Political Polarization Across the U.S.A. and Europe (Half the Answer #71, with Aurelien Mondon)

Caitlin and Trent talk with Aurelien Mondon about his recent political science paper outlining the limitations of considering all politics through the lens of "polarization." They discuss the pitfalls of the term and the ways "polarizing" events and speech can be drastically different and sometimes even positive.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources

A critique of the polarisation narrative: expanding the limits of democracy, parties and political participation

Searchlight Institute Memo on Abolish ICE

Author of ‘Don’t Say Abolish ICE’ Memo Is a Corporate Consultant

Blue states banning cooperation with ICE will backfire

Democrats Soften Their Demand To Ban Masks For ICE

Scalise Urges Democrats to Turn Down Anti-ICE Rhetoric, Highlights ICE’s Work to Remove Violent Criminals

Young Trumpies Hit D.C.

White House dismisses release of Epstein documents as a distraction from Democrats

Mike Johnson Calls For Political Rhetoric To Calm

Euphemisms, Concentration Camps And The Japanese Internment

Transcript

Trent R. Nelson [00:00:31]
Well, happy days are here again, and that's a fact. We're calling it. It's been a few down weeks. But you know what? You take a break, take a breather, and you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this is, of course, Half the Answer with your host, Trent R. Nelson, but only your co-host, because we also have the marvelous Caitlin M. Green. And you know what we both get up to? I'm a writer, editor, historian. I love philosophy. Philosopher, they go, lover of wisdom. And we have Caitlin. We have Caitlin, and she is a linguist, she's a writer, she's an editor. She is a part of that shared genius that is human existence. And she's a mom too. Caitlin, how are you today? And what a wonderful day it is, indeed, to chat with wonderful folks. Who are we doing that with today? And what are we talking about?

Caitlin M. Green [00:00:36]
You're calling it.

Caitlin M. Green [00:01:10]
Well, I have to warn you, Trent, I'm on day four of antibiotics, and I am on fire. I am ready. I'm going to be so unbearable today. I hope you're ready. I hope you're excited. The energy level. I'm so back, maybe. And I actually had delayed bringing this guest on because I wanted to be more or less alive when we got to have him on.

So I'm so excited to welcome Aurelien Mondon, a professor of politics, languages, and international studies whose research focuses on the mainstreaming of far-right and reactionary discourse and politics. Now, you may reasonably expect that I'm excited about this topic, just in my life, and so we've even cited a paper of his before, when we talked about Islamophobia in liberal discourse, and I'm so excited to have you on, Aurelien. How are you today?

Trent R. Nelson [00:01:41]
We've been missing you.

Aurelien Mondon [00:01:54]
I'm fine. Thank you. I'm really, really excited to be here, and I'm really glad to hear that you're feeling better as well. So yeah, looking forward to this.

Trent R. Nelson [00:02:20]
It's been an ongoing thing, yes.

Caitlin M. Green [00:02:37]
Thanks. It's been a rough couple of months. So, right, so I invited you on specifically today because of your recent paper with Juan Roque and Daniel Bolinas, which was in Contemporary Political Theory, called "A Critique of the Polarization Narrative: Expanding the Limits of Democracy, Parties, and Political Participation," and that's because it just tickled the spot in my brain. I was like, oh, thank goodness, this needs to happen, because polarization is a huge buzzword in sort of political media. Also, you pointed out in the paper, political science research as well, you saw this big uptick in usage of the term, right?

So I really want to thank you for being here. Since I'm back in my full form, I want to open with a screed, if that's okay. Okay, let's go for my screed. I haven't screeded in so long.

Hey, everyone, I am here with an extremely serious message that is for the grown-ups in the room. Please don't say "abolish ICE." Okay, let's listen to the experts like Blas Nunez-Neto from the Searchlight Institute. It's probably not important that he also works for a corporate consulting firm that has contracts with major government contractors in the defense and surveillance industry, who are expecting to rake in heaps of cash as the immigration enforcement budget skyrockets. That would be falling for the guilt by association fallacy, after all, and grown-ups don't do that.

Okay. Abolish is too strong, after all. If we react to Trump's lawless use of ICE by demanding to throw the whole thing out, that super grown-up memo says, we will create a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them. Did you even think of that? I bet not, and please do not say "false dichotomy" to me right now.

Okay, we are being adults. Abolishing ICE is rash and extreme. Instead, let's reform and retrain. And it's like the editorial board at the Washington Post said, maybe you were feeling excited about Abigail Spanberger blocking local law enforcement's cooperation with ICE in Virginia. How shortsighted can you be? You are asking for a backlash. I will quote, "Without state and local cooperation, ICE gets a strong justification to deploy force in pursuit of the violent criminals that the overwhelmingly majority of Americans don't want on the streets." And yeah, it does say "overwhelmingly" and not "overwhelming." I'm not sure why. It's the WaPo editorial board. Okay, we're not going to question their grammar.

It's actually much safer to have Customs and Border Protection in charge. The grown-ups at WaPo know that America has swung between extremes on immigration. What is the left extreme that we have swung to? Please, don't ask me that. In fact, don't ask me any more questions.

No, we won't commit to abolish ICE. Okay, let's calmly and deliberately set out a short list of common-sense reforms that everybody can agree on, like not deporting US citizens, using body cams, having their faces clearly visible, so that their victims can pursue justice if they survive the encounter. Oh, hold on, what's that? I'm getting something. Senator Schumer is speaking. He says, no masks, except in extraordinary and unusual circumstances. Hakeem Jeffries, you had something to say. Oh, it's that the problem isn't masks, per se, but masks being deployed in an arbitrary and capricious fashion. And thank goodness Chris Murphy is reminding us that actually common sense dictates that there are sometimes safety reasons why you may need a mask.

So no masks, unless the militarized terror squad guys really want to. That's very grown-up and moderate of you. Are you mad about this? Well, you shouldn't be. Anger is a child's emotion. And anyway, it's fine, because a Democratic aide has assured us that they are just making sure the legislative text is consistent with general best practices for law enforcement. Representative DeLauro says that the Dems are speaking to law enforcement experts about what exceptions they should make. So it's all very above board, very rational, very expert, very demure.

Yes, I know that Customs and Border Protection isn't the same kind of law enforcement as police. I know that you cannot actually dox a public servant, but we have to make compromises in order to be reasonable. Don't be divisive.

And while we're on the subject, you have got to turn down the rhetoric when it comes to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, like House Majority Leader Scalise said: if you call the heavily armed and volatile group of violent murderers names like "Gestapo" or accuse them of hurting people in a city where they shot three nonviolent observers in a month and kidnapped a bunch of elementary school kids to an unsafe and unsanitary facility in Texas, then you are actually the one who is causing violence. Scalise could not have been clearer. We have to be careful and measured about how we talk about people. This was in the same interview where he accused the leaders of Minneapolis of letting their city burn down in 2020. Why do you ask?

You know, that's the real problem with society today. We're so polarized, there's no nuance anywhere. College students demand to be coddled and protected from ever learning anything that makes them uncomfortable. Celebrities get canceled for little stuff, like abusing their castmates or performing at the pleasure of the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Lefty kids won't go to Thanksgiving at their MAGA grandparents' house. Conservative men can't find women to date them because of a trifling little thing, like they don't believe we should have rights. They're so rigid, so dogmatic. We've got to get out of this polarized way of being, right?

