Suzanne Kryder Interviews Brent Hill, Idaho State Senator and Director of a program
called Next Generation at the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

SK: Brent, I’ve seen civility defined in two different ways, as politeness and as responsiveness. Which is it?

BH: Wow, politeness or responsiveness. You know, when you talk about politeness, I think civility is somewhat deeper than that, but at the same time, it’s hard to be responsive if you’re rude to someone. They go together hand in hand. It would be hard to define civility without using both of those terms. Throw in respect and a few other terms as well, but I don’t think you can have one without the other and still be civil to someone.

SK: When there is a lack of civility in political discourse, some people say that’s because of three different groups. I’m going to give you the three groups and I want you to rank in order the impact each group has on civility in political discourse. Politicians, like yourself, the media and citizens. Which of those three groups has the biggest impact and the least impact?

BH: It may sound a little self-serving since I’m one of those, but I think the politicians themselves, the lawmakers, the policymakers have to develop a discourse that is civil.

The citizens come in too. They’re the ones who elect those lawmakers. They need to let those lawmakers know what their expectations are. If they keep electing people that are bullies who get their way through threats, we all deserve what we elect, but the people themselves, the type of discourse that they have with their lawmakers – I always tell people if you don’t like what I’m doing, please let me know, but also it would be nice to know if you have another way that you think it should be done, other ideas. Being able to communicate those in a civil way is very important so that those lawmakers can take those ideas and help implement them in the policies that are being made.

The media, you can’t let them off completely. Contention is more interesting to report on than cooperation and civility. They certainly play a role. I always like it when I see a nice piece, the old Paul Harvey type thing where you look at the good side of things. NPR does a pretty good job of that. ABC does American Strong at the end of their newscast. At least something uplifting that can be reported, something good that’s happening, not just all the contention that’s going on in politics.

SK: Let’s talk about peaceful solutions. You’re the program director at Next Generation. What is Next Generation?

BH: Next Generation is a part of the National Institute for Civil Discourse. The Next Generation program itself, we’re working with legislators. Some of the problems that we have are at the national level, but we need to remember that about half of those people serving in Congress once served in their State Legislature. If we can start developing those good habits of civility within the legislators, particularly with leadership who set the tone a lot of times for the atmosphere that is found in each legislative body, then that’s going to carry over. Many of them will later serve at a federal level.

To be able to work at the local, state level and talk about building relationships, building friendships and how important that is in order to promote civility. It’s pretty tough to be mean to a friend. It’s a little easier to be mean to a stranger. Helping people develop relationships, even within the political realm I think is very important and that’s something we’re trying to do at Next Generation through workshops that we have.

We have workshops with different legislative bodies, sometimes just leadership, sometimes just one party. Generally, we strive to do it with the whole legislature and talk about the personal experiences that people go through and let people realize we’re all human beings. We’re brothers and sisters in this together and quite frankly, we all have the same goals and that is to benefit the citizens that we’ve been asked to serve.

SK: With Next Generation, what are some of the approaches that you teach people?

BH: We talk about a number of things. First of all, we need to determine what are the advantages of civility. Again, some people have learned to deal with their political power by intimidation, by making threats, by bullying but there really are advantages to civility and getting the people’s work done and building that trust so that you can work together, get more ideas and be respectful of those ideas.

We take the legislators through a personal journey and find out what makes them tick. What were the life-changing experiences in their lives and have them start sharing them and realize that these other colleagues that you’re working with, their parents and grandparents, their brothers and sisters have lives of their own and if we can get to know one another better and understand one another better, then it’s a lot more difficult not to treat someone with civility and respect.

We try to identify the problem areas within that legislative body. That comes from the group themselves. Where are their weaknesses? Is it in one body more than another? Is it our relationship between parties or between legislative bodies or with the Executive Branch? Let’s try to identify those problem areas and come up with an action plan so that we can start working on those things that might be hindering us from having the kind of civility we want.

SK: Brent, because you’re a politician in the Idaho seat legislature, the Senate, I want to ask you to tell us two stories and not name names. Tell us how there has been a peaceful solution to some kind of civil discourse where the opponents were on opposite sides. Then tell us a story that’s unpleasant where there was a lack of peacefulness, a lack of civility in the legislature.

BH: I’ll take the one where we were not as successful as I wish we could have been. It was back with the Affordable Care Act when we were looking at setting up state-based health insurance exchange. This split not only the legislature as a whole but it split the caucus, particular the republican caucus. There were those who wanted to try to solve problems at the state level and others who didn’t want to deal with the problem at all. That took up the whole legislative session, three months. There were some hard feelings there. It took us a while to resolve those problems. In fact, it took us the interim to do that.

That leads into the success part. There were sore feelings particularly between the House and the Senate when the legislative session ended. The Speaker of the House, Speaker Bedke and I got together and said, “This is not the way we want to do things in Idaho. These are not the relationships that we want to have between the House and Senate.” We committed to each other at that time that we would do whatever we needed to do in order to restore the good relationship that we have historically had between the House and the Senate in Idaho.

