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Episode 36: David Moscrop – The Pandemic Possibility for Social Change

In this episode, David Moscrop discusses: 

  • The long history of adversarial politics and the recent rise of partisanship
  • How elites need to start behaving themselves and stop making deals with the devil
  • How to break path dependency at critical junctures in times like COVID-19 to create social change.
  • The impacts of being separated from community and connection, and how this COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity to re-centre on community
  • Equity versus equality, including some great case studies
  • And so much more!
David Moscrop - On Conflict Podcast Episode 36 Cover Art

More About our Guest

David Moscrop is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, a columnist with the Washington Post, a writer with Maclean’s Magazine, and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones. He hosts Open to Debate, a longform current affairs podcast. David is also a political commentator for print, radio, and television news. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

David Moscrop’s Resources

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

Quotes and Highlights

2:50: This [COVID-19] is a tragedy that nobody asked for. It’s also a critical juncture where we have no choice but to make a decision about how we want to do politics now and in the future. Not just what sort of politics we want, but also how we want to do them, because there are different options. There’s the easy way and the hard way, and the easy way is better. You don’t want the hard way. I used to joke about guillotines in 1789 and these days, I look around and say, well, I’m not saying that I’d bet on it, but we ought not to think that we’re beyond institutional breakdown and revolution, and we should be awfully careful about how we go forward because those things aren’t off the table. 

3:50: I’m a market socialist but I’m not a revolutionist. I don’t prefer upheavals of the revolutionary variety because I think they tend to eat their own and make an awful mess. But I start thinking about things like this, about ways of doing politics, because I think there are better or worse ways to get the things you want, and those ways actually make a big difference.

4:39: For people who are listening and wondering where I’m coming from, I’m a market socialist, a civic republican, and a deliberative democrat. One way of doing politics is through deliberation, through sitting down and recognizing the person across from you as a co-equal in governance and self-rule, and trading reasons with that person back and forth, for and against, different preferences, and ultimately coming to some sort of conclusion with which all parties can live, even if there’s not unanimous agreement. I don’t think that needs to be all our politics, but I’m making an argument that we can pursue our politics in a deliberative way that is constructive, even though we face both personal, psychological impediments to that, and institutional challenges that also incentivize a nastier, often stupider kind of politics. 

6:26: Gord asks how politics in the West, particularly the United States and Canada, become so adversarial? David replies:

  • I think they’ve always been adversarial, and part of it is a recency bias, where we look and say, Well, boy, politics seems nasty today compared to the 1960s. Two things on that: 
    • The first thing to ask is who was included and who wasn’t included in the 1960s. And very quickly you start to see that for many communities, politics have been violent and full of nastiness. They’ve been racist. They’ve been violent for years and years and years. We just didn’t pay attention to it in the mainstream. 
    • And the second thing is, say you take Donald Trump, and say we don’t like his style. We could talk substance in a different conversation, but just the way he approaches politics, we find offensive. I would agree, that’s obviously true. And yet Andrew Jackson, an American president, was  probably worse. There have been bullies for centuries. Ditto Canadian politics. The House of Commons is probably more quote unquote well behaved or civil today than it was 100 years ago. I mean, John A. MacDonald, I’m fairly sure he fought somebody or wanted to fight somebody on the House of Commons floor. So the history of our politics are antagonistic.

  • I think one of the big changes, especially in the United States in the last 30 or 40 years, is the rise of partisanship as an identity, which takes on a particularly strange and sort of a toxic form. Partisanship isn’t just how you vote or what you believe; it’s how you see the world and it’s who you are. It becomes an identity and a lens, and your inclination to defend that identity or to try to maintain that lens as the way you see the world leads you to all kinds of strange behaviors, nasty behaviors, but also bizarre behaviors.

  • Take the current coronavirus as an example. Americans’ perception of the threat of the virus, the seriousness of the virus, very based on partisan identity. Republicans think it’s less serious. Democrats think it’s more. And you might say, Oh, they’re just sorting into parties based on that prior belief, but it’s not true. If you were to switch the presidents, that would probably flip.

  • Politics has always been nasty, but now we’re getting a deep identity-based partisanship, which is sort of new, and we’re also getting the decline of liberal democracy, which we didn’t think of 40 years ago I think quite as much as we do now, and that is creating a situation I think that’s that’s new for us, and unprecedented. I don’t know what comes of that.

