Minter Dialogue with Dr Frances Lee

Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, joins me to discuss her co-authored book “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.” We explore the concept of moralized antagonism, the challenges of political polarization during the pandemic, and the failures of democratic processes in crisis response. Frances offers insights on the importance of diverse information sources, acknowledging uncertainty, and resisting the temptation of echo chambers. We delve into the complexities of balancing public health measures with societal needs, and the long-term implications for trust in institutions and democratic discourse. Frances advocates for a more nuanced approach to political engagement, emphasizing the need for leaders who can navigate complexity and diversity in policymaking.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Frances Lee:

• Find/buy Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo’s book, “In COVID’s Wake,” here
• Find/follow Dr Frances Lee on Princeton Edu

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Dr. Frances Lee, it’s lovely to have you on my show. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. You’ve written many books. You are a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and most recently co-authored a book that I think is very important with Stephen Macedo “In Covid’s Wake”, How Our Politics Failed Us, As I like to do, Frances, we’re going to get into the thick of the topic afterwards, but I do like to start with the personal story, which is, who is. Who are you?

Frances Lee: Well, I mean, I’ve been a professor now for quite a long time. I, I got my start at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and then moved from there to University of Maryland, where it’s only the. The most recent part of my career that I’ve been at Princeton. I moved to Princeton in 20, before the pandemic.

Minter Dial: Beautiful town. That it is.

Frances Lee: Yes, it is lovely, though, I have to say. You know, it is. It. It’s So, quaint and comfortable that sometimes it feels like not a real place.

Minter Dial: Yeah, you need some. You need a bit more grit. The occasional visit to Manhattan or something like that, or Philadelphia or something.

Frances Lee: Right. But, you know, I didn’t get interested in politics early in life, unlike a lot of my colleagues in political science departments. I began to get interested in politics while I was a college student at the University of Wales at Swansea, where I was an exchange student for a year. And that was. I, I, you might hear I have a Southern accent. It still comes through. So, I. So, I grew up in small town Mississippi, and I went to college in Mississippi, and I. And there wasn’t a lot of political debate. It wasn’t. It’s a pretty homogenous political place. Political terms going to Swansea, there’s a lot more variety, a lot more diversity of perspective. You know, there were the Socialist Worker students, but the student in the dorm room next to mine was a Thatcherite. And so, just made politics a lot more interesting than it had ever been to me before.

Minter Dial: Well, because you were learning sort of the whole British and European side of things. And I mean, it makes me need to ask to what extent debate was different for you in the UK or in Wales in particular, versus in your US experience, did you see any differences in the debate styles itself as opposed to the politics?

Frances Lee: I mean, I was, I was an outsider in Swansea, so. So, I’m able to listen. So, I have a little more distance than you have on your own country’s debates. And so, that, I think, helped move me towards the perspective of a social scientist that, you know, some, the interest that I was taking in the kinds of debates that I was hearing there, more similar to the way that I try to analyze debate now where I try to understand the different points of view, try not to, try not to take a side, you know, try to instead understand what, what’s the nub of the issue? Why are they differing perspectives on it? So, I think, I think that was, it was, it was not just important for getting me interested in the subject matter, but also for getting me interested in the, the approach that would then become appropriate for what wound up becoming my career.

Minter Dial: Well, in essence, the way I look at it, that describes some form of empathy where you’re really leaning into the other person’s story, you’re trying to listen into it rather than have filters that will inevitably obscure your ability to understand what the other person’s saying or feeling or where, where they come from.

Frances Lee: I think that’s right, yes. So, it’s an exercise in empathy also. Well, observation. It’s not, not a defensive kind of engagement, it’s a curious kind of engagement.

Minter Dial: And so, you live on a campus, a very distinguished campus. You’re seeing university life up close. And certainly from my experience, I went to school in England, France and the United States back a few years. I used to remember it as very vivacious land for tremendous debate. And nothing was really off the table in my world by the time. It seems that that’s changed dramatically in the U.S. can you comment on that? And to what extent do you see debate is or isn’t crimped?

