S4 Ep10: Our Better Angels (with Judy Woodruff)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I’m Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. And this week, we are helping you prepare for the holiday season. We are dropping this show a little bit early. So as you are prepping for or covering from your Thanksgiving holiday.

You can also enjoy the political struggles of a bunch of strangers who also were trying to figure out how to talk to their families and loved ones about politics. Now, we’ve heard about these kinds of interpersonal squabbles for years across our various focus groups, So hopefully after the show, you’ll find you are not alone this time of year. If it has been hard for you to talk about politics, around the holiday table. My guest and I have done some focus groups together over the past few months and heard a lot about how divided the country is right now. Judy Woodruff is the former anchor of the PBS Newshour and is currently a senior correspondent who also hosts a recurring segment talking about these very themes.

America at a crossroads. Judy, thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Longwell. It’s great to be with you. I’m used to being with you watching you moderate in your amazing way, these focus groups. So this is a treat. We’ve turned the tables.

Turn the tables. And I gotta say, you are doing this on your birthday. Which is just the nicest thing anybody has maybe ever done for you. I can’t believe you’re hanging out with us on your birthday. Which you share with Joe Biden?

I share it with Joe. Well, doesn’t everybody a birthday with a president.

Not that I know of. Well, happy birthday to you from all of us at the focus group. I’m really excited to have you here. So One of the reasons that we do this focus group work together is that both of you and I are pretty interested in and sort of how people interact with each other in this moment of what feels like extreme polarization. And one of the things I’m interested to know from you is both want you to tell us about America to Crossroads, why you decided to sort of use that as your way of getting at this question of how divided we are.

Did I also wanna know? You’ve had a a long and storied career. Are we more divided now than ever or is this just another bump in the rocky road of democracy?

Well, it is such a good question, and it all relates to, as you said, my long career, which goes back as a reporter, more than fifty years. When I started out in nineteen seventy, I was a local reporter in Atlanta, covering the Georgia legislature, covering Jimmy Carter’s campaign for governor. So that’s how far back I go. And what happened, Sarah, Jonathan Last year, as I was looking at my career as an anchor coming to a close, something I had been long planning to do. I thought about the kind of reporting I really, really wanted to spend time on.

After anchoring. And it was something I had always had in mind, but I wasn’t sure what the focus would be. And then it just hit me in the face. This country is more divided than at any time since I’ve been covering American politics. As I said, going back fifty years, Yes.

There have been Democrats and Republicans disagreeing over everything from whether we should cut taxes How much government should spend on welfare? What should we do, about immigration? But never have I seen the two parties and the American people? At each other’s throats in a way that we see today, not among everybody, but among so many people who in the past, I think, were content to say, well, I’m a d or I’m an r, I’m a Democrat or a Republican, but I don’t hate the other side. Today, you hear more and more people say they just don’t have respect for people on the other side, and I think that is truly to me one of the distinguishing characteristics of this time we’re living in.

Well, so I’ve kinda heard people say, like, is this true about the sixties and kinda like the Vietnam era? Because sometimes I hear people kinda say, to people my age, like, oh, you think that we’ve never been here before, but that’s because you grew up at this time in sort of the eighties and nineties. But of course, we’ve been here before as a country, but you’re saying no. You feel like this is worse for some reason. Why is that?

Well, what I know and comes from the experts, the folks who’ve studied this from academics and others, but among them, the people at the Pew Research Center. We’ve talked them extensively about their findings. We’ve also talked to people like Lilyonna Mason, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins who has written several books on American politics and sort of how people relate to each other. These days. She has done what I think is truly groundbreaking work in trying to understand how people have internalized their six.

How we are at a moment now when after, yes, the turbulent, eighties, nineties, the OOs. I mean, I and I actually take it the nineties, and and she does too when newt gingrich came into office with a contract for America. And so much of the rhetoric, the language then, was about It’s not just that we disagree with the Democrats. The Democrats are bad people. They believe in things that are not good for the country.

They’re not patriotic. So some of it, I think, started then, then you have the tea party at the beginning of president Obama’s presidency. And then you could look at other steps along the way, but where we are right now is we’re at a point where and again, this is backed up with a Pew research center or the American people not only think the other party is misinformed or just wrong or they have a different view but they think people in the other party are dishonest, immoral, lazy, and worse. And this is something that is new. Where if people were this far apart, I’m holding up my hands, maybe six inches apart.

Thirty years ago, today, we’re more like ten inches apart. On the issues. And if you layer in on top of that, the attitude that people have about the other party you’re looking at a much more sort of baked in division, even than we saw during Vietnam, which was when I was in college, I wasn’t so much covering politics at that time. But I was living through that era, and there’s no question people had different views. But I don’t think people thought so badly.

