Don't Give Up on People: The Radical Moderate's Guide to Polarization

Lauren Hall, author of The Medicalization of Birth and Death andThe Radical Moderate's Guide to Life Substack and the co-host of the We Made This Political podcast, breaks down why labeling half the country as unreachable is empirically incorrect, morally flawed, and strategically self-defeating for a liberal democracy. Backed by data tracking the shifting, diversifying realities of the American electorate, she reveals how voter choice is rarely a total ideological affirmation, but rather a complex, often reluctant compromise centered on narrow individual priorities. Instead of succumbing to the fundamental attribution error that strips our neighbors of their humanity, she offers concrete practices to "complexify" our worldview, dismantle artificial binaries, and rebuild essential social coalitions through localized, in-person community connections. 

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Our expectations don't just predict reality, they can often create it. In a classic experiment, teachers were told that certain students were late bloomers who would show dramatic improvement later on.

Even though those students were completely selected at random, they actually improved more than their peers. This is the expectancy effect at work, and it's often called the Pygmalion effect. It shows that we unconsciously create the world we expect. Teachers gave those high-potential students more attention and better feedback, and the students responded to that elevated belief with elevated performance.

In our personal relationships, this effect is a silent but powerful architect. If you expect your partner to disappoint you, you'll focus on their failures while missing their attempts at connection, eventually triggering the very disappointment you feared in the first place. [00:01:00] Parents do this, too. A child labeled as difficult often becomes more so because of the thousands of micro-interactions fueled by that very expectation.

Workplaces can follow the same script. Managers who expect excellence unconsciously provide better training and more opportunities, while those who expect failure withhold the resources that would enable success. Even our physical health can respond to this. Optimistic prognoses can improve recovery rates through a placebo effect, a real physiological change triggered by our belief in healing.

When we're stuck in a chronic disagreement about someone's character, for another example, we have to examine our own role as co-creators. Sometimes the most powerful intervention in a conflict is simply believing that a different outcome is possible. Change the expectancy, and you might just change the person or the situation.

I'm Michael Lee, Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is [00:02:00] Lauren Hall. Lauren is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Medicalization of Birth and Death and Family and the Politics of Moderation.

Her writing explores binary thinking to help people think about personal, social, and political problems, and her Substack is called The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life. Lauren, tell us an argument story. 

Lauren Hall : Thanks, Michael. So the argument story really starts with it was the, after the most recent election in 2024, and I I was talking to a lot of people online and having a lot of good interactions with friends on various platforms and and when the results of the election came through and President Trump was elected for a second term the response that I got from a lot of my left-leaning friends was- now we know that half of the country are racists or half of the country are bigots.

And I remember thinking to myself, that, that can't be what we just learned. That can't be what we just [00:03:00] found out. And then the second part of that argument was when I would gently push back the response would be I don't have to ask questions about people who have those beliefs," or, "I don't have to find out more," right?

"I don't have to be curious about about why people voted for him, because his vote is the only thing that I need to know." And as a political scientist, I remember thinking to myself I don't... I know this is bad on a number of levels. I study polarization, and I think a lot about questions of civil society, and my work deals a lot with intermediate institutions, which we can talk about a little bit more, but just like the family and church, and all the non-political things in our lives.

It-- But I couldn't-- I was having a hard time coming up with a response, because people were really upset and they were really hurt, and they really did feel as though half of the country was, had in fact demonstrated that they were bad people. 

So that was what started me thinking about this.

Over the last year, I've been thinking more about what this disagreement tells us as a country, and [00:04:00] how I, what I, how I need to think about that disagreement moving forward. 

Michael Lee : So do you see your, the folks that you were disagreeing with as taking the results of the '24 election and making, as I heard you, two conclusions?

One, 80 million people or more in the country are fundamentally racist, and two, I don't have to be curious about those people beyond their racist vote. Yep. And then your position would be the opposite of those positions? Or what is the disagreement from your point of view? 

Lauren Hall : Yeah. So my first disagreement was it started out with just a gut reaction, which was, this can't be good.

And meaning- ... this is actually a dangerous problem to have. And the reason that I think it's dangerous is that there's a lot of research on polarization. And w- when I talk about polarization, what I mean in the political science literature and generally is that the American electorate is moving farther and farther apart.

So people have more and more extreme [00:05:00] views. And actually what we find is that it's actually not necessarily that views have changed so much, although that is also happening, but people's views of each other have changed. And so we have really heightened levels of what we call toxic polarization or affective polarization.

And affective in that context means the emotional way we feel about each other, like how we actually think about each other as citizens. And so when I first started hearing this from friends and by the way, the, this narrative has continued, and so when I was asked to think about a disagreement, this was the one that immediately popped up because it's been ongoing for a year.