Frances Lee: Well, it’s a source of anxiety on campuses around the US that they don’t have enough diversity of view and that students, conservative students, feel that they have to self-censor. So, you know, I see that in my courses, you know, I teach in the policy school and you know, I’ve seen conservative students preface their remarks by saying, I hope you all will still be friends with me after I criticize Joe Biden’s foreign policy or, or whatever that, So, they, they’re clearly cognizant of their minority status and, and it makes them nervous in ways that, that, that, that I think is not good for debate and deliberation in university campuses. That students ought to feel free to express themselves, whatever their viewpoint, and shouldn’t, shouldn’t feel that they have to apologize or be anxious about being ostracized. So, it is an issue, I think that there’s more concerted effort now to try to redress that, but it’s not easy to address in the sense that there’s a lot of self-selection involved and the kind of students who apply to come to a place like Princeton, you know, they’re not representative of all the students who are applying to go to college. And so, there are some vicious cycles involved with, with these patterns that some types of students feel more comfortable imagining themselves at Princeton than others. And so, you can see how this can be very self-reinforcing and can create homogeneity on campuses that it’s really undesirable.

Minter Dial: I feel like I want to just follow this down this part. You talk a lot about this concept of moralized antagonism. That’s correct.

Frances Lee: Yes, that’s right.

Minter Dial: You want to describe for us why you use that term.

Frances Lee: Well, moralized antagonism is more than just disagreement. It’s more than just, you know, holding a set of views that are opposed to another group. It’s that the, it’s, you moralize that disagreement where you begin to see the, those who hold a divergent perspective from your own as bad people And therefore, not worth engaging with. And I think we saw a lot of that during the pandemic, that those who had questions about the policies or doubts or who opposed various aspects of the pandemic response were simply regarded as sort of beyond the pale, morally beyond the pale, weren’t engaged with on a good faith basis. Now this happens in many policy areas. I think it’s quite surprising the extent to which it pervaded the politics of the pandemic. Because after all, the pandemic was not a long-standing issue in our political systems. You know, it came on the scene quickly and there was a lot of uncertainty about what to do. And under those circumstances you might expect that there would be more of a, an open minded, curious problem-solving approach. Even though of course there was great fear. But a, a sense of, well, let’s, let’s, let’s see what’s working here, let’s study it and let’s consider different ideas. But it just didn’t play out that way at all.

Minter Dial: Much to the bad consequences of it in the States, everywhere. And so, this, this idea of moralized antagonism, there’s the, for me in it, there’s a sound of well, I’m better than you. And that’s that notion of I’m going to, I’m going to get up on my high horse And therefore, I don’t tolerate you, you are lower. How can you, in an environment like Princeton where obviously we got a lot of smart people walking around think that way it’s almost, you know, the only way to think is, I’ve thought this through, I’m an intelligent being. How can you think that? And there, there’s no ground given to someone who’s doubting or even contrarian. It’s, you’re just wrong.

Frances Lee: Yes, that’s right. That’s how, that’s how it works now. I think in the US this problem became more pronounced than in a lot of other countries during the pandemic. In part because the pandemic struck the US at a time when the country politically was suffering from a number of pre-existing conditions. One of which was they don’t have insurance for that. That’s right, they surely don’t. And so, it was, it was an election year. The incumbent president was a very polarizing figure who was not trusted by more than half of the country, had already been through an impeachment crisis. There were many people looking to November of 2020 as the opportunity to finally be rid of him, who were primed to see everything he, he did and every position he might take is wrong. And so, he. Supporters of Trump were seen by opponents of Trump in moral terms that the basis of Trump’s support was often understood by Democrats and by Trump opponents as being grounded in racism. And so, to have a president like that who was seen as a racist figure by a lot of Americans, a lot of Democrats certainly saw him that way. That put us in a position where it was very difficult to create any kind of unity in reaction to the crisis. So, So, I think that that certainly figured in. I mean our politics had been polarizing for a long time, but Trump turned up the volume very high on that.

Minter Dial: As Musk might say, or whatever that film is. No, it’s that film up to 11.

Frances Lee: Up to 11, yes. A spinal tap. Yes, it goes to 11. That’s right.

Minter Dial: Film references. I want to get back into sort of the politics story in a second, but just, just before that. You know, people who are listening surely have in their minds someone else who’s on the other side and that’s close to them or in their periphery somehow. And, and they, that we no longer talk about the topics there. There are people certainly that I know who I’m close to who are adamant that they are right about everything that we, that happened in Covid. It was right to lock down. It was right to vaccinate everybody and, and such And so, forth. The, the different non pharmaceutical things that they were done. And, and I mean, and this amongst other topics, people sort of get on their armored high horses and and don’t want to get down. What what sort of advice do you have to people who are faced with such intransigence when it comes to their position and their high horse?

