Eitan Hersh is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, focusing on U.S. elections and civic participation. His latest book is Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eitan Hersh discuss how to engage with politics in ways likely to bring about meaningful change; how political hobbyism tends to coincide with misperceptions about voter habits and the purposes of political rhetoric; and how to more successfully get students to engage with challenging ideas on campus.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: What I've learned all of my life is that it's good for people to be politically engaged. We want a politically active citizenry. We want people to care about politics.
You don't completely disagree with that, but you worry that too many Americans and perhaps too many people in other democracies have become political hobbyists, that they care about politics in the wrong ways. What do you mean by that?
Eitan Hersh: I think that the way that 95% of people who are engaged in politics are engaged is not really politics. It's like if we imagine that all football fans were actually football players. Of about a third of the country that pays attention to politics, nearly all of them are just engaging for some sort of emotional connection or for intellectual gratification. They want to learn stuff. And they're not building the right skills or getting the right knowledge for them to inform votes or activism. They're just doing a totally different thing.
Mounk: So what sort of a good form of political engagement would look like? I mean, one of my favorite essays to teach is Benjamin Constant’s “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” and he makes sort of two points: The first is that there was a kind of pleasure in doing politics. It was available to you in ancient Athens, which is not going to be available to you under modern circumstances, because there's too many of us, we're too busy, there's too many distractions, there's too many fun other things to do in life. So we're just not going to be spending half of our day sitting around the assembly and actually deciding whether to go to war, who to banish from the city, what kind of musical instruments should be allowed, and all the kinds of things that ancient Athenians or people more broadly in the ancient Greek world did. But Constant still said what we're going to do is to delegate a lot of our political decision making; you vote for representatives, they are your servants, they go off to Washington, they do this stuff for you, right? But you still have to be alert, you still have to be active because there's a principal agent problem. In the same way in which, in a corporation, you have to make sure as a shareholder that the CEO isn't just trying to line their own pockets. As a citizen, you have to make sure that the people who you empower are actually serving your interests rather than serving their own interests or perhaps taking away your right to engage in politics. And so I think that sort of set the way we tend to think about politics. But sure, part of the liberty of what we have in a representative democracy is that you don't have to know exactly what they're debating in Congress today. You don't have to go and do all this politics yourself. But we need this active citizenry. And the danger is that we don't have this active citizenry, that our politicians are going to go and run away with it, right?
So what does it mean that we're sort of pretending to do politics?
Hersh: If you take a typical person who thinks they're very, very engaged and they spend two hours a day on podcasts and reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, whatever, and you ask them what's going on in the state legislature, city council. They're like, I have no idea. We have 15 percent turnout rates in local elections. We have almost no reporters showing up even at the state house in most places. And so the people who are spending two hours a day on politics are not doing that basic duty that you are imagining. They're paying attention to gossip and BS, basically. When I think about politics, I think about an act that you're doing that's strategic, that's goal-oriented, to try to influence the government. So you have some goal, like a policy goal, and you have some strategy, whether that's policy advocacy, getting the right people elected, government oversight—that's what you're doing. And there are people all over the country who do that form of politics. I like to think that I do it; I follow what's going on in my community, what's going on in my state. I get the local paper. That's a version of political activism that has a very, very clear relationship to the kinds of outcomes you're talking about. I need to know what's going on in the legislature. Now, what happens at the national level? Obviously, we are a big country, so we defer to organizations to do oversight. We defer to the media to do oversight. But when it comes down to it, engaging in the nastiest form of news consumption is just sort of like following the gossip. And there's not a very clear relationship, as I described at the state and local level, between say news consumption and the ability to be an active citizen.
And there's two reasons why we should think hobbyism is bad: One is that it affects the incentives of political actors. So if we, as citizens, are gonna sit at home watch viral videos on social media and donate to the candidate who's like screaming the most, then you're gonna get political actors who know how to play that game: the kinds of people for example who are very good in politics at generating small dollar donations, Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Bernie Sanders and AOC. These are the candidates that most of their money comes from small-dollar donations. Now, why is that? It's because they know how to make viral videos. And so I think the incentives are just totally screwed up when we do this kind of political hobbyism. The other big problem, and I think we see whenever the hobbyists try to show up in real life for the first time, is that they’ve learned all of the wrong skills for politics. You've learned how to sort of emote and express yourself and get your point across and feel good. And then when you go do real politics, you realize, shoot, the goal here is to get other people to agree with me and to build some kind of majority coalition.
