This is Democracy – Episode 93: Are Americans Coming Together?

Narration: This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we’re going to talk to a political scientist, public intellectual, and master teacher, Sam Abrams. Sam has been on our podcast before. He’s doing some of the most important, and I think, rigorous research on changing American views of our society, and in particular, on the evidence, the hopeful evidence, of an emerging American consensus. Sam teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and he’s also a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He published a recent piece in the dispatch, which we have linked to our website, and he’s coming to us right now from Virginia. Sam, thank you for joining us.

Sam Abrams: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeremi Suri: Before we turn to Sam’s groundbreaking research, we have, of course, Zachary’s scene-setting poem. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?

Zachary Suri: Noticing Each Other.

Jeremi Suri: Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Noticing each other. There was a colony in the dark rolling hills among the tobacco lowlands and the formidable oaks, and the New England cottages and Baltimore docks, and there was a colony that became a country. There was a country of lies, of rolling pastures, of cornfields and bankers and cold streams. A country of plantations of brutalized slaves, and there was a lie that became more of a truism. There was a nation of fanatic segregation, of universities and libraries and great transatlantic jets. A nation of prejudice in backwards simplicity, and there was prejudice that turned into justice. There is a land of frenzied terror, of computer chips and highways and cell phone towers. A land suffering under its own fear, like a body in the face of its own immune system, and there was terror that turned into hope. Each generation there has been a different America, and progress has come always with regret, and hope has come always with hate, and each time, there has been a divide, more spoken of than actualized. Each generation there has been a new consensus, a new remembering of the remembrances, a new reckoning with the reckonings. Each time, a new generation unscrewed its own training wheels and the old ones slowly died. There was a colony and there was a country of lies, and there was a nation of prejudice, and there was a land of frenzied terror, and now there is a land of restless behemoths beginning to notice each other.

Jeremi Suri: I love all the historical references, Zachary. What is your poem really about?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about the contradictions in American history and how progress and generational consensuses are not linear, but they’re very much go back and forth and how each generation forges a new image of America, and of American values.

Jeremi Suri: Sam, is it correct to say that your research shows that a new image of America, in Zachary’s terms, is coming into view?

Sam Abrams: It is. That was a phenomenal poem. I am blown away every time I hear your poem, Zachary. I don’t know how you do it, I don’t know where that well of creativity comes from, and it’s very impressive. I’m smiling here, if you could see me. I’m thrilled you actually said that. Because one thing that happened that is of incredible significance, just two days ago in the United States, and this came out from Pew. Pew spends a lot of time, effort, and money to study the pulse of the United States, and the pulse of the globe more generally. Two days ago, they actually released a report showing that millennials are now the largest generation in the United States in terms of just raw population size. This is a very important change, yet it really went unnoticed largely because of the pandemic and the negativity in our press and Twitter. But to your point of generational replacement and then generations shaping the country and the nature of the country, millennials are now the largest group. We knew this was coming. This has been something we’ve been observing now for quite a while, but it actually just happened. Hopefully, that will spell good news, I think, for our country’s future and how we think about policy and bringing the country together again.

Jeremi Suri: I’ve been saying this for a long time and looking at these same numbers that millennials are different, how do you find them different from the baby boomers who have largely governed our country for quite some time? What differences do you see, Sam?

Sam Abrams: They’re quite significant. One of which is — and I’m going to probably not make a lot of friends here especially ones who are on tenure committees, although I’m happily tenured — is that baby boomers tend to be a little more selfish. They grew up in a world of materialism. They grew up in a world of traditional ladders. They grew up in a world of quite a bit of division and groups and inwardness, if you will, largely in response to what happened after World War II. Millennials, and I also want to throw in Gen Z, there are lot of similarities between these two groups, but they are very separate. Gen Z are my current students, millennials are my first batch of students about a decade ago, and there are some differences. But millennials are much more open, they are much more tolerant, they are less materialistic. This is the group that when you watch travel — or read a travel website, they often say, “People now are interested in experiences, not things.” That sums up millennials. The idea of ownership is a little different. The idea of community and relationships, marriage, and what they value, again, which is much more community than older groups.