Frances Lee: Well I don’t think you can expect the broad public not to have those feelings and you know for them to struggle to to engage with those who disagree strongly who have opposing identities like I think you have to be reasonable about what you expect from just the app from the average person for whom politics is not the only the only or the most important thing in their life that you know it’s a natural thing just to want to avoid conflict that you know, you know of folks who have very strongly opposed views just to dodge the avoid the topic and you know, don’t talk about politics in mixed company. That’s decent. That’s decent Religion just for just for living. But for policymakers they have to examine questions on the merits and they, they have to take seriously what they know and what they don’t know and they have to listen to an array of views to then offer good judgments. And so, I think they should be held to a higher standard here than just the average person. And I think they did not rise above these impulses just to listen only to those who are in your camp and isolate yourself in your echo chamber that that’s what, that’s what needs to be avoided. You know that they have a different type of responsibility than the typical person does.

Minter Dial: And whether it’s a typical person or person in policy understanding facts and truth and it seems to me So, I, I kind of look at this I’m not at all in your space but that that people tend to get high on their horses with regard to their facts and their version of history. There is no desire for shared version of history or a communal idea of what the facts are. And so, it becomes it’s also brought around or let’s say a continuation of the deep mistrust that has been rising in institutions well before the pandemic in many institutions obviously media politics lesser before the pandemic in in all things medical at least in the United States. But we’ve now got into how do you in the political instance when you’re when that’s your responsibility undercover the facts you’re never going to have 100% truth. You want to be tending towards truth. But in you still need to make some bets on that.

Frances Lee: Well you have to make a concerted effort to diversify your information sources that and that that’s gotten harder these days because there, there’s So, much more fragmentation in the information environment. It’s, it’s become very easy just to expose yourself to the perspectives that are comfortable for you.

Minter Dial: And so, social media will, the algorithms will typically feed that beast.

Frances Lee: Yes. And so, political leaders have to fight against that. If they want a comprehensive view. If they only, if they want to get beyond only talking to people who already agree with them, then they need to understand what people who don’t agree with them, how they understand the circumstance, what facts they can bring to bear. It is often the case that there’s a diversity of facts that, you know.

Minter Dial: And sometimes contradiction There, there, there may be things which don’t add up and maybe each are true, but they just don’t equate to an easy decision.

Frances Lee: That’s what I meant to, you know, that’s what I was driving at, that they can all, they can, they can, you can have truth from a variety of perspectives that you know and, and your perspective will be incomplete if you’re, you know, only drawing from, you know, one segment. And so, it’s become easier to do that. And so, I think that’s, that’s something that political leaders have to be cognizant of and have to try to avoid. I also think that political leaders have a lot of incentive to pretend that they know the answers, that this is reassuring to publics. And so, that I think also encourages them narrow their, the breadth of inquiry that they engage in, that instead, you know, they adopt a policy approach and then they’re not really interested in questioning that and instead just want to, just want to forge ahead. And so, I think we saw that to a great degree in the pandemic, even though there was a great deal of uncertainty, if you look back before the pandemic, at the planning work that had been done to cope with, with a respiratory pandemic that, you know, if you look at that work, they acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty around all of these measures. Like, you know, there’s a 2019 World Health Organization report that just goes through each of the proposed non pharmaceutical interventions that one might turn to in the context of a pandemic. And in each case it says, you know, well, you know, the evidence here is poor, the quality very low. And so, they knew that there was just a lot that was unknown about what would work. And so, under those circumstances, you can’t just commit yourself to a course of action and not then take on board information about what’s happening in the world and try to make that or put that in dialogue with what your priors were, you have to, you know, you have to try to make sense of emerging information. I think that there, there were a lot of flaws with those kinds of feedback processes in politics. In the pandemic. I saw it unfold very starkly across the federal system in the US Where Republican states went one direction with their handling of the pandemic and Democratic leaning states went another. And it’s like they weren’t looking at one another at all. Like there was no, they were wrong. Right. They looked at other states that were politically like themselves for guidance on what to do. There was a lot of herding behavior. You saw that in institutions and society as well, universities, you know, paying close attention to what other universities like themselves were doing in the context of the pandemic instead of looking broadly and trying to learn in the context of uncertainty. So, I think that, you know, So, political leaders have these incentives to pretend like they know and then I think sometimes they forget that they’re pretending.