Trent R. Nelson [00:03:17]
Right? So let's go. It's been a minute. Let's go.

Aurelien Mondon [00:05:53]
Absolutely. I mean, I have nothing else to say. I think you've summarized it very well. I mean, absolutely, and I think what you've done is really show how ridiculous what is portrayed as grown-up, as sensible, as serious analysis really is. And I think it really is a clear symptom of the state that our democracies are in at the moment, and not just in the United States, right? I mean, our paper was not just about the United States, it was about the UK, about Spain, France. I think we are at this kind of critical juncture, and I think what we're seeing is a mainstream elite that is completely failing us in actually having the right diagnosis.

Caitlin M. Green [00:08:54]
Podcast is over.

Trent R. Nelson [00:08:56]
Right, right.

Caitlin M. Green [00:09:20]
Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot, Trent, you and me, about how empathy has become so demonized, and that if you have a feeling that there's a population of people that's endangered or needs to be taken care of, that you're acting like a child somehow, or that you're not being rational, and you really, I think, cut to the quick of it in this paper, where it's like that is truly just a way to cut off conversation, maintain the status quo, keep the elites in the position that they're in, right?

Aurelien Mondon [00:10:05]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's something that most people notice as well. I mean, it was quite interesting because I personally started really thinking about this term "polarization" a couple of years ago when I co-authored a short article for Jacobin. I think it was at the time with Evan Smith, where we kept hearing the term polarization during the Biden era, and it kept annoying us, because we were like, hold on, yeah, there is polarization, but who's doing it, right? And should we really reconcile with people who want some communities having their rights removed, or even worse, right?

And so that kind of upset us, so we wrote that short article, and at the same time, my two co-authors in this paper that you talked about earlier, Juan and Daniel, were also working separately on polarization, and so about a year ago, the three of us were just chatting, and we're like, oh, maybe we should write something together. And we did, and as we wrote about it, as we presented it, a lot of people had the same kind of itch, in a way, that needed to be scratched, which is like, I keep hearing polarization, and it's not making any sense in the context we live in, right? It's not actually helping us understand the context we live in, and in fact, it's really hindering our possibilities of changing things and of expressing our anger, our despair, the way we feel about the state of things.

And so we were quite happy with the way the article came up in the end. I think we could have worked on it more. I think we could have sharpened it, but I think we felt a sense of urgency to put it out there as well. So it's kind of nice to see it received well so far.

Caitlin M. Green [00:11:07]
Yeah, and it feels like it's opening a door to a lot more work that you can do coming up. So I think that's great. I think this is something that also connects to work that I've been doing on anti-wokeness, right, where you've noticed that polarization narratives have the same kind of metaphors associated with them, where they're like, oh, you're infected. It's a disease. It has this viral aspect to it, of like, oh, it's a disease that's eating away. And we've got the woke mind virus. We've got all of these sort of rationalist guys who are like, yeah, wokeness is eating away and it's making you sick, right?

Trent R. Nelson [00:12:03]
Well, look at how they've spoken about gay people forever, right? It's also like an illness that is also something that you can contract, that, like, don't hang around gay people, don't listen to gay stuff, you might get gay. So it's all the same type of idea.

Caitlin M. Green [00:12:38]
Well, and trans now, the trans social contagion idea, right? That if you watch one too many YouTube videos, suddenly you're gonna want to transition. It's like, that's truly not how it works.

Aurelien Mondon [00:12:41]
Yeah, absolutely. But this pathologization of politics has always been really core to reactionary and fascist politics, right? I mean, you could think about the same thing with anti-semitism, for example, which is based on similar ideas as well. This is age old, and we keep falling for the same things, and we keep using the same terms, this kind of contagion effect, this sickness, disease. And it's just so unhelpful.

Trent R. Nelson [00:13:10]
Right. Well, my question, my question to both of you, is, sort of, how much of this polarization discussion, how much can we look at the fact that it seems as though in the mainstream we are, and Caitlin and I have spoken about this before, we're always sort of playing into what the right wing is saying. We're validating their beliefs by playing on their rules. So we're always taught, well, like Caitlin was saying in her screed, right, maybe that's a little bit too much, because the right says it's a little bit too much. We never, we don't stand up like they stand up and say, actually, all people deserve our love and respect and care, right? We're always, well, maybe they're right. Maybe some people, maybe we have to be careful. Maybe it's more important to care about the masked thugs than it is to care about the kindergarteners.

Caitlin M. Green [00:14:08]
Well, it's so one-sided, right? So that WaPo editorial that came out, I think this morning or yesterday or something, it is in there being like, if we go too extreme with stopping cooperation between local police and the CBP, then we're going to experience a really bad backlash, and the officers are going to have to be tackling people, like eight guys to a person on the street, instead of simply transferring them peaceably from the jailhouse. Like, it's very, very dangerous. You have to think about not being so extreme.

And then in the same paragraph it's like, and also, we really need to be dealing with this immigration crisis. And in fact, basically anything is acceptable because one murder is too many, and it's like, well, that's an extreme statement. To say that you can do anything in order to rid the city of one single murderer. That's not even seeing the extremism in their own speech because they're so laser focused on it's the progressives who are extreme.

Aurelien Mondon [00:15:16]
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think what really is maddening in the current situation is that I couldn't understand it during the Biden era, the fact that there was all this talk from the Democrats about, oh, we need to reconcile. We need to appease the society. We need to come back together. We need to start talking. We need to dine across the divide. All of these really unhelpful metaphors. We can, frankly, come back to this one later.

But I just found it upsetting back then, because I think it was deeply, deeply insulting to all the communities that had been at the sharp end of Trumpism the first time around, right? And also, we saw on January the sixth that these people were not about reconciliation. These people were not ready to actually accept that some people deserve rights, whether it's the trans community, whether it's immigrants legal or not, whatever, right, racialized minorities and so on and so forth, people who are on welfare and so on.

But what I don't really get anymore at all is how this can still work in the second Trump presidency, when we've seen Trump being much better prepared this time around, going full throttle from day one, breaking everything, breaking every rule, not playing by the book, not playing by the rules. And yet we still see people being, oh, maybe we should be careful. Maybe we should be nice to these people. And it's like, I'm sorry, the Atlantic is calling it fascism. If the Atlantic is calling it fascism, I think we can all call it fascism, right?

Trent R. Nelson [00:16:48]
But this is an American tradition, really. And this is in the 18th century, right? Well, we need the southern states, and so I guess slavery would be okay, and then we have a civil war, and we're all like, yeah, but we have to make sure that the South feels a part of it, and maybe let's not be as tough as we should be, right? And it just continues on. I mean, bringing over Nazis after the Second World War. We love to stretch out the arm to outreach, to say, well, but as you noted, and I think it's really time, it's long past time to be fair, it's long past time that we say, as you noted, these folks, a lot of these folks are not interested in reconciliation, and if they are not interested in reconciliation, then we have to be strong, and we have to say, you can come reconcile to our civilization. You can come reconcile to our love and kindness and mutuality, right?

Caitlin M. Green [00:17:37]
Okay, show me that you can exist normally alongside trans people and Venezuelan people and Somali people.

