, but it was a little bit contradictory from what they said because when you, when you ask them, will the, will AI have an impact on these various professions? You guys also ask them, well, what about on your job? And for, for them, 47%, the plurality there said it will have no.Basically but then 34% said it would have a negative impact and 18% set a positive. So I thought that was a, that is an interesting dichotomy in the responses there. Did, do, have you thought about that at all?CLERMONT: It’s always interesting to me how when you ask people, it was similar to what it earlier in the poll, dissatisfied with the way things going in the country, overwhelmingly negative, your own life.People are mostly positive, and we ask how’s the nation’s economy going? It’ll be largely going in the wrong direction. If you ask how your personal finances are going, 50% or more will say it’s going in the right direction. So it’s like, I’m looking at a number like that. It’s just like, it doesn’t surprise me that more people will think it’s like, okay, this isn’t going to matter from 47% saying it’s not going to matter for me is it’s a high number.The fact that a third of people would already admit that it’s going to have a negative impact is a very large number for me. People do believe that things outside of their own experience are bad and getting worse. The things to really worry, particularly as someone who works on campaigns is when people believe that they’re going to be negatively impacted by something, that’s when there’s going to be real instability.And I would argue that that third, that people. Have a negative impact on my own job is like one of those red flag numbers. Mm-hmm. And the key would to the tech industry and people, AI companies, would be to recognize that and try to alleviate that immediately.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and to that point you guys also did look at and ask people about what they thought about whether Congress is currently, doing things well.And unsurprisingly they said no in terms of regulation. But then you also did ask them should the, should US Congress create regulations around the safe use of AI that protects jobs, national security, and preventing fraud? And it was, it was interesting. I, I thought that it was 66% agreed with that and including a majority of Republicans.And, to me this is, yet another example of how the Republican electorate is more, wants a more of a what Republicans would call a nanny state than the Republican elites do. And so, but for, for them, 51% of Republican respondents in your, in your survey said that they did want more regulations around that.So, and I mean, do you think these numbers are going to increase? It seems like they probably will, especially if people start making this more of an issue.CLERMONT: I think it really does depend on how this is rolled out, and it does seem to be some degree of pulling back. It’s like Italy has already announced today that they’re banning ChatGPT; that’s a little more extreme.The example of sort of how not to do this is, well, we saw that with sort of dumping social media, like it was all sort of rolled out. There was no sort of government involvement. And as we can see now, like there, there’s lots of positive impacts on social media and there are a lot of negative ones.And as we’ve seen like as different controversies as envelope Facebook and now TikTok, it’s, there’s always pledges to do better. But the challenge with AI really is just like, if, if it’s put out, people use it and people misuse it, the consequences are going to be really dire for people. And people are involved in different scams and there can be real harm and real societal.So the need to go slow is large. And it’s not really surprising, like people, people want regulation of this technology, but I think like more important, like they want leadership and the leadership needs to come from the government. It needs to come from within these companies, and it needs to come from nonprofits and people outside of government as well as grassroots organizations.And I think like there, there was an op-ed that was published yesterday in the Washington Post by the head of the Ford Foundation, which d basically was advocating for, let’s slow down with this. Let’s really understand what this technology is and the best way to roll it out and regulate it. And part of what they were doing is a commitment to hire and pay for technologists to work in congressional offices and to try to get members of Congress up to speed on these technological issues so that there isn’t quite the gap between the companies and the company leadership and member, much less tech literate members of Congress that it shows a degree of thinking from outside government and outside these companies on how to do this better than the examples that we’ve had before that.Definitely worth thinking about, as well as also not having all the financial gains go to the companies that have created the software and are using it. And then be sort of brought back into society through, through philanthropy, but to do the whole rollout differently from a public private perspective than we’ve had before in other, other tech advancements that we’ve seen over the last several decades.