That’s a huge significant change, and this should impact, eventually, how we govern, how we think about inequalities, how we think about distribution of resources. One of the big issues that I note to my students regularly is that we don’t see that many millennials on the stage nationally. It frustrates my millennial students and my Gen Z students when you look at the Democrats, for instance; where were they? We looked at older boomers at this point. There weren’t even angry Gen Xers all that much on the stage. In an era where we’re calling for more representation, especially on the left, the Democrats are going to end up, or did end up with a choice of basically two older gentlemen, and one is Mr. Biden. I don’t want to criticize Biden on a personal level, but from a generational perspective, this is the wrong direction to be heading. It’s pretty interesting to see that millennials’ voice has been drowned out. I think it’s time for that to change.

Jeremi Suri: Do you see evidence that that is changing? Because you’ve pointed to a lot of the evidence that despite these demographic shifts, power still remains largely in the hands of an older generation.

Sam Abrams: Yes, I wish you hadn’t asked me that. The shift is not there as strongly. We don’t really see it yet. This younger group is a little bit more apathetic to politics. They’ve been disengaged for so long, it’s going to take an event [inaudible] of some sort to really trigger and fire this group up, perhaps COVID-19 will do that. I don’t know if it’s doing that right now. We are in the progress of trying to figure this all out. We have studies in the field. A lot of people are trying to make sense of what’s going on. We at AI are certainly going to be doing all of that. But no, as of now, the older generation here, the boomers, have been in power. They have been in power for a very long time, politically, and we have not seen a younger generation really speak up. Pre-boomer, we had a group called the silent generation, but I think another silent generation is coming up, and that’s the Gen Xers, my generation, folks who are in their 40s, grew up in the 1980s because we are just nowhere, you never hear anything about us. We are okay with that, but it’s time for the millennials to step up.

Jeremi Suri: Well, I like millennials so much, I like to consider myself an honorary millennial even though I’m a Gen Xer just like you, Sam.

Sam Abrams: I’d point out that there’s a very close line for you and me that way, but I remember a clear division is I headed off to college. I was on the east coast, went to college on the west coast with a tower of 200 CDs. I bought a boom box, I didn’t have a cell phone, and had to buy a clunky desktop. By the time I graduated, I had a flip phone, we had MP3s and Napster, and I had a laptop. So things do change and that really is a significant change for a lot.

Jeremi Suri: You’re describing my world, it’s absolutely right. Sam, what are the different views you see coming together now? Your recent research, especially this wonderful new piece in The Dispatch, really does point to some evidence of an emerging consensus, maybe even across generations a little bit. What do you see there?

Sam Abrams: So in the piece in The Dispatch — I thank you for saying that, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I actually just wrapped up another piece that will hopefully be out in a day or two that extends it even more. Let me mention that new work and then I’ll mention The Dispatch piece. The upcoming piece is actually about regionalism and geography. One of the things that we’ve noticed is, as people have called for opening things back up, ending certain quarantines, renormalizing certain things in the economy, allowing certain congregations to occur, I don’t mean religious, but just allowing people to go to restaurants or other venues if there’s social distancing, is that, I’m a New Yorker and New York was hit very hard. I’m now in Virginia, and Virginia was not hit nearly as hard. So people talk about regional variance, and we’ve long heard about regional differences. Oh, well, New England is very different from the west coast, if you are in Washington, Oregon, and California. I just did some empirical work on that, and that’s just not true. Just like with The Dispatch piece, if you look at how people are reacting, the truth of the matter is that people are very divided on how they view President Trump, and how they view his handling of the crisis. People on the right and traditionally more conservative leaning states are — state that they’re very happy with Trump. People who were on the left and more liberal leaning states are very disappointed and very dissatisfied with how Trump has been handling this crisis.

