Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

(This episode first premiered August 28, 2021.)

A lot of people know about the “Southern Strategy,” the multi-year plan of 20th century Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to get white voters in the South to stop voting for Democrats. But what isn’t widely known is that the GOP itself was changed by the electoral coalition that it attracted.

While lingering support for racial segregation played an important role in flipping the South toward the Republican Party, the voters who changed their partisanship and the ones who followed them have views that do not reduce to simple racism.

In her book “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics,” Angie Maxwell, a professor at the University of Arkansas, takes a deep look at how conservative politics was changed in both policy and style as Republicans reconfigured their entire concept of outreach around appealing to white fundamentalist Protestants.

In this episode of Theory of Change, Maxwell discusses how the loss of the Civil War and negative media coverage of the John Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee were some of the reasons that many white Southerners felt aggrieved from the rest of the country, and how this set the stage for a politics that pandered to this resentment. Some white Protestants went to Republicans because the party decided to actively court supporters of racial segregation, others because the GOP rebranded itself into a party for fundamentalist Christians, and finally, still other party switchers went to the GOP because it stopped supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and other policies they believed to be violations of traditional roles for women.

As Maxwell notes, those choices by GOP elites and voters ultimately led to the rise of Donald Trump, an event which many political observers couldn’t anticipate. The idea that voters constantly concerned with cosmic and earthly battles with Satan would support a thrice-married serial adulterer who owned strip clubs and casinos didn’t make sense.

But, as Maxwell argues in the discussion, the white evangelical bargain with Republicans was never about shared ideals, so much as it was about politicians obeying and genuflecting to the ideas and the culture.

Video

Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: This is Theory of Change. I’m Matthew Sheffield.

A lot of people have heard of the “Southern Strategy,” the long-term political plan of early American conservatives to win presidential elections by getting the votes of white people who lived in the southeast. Many historians and political scientists have written about the Southern strategy over the years. But what still isn’t widely known is how the Republican Party itself changed as it focused so heavily on winning over white Southern Protestants.

From its very beginnings, the Republican Party up until that point was a northern Yankee party for city dwellers, industrial workers and university professors and farm workers. But that’s not who votes for Republicans nowadays, the huge influence of Southern Protestant culture played a big role in how the GOP changed.

What’s interesting also is how American Christianity itself has at least in many ways, been remade in the image of Southern white evangelicalism. So joining me today to talk about all this is Angie Maxwell. She’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. And she’s also the author of the Long Southern Strategy, How Chasing White Voters in the South changed American Politics. Thanks so much for being with me today. Angie.

ANGIE MAXWELL: Thank you for having me.

SHEFFIELD: All right, well, so there’s a lot to cover here. Your book is really kind of, I think, groundbreaking in a lot of ways, because it looks at the Southern strategy from kind of the opposite direction. So a lot of people have written about the Southern strategy. But they haven’t written about this aspect that you did in yours. Why do you think that that is the case?

MAXWELL: Well, I guess the best way to explain it is to say I feel like many people have written about what I would call like the short Southern strategy. So there’s, there’s two answers to this. First, is this, the short Southern strategy. So it’s kind of the story we have in our heads that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 60s, tried to capitalize on Southern white voters who were frustrated with the direction of their National Democratic Party, particularly on issues related to civil rights, and with some effort by Republicans could ...

Episode Summary

We’ve been talking a lot here on Theory of Change about artificial intelligence, both the implications of it from a technological standpoint and also how it works.

This is something that is going to create a fundamental change in our society, and that’s irrespective of whatever improvements to the technologies will be developed in the future. Regardless of what you think about artificial general intelligence (AGI) or super intelligence, whatever you want to call it, the reality is that the technologies that exist in the here and now are going to have a huge impact on our economy and our individual lives.

Because of that, it’s important to consider some of the political implications of artificial intelligence and also to talk about the public opinion implications as well. What do people think about AI and how are they concerned about it? Who’s interested in it?

There are a lot of other things to talk about it, especially also in the context of how AI is a product of the technology industry and so-called Big Tech, as people have taken to call it recently. That’s shaping attitudes of public opinion on that as well.

So to talk about some of this with me today, we’re bringing in Steven Clermont. He’s the polling director at Change Research, which is a progressive polling organization, and he recently has done a survey about AI and public opinion. I couldn’t think of a better guest to come on and talk about this.

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Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Welcome to Theory of Change, Stephen.

CLERMONT: Thanks Matthew. Thank you for having bring us on, talking about our research and I’m excited for this conversation.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah. Great to have you. So, we’ll start with the idea of who’s interested in artificial intelligence news.

You guys did a, a survey of this and there are some interesting numbers here. So, maybe give us the details on like who was this survey among? And then we’ll get into the table over on the, on the screen there.

