Arthur Brooks on Politics & How We Should Talk to Each Other

CHISTIANE AMANPOUR: But now, we turn back to today’s political division. Our next guest believes “all you need is love.” You know you’ve heard that before. Arthur Brooks is a social scientist and he’s director of the American Enterprise Institute which is a conservative think tank in the United States. His new book “Love Your Enemies” argues that America’s political back and forth needs less trolling and more respect. He told our Michel Martin that we need to learn not how to disagree but how to disagree better.

MICHEL MARTIN: Your latest book, “Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.” What motivated this book? Was there a eureka moment where you said to yourself this is what I have to talk about?

ARTHUR BROOKS, AUTHOR, “LOVE YOUR ENEMIES”: Yes, it is. I’ve been talking about specific public policies for a long time. But I was reading a study in 2014 by researchers at Northwestern University on something called “motive attribution asymmetry” which is a fancy way of saying something pretty simple. When you have two sides in a conflict and each side thinks that they are motivated by love but the other side is motivated by hatred. They both think that. Now, when that happens in circumstances of war or intractable hatred, both sides can’t be right. Both sides can be wrong but all sides can’t be right. You see it in the Palestinian Israeli conflict for example or the Balkans, that here’s what that paper in 2014 showed me. I mean it demonstrated with survey data that in the United States, Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, now have the same level of polarization, motive attribution asymmetry as the Palestinians and Israelis. I was thinking about that. I thought what can I do to make it better. And right after that, I had this experience that was pretty much of an epiphany for me. I was giving a talk and I do lots of talks for different kinds of audiences, very left-wing audiences on campuses, and very conservative right-wing audiences who are activists, all in between. And I love talking to everybody. But in this last category, it was a bunch of conservative activists in New Hampshire in 2014, 700 activists or something, and very committed to their work. And I stopped in the middle of my talk and I said, I want you to remember the people who are not here because they don’t agree with you. These are political Progressives. And what I want you to remember is they’re not stupid and they’re not evil. They’re simply Americans who disagree with us on public policy. And I knew it was going to be an applause line, right. But the applause line —

MARTIN: It was not?

BROOKS: It was not going to be an applause line. But the applause line came later when a lady said, “Actually, I think they’re a stupid needle.” And it was a joke. I mean she wasn’t trying to offend and it was a kind of a genial crowd internally. But at that moment, I thought of Seattle because that’s my hometown. And I grew up in a family, not a Super political family but to give you an idea, Seattle’s arguably the most progressive city in America. My mother was a painter and my father was a college professor. What do you think their politics were?

MARTIN: I would not presume.

BROOKS: Yes. But it’s one might and one would be right that I don’t come from a conservative family. My own politics tend toward the center-right but I’m an outlier. And one thing I’ll tell you about my family is they’re not stupid, they’re not evil. They’re great people. They’re smart people. They’re right on a lot of stuff. I’m not right on everything. And it offended me. I wasn’t mad at the lady. But what it showed me is there was a train coming down the tracks in this country that was not about anger. It was something mixed with anger, disgust. It was to treat other people who disagree with us as a pathogen. It was what philosophers call contempt which is the conviction of other worthlessness of other human beings. And that’s what we’re feeling, contempt for each other and. In terms of politics, I said I have to do something about this. And so I wrote this book.

MARTIN: And talk to me about how contempt is different from anger. Contempt is not the same as say a strong disagreement, even when it’s deeply rooted in religion or just deeply held belief. How is contempt different from all the other things that people may [14:40:00] experience?

BROOKS: Anger is a hot emotion. It says I care what you think. Marriage counselors, they have found — or social psychologists have found that divorce and separation are uncorrelated with anger. There’s a guy named John Gottman who’s the world’s leading expert on marital reconciliation, Washington, Seattle. He can predict after meeting a couple once with 94 percent accuracy if they will be divorced within three years. He’s looking for eye rolling. He’s looking for dismissal and sarcasm and derisive humor. He’s looking for the things that you should absolutely not do. Now, what’s bad for a couple is bad for a society. You know we live in a country where we should be able to disagree with each other, not with civility because civility is basically a garbage standard. We should have a standard of brotherly love, of solidarity for each other. That’s the only way that we can function with a competition of ideas. That’s really what will make America great and that’s what we’ve lost.