Minter Dial: So, if I, I, I totally hear you. And I also put this in the context of, I feel that there is a crisis of meaning in our lives, in society in general. And so, you talked about herd. If you’re a sheep and you don’t know where to go, you want to just be told where to go. You, you, you feel lost otherwise. And you talk about how this became existential. It’s existential in some part, naturally, because it did bring about death, which is at the core of existence. However, when you are looking to vote for somebody, you, you see charisma and a leader. Sam Harris was talking about this in his latest podcast about narcissism and, and charisma and, and that idea of the bravado that comes with that overconfidence. So, people want to be naturally attracted to confident people. And if confidence says, well, I know what I’m talking about, even though I have no bloody clue, then that is attractive to people and voters.

Frances Lee: Absolutely. We clearly saw these kinds of behavior on the part of voters, citizens generally. We know whether or not they vote the U.S. and I suspect elsewhere, of course, I know the U.S. best. But you know that you saw this around the, almost a cult around Anthony Fauci, the longtime leader of the NIAID, major health funding agency in the U.S. that, you know, there were bobbleheads, T shirts and like prayer candles with his image on it. And it’s, this is not healthy. That’s not a normal response to a health advisory figure. But I think it reflected the way in which people fixate on a leader in the context of fear and want to believe that if they just do what this leader says that they’ll be safe. Obviously there’s long been a cult of personality around Donald Trump. Plenty of teachers. Yes. And with sold with his image on him. And so, I think we saw the sort of, that kind of polarization around, around which leader, in which leader you vested trust and you know, not no openness to considering well maybe they’re right about some things but not about others. You know, sometimes, sometimes Trump was right, but that was very hard for Democrats to hear. They were inclined to reject it. When he said in the summer of 2020 that schools should reopen. Looking at, I mean schools had opened, reopened largely in Europe at that point, but in, in the US Schools would stay closed. The bulk of schools would stay closed all the way until March 2021. So, when he said schools should reopen it. But that was something that Democrats had difficulty accepting in any form. You saw in fact a major backlash against that. And even institutions that had previously been advocating to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 reversed course in the, amidst that backlash.

Minter Dial: So, whether or not you’re a political leader or a leader of an organization, CEO, president or a university, oftentimes leaders are looked to because they have the vision, they have the decisions to make. And if you go up there, I don’t know what I’m going to do here. Gosh, I have So, many doubts. You know, Forrest Gumpy, I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like an image that people will follow. So, you, you do very much introduce this idea of being, you know, accepting that I have doubts, accepting that I don’t have the truth. You know, I may be wrong, but at the same time I feel like we as a country, in media, as a, as an instrument are extremely critical of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. You know, as soon as you evince you like that, you mumble a word, people run into you and say, well, I knew he didn’t know what he’s talking about.

Frances Lee: I mean I understand that. But sometimes we leaders are faced with circumstances where the right answers are not clear. And so, they will have to make decisions and, and they’re, they’re the public’s long-term trust in them will be enhanced if they are frank, if they acknowledge, they say this is the best. This is, you know, having weighed the, the choices before us, I think this is best. This is what I recommend. I advise you to do this. I will update you as we get new information that, you know, being honest with people, treating them like adults, you’re not like sheep, but like adult people, that, that reduces your risk of a collapse in trust. And we’ve seen the people on the people, because when they discover that you’re wrong, like for example, with the COVID vaccines, when the health leaders in the US went out and told people that if you get vaccinated that you become a dead end to the virus and you can’t transmit it, that, I mean, we hadn’t, you know, this head of the CDC provided those kinds of assurances, as did Anthony Fauci. And it didn’t take long before people discovered for themselves personally that that was not the case. And so, what does that do to trust? So, you know, they, they did not have a scientific basis for claiming that the vaccine would be capable of stopping transmission. That in fact respiratory viruses are not usually able to be suppressed through vaccination in that kind of way. It’s not like measles vaccine. So, they were, they, they went out and on the basis of what they hoped was true, told people that it was true, even though they did not have, even, even though they did not have evidence. You know, the trials, the vaccine trials did not test for an effect on transmission that was not an endpoint of the trial. And so, they went out and made those claims and then they were caught out.