When are we engaged in strategic behavior? I give this an example: If you're someone who needs to convince your boss to give you a raise, you go talk to your boss and what is that conversation like? You think ahead of time, how do I get the boss to understand my position? How do I get them to see it my way? What do I have to do to see things his way or her way? And all of a sudden you're like, yeah, I'm in a moment of strategy here. And in politics, in real politics, that's what it's like too, because you've got to build that coalition. In hobbyism, you're practicing this crazy alternative skill. And so that's why you see sometimes a bunch of people descend on a school board meeting or show up on a campus protest and just say insane things that are super provocative, because they've learned the totally wrong skill set for this.
Mounk: So let me make a distinction between two different kinds of politics and try to tease out whether one of these is clearly superior to the other, right? So one is, you know, you just consume politics, you know, in social media, or perhaps every now and again, you go and join a protest when there's a bunch of people out and you feel good about yourself shouting provocative slogans and feel like I'm really standing up for stuff, right? And that's what I take it you would call political hobbyism. It's sort of politics as moral gratification of some sort, rather than strategically trying to actually influence what happens in terms of policy and regulation and other things governing our lives. But now on the other side, let's say we have people who are quite strategic in how we go about things. They really figure out where the power lies. They try and pressure people and build coalitions and do what it takes in order to implement what they want, right? And I take it that you think that that is generally speaking more positive because you're actually affecting political change in some kind of way. I guess that's a useful conceptual distinction. I might think that there's some helpful people in the first camp, which is, for example, to have some sense of collective decency in the polity—when something happens that is just upsetting to a huge number of people, you suddenly get mass protests, you suddenly get people standing up against what's happening. And that seems to be an important mechanism in impeding authoritarian takeover, for example, when we're seeing in the country of Georgia recently.
That's sort of what I had in mind when I invoked Constant earlier, who said, look, most of the time it's fine to let our representatives do stuff, but sometimes we need to be able to tune in. And presumably that's partially when it feels like they're breaking the contract, no longer doing our bidding, but they want to become our masters. And then we need to be able to stand up. And that feels like political hobbyists might actually help to drive that kind of moment, right?
Hersh: Let me offer some clarifications. You just described this sort of like an insider kind of politics versus an outsider form of politics. And I think you kind of attributed political hobbyism to the outsider form of politics and not to the insider. Actually, that's not how I would think of it. That is, there can be very strategic protest movements and there can also be very dumb insider strategies.
The outsider strategy can be totally effective and even if the ordinary citizen who is engaging in a protest movement doesn't understand the strategy, it could be that the people who are organizing a protest do understand the strategy. When I think of examples like the Black Lives Matter movement turning into very concrete police reform in some states and cities, that was an outsider strategy popular form of engagement—protest movements that in many states did move policy very, very quickly in support of what the activists wanted. And so, I think another example of that from the Trump era was when there was this so-called Muslim ban, which then led to a lot of people essentially gumming up airports and physically gumming up airports and saying, we're not going to let the airport be functional basically. Those are very kind of strategic narrowly goal-oriented protest movements, but that kind of activist strategy is not for everything and most normal politics is not going to look like that and so the distinction for me is not protest versus insider politics it's whether you're doing any kind of politics with any kind of strategy at all. So, I mean, if I take something like—some of your listeners might remember the protest movement of Occupy Wall Street where it was very hard to figure out what anyone wanted. There was no governance of these Occupy movements where it's like a bunch of people hanging out in tents trying to reach consensus before they would do anything and if you ask them what they wanted like it wasn't clear. Now it doesn't mean even in a situation like that that the activists didn't grow as citizens. I mean, they met one another, they talked to each other. Same thing for the Tea Party. You can always sort of see like there is some growth potential or personal development that comes. But I think if you contrast something like the Occupy movement with a movement for police reform, what distinguishes them is like one was goal-oriented and specific and one was just sort of like a mess of who knows what.
