Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

Activism and Objectivity in Political Research

Leave a reply

I agree with the main argument of Michael L. Frazer’s “Activism and Objectivity in Political Research (Perspectives on Politics 2023, 21(4), 2023, pp. 1258-1269). Objectivity is usually a red herring. What we need is “active engagement with inconvenient evidence.” Frazer uses the word “evidence” to encompass both empirical data and conceptual or normative arguments. Evidence is inconvenient if it complicates or challenges our prior beliefs.

As Frazer argues, engagement with inconvenient evidence strengthens both research and activism. Therefore, the valuable question is not whether activist academics should or can be objective, but how any kind of thinker should engage with inconvenient evidence.

People who are both scholars and committed activists have the advantage that they know what they stand for, which can help them recognize which evidence they should wrestle with because it’s inconvenient. However, their engaged stance may make them resistant to such evidence. In contrast, a highly detached scholar may be less aware of implicit assumptions that need to be challenged, yet more comfortable exploring diverse views. I happen to value both kinds of colleagues.

I would add that scholars can be activists in many different ways. For example, I have served on about 30 non-academic boards or committees that make collective decisions. Sometimes in these deliberations, I present inconvenient evidence. This can be my particular contribution as an academic–someone who has the time and scope to explore a range of ideas. On the other hand, sometimes I hold back because I am sensitive to group dynamics and I believe that the organization has value even if I can’t completely endorse its current theory-of-change. Besides, tact is a virtue.

Sometimes I refrain from publicly expressing views that would challenge the public stance of a group to which I belong. On the other hand, involvement with a group may make me aware of current assumptions that I then want to study critically. In such cases, being an activist scholar actually promotes my engagement with inconvenient evidence. But I may choose the slower and quieter medium of academic scholarship or a seminar room to explore complications, so that I don’t disrupt the immediate needs of a group. Exiting and publicly disagreeing always remain options.

Belonging to groups involves literal accountability. I could be removed from a committee. A fiduciary board assesses staff and makes decisions about personnel and budget. Speech in this context has tangible implications and raises many ethical considerations.

The situation is very different if one’s activism consists mainly of addressing public audiences as an individual writer or speaker. Forcefully saying simple things may attract the most attention, but fame is a lure and temptation. I often wish that public intellectuals would be more humble and less certain.

We may also be hired to play a role within an organization, whether that is an academic entity like a university or a nonprofit or government agency. Then we are responsible for the effects of our public speech on our colleagues and students or clients. The organization may need to engage with inconvenient evidence, but introducing difficult ideas may not be timely or appropriate for a given employee. For instance, when you have positional authority over someone else, it can be wise to hold back one’s skeptical thoughts.

I would start with a view much like Frazer’s–and I appreciate his literature review–but I would then explore what “engagement with inconvenient evidence” means for people who play various roles in various social contexts. Often the genuine virtue of intellectual humility is in tension with other valid needs, and the question is how to negotiate those tradeoffs. To make matters even more complicated, many of us play multiple roles, and we fall on continua rather than within discrete categories. For instance, one may be more or less open to inconvenient evidence of various types while spending various amounts of one’s time and energy performing various functions in settings as diverse as a department meeting, a lecture room, a team writing a grant proposal, a community meeting, a political campaign, and a protest action. Both the ethical and epistemic issues are quite diverse and hard.

See also: making our models explicit; analytical moral philosophy as a way of life; du Bois: “Organization is sacrifice.”; Civically Engaged Research in Political Science; Henry Milner, Participant/Observer: An Unconventional Life in Politics and Academia

"Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge" Ieshia Evans stands in front of a line of police in Baton Rouge 2016. Jonathan Bachman/Reuters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_a_Stand_in_Baton_Rouge

nonviolence in a time of political unrest

Leave a reply

The next few years will indicate whether American history has entered a phase of political unrest or instability. This development is not inevitable–and it’s certainly not desirable–but now is the time to plan, educate, organize, and train for it.