Of people who disagreed with them then.

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s not only backed up by Pew and by some of the other work that you’ve done, it’s backed up by our focus groups. So let’s start by listening to just some of the evidence from a few groups. Here’s just a smattering of things we’ve heard over the years, but it is replete through all our groups.

It’s hard as a mom to raise your kid with loving kindness when the whole world around them

is just hating each other.

There’s such a broad division, and I didn’t grow up like that.

I have a trump hat. I have a trump shirt. I have never been able to wear them.

You know, the the loudest voices are what people see. The polarization is disappointing.

I used to love watching this. And for four years, it was just how do we kill Trump? And that was insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just think he’s too divisive for this country.

I think like Donald Trump himself made it okay. Like, our president makes fun of disabled people. It’s okay to do that. Our president, you know, makes racist disparaging comments to people. People came out the woodworks with that.

They will look at us like we are the crazy people.

Yes.

I have never had any personal friends or anything call me the names, but we have heard them We are hateful. We are racist just because we disagree and have a different opinion. Okay.

So we just took a smattering of people talking about how much they feel like it’s impossible to talk about politics or like how divisive our politics is in the country. And this is every focus group. Like, we could have grabbed any five groups and just pulled out some of the early answers. And I’ll tell you that was mishmash of different kinds of people. That was Democrats and then two time Trump voters.

And what you hear, especially from some of the trump voters, is the fact that they don’t feel like they can express their political opinions because people think that they’re racist or they’re terrible people. But on the other side, Democrats, feel like they make fun of disabled people and gay people, and it’s like an attack on their values, an attack on who we are. And so much of it, and we heard this in the groups you and I did together. So much of the blame or the reasons come back to Trump. So as you’ve been doing your work, like how much do you think because you were just talking about this, the idea that, you know, there was the new green merchant stuff, but how much do you think Trump is at the center of why we’re so divided.

Is he a symptom, a cause? What do you think?

Well, I think he is a cause. I’m not gonna say he’s the only because if you look back, as you just suggested, and the people we’ve talked to have told both of us this, this does date back several decades in American political life. And as I say, I kind of put the early nineties as a marker, kind of a guidepost of when things started to get much more. Not just partisan, but partisan in a way that was looking down on and looking in a more than disrespectful, but looking in an angry way at the other side when there was very rough language that began to be used. So that accelerated over the years, the nineties, the o o’s, and then along comes.

And as we all know, there was a lot of language back and forth when Barack Obama was running for president accusation that he wasn’t born in the United States. Again, there’s always been ugly stuff thrown around in presidential elections, but it just got uglier. And then along came in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Donald Trump is running, And we’re hearing a different level of language, I think, and a willingness to go after a political opponent. In a very personal way, we saw that in some of the the primary debates and then on into the his presidency. I don’t wanna make it sound as if he’s the only person, responsible for this.

But I think there’s no question that because of the way he speaks about others, that there’s been kerosene that’s been thrown on what was a smoldering fire, if you will. And now it’s blazing and we are trying to figure out if we can’t put it out altogether, how do we at least tamp it down? So that people can at least have conversations with each other. Because right now, Sarah, again, I don’t have to tell you it’s in the political culture. People look at what’s going on in Congress, and they hear angry language.

We saw some just a few days ago with member of Congress, challenging a witness at a Senate hearing to a fist fight and on and on. And so it spread throughout the political culture. And people are hearing that. I I hear mothers say they don’t want their children to watch the news because they don’t want them to hear some of this. And so it’s gotten worse.

And here we are in twenty twenty three, and it’s at the worst I’ve seen it ever. And what I’m doing is you just described as going around the country, trying to understand from people, maybe what would it take to tamp this down? So far, I mean, we know there are lots and lots of so called bridging groups that are out there trying to get people to have a cup of coffee together, have a beer. Together. But, you know, that’s one person at a time.

We’ve got a lot of Americans who either feel deeply or disrespected by the other party and by neighbors who don’t speak to them anymore because I hear this from Trump supporters, and then I hear from Democrats that they’re just aghast at something someone said or did who was a Trump supporter. So we’ve got a lot of healing to do right now in this country.

We’re gonna spend more time on Republicans and Democrats as we go through the show, but I wanna play some of what we’ve heard from Trump Biden voters. We call them flippers on the show. And what’s interesting is that these are the people who tend to be in the political center And we hear from a lot of them that they spend time mediating squabbles between friends and family. Let’s listen.

