For years, academics and activists have argued that Americans are being played by the political-industrial complex โ made up of politicians from both parties, corporate donors and โ in some cases โ the media.
Together, it is said, theyโre fanning division between Americans and failing to do the peopleโs business โ while serving their own interests. Against that backdrop, how do Americans find common ground on important issues? For answers, KPBSโs Amita Sharma turned to UC San Diego academic John Porten, who formerly served as director of research at the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
John, despite her history as a divisive figure herself, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene recently posted on social media that there exists a toxic political-industrial complex in this country that thrives on dividing us. Do you agree?
Porten: Yes, 100%. I think that the strength of that industry is probably the distinguishing characteristic of the political moment that we're living through today. In fact, there's plenty of evidence for this. We are seeing less bipartisan voting in Congress. I read a study recently that suggested that support for political violence among normal Americans is up over the course of the last two years. We have lots of micro-evidence that shows how the current media landscape affects people's levels of anxiety, their levels of trust in people from other walks of political life and how we're sucked into this rabbit hole of divisiveness extremely easily. So both in the sense of our individual psychology and in the sense of the effect that we see in our political culture, it's pretty obvious that she's right.
Who is in that toxic political-industrial complex? And what is the motive behind dividing the American people?
Porten: Well, the motives are easy to list. It's money and power or freedom for politicians from the consequences of egg prices. I would say that the industry probably has two sides that exist in symbiosis. On one side, you have social media and, to some extent, traditional media that are really focused on bringing eyeballs predictably into places where advertisers can reach them, and then the personalities who can be rocketed to stardom on the backs of some viral interactions. And they have really come to understand that we as people love to see things that make us feel moral outrage. We love to see things that make us feel anxious or afraid. And we will really rabbit hole ourselves into a stream of content that produces that combination of righteousness and anxiety. And so they have a real motive to produce those things so that we keep looking at our screens. And then on the other side, there are political movers, some of whom are elected politicians, others of whom are people who want to be influential in the policy world. They benefit from having a large sway over Americans and are really focused on the issues that they get to dictate as being zero-sum and yet somehow existential to the survival of our society. And as long as we're consuming outrage-provoking content about those things, they have a lot more freedom to operate in the policy areas that really matter to them without facing a great deal of accountability from us as voters.
What are those zero-sum issues?
Porten: We have been taught over probably the last 30 or 40 years that a lot of the policies that we think about as being part of the culture wars really require another side to lose for us to win. In fact, you see a lot of pop political culture stuff that frames the other side being disappointed by a policy, not as an unintended bad consequence, but as part of the benefit. When we talk about trans rights, we've been taught to think of those as really entirely about morality. I can't be right if the other person is wrong and vice versa. And so, if we think about these issues in that way, there's really no path forward other than disappointing what we see as the other half the country. It takes our eye off the ball from the places where there's broader agreement about how the economy should run or what our communities ought to look like in terms of education and health care. So again, if we lean into these culture war-style policies, which generate a lot of moral outrage, then we spend less time talking about what we used to refer to as kitchen table topics.
So if creating disunity among Americans is a deliberate strategy, then how do people themselves, say in a place like San Diego, bridge the gap?
Porten: We've got to develop the discipline to turn away from people who are telling us that there are no solutions other than to have our neighbors lose. We have to turn to leadership that will talk to us about kitchen table issues and talk about how we can forge consensus. And that's going to require us to shut off that instinct to seek moral outrage and anxiety. But at the same time that we've seen this trend toward weaponizing these zero-sum policy issues to divide us, we've also seen the hollowing out of a lot of the community-level organizations and institutions that gave us and our neighborhoods the means to resist those influences. We don't have the same rich tapestry of clubs and community organizations and free third spaces where people can meet others whose political views are not like them and work toward a common good for their neighborhood that builds up leadership that causes them to have more tolerance for people who don't agree with them on every single issue, and that demonstrate that we can make lives better for us and our neighbors without even having to touch these very important, but oftentimes purely moral, questions.
Give me an example of how at the local level, here in San Diego, there are some issues that San Diegans can come together on that are not zero-sum.
Porten: Nobody wants a dirty beach. Very few people want the library in their neighborhood to close. They don't want someone whose spouse is too sick to pick up their kids. There are all sorts of issues that we all more or less agree on, that could benefit from organization at the neighborhood level. Food drives, blood drives, all of this requires from us a couple of things as a community that I think are really beneficial. First, everyone who's involved in a club or a community organization is accountable to come out and provide something tangible. You feel a sense of if you put yourself in that role as a volunteer or someone who's working in this community group, that it's your turn to do something, and so you need to show up.