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and, and that is kind of an interesting there is a dichotomy be between how the United States and most other industrialized countries are handling AI versus China, for instance. And, and, and that flows from a, the, a difference in how they handle technology generally. So, like for instance, if you look at the way that TikTok is presented outside of China versus how it’s presented inside of China, it’s, it’s, it’s quite a different body of, of, of content.Yes. So in China it’s much more educational. It’s much less entertainment slash music slash you know, dancing or whatever. And they also seem to be, as a country, they are interested in the idea of an industrial policy and it seems like that that sentiment is kind of growing among Americans for a more of a public-spirited direction for business and for technology in particular.Did you see any of that in your findings here?CLERMONT: I think that the thing that is clearest to me is just the need for real leadership on this. From looking at some other polling, I mean, there’s majority support really for protecting consumers with privacy and data protection laws. I think the more that’s talked about and proposed, while we didn’t sort of test specific ones of those, it can generally, most things that relate to online privacy and privacy and data protection test at a 70% or higher level.There was one poll where 55% support regulating AI, like the FDA regulates new drugs and medical devices and generally anything that is requiring greater transparency from government in corporations have wide support. I think that it’s sort of the thing that we did ask, it’s sort of like what is going to be the best thing to do, which is regulate the safe use of AI to protect jobs national security, prevent fraud, protect children, or basically leave entrepreneurs alone to do entrepreneurs of the best way to determine the best way to use products. 66% want regulations that do these things. And 18% basically say leave entrepreneurs alone.But I think with this sort of the overall sort of level of uncertainty people have about what AI’s impact is going to be on the economy, on education, and then just sort of how that’s going to interact with other social media sites and issues involving mental health and excess screen time and less connection from human beings to other human beings.Any proposal that’s going to address those things will be imminently popular. Like this sort of libertarian, just sort of leave everything alone, things will take care of itself, is just like we haven’t had that experience and it’s not really where to the degree the public has really thought about AI and even understands what ChatGPT and what sort of these very advanced algorithms can do.And the ability again to create synthetic audio, synthetic video, synthetic pictures, like all of that stuff needs to be debated and worked through and be transparent, not just sort of put out there, and then we’ll sort of deal with it afterwards.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. And you guys did get into this idea of trying to tell if content is fake or real in some of your surveys. So actually that was one really interesting part of the survey and I’m glad you did it. So you actually asked people to watch a video of President Biden that was nonsensical. And we’re going to roll it here:(Begin video clip)FAKE JOE BIDEN: Where? Where is my script? Did I take my pills, honey? Do you have my pills up there?FAKE JILL BIDEN: Yep.FAKE JOE BIDEN: Don’t give me lip, girl. Papa’s not happy. Hey, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like to see me when I’m angry. That is a quote from the Mighty Ducks.I’m hungry. Hey boy, give me some chicken nuggets. Thank you, sir. No need for thanks. Put me some fries too.I wish I married that fine person, Nancy Pelosi. Oh my God. Oh Nancy, you are clearly the hottest girl in the world. Pull on your ears if you think I’m lying. If you have five friendships in a black mustache, the Ukrainian prophecy will probably die.What would Jesus seriously do? He’s probably really busy. Let’s rob the Pope. Wonder Woman isn’t stopping by my store, sorry.(End video clip)SHEFFIELD: Tell us about the responses that you got on that.CLERMONT: So basically only 28% thought that that was more funny and amusing than concerning. Like almost a majority, 45% believe it was more concerning than funny or amusing. And 26% say that’s not funny, amusing, or concerning. So over 70% basically, that’s not funny. But nearly half believed that that’s concerning.And this was, this was clearly fake. This is, we could have done it a little more subtly training like an Obama or Biden voice on synthetic voice software and really made it hard to tell whether that’s real or not. I would assume most people would think it’s real unless it’s fully crazy.But going into this, I thought that when you ask people how confident they would be that they could tell the difference between something that’s real or something that’s AI or fake, I thought that people would overrate their confidence in telling what’s real and what’s not.And I think the most surprising thing to me was only 42% were confident that they could tell the difference between real and fake. And 46% said that they can’t, and about like equal percentages say that like they’re concerned about politicians lying to them versus so much fake content around politicians being put out there that they’re not going to tell, be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.It’s hard to overestimate like the level of concern people have over misinformation. What? And really not trusting what is real and what is not. We did some work for a private client in