My sister is clear to Democratic. My dad at ninety is dealing with that staunch die hard republican that was the head of a union who thinks Donald Trump walks on water and my sister fight They fight. So, I mean, I have to be like a moderator of a sixty year old woman and a ninety year old man over politics. To me, it’s just it it breaks my heart. But that’s how people act.

Extreme people like my family. Who are saying, oh, you know, trump’s the only person who is standing up to the, you know, whatever. The various names are for the liberals. It was just exhausting to keep hearing that rhetoric and to have somebody who would not bring the country together. They’re playing one racial and ethnic group against the other for power.

My mom and my grandfather are both extreme Right. Like, Trump is the only man who can save our nation, and then I have people like my sister who are, like, complete, wildly left, and the real solution is just not to talk about it. I actively change the subject when things come up.

Mean, I have two good friends, but they are so conspiracy theory now that sometimes it’s even hard to talk anything because they are so into the cabal and all that stuff. And so when when she’s trying to tell me that there are baby parts in the COVID vaccine and that it’s it’s a conspiracy theory in the US. I’m like, but Kimberly, how does the whole world have the COVID vaccine? If it’s a conspiracy state in the US, then the whole one would be involved. Right?

And, you know, Sandy Hook was was not real, and the government did that to try to do gun control. I’m Kimberly, do you really believe that do you really believe that the World Trade Towers didn’t come down by planes? Show me facts, right, versus the back that I see. And they’re all, like, but I have the right media that I’m looking at. I’m like, well, maybe the media online’s not right, but I’m sure yours is way off base too.

So how do you come to an agreement? So we try to have those conversations, and then we just agree to not talk about it to a point.

So, our poor swing voters, they’re just trying to, they’re trying to keep everyone together, create the whole thing together. You know, one of the things you just said that I think is in saying about Trump, about whether he’s the symptom or the cause, and he were saying, you know, he’s certainly not the only cause, but the voters, they have their own symptom cause relationship. And one of the things that you hear from these voters and we played it up front is this idea of they’re pained by how divided we are. It doesn’t matter. Your political affiliation.

They think we’re too divided, and they don’t like how divided we are. It makes them sad. And they don’t like being estranged from their neighbors or their family and having these fights. And yet, and yet they too have rage. And I I’d make this joke all the time, but, like, upfront, people will be like, they’ll just lament how divided we are.

And then, like, twenty seconds later, the same person will be like, and it’s all those stupid lives fault or, you know, or it’s because these trumpers are, sub human, you know, and it it is that they don’t want it and yet they are so angry about how they view the other side. And I think there’s selector of listeners of this podcast. I mean, I get a lot of people sort of writing in being like, I can’t listen to these people. They’re such idiots and, and I guess I am constantly struck by sort of two things. One is how much a lot of these people to me do not seem like bad people Right?

Like, I remember when we were in Iowa and we were talking to that group of people, the trump voters, they were so sweet and so funny and loved hanging out together, and we’re very honest in our answers. And yet, do you think that we are better actually? Like, we we actually are more connected than we think we are and the toxicity is just fueled by the social media and all the other things and actually deep down like we can get back to that or Do you think that the division is just gonna continue to breed on itself?

I’m, by nature, an optimist, Sarah, so I have to believe. That this is something that we can work our way through. I just am not ready to throw in the towel and assume that this is the way it’s gonna be. I believe sure, you know, there are bad apples and and every barrel. We know, you know, some people are gonna do bad things.

They’re gonna stir things up. But in general, I think human nature, it just can’t go on like this. But I do think we have to talk about the other factors play here. And one of them certainly is the media, the news media, and social media. We’re in this echo chamber where one thing happens and then it’s repeated and it’s distorted and it’s repeated and it’s magnified and it’s over and over again.

And we all wake up in the morning and we are surrounded by news coming at us from three hundred and sixty degrees of difference. And yes, many of us are choosing only one side, if you will, or set of sources of news that lean either far right or lean left, or I hope some of us are still in the center because That’s what the PBS NewsHour is all about. But I think you can’t look at what’s going on right now without taking a hard look at where we are. In this moment in the media because all these views, whatever people are saying, whatever our politicians are saying, if they make an incendiary comment, it gets picked up repeated over and over again on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, TikTok, the many, many different platforms out there. I’m not saying that’s the only thing, but I think that is responsible for for so much of it.

If we were in the pre and we can’t turn the clock back, I understand that. But we were in the free internet, pre even cable newsdays. I’m gonna take us way back. I mean, when I started out on television, it was just the broadcast networks, pre cable. Cable today.