Trent R. Nelson [00:17:55]
We don't have to, right?

Trent R. Nelson [00:17:59]
We don't have to do that with George Lincoln Rockwell, right? We're not the ones obligated. And why we feel that way, I mean, I suspect that there is this sense of honor that a lot of these people feel when they say, well, I will be the bigger person. I will stretch out my hand. I will try.

Aurelien Mondon [00:18:00]
Yeah, absolutely. It's not the people at the sharp end, right? It's not the people at the sharp end of these politics who are not at the sharp end, who have to be the bigger persons. The people who are suffering day in, day out, from reactionary politics and their mainstreaming, whether it's through Trump and the Republicans or the Democrats before them, or the Republicans before Trump, these people are always asked to do more, to give away more, to kind of, it's okay, you're losing some rights, but it could be worse. And it's like this kind of race to the bottom, which I think is absolutely insane, right?

And I think the right has been very clever at hijacking liberal discourses to completely disarm the liberal mainstream, through free speech, for example, through cancel culture, all of that stuff that is such bad faith arguments. If you scratch the surface, you see that it is just completely opportunistic. And yet.

Caitlin M. Green [00:18:16]
Yep, but it's not them being the bigger person. That's them telling us that we have to somehow. And it's like, how many times do I have to reach my hand out to get slapped in the face and I'm expected to do it again?

Trent R. Nelson [00:19:33]
But they know. They know how to take advantage of us because they know that we will ultimately hold on to our principles, whereas they can play that against us, knowing that in a situation where they have power, they would never abide by our principles. So they have us in a situation where we won't break our principles to push back against them. And they know that they can fool us, even though we're not fooled. We know that this will happen.

Caitlin M. Green [00:19:53]
Yeah, but also, the people who are supposed to represent us in the sort of thinky-talky jobs, like being on TV and writing your editorials or whatever, those people are not the same people that they're talking about, right? They're not the left, they're not the woke, right? Those people don't get to work for the Washington Post editorial board. Not that really anybody gets to work for them anymore, I guess.

Aurelien Mondon [00:20:34]
Yeah, no, that's true, exactly. After yesterday. But that's absolutely true, but I think there's something there as well about how these people have convinced us that, and it's something we look at in the article as well, this longer trend since the '80s, '90s, of The End of History, which, of course, was debunked very quickly, but still kind of grips us and grips our mainstream elite in many ways, right? Lots of people are like, well, politics doesn't exist. It's about management. It's about management of the economy, management of inflation, all of this kind of stuff. Politics should be done by technocrats, by people who know what they're doing, and then the people can consume, right? And we can focus on individual desires and demands. And that's it. That's where politics should take place.

And I think a lot of us have internalized it, even us on the left, people who feel that something is wrong, we somewhat internalized it to the point where we don't have almost red lines. We need these red lines, these moments where we say, no, that's it. This is not debatable. The rights of trans people is not debatable. The rights of racialized minorities is not debatable. Systemic racism is a reality that needs to be destroyed. And then we need to draw a logical conclusion on that.

And what we are doing, in a way, is that this depoliticization that takes place, for a concept such as polarization, for example, which tells us we need to meet in the middle of these two extremes, this is deeply problematic for democracy, because this is making us lose sight of the fact that any progress that we've made in any society, whether it's the US, European countries, any other countries, has been through deeply polarized struggles, right?

I mean, you talked about the civil war before. Well, it was a very polarized struggle that led to the abolition of slavery. I agree, it didn't work out very well very quickly, there was segregation. But the North and South didn't sit at the table from the start and just decided to abolish slavery kindly. Women didn't get the right to vote anywhere through a very nice little debate amongst men who decided, oh, women are here, maybe we should give them the right to vote, right? And so on and so forth. Workers' rights, the fact that we have a welfare state or social security, all these kinds of things, they were very deeply polarizing struggles where the elite, which had a lot of power, both symbolic, financial, and political, was pitted against the people, communities who were fighting for their rights. And sometimes, quite often, more often than not, people died fighting for these rights. If that's not polarization, I don't know what it is. But if that's not also positive progress and politics, I don't know what it is either.

Trent R. Nelson [00:23:08]
Now, Aurelien, and you're bringing up people who stood up and said, we're not going to give anymore. Okay? We're done giving. We've given enough. It's time that you give us a little something. And of course, in one circumstance, we had a whole civil war about it. But we brought up earlier how these different factions, different groups, we're all giving. We're all trying to give, all trying to be more reasonable, right? The folks at the sharp end, that's also an American tradition, though. That's also an American tradition that's happened: Black people, gay people, immigrants, Spanish people, all sorts of individuals. How do we push back? How do we change that sort of narrative, that sort of form, and say, now is the time that we really mean what we say and we're not going to compromise here. You're going to have to compromise. You're going to have to come over.

Aurelien Mondon [00:24:08]
I mean, that's a great question, and that's a huge one, right? And if I wrote that paper, I think I would be invited again, probably on this podcast. But it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, and that many colleagues have been thinking a lot about, and many thinkers and many activists on the ground have been thinking about as well.

And I think it's not just an American tradition. I think it's probably a Western tradition as well, but it's also a tradition that happens in any kind of society where power is distributed unevenly, where you have a privileged elite that somehow has a lot of power, again, political, financial, symbolic, discursive, and so on. So this is not American in and of itself.

And I think what we need to do, really, is reclaim the power that we have and reclaim our faith in democracy. Because what we live in today, whether it's in the US and Europe or in many other countries, even though in 2024 we celebrated the year of democracy, where more people than ever went to the ballot box, very few of these elections were actually democratic. And I'm not talking about elections where the ballot boxes are tampered with or anything like that. I'm talking about elections where you have a real political discussion, right?

We live in societies where, even though you might not have corrupt elections and corrupt electoral systems, the fact that you cannot have alternatives to the status quo, except for the far right and fascism, is not a democratic society in my book. The fact that you can't have a discussion about the way the economic system is set up and the way wealth is distributed, that's not a democracy in my book.

So I think what we need to do is reclaim democracy. We need to reclaim our faith in democracy, and we need to reclaim our power. And to reclaim our power, what we need to do is to have faith in community and in community organizing, which means that actually, we need to bypass these arguments around the fear of the masses, which are very old arguments, since the period of the revolutions in the 18th century, the French Revolution and so on. There's been theorists on the reactionary right who have been trying to amp up the fear of the masses, the fear of the crowds. How when individuals are on their own, they act rationally, but when people are together, they just act emotionally, which of course is a deeply misogynistic argument as well, right? Which is about patriarchy, right? The crowd is women, and the individual is man.

And all of this we need to kind of go against, because this is something that we're seeing still to this day. The fear of trade unions, the fear of mass political parties, the fear of populism, for example, which of course equates both the left and the far right, even though the far right, I would argue, is not populist, is something else, is nationalist, racist, white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic, and so on.

So I think we need to recreate this faith in the people, and that's what we're seeing on the streets of Minneapolis, for example. That's what we're seeing, these people standing together and reclaiming this power, people finding that they have power at a huge cost, right? And it takes an insane amount of bravery, but people can change the course of history like that, right? And this is the only way the course of history has been changed in the past. And if it's polarization, then bring on polarization, right?