early 2020, which that was, give them a whole sort of list of things that to be concerned about as it relates to tech misinformation and was at the top of it, misinformation and political manipulation, and trying to think about AI from the perspective of a member of Congress.Like there’s lots of things that can be good about that. I mean, members’ offices are notoriously understaffed. If you’re writing complex legislation, you have to do lots of history and bill drafting. If you can train AI to, it’s like, okay, I want to write this bill, this healthcare bill on this medical device can you start with this piece of legislation that was passed 10 years ago and write legislation that will allow acts, whatever the outcome is, and then instantly create like a piece of legislation, like, or be able to most members offices use form letters and communicate through, through correspondence that, that come in.Like have like 15 or 20 or more different template. Of things to respond to. And people get back a form letter that’s signed autopen by a member of Congress. They know that that member of Congress did not write to them, but you could train AI to be, write very personal responses to situations that come in that sound like real letters.But as we saw in the example of the, after the mass shooting at Michigan State University last month, they used AI to generate responses, sympathetic responses to students. And that was viewed very negatively in a lot of ways. Like using AI as a member of Congress to be more personal does contain more risks.And that doesn’t even get into the other way that member of Congress can communicate, which is through telephone town halls where if you were being malicious, you could program a member of Congress’s voice. You can call thousands of numbers and say, connect to this telephone town hall, have an entirely synthetic discussion, and have people ask questions to this member of Congress’s voice. Have people respond to it directly, and then say weird things that undermine that member of Congress to that audience.And no one would have any ability to know about that. The type of communication that’s done, that doesn’t get press, that doesn’t get earned media, that’s not publicly visible, you could seed things within that population to undermine faith in people using these tools and unless they’re regulated are going to have really negative impacts.And just like showing a clearly obvious fake video of Joe Biden, where people are just like, okay, that’s really concerning, that’s not funny on something that was meant to be funny.The tools are so good that the ethical questions as well as the political law enforcement questions really need to be thought through.SHEFFIELD: And you did go the text version of this as well where you had written statements promoting AI, a human wrote some, and then you had ChatGPT write some.CLERMONT: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And you asked people, so you asked them two questions. One, can you tell the difference between AI generated text or content? And then here’s some for you to look at. And what you found was that only 42% of people said they were confident they could tell the difference, which I thought was interesting. I thought it might be a little higher than that.But then when you asked, okay, so who wrote this? Was it a human or a computer? And as you guys say in the report that there was no better than 50-50 whether the people could tell the difference, which, like right there, actually what you did Stephen is actually a polling version of the Turing Test which is this sort of iconic idea within the field of computing, which is to ask people, okay, so, can you tell the difference between these responses?And if they couldn’t, then that program would be said to be capable of passing as intelligent. So you guys basically did a Turing Test, and it looks like ChatGPT passed the test.CLERMONT: Yes, it did. Both the two ways, like one was, yeah, the statement that I wrote, maybe I’m just not as good writer as a computer, which may very well be the case.20% said that that was written by AI. 5% say it wasn’t. 39% say they weren’t sure, and 36% didn’t care.And then the one written by AI, 27% said it was written by AI, 4% not. The rest either not sure or not caring. Not sure, not caring was pretty strong.The other, we tested some statements about sort of drawbacks of it. We asked ChatGPT to write something about the challenges of AI and it just wrote the statement: “As we continue to brace artificial intelligence in more areas of our life, it’s important to be aware of potential risks and drawbacks. Unregulated use of AI could lead to job displacement, biases, discrimination, and privacy concerns. Additionally, AI may not always be able to make ethical decisions or understand human values. We much proceed with caution and develop robust regulations to ensure that AI is used safely, ethically, and for the benefit of all.”And that was written by AI and 85% agreed with that. 54% strongly agreed. So it’s again another example of how AI can automate me out of a job.And then I tested a few other potential statements about challenges of AI. One just written from pure resentment, like no one cared when factories were closed so why should we care for lawyers, writers, and other people could lose their jobs. Only 38% agreed with that.Asked about if technology companies, a statement of whether technology companies will use AI make things more productive, but these benefits go to