Look at what you see on some cable channels at night, and it’s pretty divisive. I’m not gonna name names, but I think we know what they are. And what I will say is that the collapse of local journalism, which is something I’ve looked at in our Crossroads series, I think has contributed to this because you probably know this, Sarah, but something like two thousand five hundred plus newspapers across America have shut down altogether over the last ten, twenty years. So people don’t have the kind of local information and news that they used to. So what are they doing?

Well, they’re either turning into cable news talk radio. They’re going up to the internet or they’re watching their Facebook feed, whatever aunt Betty or you know, my cousin Joe sent me. And it’s a much more divisive time and moment. And and the conflict is what gets emphasized in the media. I can say this as somebody who worked in the media for as long as I have.

That’s what makes a good quote show is when people are fighting with each other.

And I remember when we were in Iowa, I asked the group of these were two time trump voters, and I said, you know, who do you blame for the fact that we’re so divided And they just all said the media right out front. The dem groups that we did in Pennsylvania didn’t tag the media the same way but the Republicans really did. One of the other things that you had me ask the focus groups that I thought was a pretty interesting question as you asked about the dating habits. And we were actually asking, like, well, how would you feel if, like, your kid married somebody Oh. From a different political party?

But what’s funny is we went just recently, we were doing young groups of both young conservatives and young progressives. And so we asked them what they would do if, like, about dating someone from the other party and listen to the young, not love answers.

I tend to be pretty conservative. And so for me, that would be a deal breaker. I would definitely want someone who was aligned with similar values and that’s not to say that I wouldn’t want to, like, entering to friendships or have other relationships, but I think when it comes to, like, a significant other really important relationship like that, I feel very strongly about having aligned values.

I kind of agree with as well just because I feel like if you put a super liberal person, a very super conservative person, even with ideas of, like, growing a family and your views on how your kids should be grown up. It I feel like it could clash.

Being a Democratic Republican has so much influenced social values And I’m in the LGBTQ community. So, like, that’s first and foremost for me talking about my own rights as a woman. I can’t be surrounding myself with people that don’t see the value in me as a woman. And my friends, people in the lgbtq community, less than. And that’s what I see in so many Republicans So here’s the thing.

In these two groups, we just played a little bit, but,

like, in these two groups, it was pretty much unanimous. People were not gonna date somebody in the other political party. Look, people have always wanted to sort of like date and marry people who shared their values. That’s not really breaking news. But I guess I wonder Do you think that it’s because politics has become like the dominant prism through which we see our values now?

That people don’t feel like they can have a relationship with somebody in the other political party because I do feel like it didn’t used to be this way. What do you think?

Well, I you’re absolutely right, Sarah Longwell some extent, we’ve always sort of thought about, do you really wanna spend your life with someone who has diametrically different views than you on some really important issues and values in particular. But today, what we’re dealing with, and again, this what the scholars, the people who studied this, are telling us, is that we’ve taken on political identities in a way that’s bigger than ever. It used to be, you know, you would get to know somebody. You’d talk about where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school?

Tell me about your your family, what kind of sports do you like? Where do you go on vacation today? So much of our identity seems to be wrapped up in whether we’re a d or an r. Or maybe something in between. I don’t know.

But mainly, it’s the d and the r. And if you’re a d, then, you know, you fit into these boxes. And if you’re an r, you’re way over here. And in particular, of pro Trump r, who is seen even by some Republicans as unacceptable. But the point is that people are identifying more by what they believe politically.

And this is a relatively new thing. It’s something I mentioned Liana Mason, this political scientist who’s at Johns Hopkins. She’s done a a lot of work on this. And she was telling us that in a way, we really haven’t seen in this country. It’s almost as if you put on a cloak.

And if you’re putting on the Republican cloak, then you adopt these positions, and then you assume that anybody who’s a Democrat has that other set positions. Now that may not necessarily be the case, but we are now judging each other by those labels, and probably we’re quicker to assume things about people because of that. So, yeah, I do think that there’s more of this political identity going on today than there ever has been.

Well, just to back that up. Like I said, when we were in Iowa, one of the things that we did was ask people sort of what they thought about the other party. So in Iowa, we were talking a two time Trump voters, and I wanna listen to how they talked about Democrats.

If you’re a liberal, then you are pro choice, and then you believe that it’s okay to kill a baby. And I don’t believe that you can believe that and be a real christian. Meaning believe in the love that Jesus died for you to have.

I think somebody would be very conflicted in their heart and their mind of being both of that. And I mean, technically, I guess you could be, but that would mean you’re not allowing god’s love to be in you as much.

I don’t think that the Democrats, I hate to say it like that. I hate to segregate the party. They have too many, yeah, but what if? But what if I don’t feel like a girl, So god made me a boy, but I don’t feel like a boy. And so I’m going to change that.