I- Yeah ... I keep having the same disagreement with people over and over again. And my initial response was, I-- this is dangerous, right? But at the same time, I also understood people's positions. There was a lot of fear. There was a lot of concern for members of the LGBTQ community, right?

Members of the immigration, right? All, like, all of the people that I knew that this was coming from a place, in many cases, of love, right? People were worried about how other people were gonna be affected. [00:06:00] And so I was trying to think about where my disagreement with this came from, and I have three grounds for disagreeing with folks who are thinking this way.

And what I really wanted to do, though, is get really curious about w- where this disagreement comes from, and then how we can as opposed to arguing that these people are wrong because they're operating in bad faith instead do the work of thinking, of understanding that these concerns and this disagreement arises from care.

It arises from really good motives. But I still think these folks are wrong, and I think we have to think about why they're wrong and discuss why that position is ultimately dangerous for a liberal democracy. 

Michael Lee : It's interesting. We had a similar dispute in an episode we did earlier about exactly the same ex- issues, except about the election eight years prior- in 2016 with Jamelle Bouie, and ended up talking about to what extent we [00:07:00] can ascribe motivations to an electorate. But- Yeah ... thinking about that episode as I'm hearing you talk about the same, roughly the same set of issues in the 2024 election, really struck by a much broader question that I'll ask and answer and just see what your reaction is.

Which is, what does a vote mean? And I mean that in three different levels. So w- how do I ascribe the meaning of 80 million people voting one way? Do I take that to mean that they are in consensus? Do I take that to mean that they are in total agreement? Do I take that to mean that they all took a million roads and happened to end up at the same destination, but they don't know each other and don't know don't agree about hardly anything except this one thing?

The, what does a vote mean for an electorate? Question one. Question two, what does a vote mean for an individual, and not just in, as a collection of political parts, but in a two-party system, but especially what it means to ascribe motivations to [00:08:00] them? To what extent is their character, their humanity, the sum total of their quadrennial electoral choices?

And then third, what does their vote mean for me and my responsibilities as a human being to them, my burdens as a co-citizen, my curiosity, my lamentations, my recriminations, my repudiations, all of the above? And so the one thing, and I'll stop here because I've talked for too long. The one thing I'll say is that at least it seems like the folks that you are arguing against think the answer to the broader question, which is what does a vote mean, is definitive.

Yep. And you, if, to put a motivation to you, seem to think that it's less certain. 

Lauren Hall : Yeah, I think that's right. So over the last year, the more I've encountered this argument I think it's wrong on three levels and at [00:09:00] least a couple of them map to the two that you laid out. And we can dig into these i- in pieces.

We-- I won't lay them all out. I think first of all, it's empirically wrong. It doesn't track what we know about the people who voted for Trump the idea that h- that all of them are united in some way. And there's actually a wonderful-- we can dig into this a little bit more, but the- there's a wonderful report that just came out from More in Common called Beyond MAGA, and and it talks about...

it basically looks at the survey data and finds that there's four distinct Trump voter types. And they're all very different and they actually-- there's only one group, which is the MAGA hardliners, that you might be able to, if you were really still willing to oversimplify that you might be able to say these people tend to harbor more, xenophobic beliefs, or they tend to have more transphobic kinds of approaches.

But the rest of them actually were-- are quite complex. So I think empirically it's wrong morally it's wrong, and we can talk a little bit about why I think this is... And this goes back to my concern about the danger of this kind of [00:10:00] thinking. But then finally, I think it's strategically self-defeating.

I think it's bad for our country to ascribe these kinds of motives to to the entire Trump electorate. And so for your question- ... what does this mean? What does a vote mean for an electorate? I think the More in Common survey shows some really interesting research. And actually there's a journalist he's a journalist and professor of journalism, Musa al-Gharbi, who has done, he did a really interesting analysis of the shifts in Trump voters from 2016 to 2024.

And as opposed to getting, whiter or more male or whatever, it actually diversified, right? His v- the people who voted for him got more diverse. Higher rates of Latinos, higher rates of Black Americans voted for Trump this time than did previously. So it can't simply be that more people became racist or bad people over the course of this period of time.

Something else must have been happening. [00:11:00] And then to your other question a- and again, we can dig deeper on any of these, what does a single vote mean for an individual? I think that's the critical piece that where that the refusal to be curious becomes really damaging to our personal relationships, to f- you know I do a lot of work on the family.

I talk to a lot of people who, who've actually cut off relatives because they voted one way or the other. And I think this is really sad, right? I think people have lots of complicated reasons for voting for people, and actually, if you talk to Trump voters about why they voted for him a lot of them have very narrow concerns about- the economy, or they had very narrow concerns about their region, or they had a very narrow concern about something like tariffs, right? They were not voting for everything that Trump stood for, right? They had a very narrow slice of concerns that they thought he represented, right?