business owners in Wall Street, 80% agreed with that.And then basically, this is just something else from Silicon Valley, like cryptocurrency. Only 50% agreed with that. So in terms of writing a statement about challenges of AI, AI was able to write something that more people agreed with than any of the three different variations that I tried.SHEFFIELD: Hah. Yeah. Well, that’s going to be revealing perhaps. But to that end, you guys also did actually ask it reminds me of another portion of the survey where when you were asking respondents about what they thought would be the personal or industry-wide impact of AI, and that 76% of them said that AI would have a negative impact on political campaigning.Is that, would you agree with them in that regard? Tell me what you think.CLERMONT: I mean, it’s hard. I don’t think most people would think that political campaigns are the most uplifting things to begin with. The fact that people believe that it’ll be made worse is a little bit challenging.I think there’s going to be a lot of risk for politicians and campaign staff using a lot of AI in their content and basically treating, I think ultimately from what I’ve gotten from this research and what I’ve gotten from looking at a lot of other polls of AI—more than anything else is people want to be more connected to human beings than they currently are.I mean, 81% don’t believe that AI will provide the same quality of service as humans. 71% believe that it won’t provide the same level of entertainment. People want more connections with other human beings. And I think that’s sort the other thing of the hesitancy about AI and the hesitancy. I mean as a smartphone addict myself and who—like if I’m not in front of a computer or like fully engaged, then it’s right back to the phone to look at Twitter.Like all of this stuff really, like we know it is not healthy, I know that that’s not healthy. I think we all sort of know to some degree, people who use their phones a lot, it’s not particularly healthy. And the way to way to mitigate that is to have more human contact in our lives.And I think in political campaigns, I think in a lot of ways, the biggest problem is not like candidates are going to use AI and it’s going to be more impersonal.It really is sort of the progression of when you read about politics in the 19th century, it is all about human connection. It’s all about like the presidential candidates would basically stay at their homes. And people in various communities would rally for different candidates. People would show up to parades and be engaged with representatives on that campaign in a human level.And I think as we’ve added the colder medium of television where we mostly communicate on high level campaigns via TV ads is made things more impersonal and it makes it easier to run negative ads. It makes it easier to run campaigns that are largely negative and they were in the 19th century as well.But television inherently as a colder medium and can spread that more widely. I think there’s been lots of positive ways that computers have actually, and technology have helped campaigns. I think when you look at the early Obama campaigns and how they used Facebook to organize local events for people to meet one-on-one and Obama supporters to meet one-on-one, that was part of like the feeling that went into that campaign.That’s sort of the first thing that clicked to me on Facebook and politics was I was tracking Obama events in New Hampshire, and they were having not just a candidate shows up for a fundraiser, but encouraging people in communities to come together for a yard sale or a street. And then take the proceeds and then give it to the Obama campaign.But what it was doing was providing tools for people to meet together in real life. I think the worry in AI and political campaigns is that the more we retreat behind the computer and engage in politics through our computer, that’s ultimately going to be sort of more negative on our discourse and not really drive greater engagement, it’ll drive lesser engagement.And if the tools allow greater human contact, that is the way to mitigate it. But ultimately, it’s like what people are looking for is greater human contact in their life. Not more content, more sort of contact through their computer. That their computer is gradually making more efficient and cutting out the need for other human beings.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and I think one thing that’s almost certainly going to happen and it already exists to some extent now, is that when you look — and this is particularly true with Republican political candidates, that a lot of them are using bots on Twitter to amplify their content.So in in my former life as a Republican technology and media strategist, one of the things that my old firm did was that we actually ran the social media for the CPAC conference one year. And we were posting some lines from the speeches that everybody was saying.And we noticed that after the conference was over, that some of the speakers, people were continuously retweeting the things that we had written. And Scott Walker was the number-one offender with us, the former Republican Wisconsin governor, that there were these bots that were retweeting us at like, 2:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning: ‘I gotta get this!’And it was only Scott Walker, like, him—and there was one other person, but there was like, only those two people. And obviously no one, no human being was sitting