10:06: Gord says he’s very interested in this notion that people’s identity has become more invested in their political orientation and asks David, “Do you have any sense of what the social conditions have been that have invited people into that sort of psychological change?” David replies:

  • Yeah, so we all have identities. We aren’t always aware of them, but we do have identities. And these overlapping identities form who we are, and sometimes they’re in conflict with one another and create cognitive dissonance that we have to manage. One of the ways you try to resist identities becoming toxic is through social, economic, and political equality. If you see yourself as being treated fairly, if you see yourself as in a common endeavor with other people who are like you, if you see yourself not as in battle with someone who disagrees with you and seeing that person’s a threat to you, well then you’re going to behave very differently than if you see it as a zero sum game war of all against all. And I think, especially in the American context, the decline of equality, both formal equality and informal equality, is extraordinarily dangerous because it’s going to encourage that battle. In Canada, it’s not quite as bad. I’ve got lots of critiques of Canadian institutions, but they’re better. And so I do think part of the question of how you address the challenges of partisanship as a toxic identity is how you create inclusive institutions, including economic institutions.
  • That’s part one. Really quickly, part two is, elites need to behave themselves and not make deals with the devil.

16:35: Julia shares that as she’s listening to Gord and David talk about big-picture concepts, she’s starting to feel helpless and hopeless, and she’d like to ground herself and our listeners. She asks David, “I’d like to hear your thinking around How does that affect me? I’m not a president, I’m Joe, Julia, whomever. Yeah…help me!” David replies:

  • My book is divided into three parts. The first part is sort of, here’s who we want to be,  here’s who we’d like to think we are, here’s who we probably should be. Part two is here’s why we fall short of all that. Part three is how we can get back to where we want to be, or get to where we want to be. There are sort of two streams: 
    • There’s the individual stream: self improvement and self practice about how you could sort of think about these things cognitively. How to avoid cognitive bias, how to be open to reasons, how to give reasons, how to think about others as interlocutors, not opponents. We need to accept that if we’re going to do something then we need to do some self work on how we think, what we know, what we’re open to hearing. Why, when we hear something, we cringe or get our backs up or want to attack rather than listen and think and reflect. The first thing I say to someone is, if you’re serious about wanting to do something, start with working on yourself to be a better thinker, to be a better reasoner, to be a better citizen, to be a better interlocutor; you have to start with yourself. I’m constantly doing the self-work of asking myself, Why do I want to lash out? Why do I feel vindictive? Why did that make me angry? Why is my impulse to make fun of someone instead of try to understand them? We all get these impulses. There are very few people who don’t get them. The people who are remarkable to me and to many are those who control those things. It’s not that they have the absence of these very human emotions; it’s that they know how to recognize them and control them and to focus them in a more productive direction. 
  • Avenue two is institutional changes that support civic action, civic health, and we can debate what those are. I think they’re inclusive political and economic institutions. So you’ve got basic qualities that everyone can live with dignity and be an effective citizen and interlocutor. And then there are participatory institutions, whether it’s a deliberative assembly where you get ordinary citizens who come together and trade reasons back and forth, for or against some policy, or whether it’s a participatory budgeting exercise or process where ordinary citizens are given a part of the budget and they get to talk about how they want to allocate it and then ultimately allocate it. These are things that are done around the world, including in Canada, in some cases.

26:03: Julia and David talk critical junctures, taking the moment (opportunity), social change, and path dependence.