To be sure, there has always been political violence in the USA, often focused on the most vulnerable Americans. However, a substantial increase in the scale and scope of political violence would challenge our already fragile constitutional order and pose dangers for the rest of the world. We will know that we are in that situation if the daily news often includes reports of violent clashes, dubious arrests and prosecutions, threats, firings or resignations connected to politics, and occasional assassinations and politically-motivated mass murders.

I believe we need broad-based nonviolent social movements to get us through any unrest and ideally to bring us to a better place. Such movements will generate protest actions, some of which will involve reported violence–if only as a result of hostile responses by other groups or police. Thus we should be striving for a high ratio of nonviolence to violence.

Just in the last few days, I have heard confident statements that nonviolence doesn’t work and that violence is always necessary for achieving rights. This is false. Nonviolent struggles have a much better record of success. In any case, Americans must understand nonviolent strategies, so that they at least have this option.

On Dec. 1, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the Poor People’s Campaign, which he was organizing at the time, “is a search for an alternative to riots. This is kind of a last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence.” Here he used the prospect of social unrest to demand change. But he did not believe that violent strategies would actually benefit Black people or poor people. He saw violence as lose/lose. Although he warned privileged people that they would pay a price if violence prevailed, he never advocated it, partly because he thought it would harm disadvantaged people as much or more than anyone else.

In his final book, King expressed strong doubts that violence could generate “any concrete improvement” and defended nonviolence “as the most potent weapon.” This book was Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Since the 1950s, “chaos” had been King’s word for the fruits of violence. For instance, in a lecture at Brandeis, he had forecast “an endless rain of meaningless chaos” unless nonviolence prevailed. Those words sound prophetic today.

Most of the political violence in the USA is coming from the hard right. According to Rachel Kleinfeld, the Global Terrorism Database identified more than 50 violent attacks by the extreme right in the USA in 2019, versus about 5 attacks from the extreme left. However, that disparity is a recent phenomenon, not a long-term one, and there is much potential for violence on all sides (including the middle). Kleinfeld’s fig. 2 (below) shows that Republicans are somewhat more favorable to political violence than Democrats are. But support has risen rapidly on both sides–albeit from very low baseline–and the partisan gap is small. This graph makes me worry that almost any group can rapidly shift to supporting violence.

As we navigate the next several years, it will be helpful to track the level and extent of unrest so that we can tell what we are dealing with. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is helpful for this purpose. Its raw data include brief and–to my eye–balanced summaries of each event that they track. Here is my summary of all US events from their global database*:

US data from The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)

ACLED includes nonviolent protests. Although we should monitor them, I generally assume that they are good rather than dangerous. I would be happy to see the “grand total” in the table above rise, as long as peaceful protests represent a larger share. (Note that the rate of nonviolent protest has halved since 2020.)

Perceptions are important. In What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life, I discuss Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a major nonviolent social movement, citing evidence from Erica Chenoweth and others that violence was extraordinarily rare in BLM events and was prevented by careful planning and training. Indeed, BLM was less violent than the classical Civil Rights Movement had been. However, BLM has been widely reported as violent. Even some supporters perceive it as violent and justify it as such. This impression then contributes to a general sense that our times are violent, which may motivate tit-for-tat responses.

Nonviolence needs forthright and even passionate advocacy, as well as much painstaking training and organizing work.

Nonviolence relates to and complements other necessary strategies, such as civic education, dialogue and deliberation, political reform, defense of civil rights, voter registration, and the efforts to enhance “social cohesion” that Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) has mapped (see below). However, nonviolence is a category of its own that needs special attention today.