MARTIN: A couple of things I wanted to dig into here. First of all, is there something distinct about the era that we are in? Is there something that says to you — and I understand that you’re an economist and not a historian, if you think there’s something unique about the period that we are in. Or does it even really matter because it’s just terrible? So it doesn’t matter if it was equally terrible some other time. But is there something special about the moment that we’re in with you?

BROOKS: There is. There is. So populism always comes or nearly always comes in the wake of a financial crisis. So I’ll be kind of historian but an economist at the same time. A financial crisis ordinarily is very different than an ordinary recession. It happens a couple of times a century, after a burst of a big asset bubble like what we had in 2008 or in 1929 or there was a big railroad bust in 1896 and it goes back through history. And when that happens, what you find is not that growth is slow for people. It’s that growth is uneven for a long time, usually 10 or 15 years after a financial crisis. All of the fruits of economic growth go to the top 20 percent of the income distribution. And the political result of that is inevitably populism. Populism says somebody’s got your stuff and I’m going to get it back, whether it’s immigrants or foreigners or rich people or bankers or people from the other party. Somebody’s got your stuff and I’m going to get it back. You basically you have an era where the popular politicians are kind of walking middle fingers and that’s what people want under those circumstances. That’s what’s unique about this era but that’s the opportunity too because people don’t like it.

MARTIN: So you’re saying it’s — well, but what you’re describing, it isn’t unique, that we’ve been through this before.

BROOKS: Yes.

MARTIN: I mean what you’re telling me is that this is part of a pattern, that after that period of kind of deprivation, particularly uneven deprivation, that people are inclined to these kinds of feelings which would say to me that we’ve been through this before.

BROOKS: That is correct.

MARTIN: So is there something unique about the moment that we are in or is this just not just?

BROOKS: Well, it’s

MARTIN: I think your description is it’s quite terrible but —

BROOKS: It’s quite terrible.

MARTIN: — is there something —

BROOKS: It’s common.

MARTIN: It’s common?

BROOKS: But it doesn’t happen all — it doesn’t happen every decade. It happens a couple of times a century. And what we know is we don’t have strong institutions and we don’t see it as an opportunity. It can turn out poorly. You can go rail or rail. You don’t like this party the way they govern themselves, you can get a version of that in the other party. And it takes longer than it should for us to go back to equilibrium. When it goes well in this country and other countries, we have data on 800 elections over 120 years in financial crises. We’ve seen this in a lot of places is when leaders start a social movement and they say I want my culture back because here’s the empirical regularity. That’s how economists talk. Sorry. This is the thing that we see over and over again. Ninety-three — right now, 93 percent of the American population hate how divided we’ve become. Now, we have a habit of treating each other with contempt. I mean I’m guilty, I’m super guilty, and I’ve seen clips of myself on television where I roll my eyes when somebody says something I disagree with. And I’m really sorry for that because I didn’t mean any harm but I realize that I have a habit, I mean there’s an ingrained habit, it’s a neurological phenomenon. But what we find is that 93 percent of us at the same time don’t like it.

MARTIN: So what are we aiming for here? I have heard you say that striving for civility or striving for tolerance is weak sauce.

BROOKS: It’s totally weak sauce.

MARTIN: What do we need? What is it that we’re striving for?

BROOKS: Well, if I said — and a lot of people are thinking what was wrong with civility. And I’ll tell you, I mean if I said my wife Esther and I, we’re civil to each other, you’d say, “Pff, you guys need some counseling.” Or if I said, my employees in American Enterprise Institute, they tolerate me. You’d say, “They tolerate you? This is a huge problem. You got a moral problem on your hands.” The other thing is agreement is not something that we should be going for either because disagreement —

MARTIN: Why not? Agreement is not open wide.

BROOKS: Well, because agreement’s monopoly. The idea of agreement- disagreement is the competition of ideas. Disagreement actually is iron sharpening. Iron is the secret to success. I mean I don’t want agreement inside the American Enterprise Institute. I want a competition of ideas. You really — I know you believe in that as a journalist. You want disagreement but you need to not to disagree less, you need to disagree better.