Caitlin M. Green [00:27:01]
Yeah, well, I've noticed a use of the word polarization in a positive way when Minneapolis residents talk about, in the Twin Cities, when they talk about what they are experiencing, where they'll be like, I saw with my own eyes what the immigration apparatus of this country actually does. And I have become polarized. Or they'll say "negatively polarized," where they're like, I can see what our government has been up to when it comes to immigration, and I want no part of it. And in fact, I'm gonna dedicate hours of my day to standing outside in the freezing cold, possibly getting shot or run over, because I hate that so much, right?

And so there you go. There's healthy polarization, because when you see something awful, saying "that's awful" is not actually an example of irrationality. That's not you falling for something. It's you understanding how the world is and saying, I'd like it to be different.

And we've talked about too where, partisanship, again, we kind of need to embrace partisanship a little bit, where we're looking at an entire party whose whole attitude is, I'll never give you a single thing you want, ever, right? And so to say I'm going to reach across the aisle to that is kind of goofy. It's a little silly. And to say, oh, we need to work within ourselves to figure out how to fight them. That's partisanship, but it's also kind of what needs to happen if we're going to start to fix things a little bit.

Aurelien Mondon [00:28:43]
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things as well that is linked to what you're talking about here is also the need to overcome this idea, this very spatial idea that we have of politics, which is a spectrum, right? Politics is not a spectrum. Because if we understand politics as a spectrum, and therefore as two poles, two extreme poles that are fighting each other, then we make the assumption that there's something in the middle that is somewhat in the middle of these two ideas. And that's the kind of warm center where we can all gather around.

And unfortunately, this idea of politics as a spectrum has led us to believe that the liberal center is where we should meet. That's where reasonable argument is. That's where sensible politics is, and that's where we should be. So we shouldn't demand too much here, just like we shouldn't demand too much on this side as well. And this is deeply problematic. I'm not saying that the left and right are irrelevant. I think they are relevant, but I think it's much more complicated than a spectrum where there's a middle.

In fact, what I would say is there's no such thing as centrism, right? And many people in the US have started talking about reactionary centrism, or even extreme centrism, where this kind of centrist positioning is not moderate by any stretch of the imagination, but deeply wedded to completely irrational, deeply political and ideological tenets, whether it's neoliberalism, capitalism, white supremacy, to some extent.

Trent R. Nelson [00:30:13]
It's hardly even real. I mean, if you look at where people actually fall on political outlooks, no one is actually in the middle. No one is ever in the middle. They're here, they're there. They're everywhere.

Aurelien Mondon [00:30:15]
Yeah, absolutely. But also, does anyone want to be in the middle?

Caitlin M. Green [00:30:22]
Yeah, well, and if you think about it, these guys on the left think this, these guys on the right think this, and I'm going to find the correct position by looking in the middle, without ever consulting research or thinking it through yourself, or anything like looking at the real world at all, then it's pretty obvious that that's a mistake.

Aurelien Mondon [00:30:46]
But also political values, right? Do we really want to be in the middle of racism and anti-racism? Do we want to be in the middle of fascism and anti-fascism? I don't think, it's like a little amount of fascism is fine, right? I mean, it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous way to look at politics, and yet that's the one we're told to engage with, which is just such a bad premise.

Caitlin M. Green [00:30:53]
Just a little 50% racism. No, that's right.

Trent R. Nelson [00:31:05]
It's very Aristotelian, is it not? Like we find the mean, the golden mean between the two? And this is sort of the continuation of that idea that we can find some type of, as you noted, warmth in the middle. But it's simply not true. Why would we want to compromise with racism? Why would we want to compromise with fascism?

Caitlin M. Green [00:31:27]
Yeah, okay, I really want to talk about Dining Across the Divide, because your paper linked to it, and then I read some of them and I wanted to die. I desired the cold embrace of death.

So this is a series in The Guardian called "Dining Across the Divide," where they're like, we're gonna take two normal people who disagree on politics, and we're gonna put them in a restaurant, and we're gonna take some really beautifully lit photos of their meal and also describe what they ate, because that's really important. And then they're gonna be like, "I think we should lock more people up." "I think we should lock fewer people up." "This salad is delicious." "Well, at least we could agree on one thing."

Aurelien Mondon [00:31:39]
I'm sorry. Yeah, I feel bad. Yeah, it's horrible.

Aurelien Mondon [00:32:20]
It's one of these series that is just incredibly addictive for all the wrong reasons, right? It's just like, I know when I read it, I die inside a little bit every time, but I just can't help it.

Caitlin M. Green [00:32:34]
Yeah, no, that's right. It's like reality TV. They're just like, I shouldn't be here.

Aurelien Mondon [00:32:40]
We've got horrible politics added to that as well. But again, what I find fascinating is how this is seen as something clever, something, it's in a newspaper that is probably center-left, that is broadly against the far right. There's some very good investigative journalism that's done by The Guardian, but then there are things like this that completely muddy the waters in a way, that tell us, well, actually, we've been showing you how dangerous racism is, how dangerous fascism is, how it's rising in these different ways. But actually, we can all have fun together. That's all good.

And so it's just so problematic. I think, again, it comes back to drawing the lines. And the far right loves to pretend, and you said that in your introduction, Caitlin, about how our students are just too woke, and they just don't want to feel uncomfortable. They don't want to debate. They don't want to do these things. And the far right loves to debate, apparently. We're told, Charlie Kirk and so on, allegedly, right? But this is all bullshit, of course, right? And I'm using "bullshit" in the academic sense of the term, of course.

But on the left, we debate all the time. For example, you can debate about what to do about the climate crisis. And there's lots of different arguments by scientists that are saying we should do this, we should do that. That's a very interesting debate. Same thing about, what should we do with ICE? How should we abolish it? Where should we put money? How should we make sure that people are safe? Same thing with violence against women and girls. What do we do against patriarchy? All of that stuff. There's lots of debates. There's lots of very uncomfortable moments about this. These are real debates.

Debating whether trans people should have rights or not is not a debate. This is where we need to draw the line. Right? We should all agree that trans people should have rights, that racism is a bad thing, that fascism is a bad thing, and then let's have debates about how to abolish that and have a just, fair, democratic society. I'm not interested in a debate between "fascism good, fascism bad." No. That line I've drawn a long time ago. And that's the problem we have with Dining Across the Divide, because it makes us feel like maybe fascists have a point, or maybe we should be able to shake hands at the end. It's like, no. No, we shouldn't.

Trent R. Nelson [00:34:48]
Well, I think one of the worst parts of it is something that I harp on a lot. You can look back in the 1930s and you can look at the pictures of all the Nazi officers out at a picnic with their wives, with their kids. And when bad people pass away, when they die, when something happens to them, the society has this impulse to treat them as though they are good people in the society. And in that, when I first recognized that, it made me think, we really imagine bad people to have horns and tails and hooves and be very, right?