It’s just messing with creation. It’s just messing with The absolute.

You can’t be liberal and be far left on beliefs. And then say, oh, I’m a Christian. Well, you can say it. That’s the worst thing. People do say it.

But they don’t understand what a Christian really is then because a Christian is someone that knows, okay, this is right. This is wrong. This is black. This is white, and I’m not talking skin color. I’m just talking facts.

So, actually, the specific question we asked that group was, do you think Democrats can be good faithful Christians. That was sort of what they were responding to. And they were basically like, no. Right? And when we put that to the Democrats later and said that the Democrats were shocked.

Shaw.

Right? To hear that Republicans thought that, but What struck you about listening to the way these Republicans talked about Democrats?

Yeah. That was a question I really wanted you to ask. And I have to say Sarah Longwell was startled by the answer. I guess I didn’t expect everyone at the table pretty much who who spoke up said what you said that they as you just heard, they don’t think Democrats can be Christians, can be people of deep faith because of their position on abortion or because of their views on on gender possibly lgbtq. I it was a pretty stark window into what people’s ideas are.

And you’re absolutely right. When you asked Democrats in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania about what those Republicans had said, they said they were done. They were taken aback. They were insulted. I think one person used words to that effect that they couldn’t believe that somebody would think that they weren’t capable of being Christian, and they went on to talk about Jesus accepted people of of many different views.

And it became of, in a way, an uncomfortable, but a very telling conversation that you had with these Republican voters in Iowa. Again, two time Trump voters, and then the Democrats in Pennsylvania in how on that one point about whether can somebody be a person of deep faith? I mean, I don’t remember a time in American history when you have this attitude that maybe somebody couldn’t be a person of faith if they held certain views. So I think we are at a a new juncture in our lives.

Yeah. It was sort of sad with the Democrat group. And I’m gonna play a little bit of that, but it was sad when when they when they were like, but what do you mean they said we couldn’t be Christians? Like, remember having to sort of be like, well, it’s because they felt like, you know, on some of these trans issues, and on issues of abortion. Because people were just like, but I don’t understand.

Like, what do you mean they think that? And I think sometimes I think we overestimate the disdain with which the other party sees us. And then sometimes I also think though that we can underestimate the impressions that other Americans would have of them without knowing them. And that could be a little heartbreaking, right, to have them sort of be like, what do you mean they think that about me? Like, let me tell you about my relationship with God and how you know, how dare they?

So let’s let’s play a little bit of this, democratic group because one of the things we asked that group was just how do you deal with the Republican zero lives, or how do you interact with them? Cause there was a little bit of a a values conversation there. I will say I remember that group putting it a lot of it on Trump. Like, Trump was the one who was doing this to people. But let’s listen to how these Democrats talked about Republicans and their wives.

With me and my two brothers were the progressives in our family, well, I guess all the younger people are. But I think we just pay attention more to, like, everything line by line. And then most of the Republicans are just republican by association because they always have been. You know, they don’t know all of the bills and all of the laws and what’s going on in all states, and I don’t think they care. You know, they’ve always been a Republican and they always will be.

But I think it’s like education.

Right around the time Trump got elected, I found out my father’s now a Republican and a Trump supporter, and just the things that he says are ridiculous. And when he says the reasons why he supports him. So he’s the only one in my household. He kinda influences my mom. But whenever I go to their house, he knows better than to bring any of that up.

Because my sister and I will illustrate anything else to say. And it’s not a good conversation.

The relative that I have an issue with who I think is Republican is my son. And The only thing that I can say to him is how did you get that way? Because as a single father, he grew up with me and he saw how I voted and what our values were. And now that he’s a successful person, I won’t say he’s a successful businessman I don’t know how he has adopted the beliefs of the Republican Party.

People do this a lot in the groups where they talk about they’re either estrangement from or just they talk about, like, their close family members, And, oh, this guy, we were on TV. And I was like, oh, I felt not good for him to talk about his son, but that was clearly this, like, painful part of, like, his relationship with politics is that his kids didn’t believe that. And we just hear tons of stories like that. But one of the things you did on your program, as you talk to a bipartisan group of voters in Ohio earlier this year from a group called Braver Angels, which is a group I like. I also have done some of their stuff because they are trying to figure out how to have these tougher conversations.

And one woman talked about how she has a great political discourse while gardening with the people in her community. And that was nice. And so are those the conversations that leave you with hope? Do you feel like that’s kind of the path out of this?