there at 2:00 being like, ‘yes, there’s a line from Scott Walker was the best thing ever. I gotta put it out there again.’Nobody was doing that in real life. And like that to me, I think you’re going to see a lot more of that, especially for Republicans because they don’t really care about getting majority support for their ideas, but they understand you have to at least pretend to have it.And so that’s why it is a thing in Republican consulting to have bots that you offer to candidates. And so I think that now that ChatGPT for instance, has an application programming interface or API, there’s a lot of people out there that are going to say, okay, well now I’m going to use this API to look at my list of talking points here.We’re going to train it on my campaign messaging, and then we’re just going to feed it out through Twitter or Facebook or wherever. I mean, I think that that’s absolutely going to happen if it, it isn’t already.CLERMONT: I would agree with that. Although just to argue that, those bots we really could see how much they did for Scott Walker’s presidential campaign.But yes, but also like putting my Democratic strategist hat on, the thing that I’m going to be looking for, and advising my clients to look for, is any hint that my opponent’s not being genuine and is using bots and AI, and what they’re doing is basically insulting the intelligence of the electorate.Like some voters are not really going to care about that. Those aren’t reachable anyway. But I’d be looking for any hint that my opponent’s using AI and using AI in a way in those ways to dehumanize this process and basically dehumanize the campaign and call it out immediately. And really challenge them on that, their use of this technology in a way that is in treat treating human beings like they’re easily programmable robots.That’s not how people want to view themselves as, but any hint of that would be used to call them out constantly and like both, like not from the scope perspective, but if they’re using bots in that way is to discover it, amplify it, and make fun of them for it. And really try ways to really try find ways to actually win on the ways that we actually want to, which is not to sound like pompous, liberal Democrat, but the whole point of this is to improve people’s lives, to make it easier for kids to get a high-quality education. Or for communities to have plentiful jobs and things to all the things that Democrats are campaigning on, everyone having healthcare being able to afford to go to college or afford job training.Any effort that’s trying to undermine that is something that we want to call out. And this is just another fair game to know that there are risks of using this technology in a way to depress voter turnout, stifle engagement and use media the same way an authoritarian country would use it to basically concentrate power into the leader. And call people out on that the second that they’re veering into that territory.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, I think potentially also, I mean, they might try to do it as kind of frame it as a joke that, ‘Here’s me spamming the internet with 2,000 videos of Joe Biden saying horrible things. Haha. Isn’t that funny?’CLERMONT: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: I mean, it may not happen in 2024, but probably it’s going to happen pretty, pretty rapidly.I mean, we are now, so recently Google released a text to video AI generative system so that you literally just type in, in the demo that they had with it, that I saw that was kind of interesting, and we’ll put a link to it in here, in the show notes for people.But it was a teddy bear, a teddy bear walking through New York City and it literally generated a video. And it was blocky and not fully— I mean you definitely knew it was fake, but the way that you can map if you are using a computerized mask system or something like that, you can definitely make convincing-looking fake videos of people.And I think given what they’ve done with some of the pro-Trump online activism, they’re just going to say: ‘Oh, well, it’s just a joke. What, you take a joke, can you? What’s wrong with you?’That’s going to be, I think that might be a little hard to push back on.CLERMONT: Yeah. I think that’s right. It is worrisome. And my own personal perspective is that it’s going to be more worrisome if they do it effectively against Ron DeSantis and their opponents in the Republican primary. And that’s the same problem I had when I was laughing and enjoying Trump as he was eviscerating Republicans before he got the nomination, that is concerning.And I think it gets in a way of regulations that can clearly define what is real and what is fake and that might not be able to happen. And yeah, that’s one of the existential crises that we face if people do recognize already that not being able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake is a problem.And there are ways that just with just with the technology that’s available out there now, audio and video is enough to be concerning. And quite frankly, there was video the other day of—or audio the other day of reporters hounding Kevin McCarthy over the Nashville School shooting where he is like, do you want to talk about movies, talk about anything other than this?And there was something he said that was weird at the end, it’s like, come on guys, like the way that I was talked to you is like, is this really Kevin McCarthy? Like, or is this like clever audio of Kevin McCarthy layered