Jeff Polet: It came together, the Bush Center got a new leader back in January. And part of their mission is civil discourse and democratic renewal. And he was thinking about different ways to address what has become a kind of crisis situation in America. And by that, I mean that if you look at opinion polls and so forth, many Americans are deeply concerned about the social state of this country today. So, the Bush Center was sort of directly addressing some of these issues. And they thought about putting together the statement. They contacted the other presidential foundations as the statement indicates there are 14 of us and ran the draft by us. We had a number of meetings, online meetings, where we talked about the early drafts, made suggestions, and then at the end of it asked us if we would be willing to be signatories to this. And we said, yeah. Yeah, we think it's an important statement because the presidential foundations and centers are kind of uniquely positioned to bring a kind of credible voice to the current political moment.
Patrick Center: I'll read a portion of this and then maybe you can delve into this a bit more. “Our statement calls for a renewed commitment to American democratic values, civic responsibility, and respect for differing viewpoints. We urge leaders across the United States to model our nation's democratic principles.” This isn't just a call to citizens. I see leadership mentioned here.
Jeff Polet: Yeah, very much. I think there are two ways to think about that. One is that, you know, democratic liberalism is a way of doing politics where you navigate disagreement by allowing it to foment, by allowing it to express itself, but also at the same time, trying to cap its tendency to devolve into violence. I mean, when you have disagreement, one way to do it is just to kill off your opponents, right? I mean, silence them. or you can have other mechanisms for silencing opposition. But democracy is a way of saying that the opposition is actually healthy, that the disagreement is actually healthy, but we can keep it from ever turning into violence. And so, when you see disagreement becoming more and more heated to the point where violence becomes justified. That's a moment where you have to step in and say something has to be done about this because that's one of the primary goals that we're trying to accomplish. How do you keep this from devolving into violence? How do you maintain public order and public peace? And it's always been the case in any kind of system of government, and especially in democratic systems of government, that that goal is achieved through good leadership. That leaders can help articulate, concentrate public sentiment and appeal to the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln's word. So, when leadership begins to fail in its ability to articulate democratic values, it's going to increase the possibility that the people who follow those leaders will resort to violence in terms of navigating disagreement. So, it's really in any system of government. I wrote this in an essay today. There's no system of government so well designed that it can survive bad leadership.
Patrick Center: You earlier referred to this as a crisis situation. What are the elements that have led us to this point?
Jeff Polet: That's a really interesting question. I'd say we're in a crisis situation in the sense that There is broken trust in our institutions, not only in our political institutions, our financial institutions, our ecclesial institutions, our educational institutions. The levels of public trust are catastrophically low and you cannot maintain. public order without the cement of public trust holding it together. And so, there is a compelling need to try to restore trust in our institutions. If you ask a lot of Americans questions, the Gallup did a big poll on this recently, questions about, you know, do you think there's a possibility of a civil war breaking out in America? A significant portion of Americans think that we're already in the cold stage of a civil war. The significant number of both Trump voters and Biden voters think that it's probably time to start splitting the country apart. You know, secession is back on the table again. You know, so if you think about the Civil War as our first great crisis and the Civil War has different elements to it. One, justifications of the use of violence. Two, secession crises. And three, where political discourse is seized by the extremes. the political bell curve. This is what happened in the 1850s. The extremists on both sides were driving the conversation, they were driving the politics. That's what's happening now, it seems to be the case, that the extremes are driving the dialogue. And one thing extremists won't do is negotiate. Which is what democratic politics is all about. Concession, compromise, negotiation. And if you're operating off the margins, you can't have a functioning democracy because that's one thing people on the margins won't do.
Patrick Center: You talk about the fringes. There's far right and far left media. If that is your only source of news gathering day in and day out, and the rhetoric that is introduced, how do you unwind all of that?