And so I feel like this Dining Across the Divide business is all, it's more like washing, washing people, washing these ideas into, as you noted, a really, yeah, this is fine. We can have breadsticks and talk, and it's not a big deal. And we're not really recognizing, as you noted, what is and what is not debatable. And we're also not recognizing the fact that people who are bad faith, people who wish for democracy to die, wish for trans people to suffer, they look and sound oftentimes just like we look and sound. They don't have hooves, they don't have horns. They are just regular people, with families, with kids who love them, with grandparents who care for them. I mean, you'd be forgiven in a moment of weakness from forgetting that these are bad people because they look and sound just like the rest of us.

Caitlin M. Green [00:35:37]
You can't just see them and know.

Aurelien Mondon [00:36:15]
But you're absolutely right, and this is, I've done quite a lot of work on that, on the exceptionalization of the far right, which then prevents us from actually seeing how far-right politics also has roots in the mainstream, for example. And this exceptionalization, in particular, of fascism and Nazism, something that Robert Meister has called, in a book where he talks about "after evil," this idea that fascism, Nazism, was evil, we defeated them, and then we are fine, then we have human rights, and it's beautiful, and it's never going to come back again.

Well, obviously it came back, because the roots were never really addressed. Because the roots of fascism, that is, anti-semitism, racism, eugenics, were very much mainstream. So the Second World War, in a way, allowed colonial powers in particular to whitewash themselves, to clean themselves from all the things that they had participated in building that led to fascism and to Nazism.

And so I think you're absolutely right about this exceptionalization. And as we've moved away from the Second World War where evil became increasingly caricatured as jackboots, people with horns, people with swastikas, all that kind of stuff, then if a fascist tendency dresses differently, we would almost welcome them. I don't know if you remember, in 2015 or 2016, Mother Jones covered Richard Spencer and called him a "dapper white nationalist." I was like, Richard bloody Spencer, a "dapper white nationalist." How euphemistic is that? Right? I mean, it's absolutely insane. Just like calling Trump a populist, or calling Elon Musk just an entrepreneur. It's like, is this all they are? Is this the biggest issue?

Caitlin M. Green [00:38:12]
Well, even just taking Bovino out of Minneapolis and putting Homan in, right? It's like, okay, Bovino was a caricature, right? He was actually like a jackbooted, he had his special bomber jacket, his long jacket, and his stupid haircut, right? And he was walking around acting like a bully, looking like a Nazi, and that was easy, right? But then when Trump is like, well, I'm sending him back to El Centro and I'm putting Homan in, people are like, "Trump is moderating." And it's like, Homan is as bad, and he is doing things that are as bad in the Twin Cities. But it's like Trump breathes, and people are like, oh, so presidential. He's moderating. How delightful.

Aurelien Mondon [00:38:46]
Yeah, but you see, what's fascinating in all of this is that we can see long trends on the far and extreme right to hijack these narratives in a way. Back in the 1970s when the far right was at a nadir, when no one really voted for the far right anymore, because there was still a stench of Nazism, fascism, the horrors of the Holocaust became clearer and clearer. There was also the big movement in the late 1960s for young people, the civil rights movement in the United States, but also May '68 in France and in various other places. So there was this progressive wave. And so the far right really disappeared from the electoral arena, at least.

And some intellectuals on the far right decided to pull the plug and say, okay, we're going to stop with electoral politics. We're going to start with trying to get into power. Because before we get into power, we need to format our ideas, change our ideas, recalibrate, make them acceptable. Because we can't just go out anymore and be dressed as Nazis, or talk about biological racism, because that just doesn't fly anymore. The pendulum has swung.

And so these people ended up borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, who was a communist theorist, who was famous for developing the concept of hegemony. And so these people bastardized Gramsci, and they decided that before gaining political power, they needed to gain cultural power. And so they did that by reshaping their discourse, their vocabulary. So instead of talking about biological racism and how the white race is superior to the other races, they would talk about culture. And they would say, well, we're all different cultures, right? The French culture is beautiful, the Bangladeshi culture is beautiful, the Filipino culture is beautiful, the Mexican culture is beautiful. They're all beautiful. I love cultures. We're all equal, but we need to protect cultures. So we should keep people separate, as if French people were a homogenous culture, right? Or British people or American people. This is ridiculous.

So it was exactly the same racializing argument, which is like, well, if you're French, you're X, Y, and Z, right? And you can never become X, Y, and Z if you're not French, which is ridiculous. But that was swallowed up within liberal discourse because it sounded great. It sounded like multiculturalism, almost.

Caitlin M. Green [00:41:00]
Yeah, right. Well, and just like how eugenics got rebranded to "human biodiversity," and just "the study of group differences," and we're just studying. It's so rude of you, actually, to suggest that what we're doing is somehow morally or factually wrong.

I was just laughing because, oh no, I keep doing it. Oh man, okay, well, I'm gonna read you a tweet, and that's gonna make you mad. So let's get polarized.

So I was just laughing as I was looking around for examples and things, and I went over to Richard Hanania's Twitter, because I like to suffer, and I always laugh because he's always been such an obvious creep and weirdo and fascist anyway. But he's doing this whole thing where he's not happy about the immigration policy, so now he's allowed back, I guess. But the fact that his think tank, which he was using to just get grants and do basically nothing, was called the Center for the Study of Partisanship. And I was like, this is the most partisan man I've ever seen in my life.

Anyway, he was reacting to something that Charles Murray wrote about, oh, who cares, right? Charles Murray, a eugenicist who was like, oh, they're talking about Asian immigration and how Asians are doing too well in America, and it's taking opportunities away from white people because they're working harder and they're smarter and their genetics are better or whatever. And Helen Andrews thinks that's bad, because now McKinsey Lee can't get into an Ivy League school. But Charles Murray is like, actually, it's really great that we're importing high-quality immigrants, right?

So Richard Hanania is responding to this, going, "It's been fascinating to observe the difference between those into the group differences for the science and those in it for the white nationalism," as if those are different. Being like, well, Charles Murray likes that the genetically superior Asians are coming to America to benefit us because he's a good scientist, whereas Helen Andrews is mad about it because she wants white people to do better. Dude, both of those are predicated on your bizarre eugenicist views.

Aurelien Mondon [00:43:20]
Yeah. Again, we have debates, right? Is it the kind of debate we want to have? Is it the kind of discussion? And what does that do as well? This idea that it tells us that it's two different opposite points, almost, and one of them is correct. I was like, no, as you said, both of them should be discarded.

But I think it's, again, one of the things that I always talk about when I talk to students about these kind of things, about trying to understand the reactionary moment we're in, is trying also to always look at power. Who has the power to shape these narratives? Why is it just these two narratives that are being heard? Where is the money coming from? As you said, getting and cutting a bunch of grants, the money and all of that.

And even thinking about science, science is political. It's always political, even if it's scientifically proven. Where does the funding go? What do we fund in terms of science? Where is it done, by who? All these kind of things. And it can be positive and it can be negative, but politics is there, and power is there in what we're doing.

And I think we far too often ignore power and pretend that actually we have a level playing field, which we don't have, which we definitely don't have. And that's where, again, polarization is very problematic, because it assumes this level playing field where the left and the extreme right are arguing at each other from the same position of power. But the extreme right has tons of money, tons of media, from the mainstream media to the far-right media, from social media to legacy media. And the left does what? We have ourselves. We have each other, but that's pretty much it. We have a few podcasts, right?