Minter Dial: You wonder how we complain about hallucinations in ChatGPT or perplexity when we ourselves are entirely capable without LSD, to hallucinate such answers. You mentioned in your book and in the article, in interviews, you talk about this idea of following the science. And so, politicians said, well, that’s what the science said, that’s what the health instructor said. And so, they abdicated, indicated their decision or ability to contextualize that information. I feel it wasn’t really about. I, my, my nose as a writer, an observer. So, it was less about following the sciences, more about following the money. I was wondering to what extent you would react to that.

Frances Lee: I think in the Context of the U.S. political leaders preferred to couch their decisions in terms of following the science because it was a way to hide their own discretion. It was a way for them to say, don’t blame me, I’m only doing what the scientists say. It was a way to address the low standing that political leaders tend to have already in the US that there’s, you know, low levels of trust in political leaders. That’s sort of characteristic of American politics right now. And has been for a long time. And so, to shore themselves up in the midst of that mistrust, they would just say, well, I’m not making any decisions at all. I’m just. I’m just doing. I’m just following the science. So, I think it was, it was a kind, as you. The term that you just use, abdication of their responsibility. I think that. I think that was the primary impetus behind that kind of rhetoric and that kind of justification that was repeatedly offered through the pandemic. It was a dodge of responsibility.

Minter Dial: So, on the one hand, we have scientists who dodged the same responsibility to act as scientists you had. On the other hand, within that community, the folks who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, you had some scientists who I followed. I have a Twitter list of lockdown skeptics who each 31 of them are bona fide intellectuals, you know, really knowledgeable people who would say things and at the risk of being canceled, at the risk of losing the profession. On the other hand, you have the media who I feel didn’t play their part. I mean, you definitely talk about that. And you have the other side of the bench who are going to say, if you say black, I’ll say white, whatever you say. And this is where I want to broaden it out, is that this happened in every single country, virtually every single country in the west, except for the beautiful country of Sweden and maybe Iceland. But on balance, it was a dummying down, idiot screaming at idiots, if you will, with just trying to shoot down the others if they’re not in power. And then as at the. The bottom end of the. And the people who were killed hurt by it the most, the citizens who got to pay for it in all the costs that you talk about, the cost benefit, they were the ones that were paid. So, it feels like the people in power were not understanding of their role for that institution, whether it’s the media, politics, academics, to uphold their standards, to go above party politics. And so, we’ve ended. We ended up with this cacophony. And I think that’s how I feel. Not through mal intention, but through that sort of cluster of forces that we ended up with this absolutely silly environment where people weren’t saying the truth.

Frances Lee: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, So, the. So, the party’s out of power, used the crisis opportunistically, blaming the parties in power for every bad thing that happened as if it was all stoppable, you know, I mean, that, that was another way in which people weren’t treated as adults, you know, during the pandemic that, you know, every. Every COVID death in the US Was laid at Donald Trump’s feet as if. As if he personally controlled the circulation of a microscopic pathogen. And so, it was. It was kind of absurd. I’m sure that the politicians using that kind of rhetoric must have known that that was silly, but it was So, easy to do, And so, they indulged that.

Minter Dial: Shameless, really.

Frances Lee: Yeah.

Minter Dial: This notion of. Of every death. And I. And I. This again, going back to my sort of larger context where I feel like as a society, we no longer tolerate any death, that the precautionary principle dominates and that it’s better to save an 80-year-old than it is to hurt. Oh, gosh, a little kid who’s at university, Their. Their education. Oh, well, it’s just their education. We must save. Me, I have a story that a friend of mine, I was recounting how some very good friends of mine had just lost their daughter, 23 years old, to cancer. And because the doctors weren’t available, you know, everyone was closed down. Then she died alone. And he said, I know what you mean. I said, what do you. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, my uncle died. He died of COVID I said, he died with. Or of. Yeah, he. He died with COVID And, sorry, the parallel is what. How old was your uncle? He was 80. Well, I’m sorry you lost your uncle, but I do not believe you understand what I mean. How can we equate that death with this death? And, and as a rule, I feel like this existentialness is because we no longer tolerate this quirky concept of death. It’s, you know, something to be avoided, something we shouldn’t talk about, something if we can. Let’s become immortal, as some people are thinking about in the transhumanist world. So, is that also compounding our inability to talk frankly about something which does cause death?