And you see this in the More in Common data, that there's a, they actually use the phrase the reluctant right. So there's a group of [00:12:00] people who held their nose, and they were like, "I don't love a lot about this guy, but I'm gonna vote for him because he gives me X, Y, or Z that, that the other side isn't giving me."

Michael Lee : What I think is so interesting here is that it seems like there's a group of people who treat the meaning of the vote differently, which is that the voter treats the vote as a necessary evil. I have to make a choice between two things. I don't particularly like either one. All right for whatever reasons that I'm aware of and unaware of, I'm going with this guy."

And then other people treat the vote as an affirmation of a sincerely held belief, and then take that to say there are con- exceptions to my limitless curiosity. Yes, I should be morally accepting and interested in all of God's creatures, and everybody's capable of reason, but there are some things that you could do to me that are fundamentally disqualifying."

So for instance- ... it would be much harder for me to be, continue my compassionate [00:13:00] curiosity for you if I, let's say, found out that somebody was near to me w- was a Holocaust denier. That might be disqualifying in that sense. It would be har- hard for me to keep that up.

But that's a belief. It seems as if lots of the folks that you're talking about treat the meaning of the vote differently, as if it's an action, not a belief. 

Lauren Hall : Yeah, and I think this is... first of all, I think this is a really common human thing, so this isn't a left or right issue. I think that the phenomenon that I see happening is really an example of what's sometimes called the fundamental attribution error in psychology, and it's this tendency to ascribe simple motives to other people, right?

Black and white motives, and often negative motives to other people. But you have this complex, deep, in- rich inner life that, that explains your actions in this different kind of way. And so I think we see this a lot. When I ask people explain to me why, for example, you think this person voted for Trump," and they say obviously they don't like immigrants," or, "They don't- LGBTQ people." And then I ask why did you vote for Harris?" Or Biden, or [00:14:00] whoever they voted for. They have a range of complex reasons. They have all sorts of, nuance. And we do this all the time. Even with I love the example of road rage, because I've been guilty of this before, right?

If someone cuts you off your immediate instinct is, "That guy's a jerk." But when we cut people off, there's almost always some ki- it's, I didn't realize I was in the wrong lane until the last minute. Or I just realized that I have to move into this lane because I forgot that I have to pick up a prescription or something.

We have reasons for our behavior. But when we look at other people's behaviors we tend to reduce them to the lowest common denominator, or these really just simple binaries, like you're just a bad person kind of thing. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. 

Lauren Hall : And so I think that's where we're thinking about voting in the wrong way.

Michael Lee : David Foster Wallace talked about this fundamental attribution error so poetically, eloquently in This is Water, the Kenyon commencement speech that became the novel- Yeah ... on the subject, that talked about your default mode network as being an egocentric network, and not realizing that you're in water as the fish.

And [00:15:00] trying to find some at least charitable interpretation of why somebody cut you off in line at the grocery store at 5:00 PM, maybe they have a sick kid at home, or whatever the answer is. Exactly. And just trying to counter it and see the water that you're swimming in, and the egocentrism of some of our self-centered fundamental perceptions of the world.

Lauren Hall : Yeah, and I think, this is something that since I've been writing more on polarization, and s- especially since I've been working on the Substack, ... I've worked really hard to undermine this in my own life, because it is, once you start seeing it, you realize how easy it is to slip into this.

I'm in a, I'm in academic administration- ... which is a really funny place to be. Lots of people attribute motives to me that are just not accurate, and I have to say to myself I understand why they think that. I understand," right? "This is not necessarily personal. There's something else going on."

And so for me, I think that curiosity is critical to trying to untangle these kinds of conflicts. And by the way, I'm not arguing that people should be [00:16:00] openly curious when they are feeling... it's perfectly okay to have boundaries. But I think we also have to be really careful about what those boundaries entail, because one of the big fears that I have about our current moment is that if we are willing to cut off 80 million fellow Americans and simply say, "I have no more curiosity about you as a person or you as a group of people," that is exactly what keeps us fragmented.

That's exactly what prevents us from seeing the cross-cutting identities that will help us when we need to push back against various kinds of government abuses. And so it's deeply concerning to me that we actually need to be curious when it comes to creating coalitions and coming together as communities to fight against the various kinds of things that we might be concerned about.

So I think there's that strategic element that's missing too. 

Michael Lee : That goes to your point about the answer to what is a vote being wrong on three levels, it being empirically wrong, it being morally wrong, and it being, third, strategically wrong. And it seems strategically wrong in [00:17:00] a mostly majority-wins democracy to give up on people, to say certain groups- Yeah

of people are fundamentally unreachable or irredeemable. 

Lauren Hall : Yeah, and again, we see this in the data, right? There are actually a fair number, not a huge number, but there are a reasonable number of Trump, people who voted for Trump this time who voted for Obama in, 10 years ago, right?