Caitlin M. Green [00:44:53]
Yeah, we have this podcast. Yeah, well, the Epstein thing has really laid bare one of the major problems with how blinkered we've been, which is basically everybody who's ever funded research in the US is in those files. And that's bad in and of itself, right? But it also points out, it makes very obvious the issue that in the United States, all of our significant, all of our expensive research gets done because a number of charitable billionaires think that it's worth funding, as opposed to it being a publicly funded pursuit, right?

Like, if we had public science in the way that we ought to, we wouldn't need Bill Gates, who tried to dose his wife up with anti-chlamydia medicine instead of telling her that he'd been sleeping around or whatever. We don't need that guy. Why do we need that guy? We should just have the money to do research.

Aurelien Mondon [00:46:14]
But I mean again, right, that brings us back also to the incredible and very convenient, and I would say, very conscious naivety, of ten, fifteen years ago, when we used to think of some billionaires as good people. I mean, remember when Zuckerberg was pitted against Musk and one was the progressive one and the other one was the reactionary one? And it's like, surprise, surprise, they were both behind Trump in the end. Who could have guessed? I mean, I had no idea that billionaires had problematic politics. But it's like, again, we just, that's true. I mean, hashtag, not all billionaires, right? But it's just mind-blowing, the kind of pills we swallowed, to kind of take almost reactionary narratives and just completely close our eyes on things that were so obvious.

But I think you're right about the Epstein files. I think what's been fascinating about it is people waking up to the fact that, again, going back to what you were saying, Trent, about having evil people, and Epstein was a perfect evil, almost. But then what you realize is actually, around him, there's all kinds of elites, Democrats, Republicans, people in the Labour Party in the UK. Anyone who wanted to be close to power, regardless of their politics, ended up together in the same party. Noam Chomsky, right? I mean, it's insane. Again, but that says something about academics who love to create idols, even though we pretend we're just about knowledge and democratic advancement and all of that. We love our idols. We love to put people on pedestals. And this is what happens when you do.

Caitlin M. Green [00:46:44]
I think this is the first time that it's happened, so you'd be forgiven, please.

Caitlin M. Green [00:47:23]
We do. If you check my chapter in the book Inclusion in Linguistics, about abolishing the lone genius idea. It is open access. So we actually talked about that. It was me and Riker, and we talked about that a lot. We're like, we're gonna talk about him, but can we get around actually giving him citations?

Aurelien Mondon [00:48:00]
I will check it out then, yeah, absolutely. I thought you were about to tell me that you cited Chomsky a lot in there. And I'm like, oh god.

Aurelien Mondon [00:48:20]
Yeah, it's tricky, isn't it?

Trent R. Nelson [00:48:22]
So, in the same way that we have in our minds what evil looks like, what a bad person looks like, what a fascist looks like, what a racist looks like, we have in our minds what fascism looks like. We have in our minds what racism looks like, not just what the individuals look like, but what it looks like. And that has also fooled us in many circumstances, because, as Aurelien noted, it could never look like it did in the 1930s, okay? Because the first of all, the gig is up. And second of all, right, ideologies are born of the culture that they derive from, right? So a democracy is going to be different in every nation, every state, every place, because of course it is an amalgamation of the people of that area. And so when we tell somebody that there are Nazis in the White House, whether it's 2017 or 2025, right, they're like, what do you mean? That guy just seems just like America.

Caitlin M. Green [00:48:40]
It could never look like your friend. Come on, our nice friend Jeff.

Caitlin M. Green [00:49:32]
I would simply direct them to go on to x.com and visit the Department of Homeland Security account, because that's the one place where the Nazis look like Nazis.

Aurelien Mondon [00:49:41]
Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. And I think, looking for this ideal type or waiting for this ideal type to come back, to be like, oh, this is fascism, finally, was a complete mistake, right? Because we've seen trends, we've seen things coming back up. Of course, they were different, as you said, because it's a question of where it's happening, when it's happening, the context, the economic context as well, whether there's a crisis or not, all of that stuff, right?

Just like Italian fascism was different from German Nazism, right? And from other forms of fascism that have taken place. And yet, we've been fooled into believing that it would come back exactly the same way. And this has been so problematic until recently, and now it's like, oh yeah, actually, it is exactly the same. I mean, you were talking about Bovino before. It's quite insane how similar he is to what was happening in the 1930s.

But I always show my students as well, when I try to make exactly that point, Trent, that you just made, I show them a quote from a French neo-fascist in the 1960s, Maurice Bardeche, who has this amazing quote. He says, look, when fascism comes back, it's not going to look like fascism during the 1930s and '40s. It's going to look completely different. It's going to be in the form of a child with a different face. But no one is going to see it coming, but we'll be back, right? And it's like, we were warned. They told us.

Trent R. Nelson [00:49:45]
Yeah, but you go to France and you see the former National Front, right, and Marine Le Pen, and formerly Jean-Marie Le Pen, right? And these things come out of a completely different beginning, right. They come out of a lot of Algeria and that whole struggle and the decolonization of France. And so of course these are going to be different, and we have to be able to identify the base points within all of them. That's the only way we're going to be able to understand what we're dealing with, is to really look down and find the distilled points that they all share.

Trent R. Nelson [00:51:22]
Huey Long said the same thing about America, right? We'll have fascism. It'll be Americanism.

Aurelien Mondon [00:51:40]
But it's insane, exactly. But that's the thing, is that, oh, it can't be fascism if it doesn't come from that part of Germany, right? It's a bit like a joke about wine and whatever.

Caitlin M. Green [00:51:53]
Otherwise, it's just sparkling authoritarianism.

Aurelien Mondon [00:51:46]
Exactly. But I'm glad you, so where I was going with that, because I lost my track. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think, I mean, I've been an academic for almost 20 years now, since I started my PhD, and I've changed a lot in my terminology and things, but very early on in my research, I realized that there was a problem of euphemization, of not naming it for what it was. We were tiptoeing around it, because Marine Le Pen, or Jean-Marie Le Pen, didn't want to be called extreme right, for example. And so people started calling them populist.

In fact, it's Jean-Marie Le Pen in the early 1990s who forces the term into public discourse, which is fascinating from my point of view. He's like, oh, call me a populist instead of extreme right. And all of a sudden, everyone calls them populist. And I've noticed it, and many of my colleagues have noticed it. It's still quite hard in academia to call these parties what they are, because you will get pushback. It's like, oh, are they really far right? Are they really extreme right? Is it really racism, or is it something else?

Now it is. I mean, there's something particularly problematic in political science as well, the refusal to engage with systemic forms of oppression and racism in particular, where, if it's not obvious extreme racism, then it's not racism. If it's slightly coded, then it's something else. And it's nationalism, it's nativism, it's something else.

And I think there's been such a problem because we have caricatured fascism as evil. But calling anything fascism, calling anything racism, meant that it was almost blasphemy, right? We were going too far. We couldn't just throw that randomly. And that completely disarmed us. That completely disarmed us because then that prevented us from actually talking about the very real threat that these politics are, not just to the communities that were at the sharp end, but to democracy as well, to all of us, right? So an attack on trans rights is an attack on all of our rights, and unfortunately, we've been completely disarmed by being too scared to call it what it is. And I think that's a big issue.