Frances Lee: I think it was very hard for us to face death. I mean, that’s what we frame the book in the context of the. Our handling of crises perceived as existential in nature, and the way they drive out cost benefit analysis. Like, if you think. If you think that crisis threatens the very existence of humanity, then what. What, there’s cost benefit analysis isn’t relevant. Like you’d pay any price to preserve humanity. So. So, I think Covid was approached that way, even though, of course, it was not an existential threat. I mean, it was. It was a. It was a terrible problem, you know, crisis and, you know, not something, you know, you’d ever want to have to face. But you know, human beings have had to face pandemics on many prior occasions, didn’t wipe out humanity. We understood right away with this, with this particular pathogen that it was quite selective in, in who was most vulnerable to it. But nevertheless, rhetoric tend to frame it in existential terms, I think, because I think the incentives pushed in that direction because it makes life a lot easier. If you don’t need to balance costs and benefits, if you don’t need to think in terms of, well, you know, what are the trade offs here that, you know, if, if you know we’re going to close the schools down, what is this going to do to young people’s futures? Their life courses, their educational health that affects their longevity, you know, So, over the health of the population, over the long term, the health of these people as they go forward in their lives, that, you know, you know, other health risks like chronic disease or alcoholism and, and addiction, all these things, you know, just went off of the radar.

Minter Dial: Domestic abuse, yes.

Frances Lee: All these other threats to, well, being faded from view. And every night on the news it was the number of COVID cases, the number of COVID deaths, as if that was the only thing that mattered to us as a society. I think, you know, there’s a laziness there too. I mean, of course it’s a terrible crisis and I don’t want to minimize the suffering and death that Covid caused. But there’s a laziness in not acknowledging and recognizing that society is complex and that there are many threats to people, to people’s health and well-being, and that as policymakers you have to weigh the range of interests in society. You know, a slogan that was widely used during the pandemic, we’re all this together. Which seemed to imply that we all have the same interests. That was never true. We did not have the same interests. That young people were at less risk from the virus and they were at more risk from the mitigation measures that were taken to stop the spread of the virus. About a third of the workforce in the US were essential workers since the. They had to continue on the job in person regardless. So, these measures were not protecting them. And I think they were to a very considerable degree overlooked. They didn’t even get hazard pay. Some of them have health conditions that put them at higher risk for bad outcomes with COVID and yet nothing done for them.

Minter Dial: They went to the, they went in the boardroom defending their cause.

Frances Lee: Right. And so, there wasn’t a recognition of the diversity of interests. So, hiding from it again, a kind of an abdication of responsibility.

Minter Dial: I. So, I have one last salvo at my sort of contextual approach, which comes from the fact that we have not had a world war for 80 years. And, and as a result we’ve all been living in this lovely peaceful world, the peace dividend that we all talk about. I had recently Sir Mark Carlton Smith on my podcast, and he talked about we’re actually in a pre war generation. And I sort of feel like since we actually haven’t gone through, I mean, let’s say there was nine, 11. There’s also Afghanistan, Iraq and you know, great. All these other wars that have happened, but not on the, on the ground in the United States. And it feels like, well, this is our war. And I think that sort of, that played into the existential component. Oh, look at me. This is, this is our time. This is our 1939 or for United States, 1941. And yet perhaps the biggest existential crisis is for that of democracy.

Frances Lee: I think there was a longing for heroism, like we can be the heroes in this context. Here we look at some of the white papers that were produced in think tanks and university centers. This purple prose, you know, look at me. Grandiose interpretation. Like I, I think there was a longing for the kinds of great deeds that are done in wartime that we, you know, this is the challenge of our time and we are going to rise to it. We will bear any burden and pay any price. You know, it’s our turn now to distinguish ourselves in history. I do think there was some of that kind of thinking.

Minter Dial: What about the democracy? Because, I mean, for me, and I live in London, but I’m, I have a French passport. So, I look at politics generally around Europe. Obviously I have many Swedish friends. But also looking at how Europe is in general, we could. Each, each country has their own version of this story which paints a similar conclusion. Even though the journey was different and the context in which each government had to deal with it. I mean, left and right was different, but we, we’ve ended up with, in my opinion, more of an existential crisis with regard to democracy. And not just in the United States where we’re talking about issues of the role of media, the opportunity for freedom of debate and freedom of speech on university campuses, much less out in society. And, and the, this is what the demos is supposed to be able to do. And, and if that doesn’t participate in our structured society, then surely we, we will have an existential issue from. For democracy.