Photo: “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge” by Jonathan Bachman, showing Ieshia Evans. See also: the case for (and against) nonviolence; Rev. James Lawson, Jr on Revolutionary Nonviolence; preparing for a possible Trump victory; introduction to Gandhi

*The suicide bombing noted here took place in Nashville on December 25, 2020, when “a man detonated a bomb inside a recreational vehicle,” injuring 31. The grenade attack occurred in Pittsburgh on Jan. 3, 2021, with unknown perpetrators and motives and no injuries. Most of the incidents categorized as “sexual violence” are rapes of prisoners by corrections or police officers, which are understandably treated as political acts, although the motives may vary.

social education as learning to improve models

Leave a reply

Some theses for consideration:

  1. Everyone who acts to change society has a mental model that represents portions of the social world.
  2. It is better for our models to be explicit in our own minds, so that we can be clear about what we are assuming and open to changing our assumptions.
  3. Our models must be sufficiently complex. (For instance, if you think that the Israel-Palestine conflict has just two parties, that is unacceptably simple.) But a model cannot be as complex as reality. Modeling is a matter of judicious simplification.
  4. Our models may include causal elements: e.g., “This phenomenon affects that one.” But they also inevitably reflects values. It is better for the value components to be explicit. They may take the form of ideals, goals, specific injustices, and other objects. Or they may be normative connections among objects, such as: “This situation merits that response.”
  5. A model may be an application of a more general framework to specific circumstances. In that case, we are obliged to have a good framework and to apply it correctly.
  6. We must check our models against events, observations, and other kinds of information from the world.
  7. We must compare our model to other models (and our framework to other frameworks) and constantly reconsider whether the alternatives offer insights. The assessment of social models is comparative: it’s a question of choosing the best model for the situation, given the alternatives. If we don’t seriously consider other models, we are not thinking hard about our own.

I think that educating for responsible civic participation is substantially about developing the skill of forming and improving social models. I am very skeptical of curricula–at any level–that offer students one model. That is not even a satisfactory way of understanding the model that is presented, because full understanding requires comparison. And it discourages the essential civic skill of critically assessing one’s model.

See also: making our models explicit; decoding institutions; a template for analyzing an institution

recent changes in tolerance for controversial speakers

Leave a reply

In July 2020, I wrote a post showing that the proportions of Americans who thought that several types of controversial speakers should be allowed to talk in their own communities generally increased between the 1970s and 2010s. The categories of speakers mentioned in the General Social Survey have been gay people, opponents of “churches and religion,”* communists, advocates of military dictatorship, racists, and Muslim clergy “preaching hatred of the United States.”

I have now looked at the GSS data from 2021 and 2022. Here are the updated trends:

I still perceive a general upward trend from the 1970s until 2018. The exception is that tolerance for racist speakers did not rise--nor did it fall--during that period. Since 2020, levels of tolerance for both racist and militarist speakers have declined very noticeably.

Interpreting such attitudes is complicated because a person can express tolerance for a given kind of speech for at least two reasons. One might be a civil libertarian, believing that bad speech should be allowed and countered with more speech. Or one might not see the speech in question as bad in the first place. The graph shows that tolerance for racist speech did not rise while other forms of tolerance increased. I am pretty confident that the population was generally turning more civil libertarian, yet also more opposed to racism, partly because Americans were becoming more demographically diverse.

The recent dropoff in tolerance for racist speakers is driven entirely by people who place themselves on the left side of a liberal-to-conservative spectrum. I presume it is a result of the antiracist movements of recent years.

The modest decline in tolerance for anti-religious speakers seems to be driven by a five-point drop on the political right.

The decline in tolerance for proponents of military dictatorship has been similar on the left and right. I presume this is a critical response to Jan. 6, and I'm glad it has been bipartisan.

For what it's worth, I am consistently opposed to governmental censorship of political speech. I think that some other organizations may choose which speech to favor or exclude, but they should generally be reluctant to use bans or retroactive penalties for speech. I don't think it's obvious whether racists or proponents of dictatorship should be "allowed" in one's community. The First Amendment prevents legal sanctions to their speech. But if the question is whether they should be given prominent invitations to speak, then I am skeptical.

*For no good reason, I omitted attitudes toward anti-religious speakers in my 2020 post. See also: there has been no decrease in toleration of differences; a civic approach to free speech; what sustains free speech?

a case for liberalism

Leave a reply

Prominent people like Cass Sunstein and Samuel Moyn are publishing manifestos for–or at least about–liberalism, evidently responding to heightened critiques from both right and left.