on with reporter shouting at him? And I don’t—I mean, I think it is, I don’t know, because it is easy to fake.And yeah, that is going to be one of the challenges of people not being able to know what is real and what is fake. And if anything already, like the highest premium a candidate has now is someone who is viewed as honest and authentic and can look straight in the camera and does not talk with talking points, and seems real and authentic.I mean, I could say Sherrod Brown is able to do that. Bernie Sanders is able to do that. Joe Biden is able to do that. And the key is that authenticity is the one way to be able in real time to call out something that’s fake and then make fun of the people using it.But there really isn’t going to be able to be laws and standards the way that things are now that’s really going to be able to enforce it. It’s going to have to come from people who built their career on not sounding scripted on talking like a human being on leadership and being an authentic and genuine leader who listens, is empathetic. Those are going to be the hardest to make these fake videos about.But it’s just like the obvious fake, like the example that you showed earlier that we did, that’s clearly not real, it is really worrying—the things that do seem very real, but a little bit off that are going to be the biggest problems.SHEFFIELD: Well, and I suspect that any of the regulations regarding the use of AI that we’re going to see, some of the earliest are going to be about whether you can make fake videos of a candidate. I mean, imagine if somebody had made a video pretending to be Joe Biden, secretly ordering a nuclear strike against China, or whatever it is.Like, we’re going to have to have regulations on at least some of that stuff. And I imagine that’s going to be some of the earliest in addition to whatever other ones may come along.CLERMONT: I mean, people freaked out in 1984 when Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his weekly radio address made a joke about how the nukes are about to launch on Russia, we’ve been attacked.And he was just sort of laughing, making fun. That audio came out. It was like several days of really negative press. He had to apologize. It was just joking. And that was real. You’re a hundred percent right. If someone’s making synthetic audio that says that, people are going to overreact because even if you think it’s fake, what if it’s not?And it was hard enough then for Reagan to be able to be able to sort of walk back from that sort of now very analog situation that he was in. But he did say that, even if he didn’t mean it, but the difference now is going to be like, is it possible, like sort of the Dick Cheney formulation of if a terrorist attack is a 1% chance of happening, we have to treat it like it’s a hundred percent certainty. If there’s a 1% chance that a fake video or fake audio might be real, I mean, do we respond to it like it’s real or not?Those are going to be serious, serious challenges that we have going forward.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. But I guess to approach this from another angle, is that one of the other debates that AI has, and I guess in particular ChatGPT brought out, is a discussion about whether there is bias, quote unquote, in what ChatGPT makes.But it’s hearkening back to this larger sort of epistemological debate that the right and the left are having about, liberal media bias. I mean, it’s that same thing all over again, but in the AI sense.You guys did also look at that in, in your survey. So you asked people, would AI systems be designed in a way that will be politically biased? And 53% of the respondents agreed with that. And then you broke it down further in terms of their political leaning. So, 64% of Republican-leaners and identifiers said that they would be biased toward liberals and then only 3% of Republicans said there would be no bias. And 14% said there would be bias for conservatives.And then if we look at it on the Democratic side, 55%, that was the majority for, for Democrats said there that they didn’t know. And then only 25% said a bias to ward Republicans. And then when you look at it with the independents, there were 29% who said there it would be, AI would be biased toward liberals. And 14% said biased toward conservatives.So this is really kind of a mirror of the way the polling breaks down when you ask people about the media, is it biased toward liberals or conservatives? The, the Republicans are convinced overwhelmingly that everything is against them.And I will say for people who are just coming into this episode, that we are going to be talking about the sort of epistemic and philosophical implications of this. But we’ve also done some other episodes, which I will link to that you can check out about sort of this crisis of knowledge among Republicans.So for people who tend to identify as Republican nowadays, they tend to be overwhelmingly motivated by religion. And even if they don’t go to church, religion is their identity. It is an identity politics for them. And we’re seeing it here, I think on your survey with this here, that they’re very concerned that everybody’s out to get them here. I think you can see that in this. I mean what’s your reaction?CLERMONT: That’s about right. It is interesting to me that like only 8% said outright, no, there won’t be a bias. Like most people say they’re not sure. They don’t know. 14% of Republicans did believe that they think things would be biased in their