This data point is one that so many people on Twitter, so many people in the blogosphere, so many of those in the press like to harp on and say, look, it’s just more of the traditional divides. These groups are far apart and they’re never going to come together. As soon as you say, let’s go a little bit deeper here and actually ask what people think. Are we in the midst of a serious problem? Do you believe in social distancing? Do you think it was a good idea we shut down international travel? Do you think it was a good idea we shut down stores? Do you think it’s a good idea that we’ve limited or banned large gatherings and events like sporting arena events or stadium events? What’s remarkable is almost everybody says yes, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in a traditionally blue area or red area. It doesn’t matter if you’re extremely liberal or you’re incredibly conservative. Americans are sensible, and we need to remember that. We do have polarizing figures. They can exploit these small differences. They can play on a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump. But when you take that off the table, we find what I’ve been finding for over a decade on my research, which is thoughtful, caring Americans who really want to help each other out, and Americans who are not foolish. Americans who want to do the right thing to protect this country.

Zachary Suri: But what about the argument that throughout American history, the generational change has come from the extremes, has come from moving from one pole to another? How do you reconcile that with this argument for a new more centrist consensus?

Sam Abrams: That’s a great question. What I would say is I don’t think it requires an overwhelmingly large number of extremists. I think — and I may get in trouble here for saying this as well — but if you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, he’s been remarkably consequential. He may not have won the nomination for president, but he shifted the Democratic Party, he shifted the narrative, he shifted the priorities. AOC has been very effective at doing that since she entered Congress. She’s become much more of a centrist [inaudible] of late. I agree that a lot of change comes from the extremes. I don’t believe if you look at the historical record that it has to be an extreme leftist or right wing person needs to win, they need to shift the dialogue. I think how we reconcile that together. Jeremi, you are a far better person to provide the narrative of how that worked with LBJ and with civil rights. There were people who were on the extreme. They rightfully pulled the country in the direction that needed to, but they didn’t take power and they didn’t dominate power. But they were very powerful and important actors. I think that’s a very good example of you don’t need an extremist to win, but they can and do have incredible potency in shifting the narrative discourse. I think we’re seeing that now with people like Bernie Sanders.

Jeremi Suri: Right. I think you’re absolutely right, Sam. I think you could argue that figures like William Jennings Bryan, as well as Martin Luther King and others who never actually win office or are able to actually have perhaps more influence on the political temperature of the country than many of those who are in fact elected to office.

Sam Abrams: Right. If you look at, again, Sanders, I mean, his legislative record is not particularly great. There’s certain people, Hilary Clinton leaked out that people don’t like working with him. But that’s a fair strategy. I want to be very clear that is an absolutely fair strategy for him to take. He may not be very good in the Senate, he may not be great in terms of building consensus, and that is a strategy. Some people work from within, some people worked from outside. My colleague at AI, Yuval Levin, writes quite a bit about this. There are many ways to promote social change. There are many ways to focus and reinvigorate institutions. Some take inward position, some take an external position. So even if someone like Sanders may not have a incredibly good record in terms of being a master of the Senate, the way someone like LBJ may have been, the fact is he shifted public opinion, shifted dialogue and discourse, and laid the groundwork for people like Ocasio-Cortez and others to run. That’s been incredibly fruitful.

Jeremi Suri: Why is someone, Sam, like Bernie Sanders so popular with this emerging millennial group?

Sam Abrams: Sure. He’s popular with certain groups within the millennial community. He’s not uniformly popular whatsoever. In many cases, and I’ve written quite a bit about this, the millennials’ hearts and minds are open. They want to see someone who’s different, they dislike the status quo, they’re looking for someone who can speak to them and they believe represents them and some of their concerns about equity and mobility; he’s been very good at that. One of the things I point out regularly in my research is that money matters in politics but nowhere near the way it did a decade ago, or two, or even three decades ago. It is much more affordable and much easier to connect with people in a meaningful way. Bernie has a powerful ground organization of volunteers, these are very active people, and they are genuine, they are authentic. This mirrors what we saw when Barack Obama was actually running. His ground campaign was phenomenal. It was voluntary, it was done over text messaging. I’ll never forget when he announced his vice presidential nomination, it was done over text messaging. I remember he crashed quite a few cell networks doing that because [inaudible] .

Jeremi Suri: That’s a great story.

