Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I'm not denying that by any stretch of the imagination, but it, but it leaves the most interesting questions about politics out, which are sort of like, how do those preferences get formed? I think, you know, everything that we know from like neuroscience research and stuff like that is that the preferences are formed in relationship, you know, in interaction between these two systems, um,
or to individuals or whatever the kind of entities that are interacting are.
Well, I guess I would start by saying, you know, I generally think about this. So to me, the first distinction I always make is the difference between sort of thinking about as a supply side versus a demand side problem, right? And so the temptation is to think about as a demand side problem. We're looking at individuals and interests and like all that kind of stuff.
And so what if we were to sort of say, you know, take seriously Madison's point, like what is government but the greatest of all reflections? of mankind. If men were angels, no government would be necessary, right?
Which to me is the idea that it's the kind of fundamental insight about, you know, in small d democratic theory, which is that humans aren't equipped for democracy in order to make the audacious promise at the heart of democracy is that if you put people into the right settings that generate the right kind of interactions, then their quote-unquote better angels will emerge, right?
And that's what we need to make democracy work, to allow for that acceptance of uncertainty that we're talking, you know, that we started off our conversation with and all those kinds of things.
And so when you sort of ask, like, what's the kind of favorite thing to me, like, I'm just most interested in, like, what are the, what's the supply of the kind of opportunities humans need to be able to develop and cultivate the kind of capabilities and experiences and skills they need to
to be willing to do the hard work of negotiating difference, to build coalitions, to rethink their assumptions about who other people are, whatever the things are that you might be asking them to do.
Yes. Um, it sounds like work insofar as being a family is, is work. Right. And, um, you know, one way to think about it is democracy is the work is the, is the work of like forging a common life together. Yeah. Right. And so it is, uh, Yes, it is absolutely work to be married to my husband. It's work for us to construct a family unit that functions with our children and all those things are true.
But we also derive huge benefits from doing that. And that's what keeps us committed, you know, committed. committed to the task. And so I think this question of democracy is like, you know, the challenge is that you're doing it at scale, you know, with people with whom you don't have that same set of interpersonal commitments.
And so it presents a different set of challenges, but it's ultimately, I think that same work of forging a common life.
So let me answer that question a little bit differently than how you asked it, which is that I think so the thing that we're best at as, you know, you know, I'm an empirical political scientist, you know, meaning I spend a lot of my time looking at the data that underlies politics. And as someone who studies political participation, like I look at a lot of that data.
And I think one of the things that I've come to over the years is that. The data points that we use to assess the state of political participation don't capture the full picture of what it is. And so let me just give you one example, which is that which is related to the book, which is that if you ask the average person, what's the most religiously active group in America?
My guess is the average person off the street would probably say, you know, that a fair number of them would sort of point to white evangelicals, you know, conservative white evangelicals, because there's so much kind of conversation about the role that evangelicals play in American politics right now. If you look at the actual data, the most politically active group is white liberal Christians.
Actually, I should say this. The most politically active group are atheists. But if you take the atheists out and you put people who have some kind of faith commitment and you compare across them, it's not black Christians. It's not conservative white evangelicals. It's liberal white Christians tend to engage in twice as many political acts as atheists.
as their counterparts, whether they are black Christians or conservative white Christians or something like that. And the question is, well, why are our perceptions so off relative to the actual number of acts of participation that people engage in? And I think what that tells us is that
the kind of the kinds of numbers that we use to assess the level of participation is not reflective of the impact that those acts can have in the public square you know and you know when i first look at that data i remember i sent an email to this uh progressive white evangelical pastor who i got to know and sort of said like how do you make sense of this and he said well
it's not surprising to me at all because you have lots of people, white Christians, you know, lots of white Christians on the left who are doing lots of activity and engaging in lots of activism, but it's not connected to each other. It's not constructing relationships. It's not nested within organizations that have this ability to sort of project it onto a larger political agenda.
And so it doesn't feel like it's adding up to much more, even though people are doing lots of things, you know, which kind of gives me the sense that, well, When we sort of do things like assess the state of participation, we need to not just assess like how much our people are participating, but how that participation is connected to these other kind of elements of the political process.
So I think, I don't know that I've necessarily, so the question, one way to think about your question is like, is it because it's like tied to their political identity as white Christians? And I think, I don't know that I've, the data here is a little bit unclear because it's a lot harder to measure identity.
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