CLERMONT: Thank you for that. Change research was founded in 2017 to do quality polling online to sort of fill the need of polling, sort of moving beyond phones and the traditional way that polling had been done.

So we’re able to go online and do high quality surveys at relatively affordable prices. And part of that allows us to fund our own surveys to really look at a topic in depth like we did for AI and technology. So this is a poll that we’re going to talk about is a poll of 1,300 American voters that was conducted nationally from February 22nd to 24th, and this was all done online.

We have a proprietary technology that allows us to send ads to find survey respondents and do it in a way that we’re meeting demographic targets on race, gender, age, ethnicity, and political preference. So what we’re presenting here is reflective of the American electorate overall, and the key findings from this at the beginning is, in terms of just AI is people’s familiarity with it is fairly low.

We asked a question about familiarity with ChatGPT and other text-based tools that are available online. Only 7% said they were very familiar with it. 38% familiar at any level, and we sort of asked your interest in it, the chart you have up on the screen about half of Americans are interested in, in AI.

It skews a little bit younger. People of color are as interested in it as white people, in fact a little bit more particularly among Hispanic men. And but only 70% say that they’ve used it. And it was interesting in some other research. Found that only 37% are comfortable with government using AI to make important decisions.

And I think when we’re sort of thinking about this topic and thinking about sort of the rollout of AI and how it’s going to be perceived is, it’s hard, like over the cross of all the polling that we’ve been doing in swing states in different, different levels of voter engagement. The general public right now is exceedingly negative on the direction of the country on sort of where they feel that whether their income is keeping up with the cost of living.

The first question we asked here was just how satisfied are you with the way things are going in America today? 77% are dissatisfied, 31%, which is, it’s a lower number, but still pretty high, are dissatisfied with the way thi...

EPISODE SUMMARY

The internet is so commonplace that we rarely step back and think about how completely different today’s information climate is than even 30 years ago. News travels in seconds and oftentimes percolates even beforehand in the millions of tiny online communities that live on their own websites or within larger social media platforms like Facebook. Even elementary school children know how to easily sift through the world’s knowledge.

But as much as things have changed, things have also remained the same. Humans are still finite beings who don’t know everything, despite what you might hear on Reddit or Twitter.

Because our limitations still remain even as our technology has improved, there is the challenge of misinformation and disinformation, but are those even the right words to describe what we're talking about? Is it possible to make algorithmic distinctions between innocuous errors and harmful delusions? Are content recommendation algorithms biased, and is it even possible to have unbiased ones? These are among the many critical questions that are now being asked by people across the political spectrum.

People are right to be concerned about the moderation choices made by giant platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Unfortunately, however, many of the most prominent voices in the discussion, including Twitter owner Elon Musk, appear to be acting out of partisan motives rather than concern about intellectual hygiene. This is a complex and fraught subject, one that is just as much about epistemology as it is about technology.

Joining the show to discuss all this is Renée DiResta, she is the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that focuses on internet content and moderation.

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS

This is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.

Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.

If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.

If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.

GUEST INFO

Renée DiResta's official site: http://www.reneediresta.com/

On Mastodon: @[email protected]

Stanford Internet Observatory profile: https://fsi.stanford.edu/people/renee-diresta

"Mediating Consent" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/12/17/mediating-consent/

"The New Media Goliaths" https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths/

Discussion with Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/310-social-media-public-trust

ABOUT THE SHOW

Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.

Theory of Change on Twitter: ...

Episode Summary

Across America, and across the world, radical movements of far-right Christians are trying desperately to seize the levers of political power to force their religious opinions onto everyone else. And in many cases, particularly the 2016 election of Donald Trump, they have succeeded.

Seeing the rise of reactionary Christianity has made some non-religious people recoil in horror to the idea that religion itself is the problem. But that’s not going to work, because not only is religion not going anywhere, religion is also like philosophy or politics. They’re tools that can be used for great evil, but also for great good as well. Just ask the thousands of Christian activists who have been mobilizing for racial justice and to end gun violence right now. Or ask the Christians who worked to mobilize to end slavery in the United States and Great Britain and other countries.

The reality is that whatever your viewpoints are about religion or theology, it’s past time for people who oppose the fascistic politics that is emerging in the United States and elsewhere to come together in a shared purpose, not just to preserve democracy, but to expand it as well.

I was pleased to talk about what that means with Tim Whitaker. He is a podcaster and founder of a non-profit organization called The New Evangelicals which works tirelessly to promote inclusive and affirming Christianity.

Video

Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I’m glad to have you here today, Tim.

TIM WHITAKER: Hello, Matthew. Thank you for having me. It’s awesome to talk to you again. We’ve been chatting for a while behind the scenes, so glad to have a conversation.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alright, well, so, for people who haven’t listened to your podcast, just give us an overview of what is it, and how often does it come out, and what are you doing on it?