The word “liberalism” has many meanings and is applied retrospectively to authors who lived before it was even coined; therefore, it lacks a clear and detailed definition. Instead, it names a field of debate with debatable outer bounds.

But most classical liberal texts are at least about the same topic: how best to design authoritative institutions, such as governments or schools. Typically, liberals argue that the individuals most affected by such institutions must hold enforceable rights and entitlements–cards that they can play to obtain things or to block actions against themselves.

Liberalism is biased in favor of making such rights extensive and equal. Although not everyone can hold the maximum conceivable rights, liberals are skeptical about goods that could compete with rights in general, such as religious values or the intrinsic worth of the state or the group.

In order to make rights enforceable, liberals advocate a mix of institutional safeguards, such as limited powers for leaders, rule-of-law, and universal suffrage–with varying recipes, depending on the flavor of liberalism. Another major dimension of debate within liberalism is whether to include positive rights or entitlements, and if so, what they should be.

Liberal ideas are sometimes grounded in ambitious philosophical views, such as a Kantian notion of autonomy. But liberals’ philosophical premises vary, and one can also arrive at liberal principles pragmatically, believing that rights must be safeguarded to avoid disaster.

I often think about the case of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At first it advocated equality and a certain kind of freedom in a very radical way, eschewing individual rights and constitutional limits as obstacles to revolutionary change. While retaining its official charter and passing power from fathers to sons within the party, it evolved from radical egalitarianism to rapacious capitalism and then to a kind of statist corporatism, all during my lifetime. Chairman Mao’s successor belongs to a family with $300 million in personal assets. This shift happened because goals and missions hardly ever trump institutional design. Liberals recommend the fundamental design-principle of using individual rights to limit rulers. Since the CCP’s leaders were never limited by rights, they altered their values to advance their interests.

My sense is that when people are focused on designing or reforming authoritative institutions, many are attracted to liberal design principles. Not everyone: for example, Maoists are explicitly opposed, as are Catholic integralists. But quite a wide range of thinkers and activists, when they consider institutional design, will endorse limited powers and enforceable rights and will envision individuals as the literal bearers of rights, even if they are concerned about structural injustices against social groups and even if they aim for social or economic equality.

However, many people do not think about the design or reform of institutions. To some extent, this is understandable. There are other ways to change the world. Social and cultural movements often seek to alter people’s beliefs, values, and identities. That work can be effective and important. If it is your main mode of political action, then you may not naturally think about who should hold which enforceable rights against whom. Although your own civil rights may be helpful, similar rights for other people can pose obstacles to your cause. Thus we see lots of people endorsing freedom of speech for me but not for thee. A charitable interpretation is that they are not focused on designing or running institutions that establish general rules about speech; they are using their own speech to change mentalities.

If you are deeply invested in a social movement that aims to change hearts and minds, then perhaps constitutional issues are not your problem. You’re not asking to be a federal judge. Likewise, no one says you have to be the Dean of Student Affairs, deciding which forms of protest are allowable on a campus. You can just protest.

On the other hand, we may be called upon to make decisions that are primarily about institutional design. For example, the outcome of the 2024 US election may cause dramatic changes in rights, enforcement mechanisms, and powers. When the question is whether or how to change the basic rules, our answers should be relevant to those rules. And I believe that the good answers fall within the broad boundaries of liberalism.

Some activists may be skeptical that institutions will change for the better, or optimistic about social transformation through informal channels, or so anti-authoritarian as to be against institutions and leaders per se. They may see rules as mainly constraints to be wielded against themselves, or they may feel morally superior to the people who hold offices and make compromises and decisions with limited resources.

In the US context, pessimism is understandable; our system is remarkably static and resistant to change. Many people have long experience with being mistreated and have learned to be skeptical. But such attitudes can be self-reinforcing and disempowering–they can block people from pursuing strategies that involve institutions and can dissuade them from trying to lead institutions. In any case, liberalism does not require trust; quite the contrary, it is a way of institutionalizing mistrust.

See also: introducing republicanism; from classical liberalism to a civic perspective; the core of liberalism; what defines conservatism?