An Interview with Lonna Atkeson
On political love affairs, moral authority, and losing the working class.
This interview with Lonna Atkeson, professor at the University of New Mexico, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews. Originally published 10.4.20
We have been presented with two narratives about election integrity— on the left, you hear concerns about voter suppression, and on the right, you hear concerns about voter fraud. It’s a conversation specific to the United States. Why do you think that is? How does public perception of elections affect the democratic underpinnings of the U.S.?
I think it's about the affective polarization going on in the U.S. — voting is just another space to be polarized. Again, the left and the right see things differently. Integrity and access are both natural things to look at when looking at an election. You can be more concerned about one or the other, depending on what your experience is, or depending on what the narrative of your party is.
The question of how the public is going to view the legitimacy of elections is really the major question at hand.
Gallup polled people's perspectives on the legitimacy of both the 2000 election and the 2016 election. The public response was the same in both elections. Despite all the loud rhetoric, most people accepted the legitimacy of the election, no problem.
How should media participate in the narrative about election integrity and legitimacy?
I think that's really complex because, again, there are two, rather extreme, narratives circulating. And everyone seems to be embedded in these narratives in a way that I have not seen before. Historically, we have not seen high levels of attitude constraints — the level of consistency between attitudes within an individual belief system. However, in the last decade, attitude constraints have increased. That is largely because we are embedded in systems, the media being one, that encourages us to create more constraint among our belief systems. It aligns everybody into much clearer tribes and camps than we have seen before.
On the one hand, it is important not to be trapped in hysteria. But on the other hand, what is a civil war? When are you in a civil war? Are you only in a civil war when you have secession tablets written out?
People on both the left and the right clearly feel that the government is unresponsive, but their solutions and policy preferences are distinctly different. And we have gotten much worse at being tolerant of each other. I teach political behavior, and I added a moral component to my class where I actually try to teach intellectual humility. I think that we have lost our reasonableness.
We have such a tendency to see such undesirable traits in each other.
A willingness to recognize that whatever position someone has on a policy is coming from a point of honesty and earnestness seems to be something we have completely lost. I don't know how to get it back.
I live in a home where my sons are Republicans and I'm not, so I have to deal with this all of the time. Living in a home that is divisive makes me have to be not divisive, and I don't think we're living in many places where that's an opportunity anymore. I live in this unique home, in a unique environment. I come from a working-class family — I'm very educated and my family's not very educated. My family could be considered more Trumpian right now, and we have to be really tolerant of each other, but most people don't have to be.
As a professor, I go out and talk to my community all the time. Even eight years ago, I could go out into the community and have a discussion about interesting ideas. Now when I go out in the community, I feel like people mostly want me to tell them what they want to hear. That's a switch. It wasn't like that a decade ago.
I think if we are adamant Republicans admit the failure of their party lies in race, then we should be equally staunch about Democrats acknowledging the failure of abandoning the working class.
My family is all working class, they're all out there in the grocery store, while all of my professor friends are locked away in their houses, Zooming along. To me, this moment seems like such a class issue, but we don’t seem to be talking about it in that way at all.
Our conversations in the political realm seem to consistently fail to get to the root of people’s needs. There is an underlying feeling in this country that the government is unresponsive. I mean, I have heard politicians talk about bringing businesses together for cheaper health care and lowering the cost of prescription drugs for basically my entire life. I've heard the same messages, from both sides, over and over and over again. People have experienced this over and over again, and who is or isn’t in power hasn't mattered much to their bottom line.
When we ask why more people don’t participate in the system – maybe the answer is because participating in the system hasn't made much of a difference.
There are many reasons why people could find Democrats unattractive and Republicans or Trump attractive. We all think that politicians are liars. The thing about Trump is that he wears that all on his sleeve. He’s honestly dishonest. Do you know what I mean? I think for some people, they look at him and think, well yeah he's dishonest, but so is Biden, so is my Congressman. I think some people find his dishonesty to be an almost honest characteristic.
Right, and when people operate under the guise of morality and ethics, it feels evil.
Morality is something that worries me so much in politics. It results in equating politics with religion because moral authority is what religion has. If you have a moral reason to do something, you can't and won’t compromise. There is no ability to compromise — if you claim moral authority, there's a line in the sand.
The whole design of the American government is to try to compromise — to thwart majoritarianism, to thwart the passions of the people, and to thwart moral authority. Madison was obsessed with the possibility of the majority being tyrants, and the whole system is designed to stop that and to enforce incrementalism.
But now, I hear politicians regularly use the word moral – easily, which is dangerous because morality prevents them from compromising. It leads people to believe there is only one right outcome. And as we see the decline of religion globally, is politics the next religion? We tried hard in this country to remove politics from religion, but it seems that as political ideology becomes more constrained and more important in people's lives, we are moving to a place where politics is our religion. Especially on the left, because people on the right actually have another religion that they are attracted to. That is very worrisome.
When you have religious authority, you have a why, and when you have a why, you find a how.
Promoting politics as religion is dangerous, and promoting politicians as idols or celebrities is dangerous too. It makes it easy to forget they work for you, because celebrities have fans – and fans act as a congregation, not as a critical electorate.
It's too effective. It's not rational. Where's the rationality? We've been moving away from rationality towards affective politics, and that is problematic.
When I think about candidate campaigns, I think of them as love affairs. I think it is a really great metaphor for the way you are introduced to a candidate. You can think about this in the context of 2008, where there is this love affair with Obama. And what happens in a love affair? You project onto a person and see yourself in them — they believe this, or they are just like me on this. And over time, you come to realize, well, no, they're not just like me. And the love affair starts to change. But because politics is a collective love affair, not an individual one, the projections can remain longer. In a collective world and as a collective person, I can continue to project onto them because what is the real impact on me?