I do, but I do have to go back just first to say how painful it was hear those conversations, Sarah Longwell Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with those Democrats. And with the Republicans, I mean, to hear them talk about their estrangement painful estrangement from close family members. As you said, fathers, daughters, sons, it’s hard to hear, and you hear almost feel as if you’re hearing something that would normally be kept inside the family unit. But what we heard from the braver angels folks, this was a group that braver angels knew about. They identified them.

They identified them as people who have wanted to try to bridge the divide. They’ve expressed an interest in sitting down and having conversations. Sometimes tough conversations. With people who disagree with them. So we were talking to people who had already raised their hand and said, okay.

I don’t wanna be forever you know, way on the left or way on the right. I wanna try to relate to people who disagree with me. It gave me hope. I think it has to give all of us hope, but it is one person or one group at a time. And it’s gonna take a long time.

I think for those programs to develop critical mass, if you will. I hope I’m wrong. And I know what they hope certainly is that if they can start to see this kind of thing in communities around the country that other people will hear about it, they’ll pick up on it. It’ll get more more media attention, and people will recognize that there are real serious meaningful efforts out there to get people to just to listen. In fact, there’s one group called listen first.

I think that maybe you’ve heard of them. They’re all about, as I the name says, you know, listening. Because that’s not what we’re doing anymore. I mean, you’ve listened to some of the same people I have, Sarah, and I and some of them, I don’t think they wanna listen. I mean, We still have some very strong views out there on the part of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, who absolutely reject the premise that the other person is saying, whether they’re a family member or not, And how whether braver Angels or common ground, there are these wonderful groups I’ve been in contact with.

We’ve talk to them about what they’re doing. How are they gonna get people to overcome that? It’s hard work. It’s almost one person, one family at a time.

Yeah. I mean, it is hard to figure out how to scale what is supposed to be kind of like our ability to just interact with each other normally. Like, like, the fact that you, like, programmatically need to figure out how to be, like, how do we have people talk to each other effectively of differing political views sort of feels like we’ve already lost because you have to, like, fund organizations to do it versus this just being a, like, natural way that we engage with each other, civically, and civily that allows us to exist, but I I wanna go back, actually, because you brought this up, and I was trying to rush the next question, but I wanna take a second on it, which is the the how sad it is. Like, sometimes people ask me, they’re just like, oh, how can you listen to these people? Whatever.

And one of the things that I don’t think comes through when you’re just listening to the Right? The clips is alright. This is what people said fine. But the crushing loneliness that you see from people the sadness that you see when they talk about losing these relationships, the way that they are so dug in tribally and in a partisan way that allow them to relinquish their relationships with people that clearly mean a lot to them. You were talking about the media early, but just like, there’s so many conflict entrepreneurs out there that are willing to jump into those cracks and widen them, to drive wedges into them, to poison in people’s ears, in a way that I I watched people.

And, like, there was this guy one time I remember, and he was talking about how his granddaughter had canceled him. He was just like, she’s canceled me for things that he said, and the things that he said sounded not great about immigrants. I would say, I’m not sure I would have pursued a second conversation with this guy either he was using that this terminology canceled so that he could be part of the tribe that for whom being canceled as a kind of cultural signifier, but really The guy was sad, his grandkid doesn’t talk to him anymore. You know? And, like, I don’t know what to say other than to acknowledge it, but I think the humanity of it all is real and find myself sort of disliking people less as I do these and more feeling very angry at the forces that exacerbate the pain and loneliness that is part of the human condition and turn it in such a negative way.

No, I’m so glad you’re making this point, Sarah. I completely agree and we so often ignore and or forget or don’t talk about the human. Impact of all this. We’re talking about the political impact. We’re talking about the the effect on our democracy, which we should be talking about because people are worried if this kind of division continues and other things happen, that our democracy is weaker, because so much of our democracy depends on people being able to come together to frankly to compromise at some point.

We can’t always have diametrically opposed positions and then go on to solve problems. Each side has to give some And that’s not where we are right now in our political culture. It’s my way or the highway is what’s being celebrated. On both sides to to such a large degree. But I I completely agree with you.

And your point about the folks who are making pay out of this, making money, who are generating business. And I spoke just a week or two ago, with, political historian at Vanderbilt. Her name is Nicole Hemer. And she points out. She’s done a a lot of research on all of that she’s actually studied the history of the conservative movement, but she’s done a ton of research.

And she talked about how you know, there are figures in our history who have personally profited, for their political careers that profited and or they’ve made money or advance themselves by dividing people that it is about dividing people. That’s what’s advanced them. And elevated them politically. And I think we need to call that out when that’s happening. And we know there are folks out there that are engaging in this and have engaged in it.

If somebody’s knowingly sort of digging in, and as you say, exploiting those crevices, those cracks in the family, in the way they talk about issues and differences. It’s just not healthy. It’s not good for our country. It’s not good for for

For our souls.