  • David: Imagine you land yourself on a desert island and you gotta make your way inland. What do you do? You hack yourself a path. And the next day you’re not gonna get up and go hack another path; you’re gonna take the same path because it’s easier. We take the path of least resistance, and if it works well enough, we just keep on it.
  • Julia: And our neural pathways work that way too.
  • David: Exactly. Neurons that wire together fire together. And that’s true of institutions, it’s true of habits. But it’s also true that sometimes you reach a fork in the road, and for whatever reason, you can’t do things the same way you used to, and now you’ve got to pick a new way of doing things. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote one of my favourite books called Why Nations Fail, and they talk about this a lot. One of the cases they cite is the Black Death of the fourteenth century in Europe that decimated Europe and also decimated the feudal system. The path dependency on the feudal system started to break down, or at least broke down much faster in the aftermath of the black death, and what rose to replace it? Democracy. The collapse of labour had, to some extent, empowered the labouring class, who came back and said, Well, now we’ve got some leverage, and we’re gonna use it to extract institutional changes and rights and so on. So you can trace some of the origin, some of the consequence of the rise of European democracy, especially first in England, to the black death. It’s a critical juncture.
  • David: I do think there’s an opportunity for us to look at this and say, liberal democracy is crumbling. The market system as we practice it is flawed. And if we’re going to hold this all together, we’re going to need structural changes, and that could take different all kinds of different forms. The argument that I’m advancing is for a democratized economy and a deliberative, inclusive, participatory politics to complement representative democracies. Our civic institutions, our political institutions, our economic institutions need to be thicker because you can’t really be a full citizen if you don’t have the means and the opportunity to be a full citizen. It’s coming from a place of a vision for a democracy that is thicker, more inclusive. That is based on the fact that the right to be a citizen and to participate in civic life is dependent on all kinds of needs that we don’t take as rights, that we might have to, going forward.

34:55: David says: 

  • I think a lot of the crises, of liberal democracy, of capitalism, of different things, are crises of community. This is in fact a very conservative point; this is a communitarian old-school right-wing point that I very, very strongly believe in: that we don’t respect or protect or emphasize community enough, community-building – that might be through civic action, but it might just be through spending time with your family and your friends; that a lot of our pathology is due to the fact that our communities are strained that we don’t have those connections. Some of that is because of the market. If you can’t afford to live in a neighborhood, if you can’t afford to live in the city – we see that the market sometimes tears communities apart.
  • Now we’re seeing people separated from communities, and we see how traumatic that is and how hard that is and hurtful that is, and alienating. And we say, Well we want that back. We want community back. We want to be able to sit beside people. We want to be able to hug people. We want to touch them. We want to be in the same room as them. Digital’s not the same. We miss being out among other people in the community and, well, boy, we want that, and we’re gonna go back, and we’re gonna reclaim it. And so there’s also an opportunity to recentre on community as well. So hopefully we continue to forefront that as we move through this crisis and its aftermath.

39:15: Gord asks David if he can offer advice for those in leadership positions, such as the executive director of an institution, in a time of breakdown or crisis. David responds:

  • David shares a story of being the executor after his father died: “I was studying democratic deliberation at the time. For our family, it was a time of crisis and chaos, and there were quite a few of us. And we had all the old family pathologies that you have, and we had all the family alliances. 
  • I decided to adopt what some call authoritarian deliberation, somewhat tongue in cheek. What I did was say, Okay, we’re in a stage of crisis. We’re in a stage of extraordinary difficulty. We’re in a stage of break down, to some extent. This isn’t the time for someone to be an authoritarian, to seize power and tell people what to do. But there is a time where we need to make decisions. We need to make them quickly, and people need to be accountable for them. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a series of meetings where we’re going to sit down and deliberate either in person or remotely, quick, and we’re gonna talk about what we want, we’re going to exchange reasons, and then I’m gonna make a decision because now isn’t really the moment to put it to a vote. 
  • And what I found was I was able to build consensus. I was able to get buy in, and I was able to execute decisions that ended up being productive. 
  • Now I’m not arguing for authoritarianism. What I’m arguing for is the fact that in a managerial structure – I’m not talking about democracy, I’m talking about managerial structures – there are people who need to be accountable. There are people who need to make a decision. They can do that in a way that brings people on board and creates buy in and understanding. My argument from a managerial perspective is that you ought to be bringing people in, meaningfully listening to them, explaining what you’re deciding and why you’re deciding it, giving reasons, and then being accountable for those decisions, and leaving them to what extent is possible open for revision so that you could come back and say, I made a mistake. Here’s why I made a mistake. Here’s how I recognize that. Here’s how we’re going to correct it. And I have found that, and lots of people, as you well know, who study this will have found that people will respect that. They don’t expect you to be perfect. They expect you to recognize shortcomings, to recognize error, and to recover. 
  • Leadership isn’t saying I’m gonna go poll my constituents and do whatever they say. It isn’t, I’m going to do whatever is popular today, because what’s popular today might not be what’s popular tomorrow, and what’s popular today might not be just. Leadership is saying I have authority to make a decision. I have capacity to exercise judgment. I have responsibility to the people on whose behalf I’m making decisions. I’m going to think, I’m going to consult, and then I’m going to make a judgment call and do something, and then I’m gonna be held accountable.