MARTIN: Actually, I would disagree with you. I’m going to say what we want as journalists is clarity of ideas. We want clarity of ideas well expressed.

BROOKS: Yes. That’s — well, and indeed —

MARTIN: Without contempt.

BROOKS: — you need people to be able to disagree. And in point of fact, if you’re not surrounded by some people who do disagree with you, you become weak, you become full of groupthink. That’s my point. And so agreement is not the goal. Civility is not the goal. Tolerance is not the goal. We need to be able to disagree with each other to compete with each other and do so in an environment that’s filled with respect, with kindness, with warm-heartedness, with love.

MARTIN: With love. You make a compelling case in the book that A, there is a serious problem, right, that contempt is kind of like the opioid crisis of our civil discourse of our public life together. You make a compelling case that this is something that infects so many areas of life, including interpersonal relations. This is a very serious problem. I have observed that the one name you avoid mentioning in this book is Donald Trump. And I do have to ask why. I mean because if anybody expresses contempt for people on an ongoing basis, people who work for him, people who disagree with him, can we not agree that it is he — it is his fuel?

BROOKS: This is not a book strictly about politics. Politics is like the weather, it changes. People don’t have — you know people all have views on it but very few people are actually experts. This is a book about the climate. I’m a climatologist, not a meteorologist. And if I actually start talking about the current weather, the politics about Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or about Bernie Sanders or about Elizabeth Warren or anybody who might be in the Republican field, it’s limited to this political world.

MARTIN: Except that this is a very unique politician for this particular moment in time. This is a political figure who expresses contempt even for the people who have worked for him, who he has appointed to key positions, on a regular basis who has addressed people of different races, contemptuously. And I have to ask you, there are other principled conservatives like yourself who have felt it necessary to identify and speak to this, in the same way, that other principal people have felt it necessary to speak about the origins of the opioid crisis. And I have to ask why you are not.

BROOKS: Well, I have a chapter in this book about leadership that talks about the difference between coercive and authoritative leadership. And in that chapter, I talk about the rise of President Donald Trump as a course of leader, as somebody who tried to shake up the system. And as a result, who alienated a lot of people because coercive leadership generally tends not to last. So I do talk about the Trump phenomenon in the same way that I talk about the Sanders phenomenon which was very populist on the other side. I think under very realistic scenarios, lots of realistic scenarios, we could have had a President Bernie Sanders and we would have been having a conversation about Sanders talking about, you know, making ad hominem arguments about what’s really in the heart of these people, these rich people, and these capitalists, these bankers in the same way. And again, these are not the marginalized populations that’s so offensive to hear anybody in the Republican or Democratic Party, especially and including President Trump talking about. But then notwithstanding, I think that it’s very limiting to say this is because of a particular political figure. A key point I make in this book is that the populism of President Donald Trump, or for that matter, of Bernie Sanders or anybody on the left-wing of the Democratic Party, these are symptoms. These are not the cause that causes our culture of contempt. Our culture of contempt which is remediable. We can fix this but we can’t do it if we’re stuck talking about the circus if we’re only talking about the politics per se. We have to talk about the cultural cause and not the symptoms of the cause. We’ll be going in the right direction.

MARTIN: This is one of those questions that it’s just very difficult for you sort of to answer hypothetically. But when you’ve got the president of the United States who refuses to — or who morally equivocates about white supremacists, who have actually killed a person, what is one to do? Is one to ignore that?

BROOKS: No, no. One is not to ignore that. I would never say somebody — we should disagree and we should disagree vocally and we should go hammer and tongs after the things that we think are inappropriate and incorrect and even evil. But we should separate the people from the ideas and that’s what the people that are manipulating us in this country, the people that are in politics, in media, in entertainment, on college campuses who are saying the other side’s stupid and evil.

MARTIN: But I keep — you keep talking about the other side. And I find that when people want to criticize Donald Trump that then they wrap themselves around Trump supporters. Oh, you’re calling all Trump supporters racist. No, there are people who find President Trump — they find his utterances racist, misogynistic, in some cases anti-Semitic, course destructive, narcissistic, and destructive to the body politic.