As you have conversations, you get to know people in that organization. You aren't leaving the organization if there's one complicated conversation. You're giving this time so that you can develop those relationships. And the second thing that happens, which I think is equally, maybe even more important, is that if we are all arranging some potluck or a clothing drive for kids at Christmas, there's someone who's organizing that effort. That person has the phone numbers of all their neighbors. That person has demonstrated success in mobilizing the community around something that most everyone around agrees is good. And so what you're building is this social capital for leadership that can be tapped when you need someone for the school board or someone for the city council.
We've lost a lot of that grassroots, organic opportunity to build leaders from the ground up. And that makes a lot of our communities susceptible to having people parachute in because they have the right talking points. And if we want to be able to resist that, resist having our communities pulled into that cycle, you really want to have people around that have the trust of the community, that have a demonstrated capacity to mobilize everyone, and that know their neighbors really well.
Expanding a little bit more on the process that you just outlined. Let's take homelessness as an example. It's been a hugely challenging problem to resolve. What does real coalition-building among residents look like? What do potential solutions look like?
Porten: It's a great issue to start with because the causes of homelessness sometimes get wrapped up in zero-sum politics or thinking that we as a community are hopeless to agree on how we solve this problem. But at the same time, there are people who, in our neighborhoods, are suffering, and there's some amount of good that can be done to help them. Do you volunteer at a soup kitchen? Do you try to set up a food drive? Are there ways that you can think about reaching out to the homeless community by organizing your neighbors in a way to provide aid for these people? That someone is suffering immediately and I want to help them out, it creates this organizational structure, creates this accountability among neighbors, builds this tolerant conversation-seeking organization that doesn't start with the contentious issue. It starts with the thing we all want, which is the people in our neighborhoods to be better off.
I think another thing that's great about the homelessness issue as a conduit for this conversation, is that you're going to lose someone in your neighborhood. There's going to be someone that thinks that the homelessness issue doesn't need to get resolved.
The only thing that we need to do is shove these people aside in some way. They're not going to join your organization. You can't get discouraged by that. What you have instead is a fabric that you're weaving among the people who are there, who do think that even if their policy preferences about how to manage homelessness differ, there's a moment where you're coming together to do something constructive and tangible. And that creates the social fabric that's not going to tear the second that it gets tested by some difficult conversation or some interest group coming in from outside the community trying to affect what happens to you and your neighbors.
John, how vital is this work in securing this country's future?
Porten: I think in some ways, it's hard to come up with anything that's more important. We all know that there are individuals and companies that have resources and power that are beyond anything that we have as individuals to help and protect our families and our neighbors. What we have as a resource, and what we've abdicated to some extent over the last 20 or 30 years, is our strength in numbers. The way that we push back against forces that want to pick our neighborhoods and communities and even families apart is to find some way to create a fabric that they cannot tear. And it's hard work. It's difficult. You have to get out there and you have to tolerate people's differences. You have to do the work to have these things happen instead of doing the thing that you would maybe rather be doing on a Saturday night. But when you gather that momentum and we have the resources that we can use to advocate for our own communities and our own neighbors, that's when we can put up serious resistance to any organization that wants to come in from outside and make our lives worse.
Coming back to the larger issues that do divide America: civil rights, social issues, the environment, immigration. How are they ultimately dealt with in a way that a majority of Americans, who favor democracy, believe that their political system is actually working for them?
Porten: It's a really hard question. And I think that there is a risk that my message here is going to get read that we should abandon the difficult conversations. And I think the way that I would address that is to say, 'are we really having those conversations now? Or, are we just shouting into the void in a direction where we think people who disagree with us are standing?' It's important to remember that during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there wasn't social media. Congress was voting in a relatively bipartisan fashion compared to today. And that was still a gut-wrenching experience for the American nation. Desegregation was a hard-fought victory, and there were a lot of people who felt that was a change that they could hardly live with. It was a difficult conversation that tore at the fabric of the country. I think that ultimately we survived that moment because we had some of this common interest and community fabric to fall back on. And so as we talk about reframing our national political conversations to be about things that benefit most Americans, as we talk about how collaboration can bring us to those places, as we think about building community in our neighborhoods, and we're starting to build grassroots leadership that we trust, even when we think they're wrong, we think that they have our best interests in mind. That is when we have the social capital to have these conversations about difficult moral, sometimes zero-sum issues without tearing the fabrics of our community apart, where we can go back to the policy areas that we think we can cooperate on, and we have that reserve of trust and tolerance for each other. That's when you can have those conversations in a way that's meaningful.