Mounk: Let me go to a topic that I think in a sense is related. You know, I'm always struck by the American debate over voter ID laws, in particular, for two reasons. One is that the democracies I'm used to in continental Europe all require some form of voter ID and the United States in most places and circumstances does not. And then the second is that there is this sort of background assumption in American politics that voter ID laws, requiring voter ID in order to be able to vote, would really harm Democrats and help Republicans. And the theory here is supposed to be that Democratic voters are on average poorer and that many of them don't have a form of ID. Now, I always have sort of two responses to that, the first of which is normative and the second of which is empirical. The normative one is if it really is true, as these arguments imply, that there's just millions of black voters who don't have any form of ID, the biggest problem isn't that they're not able to vote in the presidential election. The biggest problem is that they don't have a form of ID that allows them to use banks and identify themselves in all kinds of contexts in which would be very helpful to their life to be able to do so. Presumably, the fix (and I know it's always hard to know what fix is in a pretty broken system) is to make sure that they have access to a free high quality ID rather than to say, let's not require that for the vote. But the empirical point is just a hunch that these kind of laws don’t have quite the political effect that both Democrats and Republicans seemed to think they did, because Democrats would strenuously oppose any of those voter ID laws, and Republicans would strenuously try to put them in place, in part because they both were convinced that it would be in their partisan interest to take those respective actions.
Now, you have a paper with Justin Grimmer that puts a lot of cold water over that empirical assumption. Tell us a little bit about the kind of empirical difference that voter ID laws or other kinds of voter suppression attempts or changes to voting rules. actually have in the American polity.
Hersh: Our paper together, me and Justin Grimmer, is very expansive. So it also deals with very similar claims that the right makes about something like mail voting, how Donald Trump says mail voting is going to help Democrats and Democrats say, no, it's not. And there's big fights about this stuff. And all these laws have a very similar flavor that they are not actually going to have noticeable impacts on who wins and who loses.
So the logic with voter ID is maybe most straightforward. It is true that racial minorities are less likely to have a photo ID in places where we've studied this. I did a lot of work with this in Texas. But it's also true that very, very few people don't have ID, it’s 4% or something like that of people who maybe don't have an ID. And it is disproportionately true among racial minorities. But if you're worried about the law affecting outcomes, you can't stop there. You have to understand how many people without IDs are not going to vote because of that. And one thing we learn is that—
Mounk: —And presumably the kinds of people who don't have an ID are also likely to be the poorest, at least civically engaged people. So non-voters are already going to be overrepresented among that group, I would guess.
Hersh: Correct, the people who don't have IDs, I mean they don't have jobs, they are sort of at the fringes of civic life, and so they have very low turnout rates. Of course, I'm not making a normative judgment about whether that's good or bad, I'm just saying that the law is not going to turn away a huge number of the people who don't have IDs, because they weren't going to vote. Also, obviously some people will, like you said, get an ID on account of the law, so they won't be denied the right to vote because of the law. But maybe the most important nuance of our paper is that the people who are actually affected by the law are actually quite balanced between Democrats and Republicans. And this comes from, I think, a sense of confusion that if you say some law, say, disproportionately affects African Americans, you then make an incorrect conclusion that therefore it hurts the party that most African Americans support, which is the Democrats. That's not necessarily true. And the reason it's not true is that a law can disproportionately negatively impact, say, African Americans, but it mostly affects white people, right? So like if 12% of the country or a state is black and 18% of the people who don't have ID are black then you would say it disproportionately affects African Americans. But still, the vast majority of the people it affects are not black.
Mounk: One context in which this comes up is that it is true that African American children are much more likely, proportionally, to live in poverty than white children in the United States. And you know, that's obviously a huge disparity that has deep historical sources and is deeply unjust and unfair; It is not true that most children who live in poverty in the United States are black, just because the white population continues to be about four times as big as the African American population. Most of the children living in poverty in this country are white. And so this is, I think, one context in which a similar statistical shortcut leads people astray.