For our soul. Thank you. So I think about psychologist, sociologist, anybody who studies, you know, what makes a healthy society is people support each other that they’re strong family units. So family units are being tested right now. I mean, when I’m talking to you during Thanksgiving week, people are gonna be coming together this week or not.

And finding out whether they can have these tough conversations. And hopefully, people will put what I started to say a minute ago is I think what we’re gonna have to do to get through this is have our attention directed away from some of these quote hot button political issues and toward other things that matter above all. Our health, our well-being, love and respect for our fellow man.

Yeah. We had, Tim Ryan on here, not that long ago. He was basically advocating. We all do MDMA. And, start sort of micro dosing.

I wanna take this optimism and run with it. Okay. And I wanna listen to some of the people in the focus groups who are trying to make this thing because we talk to a lot of people who acknowledge the the struggle that we’re in, but they’re they’re really trying to do their best. So let’s listen.

Like my mom’s a Liberal Democrat. And I work in something completely different. We have the most loving relationship. It’s because I don’t identify our relationship based on Democrat Republican.

Yeah. So, you don’t judge Democrats as being sort of bad character.

They’ll love their their children. They want they all want the best for their families. We’ve lost that debate. We can’t rationally friendly, have a circle meeting Ron DeSantis say, I believe in this, and I believe in that, and I love you anyway. You know?

Right. I mean,

it’s a lot. You wanna,

you know, you wanna go have coffee. That’s right.

I had a friend at work when she found out that I had voted for Trump, and we were good friends, and we worked really well together. She said, I think we can’t be friends anymore. I mean, she actually said that now I laughed at her because I laugh at everything. Honestly, I mean, and we’re great friends still to this day. And I think that’s what America needs.

We need to be inclusive and we are so divisive right now. It’s hurting our country.

My daughters are both very liberal, which pains me, but I support them and they’re beliefs and try to have conversations with them about what I believe and why I believe that way, but I don’t try to change them. I just let them know how I believe and why I believe that way. But if they choose to marry a Democrat, I will support them one hundred percent. They were both raised in church, taken to church every week. They both watched the news that I watched And so when I say that, I mean, Tucker Carlson, and I know it drove him nuts at times as I learned more about the way they believe, but, certainly, I feel like it’s important for them to know that I support them.

Yeah. The last guy was talking about his kids, and there’s a lot of good stuff, I think, about parents who are trying to maintain their relationships with their kids. Who I think it’s a tale as old as time a little bit to have more conservative parents with their more progressive kids. So that was the Republicans, and you may remember them at that Judy because that was mostly the Iowa group, but let’s listen to the ds from Pennsylvania, talk about similar stuff.

No. It’s more to a person than your political party. You know, there’s there’s some good Republicans out there. I’ve heard that we’re trying to run for president against Trump. Will hurt?

Is it alert? Yeah.

He’s one of them.

I like him. You know what I mean? There there are good Republicans out there. You just gotta get rid of the Trump. Trump is the problem.

Right. Not the Republican Party. It’s true. To greed.

Do you know there’s more to someone than their political beliefs?

Oh, sure.

So I guess I would have to look at this person as a whole.

My good friend that I work with, he loves Trump. He has trump socks in his drawer at work He begs Trump a hundred percent. No matter what this man says, no matter what this man does, he trunk can do no wrong. And he’s an African American guy from Brooklyn. Trump can do no wrong by him.

Ben you’re still friends.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

But also my dad has two gay sons who put together a presentation for my mom and dad of all of the lgbt harmful things that has happened since he was in administration, and my parents broke down and cried and said that they had never learned information like that before and had no idea that there were harm like that happening, and so they did more to educate themselves and both switched parties to Democrat, and they live in Florida now. So that’s become a new challenge.

I think they have friends who live in Republican. I think they live in Republican, but I don’t know that they vote. And, they know that I’m a Democrat, so, like, they won’t. I think they’re more centrist than their views than, like, the way out there evangelical Republicans that we see all over the news and stuff, but we don’t talk about politics.

They just have certain views and they see the world’s a certain way, and we just agree to disagree. But at the same time, it’s like, okay. This is what you believe, but this is not, like, who you are or anything like that.

So you do hear a lot of people when they kinda get the better angels of their nature kick in, they’ll tell you, like, oh, I’ve got a friend and, like, they’re a good person, or they talk about trying to make their relationships work. And I guess as we head into the holiday holidays, all the different holidays, What do they do during the holidays when they’re with the people that they love? Are you an advocate of no politics at a Thanksgiving table to keep the peace or do you think we just have to find a better way to talk about politics with each other?