Frances Lee: That’s right. So, the, the Book that Steve and I wrote comes, comes out of anxiety about democracy. That’s the origin of the book, that’s the subtitle, right?

Minter Dial: I mean, how our Politics Failed Us.

Frances Lee: Right. But you know, it’s about failures of democracy, failures to consider an array of views, the failures to treat voters are citizens as adults, to acknowledge uncertainty where it exists in the context of the US Federalism that, you know, we had a lot of what has traditionally been referred to in the US a lot of experimentation in the laboratories of democracy where different states are pursuing different policies. It was an opportunity for policy learning and yet we saw So, little of it that even though there was a great deal of experimentation going on, it was segmented by party and there was not learning across the partisan divide. Now you might say American democracy worked in one very limited way, which is that the voters in different states got the policies that they wanted, that residents of democratic states got a heavy dose of stringent non pharmaceutical interventions much longer school closures and business closures and restaurant closures and you know, all the like. Whereas residents in red states like Texas and Florida, they, they got the, the more lax policies that they wanted. Then their schools reopened much earlier and they had fewer restrictions on society. And so, governors in the US all through the crisis were very popular. And no matter what policies they adopted and in the elections that occurred after the pandemic, they almost all got re-elected. And so, you might say, well, that’s democracy working just fine. Except normally we think of democracy as helping us uncover what is good policy for the people. And that, that didn’t, doesn’t seem to have happened at all. The democracy didn’t seem to help uncover what was good policy because there was no learning. And there we didn’t share a common dialogue about our different perspectives, where we learn from each other and where we can come to a common interpretation of what’s happening and what it means and what sorts of policies should be adopted in response to what we agree is happening. That, that, that, that kind of shared understanding was not reached. Instead we just had different factions talking to themselves in, in echo chambers. And so, if you want democracy to serve that larger human purpose of advancing the public good, we need to do more than just reflect the preferences of what people in these various factions hold. And so, that’s where I, I see our democracy as, as having profoundly failed during the pandemic. Now you mentioned freedom of speech. And we saw governments around the world trying to manage dissent, to suppress dissent around, around pandemic policy. And in the US it was not just about whether vaccines were a good idea. They often, it’s often you often hear misinformation sort of defined in terms of misinformation about vaccines and, and, you know, people not getting vaccinated from preventable illnesses and putting themselves at unnecessary risk because they have bad information. So, that’s. But it extended far beyond that. Questions about whether the, you know, the cloth masks that people were wearing was that were actually helping to suppress the spread of the disease. Something.

Minter Dial: Where’s the proof?

Frances Lee: Yeah, where’s the proof of that? And all the whole range of measures that were taken in response to the pandemic, many of them were just purely experimental. This is, we’re trying this. We don’t. There was not an evidence base that, you know, that would allow policymakers to say, we, we, we have good evidence to that this will work. They couldn’t say that. And so, instead they just attempted to suppress any questions. And so, you had the, the White House in the US Putting pressure on social media companies behind the scenes, threatening them with regulation that would, would have put them out of business had they opted to pursue it and demanding that particular accounts be de. Amplified or taken down. Yeah, deplatformed. And, and you know, a whole, whole range of, of demands they were placing on social media companies to, to try to maintain better control of the information environment to a considerable degree. They still failed. That question still got raised. And we’ve seen trust in public health in the US Fall dramatically. So, they were not able to do that. They tried to suppress discussion of whether Covid might have originated in a lab leak. And yet now most Americans, something like two thirds of Americans, believe it did come from a laboratory. So, these efforts to manage the information environment were not successful, at least in the U.S. now, of course, around the world, there have been more regulations adopted on social media to, to give governments more tools to control. So, I, you know, maybe they will be more successful than the US Government was, but certainly the u. It’s a global information network now. And I think governments are probably tilting at windmills here. Not to say they won’t cause suffering for particular individuals and you know, you know, can’t impose costs. But will they succeed in managing information So, that questions don’t ever get raised? I’m not sure they’re going to succeed, but that’s another issue for democracy coming out of the pandemic.