Jeff Polet: Yeah, I think that's a million dollar question. And I think that's going to be one of the great challenges we have going forward. We know that people are siloing. They're siloing in geographic terms, they're siloing in economic terms, they're siloing in cultural terms, and they're certainly siloing in terms of how they consume news. I think it is a really serious problem that we have right now. How social media reinforces prejudices. So, we'll talk about different biases, cognitive biases that people have, and one of the most dangerous ones people can have are confirmation biases. And it's clear that media consumption has become one large exercise in confirmation bias. My own view is that the way you break out of this is to return to a genuine set of democratic practices. And that is, it has to be a kind of fine grain localized thing where people are living together, working together, shaping and forming a common life together, getting to actually know each other. You know, I think a lot of times people say, okay, I don't agree with so and so on a lot of stuff, but he's a pretty good dude. You know, I spend time talking with him, you know, when we're out mowing our lawns or something, you know, he's not a bad person. We have to get over this view that people who disagree with us are bad people. And that used to not be the case. And I think this is where the presidential centers and foundations are really hopeful. Ford and Carter had an incredibly heated campaign in 1976 that Carter won. They became very close friends after Carter's presidency because they never let their political differences define them. They never let their political differences get them to the point where they believed that the other person was a bad person simply because he disagreed with the other person.
Patrick Center: The overarching question, why now?
Jeff Polet: Why now? I think part of it is... It was an initiative of the Bush Center. I don't think there was any particular event that set the wheels in motion other than they got a new director in place and he was sort of attacking them in a new direction. The larger question of why now is, I think A, increasing levels of public concern about the state of things. B, a perception, rightly or wrongly, but I think mostly rightly that our leaders are not helping us in this situation, they're actually making things worse in some ways. And the third thing would be, I don't know that this statement would have been issued if January 6th had not happened. But my guess is that there would have been less of a compelling need for a statement like this without January 6th. I think January 6th revealed a kind of new level of friction in our politics. And so, part of it is this sort of understanding that we need to respond to events as they are happening on the ground and to reaffirm the sort of central values and central purposes of our system of government, and not get too bogged down in the things that we disagree on.
Patrick Center: So, what can be done now? Is it really the focus on leadership? You mentioned January 6th and we had leaders step up, they voice their concerns, and then they walk it back a month later. How does that work?
Jeff Polet: What a leader can't be is so concerned about preserving his or her position. that they lose sight of that which the position is designed to serve. Right. So, when holding office becomes more important to you than exercising office, you've reached a kind of crisis situation. And I think that's what happens sometimes is that people become more concerned about keeping their jobs than doing their jobs. So that's part of it. The other thing that's happened in Washington, and the reasons for this are not entirely clear to me. There are different arguments as to why this might be the case. But Washington has become a much less cooperative and a much more divisive place than it used to be. So, it's going to be hard at the level of national politics for us to get this all straightened out if the people in Congress can't figure out a way to work more cooperatively with each other and work more cooperatively with the president. And I think there are various factors at work here. I think we have to look at the way we do our elections. I think that we have to look at the way we draw our congressional districts. I think we have to think carefully about our primary system. You know, I mean, here in West Michigan, in my judgment, it's absolutely criminal that somebody like Pete Meijer gets booted out during the primary system for somebody who's completely unqualified for the office because of the way he voted on the second impeachment hearing. How's the healing going to take place? Because now we've seen where these divisions can lead. We've seen the horror of where these divisions can lead. How do we heal now after that? And America's always been pretty good at this. We've been very good at dividing. We've also been very good at coming together. We've been very fragile, but we've also been resilient. The problem we have right now is we don't have a clear idea of what a healing could look like. And the reason for that is because we have lost our story. We don't have a common story or a common culture the way that we once did. Without that, the Democratic project is impossible. And so, we have to focus on things such as civic education. We have to focus on things like civic participation. We have to focus on things such as the values that are articulated in this Bush Center statement, mutual forbearance, toleration, commitment to a pluralist social order, the sort of virtues and values we associate with democratic governments.
Patrick Center: Jeff Polet, you are the director at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation's Leadership Forum. Thank you so much.
Jeff Polet: You're welcome.