Hersh: Yeah, I mean, the biggest one in voting rights is actually about felon disenfranchisement, where in every single state, African Americans are disproportionately disenfranchised on account of felon disenfranchisement laws. And across the country, most people who are disenfranchised by these laws are white. And the white non-college educated men who are the largest group of people who are disenfranchised tend to be very Republican. And that's sort of the case of the voter ID law too. The voter ID law is going to disproportionately negatively affect racial minorities. And for that reason alone, it might be deemed illegal under certain interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. But it still might be the case that the most people who don't have an ID are like low-socioeconomic-status white voters and they are very Republican. The features that you have for a lot of these laws that are subject to a lot of debate around voter suppression is like, the law doesn't affect that many people; of that small number of people who it might affect, it only affects the turnout rates of a small number of those; and of those, there's roughly a balance between Democrats and Republicans. And in part, that's because we're living in a particularly in a different time than we did 50 years ago, where low-socioeconomic-status people who might be most sensitive to these changes in election laws are both disproportionately minority and mostly Republicans.
Mounk: You have done some work on college campuses to try and both increase the understanding of the mostly left-leaning students of conservative ideas and more broadly of encouraging civil discourse. Tell us a little bit about what you've been doing on that front and whether that's made you more or less hopeful about the future of American higher education in our society more broadly.
Hersh: So a couple years ago I started developing this course curriculum on American conservatism. And what it has that I hadn't found in other places is a focus on public policy, contemporary public policy, bringing in conservative perspectives. So it's not like a history of political thought. It's not a history of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. It has some of this stuff because you need some baseline. But the main focus of the course is family policy, religion and public life, welfare state, capitalism, affirmative action, guns, etc. And we basically are studying conservative perspectives and social science that conservatives tend to bring in to talk about these issues. I designed the class on purpose not to be a class that's like a debate class where I bring in side A and side B, mostly because I want to cover a lot of ground and I wanted the students who are overwhelmingly liberal on an overwhelmingly liberal campus (on which there are lots of courses that essentially articulate a homogenous left position) to really get a flavor of a conservative identity, tensions in that identity, where the economic liberals differ from the social conservatives and so forth. But that's a class and it's been like the best teaching thing I've ever done. It's a very popular class. I think I'll have a hundred students packed into a room next semester.
And it does give me hope because it's like a bubble inside a bubble. It's obviously self-selecting for students across the ideological spectrum—by the way, I think it's probably the most ideologically diverse room on campus, at least one that's talking about politics. And it goes really well. The students want to learn about this stuff. It's stuff that they've never encountered before. They've never thought about family and children and divorce and religion in any of these ways that we're talking about in class. And it's a delight. It's a delight. I think we need a lot more of it.
Mounk: What do you think attracts students to the class? My understanding is that your other lecture classes were popular as well. So part of this may just be your reputation on campus. I assume you must attract some cohort of conservative students. Beyond that, what do you think draws in students who are either just intellectually curious and open-minded or who are perhaps very devoted progressives and left-wingers? What makes those hundred kids choose the class when there's obviously many kids who don't?
Hersh: I do think that the focus on contemporary politics and policy does attract students in a way that a class on Edmund Burke wouldn't. Because there is a certain feeling in the class that we're talking about illicit things. And I don't think that feeling comes from me trying to talk about it that way. It's just that there's a class on conservative views on gay marriage or on the trans rights. And to the students, this stuff is juicy stuff. And the students just never get to talk about it.
I once was asked to give maybe a year or two years ago an evening lecture to the Tufts Republican Club about family values. That's what they want to talk about. And it was a big event. There were a lot of students there. And towards the end of the event, there were a bunch of students who had not sort of raised their hands and participated. And I asked them, did you guys want to say anything? And the students said, we're not really part of this club. We just want to come and hear what it was about. And they were kind of shocked that there was just sort of an open conversation on campus about what people want from marriages and from raising children and how the government can help or hurt that. It was just sort of shocking to see students say we're not talking about all of these important things. And so I think a big driver of the class is like, we're just having an open, productive, nice conversation about juicy topics that are topical in the world, that are important to people, and that are just sort of absent from other domains on campus.
Mounk: I sort of go back and forth in how optimistic or pessimistic I am about the state of life on campus for undergraduates, by which I mean that certainly one of the things that I loved in my undergraduate experience was a sense of exploration of ideas, was a sense that I had friends with whom I could debate the world in a way that wasn't devil's advocate, it wasn't “debate me, bro” right? The kind of pejorative characterization of that that you sometimes see on social media. It was people, 18, 19, or 20, thinking about the big ideas about the world and trying on different positions in a way that felt both playful and free in that moment. But that was morally honest. I mean, it was an attempt to try and figure out how you should think about the world. And I'm really worried and saddened about the fact that when I gingerly ask my students whether they have some equivalent of that today, most of them say no. They say there's many things that you would only discuss behind closed doors with your best friend, if you happen to have somebody who you feel is somewhat open to that kind of thing or perhaps somewhat politically aligned. You would not debate many issues in the dining hall.