Sam Abrams: That’s a very similar dynamic here, where a lot of the parties and a lot of the current political elites are out of touch and disconnected from this younger generation. So I expect to see a lot more consideration paid to these folks. That means you have to be your authentic self, your genuine self, and you have to work to connect with them. Sanders has been very good at this. But again, it’s very important to mention that there are ample numbers of individuals who are younger who dislike him, who just like his approach, and dislike those who are in his field operation. They find him too aggressive. This actually was something that came up in one of the debates actually, where I believe Senator Warren confronted him for having unusually aggressive ground campaign. So I want to point out that he has connected very well, but I think the data regularly shows that it’s not some uniform or monolithicly large block. But he certainly does have a lot of support among these younger crew.

Zachary Suri: Is this general change as much cultural as it is political?

Sam Abrams: I try not to separate those two concepts, actually. I think it’s very hard to do it. I know a lot of people like to do it. So I would say it’s so deeply coupled and so intertwined that it’s hard to pull that apart. So I would say yes, they are deeply connected. Cultural norms influence political norms and vice versa. There’s that feedback loop, so I don’t know what else to say other than I think, yes, that’s all true.

Jeremi Suri: Right. I think this comes through in your research as well. It does seem as if there are differences over the candidate people like, but the kinds of politics they want, which is I think fundamentally what political culture is about, that’s where I think you’re seeing the emerging consensus. People want leaders who are more empathetic, who are more in touch. It does seem to me that’s where political culture might be most important right now.

Sam Abrams: Yes, I think if you had a candidate like George H.W. Bush many, many years ago, for instance, he famously couldn’t tell you how a checkout worked when he needed to go buy milk. He was completely disconnected from that. I don’t think that would play very well anymore at all, and I think a sense of normalcy and realism is absolutely critical, and I think that change really came to a head with someone like Barack Obama. Barack Obama would release his playlists, the various things he would be listening to. He’d be able to make very powerfully important cultural references across the board, and Jeremi and Zachary, I completely agree, we need to have that. You can’t be removed anymore. It used to be, well, you can be a political operative or a political manager, but you don’t necessarily need to be part of the cultural zeitgeist. You’re above that or it’s an unnecessary facet of being a good leader. I don’t think that’s possible today because I think they’re so tightly coupled. You need to be able to know. Now, of course, the downside to that is, do you really need to pay attention to TikTok and celebrities on TikTok and Twitter? I learned quite a bit about this from my freshman class or my Freshman Studies class. I hope I don’t need to pay that much attention down the road to people doing dance routines for 30 seconds, they are fun to watch. But finding that balance and that right balance is going to be key.

But as I say, lots of folks, this is a brave new world, things move so quickly with technology. The rules are so fluid. I used to say we in political science had some rules, we understood the impact of certain technologies, we understood campaign effects, we could predict things reasonably well or at least explain them if we couldn’t predict them, but explain dynamics with some sense of regularity. The world has shifted so rapidly and the technology has changed so quickly in such a meaningful way that we don’t have a great sense of this and we can speculate, a lot of us do. But something fun to do is next time you clean out your office or closet, wherever you have old magazines. I was cleaning out my old Foreign Policies and my old Foreign Affairs and there are these articles from five years ago that talk about this great technology shifts and how that’s going to impact the way we communicate or do business or associate, and none of that ever happened, but we keep writing about it. So it’s hard for me to speculate, but I think this is tightly coupled and there’s no way we want to try to pull this stuff apart. It’s just too [inaudible]

Jeremi Suri: Right, and certainly, the COVID crisis brings that out in every way. It seems both the intersection of politics and culture and also the importance of technology, as we’re doing this podcast not in a studio, but through new technology.