direction. Which I always, I always think is interesting. But it mirrors like when you ask people like, which–SHEFFIELD: Sorry, sorry. It was actually higher. So if you had, the Democrats said only 7% of Democrats said it would be biased toward them.CLERMONT: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: So it was double the amount, which it was interesting. I thought that was an interesting dichotomy there, but go ahead.CLERMONT: Yeah, no, I think that’s interesting too. Democrats overall are less focused on, like the media’s biased. I mean, most people, most Democrats don’t necessarily think that it is, or that it’s that there’s some bias towards conservatives.But yeah, like when you ask Republicans like, is the news media trustworthy? The answer is overwhelmingly no. But you ask like, is Fox News trustworthy and unbiased? And the answer is overwhelmingly yes.So much of when we’ve asked people sort of detailed ‘what media do you consume, and do you trust the news media overall?’ And then ask trust questions for everything that they consume. Most people, Democrats and Republicans trust the media that they consume with the exception of Facebook. Like people don’t trust the information, the news that they see on Facebook, both Democrats and Republicans.SHEFFIELD: Hey, good idea.CLERMONT: Yeah, and I’ve not looked at it recently for Twitter since its ownership change. But I would note in our poll that the sort of overall impression of Twitter was fairly negative. But I think that’s right. I mean, people do believe that the other side will be unfairly advantaged or that there’s bias and that’s really been conditioned on the Republican side for generations, that the news media’s biased.And so the expectation would be, especially with prominent Republican leaders like Donald Trump and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and others denouncing tech and the tech industry fairly consistently and fairly aggressively, that Republican voters would be the ones that are more likely to believe there’ll be political bias against them with AI software.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.CLERMONT: And there’s nothing comparable on the left or the Democratic side pushing that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Which is really interesting to me. Because when we’re talking about what do people want to be done about AI in terms of regulation, it does fit into a larger technology policy area that the Democratic voter wants more leadership, wants more regulation, wants more concern, more discussion about these things.But when you look at Republican elite rhetoric versus Democratic elite rhetoric, it’s Republican elites who are talking about this far, far more. And I think that not only does it fit within this media bias context, it also is a way for Republicans to try to portray themselves as populist because that is basically the way that Republicans have been able to win elections continuously since Ronald Reagan is to say: ‘Actually, yeah, even though the billionaires are the people who support us, we are the populist party. We’re the working party because we attack these Big Tech elites because we attack Big Hollywood or whatever.’And that, it’s just literally a copy paste of that same earlier strategy. And yet the Democratic leadership class, let’s say President Biden or Chuck Schumer, they’re not, they don’t seem to be engaged and understanding that their voters want something else from them. They want them to step up on this topic. And also that it’s creating a real opening for Republicans.CLERMONT: I think that’s fair.The challenge that exists on this, and the relationship between the federal government and particularly the technology industry and technology companies, is that both parties are reliant on people in this field for campaign contributions. Ron DeSantis is going to the Bay Area relatively soon, it was reported in Puck Media and doing an event hosted by one of the founders of the data firm, Palantir.And yeah, there’s levels of hypocrisy on ‘We’re going after tech. We’re going to be the party of the working man,’ and then using that as a wedge while at the same time raising money from their allies who are in this same industry.This is a conversation that goes way beyond this topic about like money and politics, which is ultimately the issue that we need to address on the corruption side, and the way we finance our campaigns and who is financing them, and the campaign finance regime that the Supreme Court created.So yeah, there, there’s a lot of political benefit in going after tech on the Republican side while at the same time fundraising from it.There really isn’t the counterbalancing effort on the Democratic side to have a serious examination of the role of technology. What are the right regulations? What are the right things that we can do to benefit the most people while maintaining entrepreneurship and people investing in solutions that are going to make a difference in people’s lives?There really isn’t that space right now in our politics for that type of discussion. Certainly on the national level, certainly that would be covered on cable news or in a political debate. And all the incentive is going to be as the primary season begins is for Republican candidates to do this dance of simultaneously raising money from people that work in the technology industry while bashing it, being the one who’s going to claim that they’re going to go after Big Tech the strongest.Yeah, that’s going to be a key driver of the Trump campaign, the DeSantis campaign and others who get in this race.