On the other hand, I found that when you try to create a space for that in the classroom, it's not that hard to do. Sometimes it can go off the rails, or there can be a few students who clearly are just censorious and who don't want to allow that conversation, and you can see the other students getting scared. But on the whole, I think it succeeds. And I don't think that I'm sort of an exceptional teacher or something like that. I don't think it's because I somehow am single-handedly able to overcome these kinds of obstacles. And that makes me a little bit more optimistic that perhaps we're over-indexing on those fears? How do you share the background concern I have and sort of how bad do you think things are at the universities that you've observed?
Hersh: Let me say that I think there are two kinds of polarization happening, neither of which are good. One is by campus. So I think that if you go down to big state schools anywhere, I not that long ago gave a talk at Florida State, that's a good example where it's like a huge school. It has everyone, it has the smartest kids, it has kids who are from every walk of life. And when you get into political science class, you can expect that a bunch of kids there have a different view from you about abortion or gay rights or Israel-Palestine or whatever. That's just because that's like that society and it's represented in those classrooms. And I think that there's increasingly a polarization where on campuses like the one I teach on (and maybe one that you teach on) just doesn't look like a microcosm of American society and many, many views are not represented. I mean, I think that one reason the Israel-Palestine stuff was so hard this year on campuses is because on most issues, like the big social issues, the students expect that everyone agrees with them on campus. That there is basically no one who's super pro-life and then they reached this year in which there are really passionate positions on both sides and they kind of lost their minds over it.
Mounk: And including, by the way, university administration, which came into the habit over the last 10 years of opining about all kinds of political events in the world on the assumption that 90% of recipients of this email are going to agree strongly and the other 10% are going to know to shut up. And suddenly you have an issue that's 50-50 on campus (or whatever it is, exactly) and you don't have the sort of background preference cascades and preference falsification mechanisms that make the ones who disagree shut up and then people are really upset about the email from the university. And so I think one of the good things that have come out of this—Harvard just announced this along with a bunch of other universities, and I've been arguing this for a good number of months with many others—is that some of these universities are now remembering the wisdom of the Chicago principles and saying perhaps we shouldn't have these institutional statements taking positions on 90-10 issues, either, because then we're going to have to issue them on 50-50 issues and then we're going to get screwed in situations like this one.
Hersh: Right, at the same time, I do think we have this major brand differentiation happening where the bigger state schools in the red or purple states are saying we want to make sure the culture of our campus is welcome to conservatives and liberals to healthy debate. And so we're going to invest money in building programs for that. And there are going to be other schools that kind of double down on a very kind of homogenous leftist position in the culture that they're trying to curate. And that's going to be a brand differentiation that affects where students go and where donors go.
Mounk: To end this conversation, let me go back to the beginning. I've been wondering through this conversation whether I'm a political hobbyist. I think I may be. I think a lot of people listening to this podcast may at least have traits of political hobbyists. How can we do better? What in our behavior should we eye skeptically and how can we avoid the pitfalls of political hobbyism in ourselves?
Hersh: Yeah, so one is to read the book that I wrote about political hobbyism. I think you’ll see that I profile about, I don't know, six or eight activists who I think are doing politics in a productive way. And a lot of those people are doing very simple things, organizing their old age home so that people vote, helping organize families in the school to help their students and students in a not so good public school system. And I don't think everyone has it in them to be that person, the local civic hero. But I would like more people to read those stories and understand that that's sort of like the form of politics they should hold dear to them. We probably will learn more lessons about politics and be better people if we think about the person who's on our condo board or on the social action or ritual committee of their church or who's on the school board and understands what their constraints are. How do they do their work? How can we learn more about how they operate? Those people I think will feel more real, and will give us lessons for how we can all behave better than if we just read op-ed pages that lament what's going on in national politics. So I think it's reorienting ourselves to what political activity can look like and what inspiring political activity can look like at a state and local level. It's a good first step in my view.
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Eitan Hersh on the Perils of Political Hobbyism