And if you're thinking about people as monoliths who never change, and right they're just these people who, it's like you were, like, a Trump voter from birth until you die, right? ... And so again, the question is what do we mean when we ascribe someone the label a Trump voter, right?

What does that mean about what we think about them as a human being? And how is that reducing them to this one tiny moment in their life this one decision that they made? But then on the broader scale of things I talk a lot on the Substack about the fourth dimension of time, right? It people do change.

People change their mind all the time. When we're talking about curiosity, I always think about Daryl Davis because he's one of these amazing people, [00:18:00] and I don't think most of us can be like him because I think he has some sort of unique brain that is just, like- Wow ... deeply filled with curiosity and wonder about the world.

But, he was, y- as a Black man, he's willing to be curious about members of the Ku Klux Klan, right? He's able to go to KKK members and say, "I'd love to talk to you." And when we have... I do think it's slightly ironic, too, that a lot of the people that I hear this argument from are relatively safe, and so they're actually not the Daryl Davises.

They could afford to be curious in a way that, that doesn't put their safety on the line. And so I'm not asking, members of marginalized communities to, to put themselves into dangerous situations. I'm not asking for people to do things that are unsafe. But I think that we need to be careful about what safety means, right?

We should be curious and be able to take sort of civic risks by getting to know each other. 

Michael Lee : I love the phrase civic risk by getting to know each other, and I love the idea of not giving up on people- ... and not letting go of people. And so to that end, sometimes these [00:19:00] conversations, because we talk about polarization, and polarization often refers to the parties, and parties often refer to voting, and voting often refers to quadrennial elections and Congress and so forth, that we can fail to see the impact of polarization in everyday life, in workplaces, in churches, of course on university campuses, in neighborhoods, in HOA meetings, in apartment complexes, and everywhere else.

And so with an eye towards those latter things and not towards elections and voting and the last two candidates or the last eight candidates, what are two or three things that people can do to take the temperature down to reduce polarization in their own lives, either in terms of the way they treat others, so a kind of between action, or within, a kind of self-focused action?

Lauren Hall : Yeah I think a lot of it, it, on the internal side I do a lot of perspective shifting. I've trained myself over time to, before I react, to put myself in the other person's shoes for just a second, right? And so this is in some sense just [00:20:00] working to undermine that fundamental attribution error, right?

What possible arguments could they have for what they're thinking and doing, right? What's a steel man argument? What's a good faith argument for their behavior or their argument or whatever the case is? So that's an internal piece of work that I think we can all do a little bit better.

The second thing though, I think, is getting back into the, this and this is really tough. I think we're, we're still in some sense recovering from COVID. I think people are still used to Zoom interactions and a lot of us went into shells and are just getting out.

But one of the things that I keep coming back to is the need for in-person connections. So much of, I, I would say that the fundamental attribution error is weaponized on the internet, right? E- especially when you're dealing with people who are kind of strangers, right? Relatively anonymous people that are out there.

And so what is really important is to get out into your community, and that's when you're gonna find that, the guy down the street who voted for Trump is also a member of the volunteer firefighters, right? He's like on the, he's a volunteer firefighter, and he [00:21:00] really cares deeply about his community, and he works with the rotary every weekend to collect food for the food shelf or something, right?

All of a sudden, that creates complexity. That creates a sort of level of understanding of this person that means that the vote becomes less important, and is just, again it becomes part of this much more holistic view of who this person is as a human, as opposed to the defining characteristic of this human.

So in-person and community-based interactions I think are absolutely critical. And then the third piece is this high-level thing that I think people like us who think who work a lot in sort of media and teaching spaces I really think we have to work to challenge binaries, and we have to catch ourselves when we're presenting things as binaries, right?

As binary choices. And I know I failed to do this for the first 15 years of my teaching experience. I would accidentally, I would like- place false minors in front of my students and not realize that I was actually animating, [00:22:00] tribalism and polarization. But I think, my, one of the things I think about as a public writer is the need to, I can't remember who came up with this term, but the need to complexify the world.

It's not my job to make things easier to understand in some sense. It's my job to show people how complex the political world is, how complicated our social and political relationships are. And I wanna do it in a way that's understandable but I think that when we reduce things down to these binary choices pro-life versus pro-choice Blue Lives Matter versus Black Lives Matter, we actually erase the huge middle ground that most Americans live in.

And if you look at policy data, that's true. Most Americans live in the middle of these false binaries that we've created. And so I think the media has a, an important role to play in complexifying policy issues and complexifying political issues in that sense. 

Michael Lee : We thank you so much [00:23:00] for coming and complexifying our political world here today.

Lauren Hall, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Lauren Hall : Thanks, Michael. This was fun. 

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree@gmail.com.