We worked all summer long. We had several meetings with House and Senate leadership, just the majority with the minority and we had to start with leadership. We each went around the state and visited with our members and we had town hall meetings with them. I did not limit my visits to only Senate members and the Speaker didn’t limit his visits only to House members. We talked to our legislators wherever they were in whatever part of the state, showing some interest in their lives. We visited them at their homes. We visited with them at their business and in many cases, got to know their families and their children. You know what? When we went back that following January, it only took us about four or five days until things were back to the good part of normal.

SK: People in general have to have their own views. We need to listen to all the views. What you’re saying is that a lot of times the people in the middle are not involved. Is that what you’re saying?

BH: Well, that’s certainly not always the case but sometimes people are in the middle because they don’t have strong feelings about politics at all. Now that’s certainly not the majority of those people that consider themselves Independent but enough to provide a feeling of apathy sometimes.

We have a pathetically low number of people that vote in the United States and even in their local elections. I know that some people are disenchanted with politics, they’re discouraged about it, but it’s like other things in our lives, if we get discouraged about something, say a problem within our own family, some people just pack up and move out of their family, but that’s not the way most of us handle it. We work things out together. We sit down. We communicate. We get involved.

I sometimes get some pretty mean correspondence from constituents out there, but I would rather have mean correspondence than someone who just doesn’t care or didn’t take the time to communicate with me. If it seems mean to me, it’s an opportunity to communicate and clear up misunderstandings and to learn more from one another.

Suzanne Kryder Interviews Tasha Philpot, Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.   Her Ph.D. in Political Science is from the University of Michigan.

TP: I think of civility as just a basic, common respect and politeness that people can exhibit towards each other.

SK: Is this a given in humans because it seems like we’re not really that polite? Is this something that will always be?

TP: I think it’s definitely learned behavior. Basic manners are something that my parents instilled in me, but I’ve noticed, particularly in this current climate that things like manners and respect have become partisan. I definitely don’t think of it as a given. I think that we’ve entangled things like civility and respect with political correctness, which has a negative connotation.

SK: Tasha Philpot, you’ve authored several books for example Conservative but Now Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology Among African Americans. You’ve also coedited a book called African American Political Psychology: Identity, Opinion and Action in the Post-Civil Rights Era. I’m not asking you to encapsulate everything you’ve learned from your research, I’m just curious if there is anything from your findings about civility.

TP: Well, most of my research deals with race relations in the United States. There is certainly a lot to be said about the racial hostility that has occurred from the beginning of the Union up until present. I think one of the interesting things about this current political climate is just how rampant racial hostility is. One of the things that I’ve learned certainly is that a lot of political decisions, particularly as it related to supporting one political party or another has to do with your level of tolerance for this racial incivility.

SK: What about this whole collaboration thing? If someone says, “I don’t talk to anyone who is an uncivil racist,” what would you say about that?

TP: That’s a little difficult. I think about my friends who do not share the same ideology as I do. We may disagree on things like how much we should spend on the military or how much we should spend on social services, but it’s very different when it comes to race because you’re not talking about just the proper policies that go with that issue, you’re talking about who gets to be a citizens and who gets rights in the U.S. context under the Constitution. If you’re racist, we’re not disagreeing on a hypothetical issue, we’re disagreeing on whether or not a whole group of people are worthy of being thought of as human let alone citizens.

SK: Yes, it’s about rights. Do you have any ideas about other solutions for how citizens can view each other and be more civil?

TP: I’m definitely a big fan of utilizing government. I don’t think that hearts and minds can be changed on their own. History has proven that that’s just not where we are as a nation. It has taken government intervention to right some of these wrongs. Hopefully, as time evolves and we become more connected as a world through things like social media, we’ll learn about each other and a lot of those fears and apprehensions that we have towards others will be relieved.

SK: What if nobody runs who we like who is civil? It seems like this whole system of who gets to run, who has the money, who wants to run, who wants to put up with people sending uncivil messages or phone calls. Who wants to go through that?

TP: I absolutely hear you on these issues. One of the issues is with the advent of things like camera phones and internet searches that you really have no privacy. You have to find people who have squeaky clean backgrounds or large enough egos where they’re not bothered by their personal lives being uncovered to run for office.

There are lots of organizations now that are popping up that are grooming the next generation to run for public office, so you get a younger, more diverse cadre of people who are willing to invest in running for office. With that you get people who are willing to invest monetarily.

There are lots of examples where people didn’t have to raise a whole lot of money to run for office particularly in lower level races like school boards and city councils where you just need an interested party who is dedicated to the issues to run.

SK: The word “disrespectful” means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

TP: Being respectful at a minimum is allowing people to be who they are without judgement and without persecution. Allowing people to articulate their truth without being penalized with the hopes that if you do that then they’ll reciprocate. It’s not saying that you can say whatever you want without any consequence, but it’s allowing people the space to do so so that they will give you the same type of treatment.