Sam Abrams: Exactly, and we talked about, my social media feeds, which I try to limit, are filled with comments about Zoom. Half of them are negative, they’re draining, you have to pay attention to how you look, and people are judging you based on how nice the background is, right? I just had the pleasure of, well, actually, I would just say thanks to Zoom, I was able to invite guests who I normally would not be able to bring to my course from a variety of perspectives. I had a number of folks who are very, very religious, which my students had never had the chance to necessarily hear from. I had scholars and leading thinkers from the right and the left speak in a way that normally wouldn’t happen and that’s been a way to connect in some remarkable ways. My family’s Jewish, we did a Zoom Seder. Objectively, it was horrible, but we all talked over each other, kids were crying, nothing really happened. When we’re all done, I shut the computer and step back and said, what a magical evening because there are 20 different households staring at a little black box, trying to connect in a spiritual way and it was spiritual. So again, this stuff really matters, and I’m concerned actually on that front, but Joe Biden is not connecting very well and not connecting well enough at all, considering the technology we have. Trump is a master of this, and I incidentally worry about how that’s going to play out for mobilization and election efforts.

Jeremi Suri: It sounds like your Seder was a little bit similar to ours, except in ours we had multiple households on and there was a moment where we were all watching each other eat.

Sam Abrams: We didn’t even get to the eating together. It was more of a 20-minute mess and it’s something I will never forget and I’m actually very grateful that happened. But we have some actual data on this. One of the things to note is that for those people who had meaningful social relationships face-to-face or even over the phone, they were deep, regular social intimates, one of the things that we’ve been able to capture is that we know that even with the isolation measures, even with the lockdowns, even with the staff work-at-home, the work-at-home orders, those individuals have actually been able to maintain fairly balanced, social lives since this has happened. Unfortunately, on the flip side, for those who were isolated pre-COVID for better or for worse, unfortunately, the technology has not increased their connectivity. It’s only hampered it. So one piece of advice I make to people is, so I wrote a piece about picking up the phone. People are often uncomfortable looking at each other through an intermediary, but pick up the phone, call a friend and call a grandparent, call a cousin, call someone. That technology is very intimate to hear someone in your ear and that seems to be working in terms of bridging and bonding connections in this pandemic.

Jeremi Suri: Well, this would seem to echo what we talked about in a prior episode on education during this crisis that children who are well connected to educational environments tend to stay well connected even in an online framework. Whereas those who aren’t, it multiplies the difficulties that they have and that’s what we’re [inaudible].

Sam Abrams: I certainly agree with that. One thing I want to note though, and I think that’s really important, is that a lot of people are, and rightfully so in a lot of cases, are saying that digital divides exist and in particular when we think about education folks with less substantial means are going to struggle, they’re going to be harmed in greater detail than — rather in greater amounts than those who have fast connective Wi-Fi who have new computers. I certainly agree with that, but cell phone coverage and access to just phones is almost universal. So there are still ways to connect, I’m not saying in a [inaudible] learning environment. I wanted very clear that those considerations for inequalities matter. But I still believe if you look at the density of the phone networks, that we all have the capacity or almost all of us have the capacity to connect today. That’s an important distinction to make.

Jeremi Suri: I think this leads to our final question, which is always where we like to close for listeners, particularly for listeners who are Millennials and Gen Z. What can they do if they believe in helping to forge this consensus, this new American consensus, a consensus that’s somewhere in the middle where it usually is, around social justice, around carrying leadership, around an effective foreign policy? What should they do? What should they be doing right now to help push this process along?

Sam Abrams: So many, many, many things. One which sounds awfully trite is be nice, as strange as that sounds. Sometimes, when I tweet something out, and I try not to do it too much, but tweet out a new article, I get some pretty horrific responses and just pretty mean responses and often I’ll direct message people and say, “I’m happy to talk to you about it, but was this a productive comment?” Just saying, “You’re a fool.” “Okay. Well, let’s talk about it. I’m happy to do it.” They rarely write back. But I try, for instance, in my social media to be very positive, and I don’t try to go negative. Empirically, going negative is a very effective way to get noticed, going negative is a way to generate a lot of attention, but it doesn’t build and bring people together. So be nice and don’t go negative if you can avoid it. I would also say, avoid that negativity, limit your exposure to social media. Because the more you do it, the more lonely you become, and the more insecure you become, and that’s where some of the [inaudible] to lash out occurs.