Minter Dial: Absolutely. And I’m writing a new book and I talk about this notion of actually thinking about the nation in which we live and, and having that be the way to define or describe what do you mean by common good? And, and I, I, I salute for example the Russian spirit because there’s a very specific different idea of the common good in Russia. And I’m not saying necessarily it’s the one for anybody else, but what I like is, is that it’s very specifically Russian. And, and then you look at how other countries like China try to lock down information yet in the democracy we also we’re looking at how the narrative is being spilled, how the media played kowtow to the media, the, the needs of the politicians in the wartime crisis and then how we even tried to let’s say restrict vocabulary and the idea of cases for me just drive me bonkers. What do you mean by a case? Herd immunity, change definitions? Antivaxxer to point out anybody who was just horrible on the other side these terms and, and I feel very sad that and I, I feel, I feel very much like you might you said at the very beginning it came on quickly but the hangover is going to last a bloody long time. I, I, I loved you reading your book. You talk about it, about it being more a folly than a villainy in terms of your approach. I felt very level headed. I So, many more questions about how you and Macedo came into it, but I have to close it down. What parting words and advice would you have people listening to this with regard to that, say, protecting democracy in whichever country we are in, engaging in friendly conversations with people who are important to you, who have different opinions and or whatever we need to do to improve in the future. What type of last words would you like to share with us, Frances?

Frances Lee: Well, I think it’s important to be alert to the temptation towards moralized antagonism. It’s a very lazy way of engaging with the world that people who agree with me are the only good people and you know, just to be alert to that temptation and to try to resist it, to try to hear other people as human beings, hear their concerns, let them tell you the facts they see, treat people on the basis of good faith, learn from them that I think, you know, that’s the practice of democracy at the human level now, you know, you know, I’m not like I said earlier, you know, I think one has to be realistic about what the typical person will do. But I think that to the extent that you want to, a person wants to engage with public affairs, that these are the kinds of habits of mind that make you level headed and that enable you to have a breadth of view Certainly we should expect our leaders to be able to do that. And so, don’t just vote for the leaders who are the best at, you know, delivering you red meat and, and who flame inflame the passions. Look for the quality of mind that can understand the complexity of the, the policy choices and the diversity of our society and to try to forge a path forward while recognizing those complexities and that diversity.

Minter Dial: Well, I hope that In Cova’s Wake is selling well. It needs to get out there. I’m hoping that you and Professor Macedo’s experience has been good through this because I can imagine it was somewhat of a deep, controversial story for you guys to pull through. And I’ve got this lockdown skeptics Twitter list that I keep on having and might add you to it because you’re adding healthy doubt. And I think skeptical critical thinking is really one of the core concepts and things we need to bring in. How can someone get your book? That’s the minimum. Follow any of your writings. I know you’ve got many other books. Are there any other sites you’d like people to go to to check you out?

Frances Lee: Well, the book will publish in the UK in May 11, And so, it should start to be available in hardcover there. I have heard reports that one can already get it on Amazon in, on. In the Kindle format.

Minter Dial: Even in the UK Amazon is its own beast. I’ve had that experience.

Frances Lee: So, I looked it up this morning. It was $10 on Kindle in the US So, not an expensive proposition. So, on deal. It’s a decent deal. Yes. So, you know, it’s published on a university press book. It’s Princeton University Press. So, this is not a press that, it’s not a trade publisher. You’re not going to see big displays of this book in your bookstores. We don’t. My co-author and I don’t have a publicist that we, you know, we’ve just, you know, we wrote an academic book. But it, it does seem to be speaking a bit broader than the typical academic book, which also means that there’s been delays in shipping the book ever since, ever, ever since it published, at least in hard copy, you can get the Kindle version right away. So, if you see a copy and you want one, recognize that if you try to mail order, it may take a couple of weeks.

Minter Dial: A little bit of patience will go a long way.

Frances Lee: Yes.

Minter Dial: Well, thank you for your work. I think you’ve done valiant work, you and your co author, Mr. Macedo, and hopefully we’ll have a chance to somehow have an in real life conversation. You never know. But if you go this way over to London, do look me up. I’d be glad to show you around. Thank you So, much, Frances.

Frances Lee: It’s a great conversation. Very much appreciate it.