BROOKS: Right.

MARTIN: Trump supporters, that’s not the issue. I mean that’s — so the question —

BROOKS: Right. You’re talking about [14:50:00] President Trump’s utterances.

MARTIN: Right. So then the question is what is one to do about that?

BROOKS: My belief is that when you don’t like who you disagree with strongly when you repudiate the utterances of another person, another politician, you have the right, you have the obligation, you have the privilege in the United States of repudiating those utterances. I strongly would suggest to people that they not repudiate the person per se. Why? Number one is that’s ad hominem where there’s a lot of cases in which we don’t know about that actual person but we do know about the utterances. The second point is it’s not very convincing to other people. Look, if you’re in the business of persuasion, if you don’t like how Donald Trump talks or by the way, we’re in the middle of a big controversy right now about anti-Semitism from a sitting member of Congress in the Democratic Party, it’s a big mistake to say she is an anti-Semite. It’s a big mistake because you don’t know that. What you do know is what she said is anti-Semitic in your judgment. And that’s completely legitimate to say that.

MARTIN: Is it your view that this is an individual problem that is to be addressed in an individual way? Because you are describing a cultural problem, something that is indeed systemic as you’ve laid it out for us. Is your view that this has to be handled individually, that this really is about individual discipline, individual emotional discipline.

BROOKS: I’ve come to that conclusion.

MARTIN: Really? Tell me why.

BROOKS: Yes. And you know part of it is I’ve spent my career studying institutions, looking for institutional solutions to cultural problems. And a lot of times, it’s really appropriate. You know you have a cultural problem and you want to solve problems of poverty for example and you want a better welfare system. Great, I think that’s terrific. You want to improve incentives for people and you want the government to provide benefits in a different more efficient or more humane way. I think that’s great. But in this case, love is not an institution that starts with a government level. It doesn’t start at the level of a million. You don’t love people starting at 1 million and above. You love other people. And so that means if we want to start a movement, that movement actually starts — it’s a little tiny movement that starts between individuals and it starts with my own behavior. Now, this is a — this is something that I came to through a lot of thought and through a lot of mistakes quite frankly because I’m an institutionalist, because I’m a social scientist, dealing with public policy. But I realized I was going about it in the wrong way. I needed to change my heart. I needed to actually treat people with more love. And I needed to teach people, as well as I could, using the platform that I’ve got that they can be — as Barack Obama used to say, they can be the change that they really wanted.

MARTIN: You know it’s interesting because a lot of people when you’re talking about race for example in this country, I think it is fair to say that racism has been a stain on the American character. I think that’s. fair.

BROOKS: I agree with you.

MARTIN: A lot of people have argued about whether this is something that can be systemically addressed. And some people say, oh, it’s changing people’s hearts. OK, you have to change people’s hearts. You can’t change people’s hearts. The people who are suffering under racist systems would say, “No, actually, I’d like you to change other people’s behavior. I’d like you to stop discriminating against me in housing, in my ability to access credit, in education. I’d like you to stop killing me when I don’t have a weapon. I’d like you” – you know what I mean. So how do we resolve that? What do you say to them? Wait for people’s hearts to change?

BROOKS: No. I say that these are things that are not mutually exclusive.

MARTIN: OK.

BROOKS: If you can change the institution, you can change hearts. We can walk and chew gum. One of the things that we know is there are lots of cases where institutions have to change laws for example. I mean the Civil Rights Movement is a classic case where you changed institutions, the Department of Justice in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the fact that we had not caught up in people’s hearts that were living in really racist parts of the United States. So that made tremendous gains. People’s hearts caught up some later. We still have more work to do. But it was very important that we change the institutions. At the same time, there are certain — we don’t want to pass laws against contempt, we don’t want to pass laws against treating people with contempt to disagree with us on politics because this would be radical violations of our rights to free speech and free expression. So those are the things where our hearts are more important than the institutions because that’s what we have at our disposal. And in every case where we need to change institutions and we need to change hearts, we should be able to do both. And I want to work on the latter in this particular case.

MARTIN: Thank you so much for talking to me.

BROOKS: I appreciate it so much. I appreciate very much this interview.