Caitlin M. Green [00:54:00]
Yeah, well, and we're having this fight right now about whether we can call the detention centers concentration camps or not, which has been going on forever. Whether we can call a genocide a genocide, and it's like we have, we already, ahead of time, created definitions that I thought we all agreed would hold, right? And the places and the actions that we're referring to fit those definitions like a glove, right?

And yet it's still, we're cheapening the experience of people who survived concentration camps before, et cetera, et cetera. And this goes back. I found an old NPR piece arguing about whether it was okay to call Japanese internment camps concentration camps. And it's like, actually, historians were trying to tell the NPR authors, you need to understand that the word "internment" is a euphemism for concentration camp. You have to understand that, and using it is actually euphemizing and minimizing the experiences of the people who survived the Japanese concentration camps in America.

And the places where we are sending our migrants now, where they are in unsanitary conditions, they are crowded together, they have been moved there against their will and against due process, that is an example of a concentration camp, straight up. And to tell me I can't say that is a form of extremism.

Aurelien Mondon [00:54:59]
I think you're absolutely right. And I think one of the things that is quite key is that, ten, fifteen years ago, these people could claim ignorance. They could claim, ah, are you sure? Or, I'm not sure. But now that the masks have fallen on the far right, now that Bovino is dressed like a fascist, now that Trump is doing white supremacy, now that Musk has bought a massive social media platform and is doing horrible things, no one can pretend this is not what it is. And yet, there's still people pushing back. There's still people thinking, are you sure?

Caitlin M. Green [00:56:00]
We want to get it right. That's the thing. Yes, let's make sure we have our facts straight now.

Trent R. Nelson [00:56:01]
But again, this harkens back to the beginning of our discussion in which we noted how they take advantage of the fact that we have principles, right? And so you cannot imagine the far right having this discussion, right, with, like, right-wing version of Trent, right-wing version of Caitlin, right-wing version of Aurelien being like, oh, should we really be calling every person who believes in any amount of social welfare a communist? That would never be a discussion that's happening because they don't care. We care. We say, well, is it really fascism? Is it, or are we just being hyperbolic?

Caitlin M. Green [00:56:40]
No, it's not. Yeah, let's not go too far now. And meanwhile, they're like, Kamala Harris is a straight-up Marxist. Like, what's happened? That's right, she's personally going to every prison and giving everybody transgender surgery. Why am I being so pussyfooted, then?

Trent R. Nelson [00:57:09]
We need to grow up. We need to grow up. We need to say you're a fascist, and this is fascism, right? And this isn't communism, but we're not going to be thrown off, of course, by this sort of mincing of things. You're a fascist, okay? You call yourself a populist. You're a fascist. Get over that.

Aurelien Mondon [00:57:00]
Absolutely. And I think that's one thing that we need to do. The other thing that we need to do as well is very clearly point the finger at the people who have enabled that as well, and who are continuing to enable this. Because there are also power struggles here that are taking place where, for many people who are not necessarily fascist, it's better to have a strong fascist right than to have a strong left. Whatever it is, whether it's from social democracy to much more extreme left, because the far right is not a threat to the system as such, or doesn't have to be.

In fact, that takes us back to the 1930s again, when the Weimar Republic was hoping they could use Hitler as a puppet, right? And Hitler seemed a lot less threatening than the socialists or the communists at the time in Germany. And we're not reliving the same history, obviously. And I think we need to be careful with this kind of historical comparison, but we also need to learn lessons from what has happened before.

And what we're seeing right now is that a lot of mainstream elites who are saying they're against the far right are far more comfortable with the far right than they are with the left. We're seeing, for example, people like Emmanuel Macron telling us that the Rassemblement National is as dangerous as a loose coalition on the left, which is ridiculous, right? We're seeing the same thing in the UK with the Labour Party, the center-left party, the equivalent of a Democrat, doing the same thing about the Greens and the far right as well. We saw the same thing with Democrats in the US.

Why do I think it is? Well, because it's a question of power, and these people know that if a real left really got into power and decided to really change the system, decided to address the many crises that we're facing, whether it's the climate crisis, the crisis of inequality, the various health crises that are around, the democratic crisis, then these people would stand to lose out a lot, right?

And so this system is propping itself up. I'm not saying they're necessarily doing this consciously. I think there's a lot of what I call in a paper "epistemologies of ignorance," building on Charles Mills, for example, who's done some amazing work on the racial contract, and others as well. This idea that people convince themselves that this is the only way forward. And so it's kind of semi-conscious, but it's almost invisible to them at some stage. Some of them, for some, it's more conscious than others.

But when you look at, for example, I think the Epstein scandals, the Epstein files, again, are just fascinating about this, because what we're seeing is you get people from Clinton to Bill Gates to Trump to Musk to all of that, linked together. And it's like, well, not all in cahoots. Of course, they were not all there at the same time, but you can see that there's an ecosystem here, and that these people are closer to each other than they are to the rest of us. They're closer together than they are to the rest of us. And if we were in power, then things would be different.

Trent R. Nelson [01:00:16]
You just said it, right? Capitalism reconciles itself better with fascism. Capitalism looks at socialism and says, part of your core tenet is rearranging us, right? Whereas fascism says, part of our core tenet is accentuating what you guys already do, right? So how much better is that of an incentive, right, for the person who's selfish? A thousand percent.

Aurelien Mondon [01:00:39]
Exactly right. And you know what? I don't think you have to go to socialism. In fact, capitalism reconciles itself better with fascism than it does with democracy, even without naming what kind of democracy we want. And that's why we're seeing the rise of technocracy, the rise of autocracy, reactionary tech, all of that stuff, right? The rise of lobbies, the rise of massive PACs and so on.

Caitlin M. Green [01:00:01]
Yeah, I think that idea of just thinking that you can use the fascist to get to your desired goal, I was getting really frustrated because I like to look at this sort of the woke university kind of thing, that whole discourse, right? And so I've been reading all of these things, especially by Steven Pinker. He loves to put out an op-ed every month or two about this, where he'll be like, Democrats, all of you academics, you're really missing this amazing opportunity to let Trump fix our problems. We can just not go along with all the overtly fascist parts. But we had an issue of woke lefty professors and students ruining everything, and he wants to help us with that. So why don't we just take advantage of that amazing thing? And I'm just so afraid that Trump, being such an overt fascist, is gonna scare us away from doing the necessary work and curbing wokeness on our universities. It's like, bro, he wants you all gone. I don't know what to tell you.

Aurelien Mondon [01:02:19]
But you can see how that works, though. Again, that takes us back to this construction of the evil image. Oh, yeah, okay, sure, Trump is going too far, but there's a problem. No, there's no problem at all. Just by saying Trump is going too far, you then legitimize the idea that there's actually a problem in the first place, which is ridiculous, right?

I always find the way the right and far right talk about universities fascinating, and your take on it is great. I always like when you talk about it. But it's such a ridiculous point to make that students or academics have power. We have so little power, and particularly left-wing academics. I mean, as if academia is such a conservative setting. It's based on hierarchies. It's based on, as we see again with the people named in the Epstein files. It's like, yeah, it just blows my mind how the far right has constructed this myth around universities as radical spaces, which they can be, don't get me wrong, but they're not in and of themselves. And we've lapped it up because it makes us feel good about ourselves, and then we do nothing with it.