SK: This whole issue of politeness, I read one time that a person could be really polite (I’m thinking of a legislator) and say, “I’m listening to you,” but then they act on the legislation as if they’re not listening. They do the opposite.

TP: Being polite doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re conforming to the other person, it just means that you’re responding to the disagreement in a respectful way. It’s perfectly within their rights to stick to their guns in terms of legislation and vote their preferences but in conveying those differences or listening to people who are different, you can still be polite and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re being two-faced or duplicitous.

Suzanne Kryder talks with Jesse Baldwin-Philippi, associate professor at Fordham University in the
Communication and Media Studies Department. Her research centers around political campaigns,
political participation, citizenship, and digital democracy.

SK: Jesse, social media is sometimes cited as one of the main causes of increase of incivility but at the same time, we’re seeing more accounts and more people using social media. How do you explain this hate/love dichotomy?

JBP: I think it’s really important to contextualize and even historicize some of the incivility that we see across a variety of media platforms. Of course, we now live in social media all of the time, but incivility happens in a variety of places across the internet. Research has show that it has tended to be worse in some of those places than others.

Another place that incivility has long been fostered is actually via television news as well. It’s not limited to social media, but social media is certainly where we are increasingly living our lives. It makes sense that as more and more people spend more time there that we will want to do so also even if there is incivility there just like there is in many other parts of our lives.

SK: Jesse, you’ve written a book called Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship. You mention some tactics like posting, talking points, fighting rumors. Are there other tactics and are they asking people to be civil?

JBP: I will say generally when campaigns give instructions about what to do, what to talk about, they often encourage people to be civil because there is decent research that shows that that is the way to help make people believe in you or agree with you. It makes them look bad also. We’ve seen some infamous examples of supporters of candidates spouting off in uncivil ways and getting the candidate and themselves in trouble. They don’t want that to blow back on them.

Often times that is an underlying direction or instruction but it doesn’t come up repeatedly or routinely unless something is going awry, unless there are notable examples of uncivil talk happening then they will step in and amplify that message.

Other than that, it’s about controlling the message. It’s about hearing from you or me, the people, but it’s really about making sure that they want to adhere to that campaign message. This week we’re talking about X. Next week we will talk about Y. It’s about controlling that narrative.

SK: Jesse, your website says that one of your goals in your research is to impact tech policy and politics. What kind of impact do you want to have and will it impact civility?

JBP: Honestly, civility is probably not one of my foremost concerns in that area. I realize that might sound surprising, especially considering the topic of the show, but one of the reasons for that is that there has been a lot of research lately that shows that incivility, even though we might think it is a problem and it tends to turn some people off from talking about politics, it doesn’t necessarily diminish the substance of the debate. People are still having back and forth arguments and discussions in the face of this conversation. It's an interesting question to leave open about how our perceived norms and types of political speech that we want to engage in may be shifting too if we are seeing this uncivil type of speech within these places but still having productive conversations even if they also look uncivil.

SK: One suggested solution is to have people get away from this confirmation bias. People usually [inaudible 04:08] like whatever they believe, they know where to go to get that confirmed. Some people say people don’t value facts or they value feelings or maybe they don’t want to spend the time because it takes time to look up different resources. Do you have any solutions?

JBP: There are two parts of that question. One is how do we get people to not select into and select out of media they agree with or disagree with? That’s been a problem that we have faced in newspaper reading offline and online. Fascinatingly, research has by and large shown that we are not any worse off in a digital realm.

This idea that we are all in our filter bubbles when we go online or go on social media has been widely disproven both across how we search for news in a search environment and which news sites we go to but also even within social media platforms, which is contrary to peoples assumptions about what those social media ecosystems look like. That is something of uplift. It’s perhaps not uplifting that we’ve always selected into news we agree with but that actually we are more exposed to differing points of view in our digital news consumption is a little bit of a silver lining there.

SK: It sounds like we have faulty perceptions. Would you agree that we are making up things that are not really true? Maybe we’re making up all this polarization. Maybe it’s not really real.

JBP: We are more polarized in our ideological beliefs and issues, but no matter what era we are operating in, a lot of things seem worse or newer when they are happening in a new place, not least of all because we see them in a different way. Social media makes information available to us at a scale that unimaginable before.

We do see these things but that kind of threat or fear assumption that it’s radically different and much worse than before I think needs to be outright criticized and grappled with, making sure that those assumptions are actually correct because so often we find out that we’ve actually always had this problem. If we assume that it’s a tech problem, then we’re going to come up with the wrong solution than if we assume that it’s a human problem that we’ve had for a long time.

SK: Right, it’s kind of like people complaining about the printing press; “That will be the end of the world.” Maybe in 50 or 100 years when people are used to technology, it won’t be so upsetting.

JBP: That’s probably reasonable although there will inevitably be something else that will seem much more upsetting in that particular moment too.