47:57: Gord asks David to speak about the difference between equality and equity. David says:

  • One of my critiques of liberalism is that liberalism is obsessed with equality, less obsessed with or even aware of equity. So imagine it this way. Imagine a platform with three different heights and imagine three people of three different heights themselves. With equality, you would say, Okay, well, we just level the platform and everyone stands up. So you’ve got one person who’s tall, one person who’s short, one person who’s shortest, and we say, Well, that’s equality. The platform was level. Everyone just stands. Some are tall, some are shorter, some are shortest still. Equity is saying, We’re gonna put the tall person on the short end of the platform, the second tallest on the second shortest, and the shortest person stands on the tallest. And then everyone is the same height, in terms of the platform. Equity is concerned with the just distribution, not of the same distribution.
  • From an equity lens, democracy isn’t just about everyone having the exact same vote or the exact same share or the exact same theoretical opportunity. It’s about the fact that there are differences built into realities and communities and issues that need to be respected, and that sometimes people need a little more. Sometimes people need a little less. You adjust accordingly. Equity is harder because it’s not one size fits all. You’ve got to make judgment calls, you gotta adjust as you go. Equality is set it and forget it, and then you say, Well, some win. Some people lose. What you gonna do? Everyone was equal. Reality isn’t like that at all, right? We don’t start from the same places. We don’t have the same skills. We don’t have the same parents. We don’t come from the same cities. So equity allows us to rebalance according to need. It’s more difficult, but it’s also more just.
  • One of my favorite examples from political science is from a book a couple years ago by Tali Mendelbert and Chris Karpowitz called The Silent Sex. They studied the dynamics of deliberation and they found a golden ratio of women to men in a deliberation to get quality deliberation, nonsexist deliberation, and so on. You might say, Oh, that must be 1 to 1. Not true. If you have too many men compared to women, the men misbehave because they are bullies and they’re louder, they’re more, whatever. But if you have too few men, the men try to peacock and they misbehave. So there’s a golden ratio of slightly more than…I can’t remember, like one point something women to men, but it’s reflective of a reality that we have these socially patterned types of behaviors and realities that, when you apply the equality lens, you get worse outcomes than if you apply the equity lens. We need to get over this idea that equality and fairness are the same thing. In fact, often it’s the case that equity is fair and equality is not fair, and that’s something we need to deal with.
  • Julia mentions an experiment by Frans de Waal regarding monkeys rejecting unequal pay, and says that fairness is deeply embedded and encoded in us.
  • David points out that sometimes we do want simple fairness in terms of equality, such as a coin toss (depending on the situation)

58:55: The big takeaway is, people have capacity. People can learn to be good citizens. They can learn to deliberate. They can learn to understand when equality is appropriate and when equity is appropriate. They can empathize with others. They can build what might seem like unlikely communities. But that involves some personal work, and it also involves politicians and other elites who have to behave themselves and not exploit cleavages for political gain. And it involves substantive institutional changes that allows there to be the fundamental requirements for people to do that, material requirements for people to do that, both formal and informal, legal and materially substantive; not only the right to participate, but also enough money to pay the rent or to have child care so you can show up. And if we can get those things, if we can get politicians behaving, individuals doing self work, and institutions providing means and opportunity for people to engage, that we can create the kind of institutions and the kind of society that can withstand crises in the short term and can stay standing and withstand general decline in the long term. That’s a choice that we could make. And we’ve reached a critical juncture today as we sit here now, as people will listen now, where we can make decisions that are going to affect whether or not those things are possible or not, and we ought to take that opportunity to do it. That’s by far the better way to do things because the alternative is decline and the sort of conflict that we don’t want. And to me, that’s just a no-brainer.

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Julia Menard and Gordon White, in addition to being the co-hosts of the On Conflict Podcast, are also the Principals and Founders of the On Conflict Leadership Institute. Julia and Gordon firmly believe there is a strong correlation between conflict and the responsibilities of leaders, and that idea sparked the creation of the Institute. Come follow Julia and Gordon as they explore the nexus of conflict and leadership over at the On Conflict Leadership Institute (OCLI).

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