Caitlin M. Green [01:03:19]
Yeah, right. Well, and for people like Steven Pinker, it apparently just was such an attack on his way of life that students and grad students and post-grads didn't want to be considered viable targets for sex from their professors. Somehow, this was so intolerable that we had to cozy up to Epstein and fascism and just allow this huge slide to happen, just so that people would stop saying that.

Yes, that's Matt Bors, right. "I hate this, I really do, but you've left me no choice." Like, no, no, you had a choice. I'm so sorry. No, and it was me. I made Steven Pinker be that way because I personally bullied him, and I really regret that. Actually, no, I regret nothing. I was his first block in the block list. I was, like, two days before the big wave of blocks. So it did feel a little personal. I'll be honest. It felt good.

Okay, so the last thing I want to get back to, this fear of the masses thing, because I'm obsessed with it. I love it so much. Rich, in the way that you love a leech or a gross bog that you found. I just love it.

Aurelien Mondon [01:03:57]
Yeah, but it's like a meme, right? I always come back to this meme of this guy shaving his head and getting a swastika tattooed, saying, "You made me do this."

Aurelien Mondon [01:04:12]
If only the left wasn't so mean, right? God.

Trent R. Nelson [01:04:30]
Caitlin, you were very polarizing, exactly.

Trent R. Nelson [01:04:41]
Oh, he didn't like you. Absolutely.

Aurelien Mondon [01:04:44]
Well, I mean, that's bad. Your fault, right?

Trent R. Nelson [01:05:06]
Well, "villain," a person who's from a villa, right? A villain is a person who comes from a village. And yet that word, just like "mean," has been taken and applied to the average individual as a pejorative, right? Villains are bad. "Mean" is, yeah, we have a whole bunch of problems with that, and I think it's really baked into how we even talk. Obviously, that's why I brought up the etymology.

Caitlin M. Green [01:05:22]
Right. It's Cruella de Vil, actually, who is a wealthy person. My goodness.

Caitlin M. Green [01:05:40]
Well, I think that, okay. So again, I don't mean to harp on Steven Pinker, right, but he did write a book called Rationality, so he is sort of asking for it. But he does have a lot of his writing where, as you get into it, it starts to sound basically fine, and right? And then you get to some point where you're like, oh, the unavoidable conclusion of this whole thing has been that, actually, aristocracy is kind of great, and the elites are the ones who really know how things should go, and we should stop trying to prevent them from dictating the way that everything should be run. And because they got there for a reason, because they're extremely civilized and rational and intelligent, really.

And this whole idea that mob rule is bad and dangerous, that once you get people into groups, they become irrational and violent. It dovetails so neatly with the fascist ideologies that we also see that it feels silly that anybody would still be promoting it. And yet here we are, right?

And it goes similarly with this pathology idea. Groups of people will spread germs, and they will also spread radicalism. And the woke Twitter mob idea, that being the same thing, where it's like, I'm so sorry that you got some comments that you didn't enjoy reading. That is kind of the reality of being on social media, unfortunately, but I don't know why we decided to enable a fascist takeover about it.

Aurelien Mondon [01:07:33]
Yeah. I mean, absolutely correct. And I think this is one of the things that always brings it back to populism, and what I've called "populist hype" with colleagues as well, the way populism has been applied to the far right completely mistakenly, from my point of view. Because actually, the far right is not for the people. It speaks for the people, but not by the people. It's never, fascism, of course, Hitler, Mussolini, they claimed that they were doing things for the Italian people, for the German people, and so on. But this was never by the people.

While a left-wing form of populism, or other people, you don't even have to call it populism, but gathering the people, gathering left-wing masses and all of these kind of things, has always been core to any progress we've had, right?

So I think there's been some really interesting developments in academia on anti-populism as well. There's lots of colleagues who have done some great work, and I'm thinking in particular of one of my colleagues here at Bath, Alex Yay, who's doing his PhD right now, his doctoral studies on this, developing theories to understand not just the way populism works, whether on the left or right, but also the way anti-populism works, which is the way populism plays a similar role to polarization.

It prevents us from actually looking at alternatives to the status quo, because we are told that as soon as you try to shake the status quo a little bit, to change things, to propose a radical rearrangement of the way our society is organized, economically, politically, and so on, you become a populist. And if you're a populist, well, you're just like Trump, right? And if you're just like Trump, well, you're just like Hitler, pretty much, right, these days.

So there's this conflation. So it's like, Bernie Sanders is just as bad as Trump. It's ridiculous, right? Bernie Sanders is a moderate social democrat. He's not even far left by many definitions, like you see in Europe, right? And yet they're conflated.

And this also then completely, the term populism used this way completely delegitimizes the people. The people become delegitimized as naive, as childish, as following demagogues, as following liars, people promising them a lot of rubbish. Of course, when we talk about populism, we tend to talk about the working class as well, which of course becomes completely caricatural, which is not really about the working class. It's about people who come from a certain background, which completely ignores a racialized working class, which is far more numerous, but far more precarious, and so on and so forth. And so all of these, at the end of the day, really go against democracy, and yet it's seen as sensible, serious, grown-up.

Caitlin M. Green [01:09:41]
Yep. Oh yeah, right. Well, and as soon as any kind of progressive politician is at all charming, all the alarms start to go off where people are like, oh no, a populist. Oh, he's gonna get the masses to rise up. He's gonna whip them into a frenzy. They're gonna be just like a crazy mob. They're gonna have their pitchforks and their torches. And it's like, okay, Zohran Mamdani has dimples. I'm sorry. Oops.

Trent R. Nelson [01:10:12]
Well, my friend texted me. I asked him, I said, how's New York City going? He goes, it's fine. We have to pray five times a day, but otherwise, it's all good.

Aurelien Mondon [01:10:20]
I don't think New York exists anymore, anyway, since he's been elected, right? It's disappeared, or it exploded.

Caitlin M. Green [01:10:34]
No, it exploded. That's right. It fell into the sea.

Aurelien Mondon [01:10:40]
No more billionaires.

Caitlin M. Green [01:10:47]
That's right. Well, living as I am in the smoking husk of Portland, Oregon, I sympathize. I didn't realize that Minneapolis was also a smoking husk. Though I'm really glad that I had Representative Scalise to let me know about that. I thought that my friend was living in a house on a city block, but it turns out she's living in a crater.

Well, did we do it? Have we covered all our, I get so excited. I have to do more yelling all the time. Awesome.

Trent R. Nelson [01:11:22]
I mean, there's always more stuff I could yell about. Aurelien, you're absolutely brilliant. And thank you so much for yelling with us and for teaching us some stuff.

Aurelien Mondon [01:11:32]
My pleasure. I mean, I could yell forever, so whenever you need me, I'll be back.

Caitlin M. Green [01:11:38]
Okay, well, you'll probably find me bothering you again in not too long of a time.

Aurelien Mondon [01:11:45]
That sounds good. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation. So yeah, thank you.

Caitlin M. Green [01:11:50]
Thank you so much. The article is "A Critique of the Polarization Narrative: Expanding the Limits of Democracy, Parties, and Political Participation." This has been Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer, and officially, the happy days are back. So you're welcome, America, and we will see you next time.