But there’s some other concrete steps that we can all take that don’t involve money. I want to be clear, this isn’t one of those cases where you need to be a billionaire to run something. There have been plenty of political candidates who have been very effective at winning office without large sums of money, and AOC is another example of that. What you can do is you can start doing more research and presenting more reason online. You can connect with your neighbors, you can pick up the phone and call your neighbors. You can call your friends, you can call your family. You can make sure people are registered to vote, as many elections may be going, not necessarily online, but online via the mail, if you will. We can make sure that our neighbors actually cast a ballot. We can make sure they actually do that. We can talk about politics in a constructive way. We can be open and be willing to engage people we disagree with. We can help try to find candidates that are interested in running. One of the things that we see in political science and we see in the public policy world is that a lot of people have just turned away from this. Some of my own research has shown that the negativity has turned a lot of millennials away. Well, if we see people who are well-situated charismatically, culturally, intellectually, dispositionally to run for office, why not try to rally behind them and help them find their voice and encourage them to speak out and to get more involved in our communities?

All of these little steps are doable. They don’t require a lot of resources other than time, we have a lot of time. I spend a lot of time looking at time diaries. It’s a wonderful way to see what Americans are doing. Use your time, and that has actually increased significantly over the year [inaudible] find the time to engage. We can be positive, we can support candidates we like, we can support people who have the discourse we like, and rather than attack people we may find objectionable or put people down, we can address them in a civil way, in person, over the phone, in neighborhoods, and even online. So I actually think it’s a phenomenal question you ask, and it’s a very different type of answer today that I’d give than I would have given when I was finishing up my undergraduate studies heading over to graduate school. It was all about money. I would have said it was all about the power elite and the power bosses. That I believe was very much true. You had a set of individuals whose hearts and minds you needed to connect with. These people had a lot of sway. You had to win them over, you had to build coalitions. We still need to build coalitions. That’s very important. I do like the idea that on occasion, extremism is important for shifting the dialogue. But then coalition-building and bringing people into the big tent still matters to win elections. I think that Joe Biden showed that by winning the nominee. He didn’t have to say much, he can let the extremes [inaudible] on their own. They may be doing that with Trump as we speak.

But the tactics we can take, the way we can communicate today, this is very different. We don’t need the money, but we need the time, the interest, the compassion, the empathy, the love, if you will, to support each other to push this forward. I have the pleasure of working with many students, whether it’s in my home institution or when I travel. This is an idea that resonates with everybody. This is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing, it’s not a liberal thing, it’s not a conservative thing. This group of people wants pragmatic solutions that bring people together. People on the left and right all believe in social justice. It’s just a matter of how we get there. I want to be very clear about that. There are some who would like to hijack the narrative, of course, and make it an extremist one, but most millennials and Gen Zers that I talked to want everyone have a fair shot, and then have a chance at upward mobility and the American dream. The ways to achieve it and the ways to effect change are different than 20 years ago. It involves time, and voice, and compassion, and empathy, not money. That’s a very good change that I think people welcome.

Jeremi Suri: That’s a very powerful statement, it brings together your research so well. It also showcases what I find so impressive about your work, Sam, how you connect a rigorous social science with very pragmatic ideas about political change. Zachary, does this resonate for Gen Zers like you? Do you see yourself devoting the time and making the effort at being nice and connecting in this way?

Zachary Suri: I think so. I definitely think that we’re moving towards a generational consensus, and I think that Gen Z is going to be a part of that. I also think that what really resonated with me in particular was the power of extremes and how by taking extreme positions and by encouraging different voices to be heard, we can move towards the right direction without having to move perfectly towards an extremest pole or something.

Jeremi Suri: And how those new ideas can actually then become the basis for bringing people together in more of a big tent as well.

Zachary Suri: Exactly.

Jeremi Suri: Well, thank you, Zachary, and thank you, Sam. I hope everyone will read Sam’s research. We’re showcasing some of it, of course, with the podcast here. I think it’s so important that we don’t simply judge our society by the loud mouths who are most commonly quoted and seen on television, but actually look deeper, as Sam is, to the emerging attitudes and changing sociological structure of our society. Thank you, Zachary, for your poem.

Sam Abrams: The phenomenal poem. Totally phenomenal, as usual.

Jeremi Suri: Thank you for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

Male 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Male 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

Female 1: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.