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting further that when you actually look at the political contributions or the rhetoric of the people who are in particular AI focused, they do tend to be kind of stereotypical Silicon Valley libertarians, right-wing Ayn Rand fans like Peter Thiehl, the chief of Palantir.Like Elon Musk, who gave millions of dollars to OpenAI but now says he wants to make another one that’s going to be anti-woke, quote unquote.But then you’ve got other ones, like there’s this whole— and we’re going to do an episode about it on the show, but this whole idea of “Longtermism,” which is kind of like a blend of Ayn Rand plus Scientology, it’s a very bizarre right-wing pseudo-religion. And basically Sam Altman, who is the head of OpenAI seems to be aligned with some of these ideas.And a bunch of other people in this field have this idea that basically they’re trying to get people to focus on, well, we need to think about computers that are going to destroy us all because they’ll be so smart, they’ll be like Skynet and Terminator, but don’t want people to focus on the here and now and the implications of the technologies that currently exist and the way that they’re being used and who’s using them. How the money’s getting distributed. They don’t want people to talk about that stuff.They want them to think about this fanciful sci-fi concept instead. It’s really curious.CLERMONT: Well, you were talking about something that I am not aware of until just now, but I will have to read more about it. That’ll be my weekend work.When we’re thinking about responsible AI, which is like some, I mean some, we’ve always been operating in universes with AI on some level, like giving us recommendations on Netflix and Spotify music lists. Like I found out more about a lot of the bands that I’m listening to now are something that like I owe to the AI at Spotify and AI at Sirius XM radio.But like the important thing, I think, at least for AI in a way that’s actually going to persuade voters that this is going to have a positive impact is spell out the benefits and worries for to be as specific as possible on what the benefits of the technology will be, and what they’re doing to protect consumers and the public.Beforehand my parents lived in San Francisco and in 2018 when like the automated scooters were just being launched, the company just dumped scooters everywhere in San Francisco and it was chaos. They were on the streets and sidewalks. The government didn’t know what to do. I think there was some sort of collective that came and put them in a pile and burned them in front of the Facebook bus and sort of the equivalent of just putting stuff out there and then having the government catch up is just going to be too damaging.And so, like at every possible level, we need to be having the discussion of what the benefits of the technology will be and how the consumers and the public are being protected. And honestly, the best way to sort of talk about this and understand it is just ask ChatGPT to say what are the challenges of AI.It’s one thing that it, as one of your previous guests noted, it’s just predicting language so it knows what to say. But the people supporting it and promoting it need to actually spell that out and show the level of concern.And this is going to have to be something that, again, Washington can’t just sort of put this on a plate with a bunch of other issues. Which is have many hearings on this topic. Bring in experts, take up the Ford Foundation and other nonprofits and advocacy groups that want to bring technologists and people who understand this technology into government and have a whole of government examination.I think it’s incumbent to discuss this—and this is why this is great and thank you for having this show—I think it’s also up to all of us to understand these products better, both people that work in politics and work in media, but I think in general, it’s not just sort of wait for it to happen and sort of hear from friends what this does, but really try to understand this in a way that we didn’t necessarily for social media and didn’t for a lot of the other things that came like automation that we’ve been processing as a society for the last two decades.This is too important. And part of this, part of this whole poll in doing this was allowing me to educate myself more on what people think and how this is going to be received politically. But I think we need, it’s going to be incumbent on everyone in media to really talk about this and understand it and have these types of serious, serious discussions that we’ve had in this last hour.So I really thank you for that.SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah. Well, that’s definitely what we’re trying to do here, so I do appreciate you joining us as well. You are on Twitter still—at least until it burns to the ground,CLERMONT: Until burns to the ground, even after it burns to the ground. SJClermont at Twitter, @sjclermont, and then @changepolls for Change Research and changeresearch.com.We poll regularly on all sorts of different political topics and non-political topics. And yeah, engage with us any way that you can.SHEFFIELD: Cool. Well, I’m glad to have you here.So that’s our program for today. I appreciate everybody for watching or listening or reading. Thank you for joining us. 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