Well, as a reporter, for many, many years, I always tried to stay right as an observer of many of these conversations. And in my extended family, both my husband who journalists and my own. I’ve seen an evolution of views. I think I’m an advocate of play it by ear because if you can have some of these conversations about what’s going on in the world. Great.

If you can do that without getting your backup, I mean, without people getting angry or taking it personally, I think that’s great. But if it becomes painful, if people are saying things that are hurtful to each other, I don’t think that’s healthy. And I think you put those conversations off and you try to change subject. So I think every family has to figure out for themselves, you know, what the parameters are. I think because the last thing you wanna do when you finally get everybody together and, you know, somebody’s driven hundreds of miles to grandmother’s house or unable’s house, to get there and then spend the whole time, you know, huffing and puffing and angry.

That’s not what we want. But all the more reason why we need to think about ways to get through this. And as you and I said earlier, maybe it’s by focusing on things that matter, but that aren’t so political. As I’m saying that, Sarah, look, these are issues that matter. The things that people disagree over today.

They matter immigration, what we do about it. As a country. That matters. How much we spend on health care? And for whom that matters, housing.

What we do about Israel and Hamas, all those things matter. And yet, look how divided we are. So if there’s a way we can say what we think, and understand that it’s okay to have a different view and still love the person who has that different view. That’s okay. But if we start to personalize it so much that we assume that other person is a bad person because they hold that view, that’s what I think has happened, more recently and that’s what I think is really hurting us.

Yeah.

And it’s hard because the stakes are really high on a lot of these things. Like if you think that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and I do, then, you know, it’s tough when you encounter people who sort of support him and think it’s all kind of funny. I think it’s all a little bit of a joke. I think that if you’re somebody who is deeply pro life, and you think that Democrats are actually murdering baby, you know, like sometimes I think it’s actually a wonder that we don’t just dissolve into civil war altogether. But thank god for pluralism and for at least there’s still enough of the sort of live and let live democratic small d values in there that I think It’s not all hopeless yet, but I wanna say two things just before we wrap.

But one is, you know, when it comes to people and how this sort of tough polarization. I always talk about, there’s this old parable about the the two wolves inside of you. Everybody, it’s like an Indian spiritual. It’s like a little kid talking to his grandfather. Saying I’ve got greed and avarice and a whole bunch of bad things on one hand, and I’ve also got love and light and decency on the other.

And, like, They feel like two wolves fighting inside of me, my good impulses and my bad impulses, and which one’s gonna win. And the grandfather says, the one that you feed and the reason that I really put these things at

the feet of the

conflict entrepreneurs and the politicians is because I believe they’re feeding the worst inside of us, and I see a lot of the good stuff that exists in people, and what I think is gonna get us out of this actually is at least in part having leaders that are speaking to the good parts of us and are trying to feed those good parts. And I think that the work that you do really does feed the good part. And so I really appreciate it. But also I wanna say that I was on a trip with Judy Woodruff accidentally recently where we had to both go, we’re both going to the same place to give different speeches, but she’s like very famous. And so she was sort of giving a central speech, but we land in not the place we were supposed to land and they just were like, good luck getting to the place where you were trying to go.

And then they took Judy’s luggage and they flew it to a different place. And so I’m standing with her at the airport, and we’re all trying to figure out what’s happening. There’s like several other people, and she’s like, has to go somewhere else to speak, and she says, Boy, don’t know what to do. And I’m saying to her, Judy, you should just bail on this. Like, that you should not kill yourself.

To get to this, we are gonna have to take another flight and a ferry. We’re gonna have to go spend a night in a hotel somewhere. You’re gonna not have your luggage yet. And do you know Like, I, I don’t think I would’ve ever made it. She was on a six AM ferry.

I’m like, going to this place because she wanted to meet her obligations. And I just wanna say to you that I have Aw. Felt slightly bad ever since that I was telling you not to do it because you didn’t. You came. You gave a speech you rock the place.

Was good for me to see somebody take that obligation so seriously.

Oh, that’s way over the top, Sarah. You know, you you there’s a whole dark side to me that you’re not one of these days, I’ll share some of those stories about that.

I can’t. I would love it.

Credibly generous of you. I love talking to you about all this. It’s It’s something I I want more and more Americans to be talking about because maybe just by grappling with it, we can find ways through it.

Judy Woodriff. Thank you so much for joining us and for bringing us along as you travel the country this year, and thanks to all of you for listening to the Focus Secret Podcast. We’ll see you next week and happy Thanksgiving and happy birthday to you, Judy.

Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks so much, Sarah Longwell.