WHITAKER: Yeah, sure. The podcast is called the New Evangelicals Podcast. It comes out at least once a week, sometimes twice, depending on what’s happening in current events.

Most of it is me interviewing all different kinds of guests coming from some kind of like Christian perspective, but usually more liberal or progressive or scholars who are focusing on certain like focuses like Christian nationalism and just trying to unpack that for our audience. Most of the people that listen to us are people who have a history of growing up in Evangelical fundamentalist spaces. So, someone like John MacArthur might’ve been a leader that they were exposed to. That’s who I was exposed to as a kid. So as we kind of walked away from that, we still want to follow Jesus, but we’re not really sure how.

So our [00:04:00] podcast helps introduce people to scholars and theologians and people like that who are thinking about and living in ways that are different than how we were brought up to think about the Christian tradition but are still faithful to Jesus.

So that’s like the main crux of it. But we also do episodes where I’ll bring on someone who disagrees with me, like an actual Christian nationalist, or my podcast producer Noah will come on sometimes and we’ll just have a conversation.

So it’s a pretty wide podcast, but usually it’s in some kind of interview form.

SHEFFIELD: And how did you get into doing it or why did you decide to do it?

WHITAKER: Well, I started it because I started the New Evangelicals on Instagram first. It was an Instagram page, and when that kind of exploded almost three years ago now I said to myself, I already have a podcast that wasn’t part of this work I was doing.

And I said, I think I have to switch over and make a new podcast called the New Evangelicals podcast to have these more long-form conversations because this stuff is so complicated. So that’s why we started it, trying to get people a more long-form content than just Instagram stories or short posts or reels, because again, theology or social issues are really complicated and take a lot of nuance to unpack.

So that was kind of the motivation behind it to give people something more long form than just that short 60 second hot take or, short tweet.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and of course you can’t even make a freaking link on Instagram.

WHITAKER: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, you would have to post it in the stories as a link and it’s a whole thing, but exactly right.

So, so we just knew that long term, I wanted to have conversation with people. I mean, I like conversations. I like discovering different ways of thinking. And so it’s been really cool. We’re about 144 episodes in now, and we’ve had all kinds of amazing guests on the podcast, and it’s been really cool to be a part of it.

SHEFFIELD: And all right. What’s so tell us about your background. You grew up Evangelical, obviously, but tell us.

WH...

Everything we do, think, or feel is based 100 percent on rational thinking. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

The truth, however, is that we humans often act based more on psychological impulse than on intellectual reason. That underlying reality is one of the main reasons why so many Americans who adhere to strict religious belief in their own lives have been willing and even happy to support Donald Trump, a man who is as amoral as he is irreligious.

We’ve talked many times here on Theory of Change about the polling and the interest groups behind how and why this happens, but sometimes it’s important to delve to the personal level to further our understanding.

And if you ask me, there is almost no one in American political life who exemplifies the radicalization that’s happened among many Christians than Rod Dreher, a veteran conservative writer who for many years wrote a blog for the American Conservative Magazine and is now doing an independent newsletter on Substack. As I hope to show you during this episode, Dreher’s story is an incredibly personal one, but it also says a lot about the American right, and some about the American left as well.

Our guide for this episode is Phil Christman. He is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and the author of several books, including most recently How to Be Normal. But most importantly for this conversation, he recently wrote an article for Slate about Dreher’s life and how it’s become an object of fascination for more than a few people on the left wing of Democratic politics.

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS

This is a free episode of Theory of Change. But in order to keep the show sustainable, the full audio, video, and transcript for some episodes are available to subscribers only. The deep conversations we bring you about politics, religion, technology, and media take great time and care to produce. Your subscriptions make Theory of Change possible and we’re very grateful for your help.

Please join today to get full access with Patreon or Substack.

If you would like to support the show but don’t want to subscribe, you can also send one-time donations via PayPal.

If you're not able to support financially, please help us by subscribing and/or leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Doing this helps other people find Theory of Change and our great guests. You can also subscribe to the show on YouTube.

GUEST INFO

Phil Christman's website: https://philipchristman.com/

On Substack: https://philipchristman.substack.com/

Christman's Slate essay about Dreher:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/rod-dreher-chapo-blog-american-conservative.html

ABOUT THE SHOW

Theory of Change is hosted by Matthew Sheffield about larger trends and intersections of politics, religion, media, and technology. It's part of the Flux network, a new content community of podcasters and writers. Please visit us at flux.community to learn more and to tell us about what you're doing. We're constantly growing and learning from the great people we meet.

Theory of Change on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoryChange

Matthew Sheffield on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield

Matthew Sheffield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattsheffield