Few Harvard professors have been as outspoken against the Trump Administration’s attack against their University as he has: Ryan Enos has spoken at rallies, given interviews, and written in defense of academic freedom. This isn’t a new quest for him, as he was critical of Harvard’s leadership in the wake of October 7. We take Professor Enos’s attendance of the St.Gallen Symposium as an opportunity to discuss the state of the union, and of the Democratic Party in particular.

Professor Enos’ research is situated at the intersection of psychology, geography, and politics in the United States and other countries. He is Professor of Government and Director of the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS), Working Group on Political Psychology and Behavior (WoGPop), and the Harvard Digital Lab for the Social Sciences (DLABSS). Before joining Harvard University, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His first book, The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (2017), won the American Political Science Association Experimental Research Section Best Book Award.

Recommendations:

• John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
• Daniel J. Hopkins, The Increasingly United States, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, Hopkins
• Jim Sidanius & Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance, Social Dominance | Cambridge University Press & Assessment

Views from the Sister Republic, a University of St. Gallen podcast by Claudia Truvilla. And welcome to a new episode of Views from the Sister Republic.

Ahead of this year's St. Gallen Symposium, I have the chance to talk to someone who is what the French would call an intellectuelle engager, more than a scholar, a public intellectual who is not afraid of the risks that come with taking a stance.

Ryan Enos is a professor of government at Harvard University, and he has in recent weeks spoken at rallies, given interviews and written several opinion pieces, all in defense of academic freedom. And this is not a recent quest. He has actually also defended academic freedom against his own institution.

Moreover, he is a sought after political scientist whose research is at the intersection of psychology, geography and politics. Ryan, thank you for coming on. Graziamerica thank you.

I'm really glad to be here.

Your first and award winning book is called the Space Between Us, and it's about how spaces shape political attitudes, how the segregation of spaces, the residential segregation of American people, shape their political outview. You have grown up in San Joaquin Valley or San Joaquin Valley, depending on how Latino one wants to be in the pronunciation.

How has that space shaped your view on politics?

That's a really great question, and I'm glad you asked. So the San Joaquin Valley is a really fascinating place because it's a part of California that people don't think about.

When they think about California, even people in the United States, we think of California as movie stars and beaches and maybe San Francisco or something. And the San Joaquin Valley, on the other hand, is the farming part of California.

That is the part people forget about in between the beaches and the mountains. And it's actually, though, this fascinating, diverse place.

When I was a child there, it was a place that was full of people who were children of from the Air Force like I was, and then farmers, but also all these Latin American immigrants and refugees from, from the war in Southeast Asia that had come over.

And all these people came together and brought this mix of politics that, that really made it one of the most sort of diverse places in the United States where people's views came from all these different places and came together to make this unpredictable political place that was on the one hand, rooted in these sort of conservative farm values, but it was being changed by these new groups of people coming in. And I think that gave me this appreciation for how diversity and how people's backgrounds ends up ultimately shaping their politics.

So was that really a melting pot or was it also more of a mosaic?

Well, that's a good question.

I mean, the question of whether something's a melting pot or a mosaic, I think is one of the most essential questions of America generally in places like the Central Valley or something that is just a microcosm of that. And I think that defining it as one or the other is a little difficult.

But in many ways it is a mosaic because those cultures have remained very distinctive in some ways. But at the same time, it has melted together in some ways that what I.

What I point out to people a lot is even when I was growing up, something like the influence of Mexican culture on a place like the Central Valley was considered very.

Almost like foreign and exotic, which sounds very strange to somebody in California now because Latino culture is such a big part of the way we do things. But it was hard to find, like a Mexican restaurant, for example.

Oh, seriously?

So in many ways that's melted into the larger culture. And so in that way, it has kind of melted together. But these cultures are still. The place is still distinct. It's defined by segregation.

It's defined by people that live on one side of the town and another type of people lives on the other side of the town, and by people not being able to speak each other's languages. And those sort of forces of segregation are what I write about in my book and what I think, in a lot of ways, shapes American politics to this day.

What I noticed in your biography is that you actually did all your university studies in California, but then you moved to Chicago to teach. How did that happen? Because you mentioned in an interview how fundamental that was for you to discover your research topic.

Yeah, that's a great question too.

So I did after college, I went into a program that was Teach for America, which is this idea of taking people and allowing them to enter teaching through a non traditional route to serve in under resourced communities in the United States. That's actually, by the way, a program that is now losing its federal funding because of the recent teardowns from Donald Trump.

But it took people and sent them to teach for it was only two years in a location where they normally wouldn't be teaching. And I taught for three years there ultimately. And it was the most rewarding experience of my life.

In many ways it made me into a teacher like I still am now, but it also gave me this exposure to these forces that were just incredible in the way they shape people's lives, these forces of segregation in Chicago, which is this overwhelmingly segregated city. And it made me realize that that force of segregation is what dominated the politics there. The whole city was defined by it.

People's lives were defined by it. About the fact that there was a black side of the city and a white side of the city and a Latino side of the city.

And crossing over those boundaries was something that was rarely done, except for people like me in many ways, that lived on one side of the city and worked on another side of the city. And reflecting on that is what took me to graduate school. And I ended up writing about, and I still write about to this day.

To what extent is the segregation that you observe and write about mainly racial, ethnic, and to what extent are we looking at class segregation?

Well, there's both. And of course, racial segregation and race and class are tied together in the United States. And so those two things go together in many ways.

But something I focus on is that in my research is that the psychological forces that shape segregation can happen in any group. It doesn't matter whether it's race or class or religion or anything else.

And in fact, we've done experiments that have showed this, where we take people and we make up groups.

We use a psychological paradigm that is known as minimal groups, where we just assign groups to people, and then we will actually segregate them in space and find that that shapes their behavior with these minimal groups. So it can be any group.

But ultimately, because race in the United States has been such a dominant part of social cleavages, that is usually what we're talking about. I have done studies on the forces of segregation elsewhere.

We've done them in the Middle east and other places, and you can find that these same sort of forces that are driving, that are harnessed through race in the United States can work through other types of divisions elsewhere.

I was also wondering, when I read the title of your book, the Space Between Us, you could also change that a bit and say the space between the United States or the different United States of America, how much has this also informed your. Your gaze on the last election? How much can you see that segregation has mattered again in the last election?

Yeah, it definitely has. And.

And this actually is a good follow on to your last question, because I think in some ways, when we look at the last election or any of the last decade basically, of American politics, a lot of the forces that are shaping it are geographic divides, people separated in Space like I write about in that book. And some of those are of course, racial. We haven't got away from race as a defining force in American politics in some ways.

Some people will tell you, and I think there's a lot of truth to this, that Donald Trump as a politician grew directly out of the fact that the United States elected a black man to president for the first time. And so we're still sort of living with the shadow of race in the United States. Very much so.

But nevertheless, I think a lot of what we're dealing with now in American politics is we could think of this as an urban, rural divide.

We could think of this as in some ways a class based divide, like you asked about before, where there's people that live separately from other people that are looking in across the country, are looking out to say, let's say rural dwellers, looking at city dwellers and saying that those people are different than us. There's a space between us. And that space is driving their political behavior in very profound ways.

Why has that become so exacerbated in the last years?

That's a good question. I mean, as many things I don't know if anybody quite knows, and it's multi causal.

If you look at the correlation between density, population density and voting in the United States, it's increased over the last 100 years almost continuously in some ways till right now. It's one of the biggest predictors of how people will vote is just the population density of where they live.

And what has driven that is a really good question.

And some of that is going to be changes in the economic structure where the divide between places economically based on population density has changed a lot. Where so much of the wealth in the United States has flowed towards more dense places and jobs have left less dense places.

And as the population is reshuffled into the parties based on whether or not people have a college degree, it's also coincided with those things. But those processes can become self reinforcing in some ways.

Where even in rural areas, people with college degrees have sort of drifted towards the Republican Party. And so I think a lot of it becomes more of not just an economic force, but a cultural force that goes along with these things.

And the process becomes self reinforcing.

What is always striking me when I'm back in the US is that it's actually a country that's still very much on the move. I see people change coasts. I mean, you are a son of California. You moved to the Midwest, then you moved to the East Coast.

That's a ginormous change, particularly for someone who is from Switzerland. And already moving from one city to another is, for us, a major cultural break.

But then at the same time, I often notice how people have very little exposure to parts of the country that they are suspicious of, if that's a good term for that. For instance, when I did research in Amherst, I had to go to Iowa for archival work, and my New Yorker neighbor was like, oh, my God, no, please not.

And I was like, have you ever been to the Midwest? Yeah, Chicago. But the rest, God, no. And I'm struck by how people of.

Of actual resources who could afford to travel the entire country are sometimes a bit stuck in their corners. How. How come?

I think part of that, of course, is just that the United States is so big.

Yeah. But still.

Well, still, yeah. That is worth reflecting on, though, in the sense that I think even Americans sometimes don't appreciate how big the United States is.

That is going to. It's going to shape the way the country in a way that almost makes it almost incomparable to other places.

You know, just a sheer geographic and population size of the country compared to other democracies makes it almost an outlier. Right.

Now, what that's going to mean is it means that it's hard for people, of course, to understand people from other parts of the country in a way that I think makes it almost unique. But that being said, of course, there can. Built on top of that can be these social divisions that make it difficult for people to go places.

I was talking to one of my graduate students the other day, and so here's somebody who's a graduate student at Harvard and so is very cultured and knows a lot about the world. And he was talking about.

He was on his way to Missouri, and he said it was actually the first time he was ever going to have been to a state in the United States that was not a coastal state. Yeah. And that's sort of remarkable when you think about it. Right. Given that how many states that means that he hadn't been to.

But I don't think he's alone like that. So this is certainly somebody that would have the means to go.

He'd been all over Europe, for example, but he'd never been to the interior of the United States. And I don't think that's totally unusual.

And part of that, I of course would be interested to know how many people this actually applies to, but it applies to at least a somewhat significant portion. And I think part of that is going to be a result of what we were discussing earlier, this sort of class based geographic divide where let's say a.

And this is actually something I've been researching recently and I think it's very interesting.

But let's say somebody from New York might look out and say I have more in common with somebody from San Francisco, even though that's all the way on the other side of the country than I do somebody from even, let's say, like what they would call upstate New York, like rural New York.

Poughkeepsie.

Yeah, exactly. Poughkeepsie. Yeah, someplace like that.

And so when they think of where do I want to go in the world and you know, we're all sort of attracted often to places that are similar to us. We feel more comfortable there.

They might say New York or they might say, they might say San Francisco or Los Angeles or Seattle or something like that, rather than Poughkeepsie or you know, Middletown or some other little, little town in New York that they, that they are geographically close to and let alone, you know, Iowa or North Dakota or someplace like that.

I mean, one thing is, is bridging these enormous spaces, granted they are enormous in the United States.

And the other thing is, is really overcoming divides within cities that you've talked about in the beginning and I've been for years, and I think I'm not alone in that struck how little is done to remedy this. But then I stumbled upon one of your quotes in an interview.

I think it was with the New York Times where you said that even the left isn't really interested in finding solutions. I'll read out what you said in that interview.

My sense is that much of the college educated liberal political rhetoric is focused on social signaling to satisfy their own psychological needs and improve their social standing with other college educated liberals rather than policies that would actually reduce racial gaps in economic well being, civil rights protections and other quality of life issues.

Why it's always a little startling to have your quotes read back to you. And I was wondering where that one was going to go, but I would stand behind that. I think I was right to say that.

I don't always think what I've said in the past was right, but I think that correct. And that's an interesting question about why is that the case and what I'm referring to there.

I mean, I could it could be referring to a lot of things, but just to be more specific is to say, let's take, let's keep going with example New York, because we were talking about that. So you have a lot of, you know, you look at Manhattan and New York and that's one of the wealthiest places in the world, right?

You know, people living in, in pure. A lot of people living in this sort of a place of fabulous wealth where they have all the culture and riches and everything at their fingertips.

And then you don't have to go far into the other boroughs of New York, even to certain places within Manhattan.

But if they went to the Bronx or to Queens or to Brooklyn or Staten island, they would find places there in their own city that are impoverished in a way that would of course shock people, you know, from many people from across the world, but even people from New York, if they, if they bothered to look. So we're dealing with things like homelessness and crime rates that are very damaging, you know, sort of decay of spaces, all these types of things.

And so why do people allow that to exist in their own city despite the fact that they are self professed liberals that would want to and that kind of stuff? And it's hard to know. I think part of it is these sort of social divides we talked about earlier, where people are segregated.

And in many ways it doesn't touch them, it doesn't affect them. It's closed off another part of the city.

They can go to work in Manhattan and not have to worry about what's going on in the Bronx or something like that. If it does come to touch them, then it's something they really worry about.

But for the most part it's something that they can kind of shut off from worrying about.

I think it also has to do with the fact that this sort of not everybody, but a lot of people don't have a true ideological commitment to what they profess. Politically. Most people, even the well educated, don't care a great deal about politics.

And occasionally sort of signaling that they are to the left and that people like that to agree with people like them is important.

But actually making a concerted effort where they're willing to give up some of their own wealth, for example, to remedy these things is not something that they're willing to do.

So that explains why they would not support really policies that might affect, for instance, the quality of their school district, for instance.

I think that's a big worry always of the educator classes, but it does not entirely explain why the Democratic Party as such was, wouldn't be more committed to changes.

Do you think the fact that even in Democratic run cities and Democratic run states, people haven't really seen a better equality of life and quality of life across the board has led to the current state of the Democratic Party, or are there other factors at play?

Well, there's absolutely other factors, but I think that that of course is something that can help explain.

It's not only quality of life to say things like to say to when, when we point to things like what we might think of as problems of, let's say, urban areas in the United States, that's not the only thing we're talking about. In fact, the correlation between those and let's say people in the last election switching to Donald Trump is, is pretty small.

It doesn't appear to be something that explains it very much.

But at the same time, what we've seen in the United States is something that might be broader, which is to say a general abandonment of working class issues by the Democratic Party where a party that once once was defined as a party that was a party, a party of the left and sort of left based economic, left wing economic issues like being aligned with organized labor, even doing things that were broadly centered on helping issues of racial divides in the United States were largely moved away from. So the Democratic Party was once a party that was the party of Lyndon Johnson, was the party of Franklin Roosevelt.

And it's a party that by the time it got to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama was a party that has sort of redefined itself as something that was not a party of the left, but more a party of, let's say, the center or even sort of the center right.

And at that time, a lot of people that were working class people in the United States sort of saw it as a party that didn't, that didn't work for them and eventually sort of drifted over to the, to the Republican Party.

They seem to have squandered that.

But they did squander that. Now, how much of that was because Democrats did something wrong and how much of that was forces outside of their control? It's hard to know.

Something that I point out a lot when people talk about the rise of Donald Trump and how much that defines something that is essential to American politics is that Democrats were one of, of, you know, almost every incumbent party across the globe that lost in these post Covid elections.

And so in some ways Democrats were, were the, you know, were just another example of parties that couldn't hang on given this sort of worldwide malaise maybe that people were, were experiencing.

But at the same time, they probably could have done stuff, especially when they were facing a candidate like Donald Trump who was unpopular and is unpopular, to secure the majority that they had at the time. And they didn't do that.

And had they done other things, and I'm happy to talk about what those might have been, but had they done other things, they might have been able to hold on to that majority and we might still see them in office today.

You said that there are other things that they could have done. Well now that's in the past. But what should they do now to regain voters confidence and maybe have a blue wave next year?

Yeah, well, the easiest thing to do as it seems, would be to perhaps to sit back and watch Donald Trump self destruct. I mean, there is a pattern. Yeah, but because in some ways that seems to be what he's doing.

But there is a pattern of in the United States in particular, I mean, this can be more largely true in a lot of democracies. But in the United States in particular, there's a pattern where voters turn against an incumbent.

And so we expect, and this has been true in almost every election in the United States in almost the last 80 years, where the party that holds the White House loses seats in the midterm election.

So when we have a midterm election, 20, 26, we could expect that the Republican majority, which is very small, will probably go away and Democrats will regain that. But the way things are headed, we might expect there to be some kind of a wipeout of Republicans by the Democrats because Trump is so unpopular.

But the question might be why is that? How do Democrats capitalize on that and how do they ensure that Donald Trump remains unpopular?

And one of the debates you saw when Trump won office again was is this sort of program of what we might call resistance, where Democrats say we are going to go all in on opposing Trump, Is that the right way to do things or should they say, okay, we're going to try to sort of go along with him and you know, maybe play, yeah, play nice, something like that. And a lot of people, I think, and I think this was incorrect.

After Trump won office, they took it as a sign that he was somebody that was a popular politician and that Democrats policy of sort of resistance that they saw during his first term was not the right way to approach things. And I think that was the wrong lesson.

Joe Biden won one of the largest victories we've seen by a presidential candidate in almost 50 years. And when that happened, and gained large majorities in the House and the Senate. And when that happened, that led to that situation.

I talked about where they had this overwhelming. They had this overwhelming command of the electorate and of the government and had an opportunity to do a lot.

And we can talk about how well that worked, but they had that opportunity that came out of that policy of resistance. And I think that based on that evidence, we could say that sort of approach to being an opposition party really worked.

And it's something that Democrats would do well to adopt again now and to say, we are going to make ourselves into the anti Trump party. Ultimately, if they get back in office, then there's a question of how do they govern in a way, how do they assume. Yeah.

And are they effective not just in being an opposition party, but a governing party? Because those are different things. And, you know, it might be easier to oppose somebody than it is to govern, but to get back in office first.

I think this policy of opposition really works.

You mentioned that there is the option of just watching Donald Trump self destruct, but the problem is, while we're watching, he's destroying other things. And he has come after the sciences, academia, your institution in particular, seems to be a red flag to him.

Have you expected this to happen when he was voted into office?

I didn't, and not to the degree it has. And I was wrong about that. I think, fortunately, I didn't do many interviews about that at the time.

So you haven't been able to find a quote about it.

But now I'm revealing my own mistake now, because this is what I told people at the time is I said, hey, look, we went through four years of Donald Trump before, and I didn't like it and agree with my policies, but the country largely came out okay. And many of our worst fears about Donald Trump were not, were not realized. And so, you know, I, I said, I, I think things will be okay.

And I think he probably is not that interested in, you know, he's not an ideologue. He's just interested being popular. And I think in many ways that kind of still probably defines Trump.

But nevertheless, I, I was completely wrong about that. I, I did not anticipate the vigor with which he would pursue his anti democratic agenda in the United States.

I mean, anti democratic with a small D there, where he would oppose many of the democratic institutions and the liberal democratic institutions in the United States.

And I didn't anticipate how strongly he would turn into what we might call a sort of competitive authoritarian leader where he was trying to tilt the institution's democracy against his political rivals.

And I think that what I did not anticipate, but it seems, you know, very glaringly obvious now, is that so much of Trump is motivated by a desire for retribution, where he chooses to punish what he considers people that to be that are his enemies one way or another. I still don't think he cares about policy. He doesn't care about ideology. He doesn't really have a coherent agenda.

But what he does care about is he cares about, about punishing people that he thinks have wronged him in some ways.

And when he does that, he's effectively tilting the democratic institutions against his political rivals, like other authoritarian leaders across the world have done. And so it has a similar, has a similar outcome.

And I, and I do think ideologically there is many people that are willing to ride on him, you know, and use his position in office to try to put into place things that they actually care about, which, and that is a coherent ideology.

So this is like some of his anti immigrant rhetoric and other things, anti immigrant policies that he's put in place are things that people that are committed to an anti immigrant agenda have taken on board.

But the attacks against Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, but also Yale, is that a reflection of just an anti, quote, unquote, establishment animus? Is that driven by a, another type of ideological agenda that we have not yet talked about?

Right, That's a good question.

And I think that if I was going to take a step back, actually from the answer I just gave, I think this would be an example of something that is not just Trump's desire for sort of personal retribution, but his desire to uphold his own personal power and to try to attack people that might be critics of him now in the same way that authoritarian leaders do in other places. So something we see is that across the world, people that are authoritarians, they attack centers of dissent.

So they attack universities, they attack law firms, they attack the press. Any place that can be a place that expresses dissent towards the regiment.

And those are exactly the institutions that Trump has attacked in the United States. So why Ivy League institutions? You know, the United States has, depending how you count them, about 6,000 colleges.

So, you know, it's got universities and colleges all over the place. And he focuses on this handful of sort of prominent elite ones. And my guess is the reason is probably twofold.

Most importantly is because those places are the symbols in many ways of higher education in the United States. And so he can't attack all 6,000 of them at once. He instead attacks ones that are prominent and will send a message.

The other thing is, goes back to just a guess about Trump's sort of personality. And this is just me playing amateur psychologist.

I don't know this to be true, but it seems to be that a lot of him is motivated by a resentment against the fact that the sort of educated liberal elites in the United States don't like him.

And he thinks of places like Harvard and Columbia and places like that as the places that have created those sort of educated liberal elites that don't like him. So I think part of it does go back to his own desire to seek retribution on his political enemies.

Some have argued, and you find that argument also in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that the, and I quote here, a title that I saw there, that higher education had a coming for them, that they made themselves an easy target, particularly in the social sciences and the humanities, where there is a high degree of, shall we say, ideological conformity or homogeneity. You've actually commented on that issue as well once in the Harvard Crimson, that there might be an issue there, actually.

And of course, October 7th has also its large shadow cast over elite institutions. So what could presidents such as Harvard President Gerber have done differently to shield themselves or was there no way to shield themselves?

Well, the answer to this, it requires a bit of nuance. So I hope I won't go on too long about this.

Please take your time.

Okay. Okay. That's what I like about these podcast formats, is they're not just 10 second sound bite.

So I can go on about, I can try to provide this sort of nuance. But I think there's two things to consider with this. So one is, on the one hand, I don't think there's anything that universities could have done.

And so we do have to be clear about that in the sense that. But as I mentioned, what Trump cares about is he cares about attacking places that are centers of dissent.

And so he would have found reasons to attack universities one way or another.

In fact, many of the places that he's attacked are not in the sense that trying to take away their funding and that he's actually going to damage to his policies. Attacking universities are not the social sciences. They're not these kind of hotbeds of, of left wing activism that we might think about.

They're not even the humanities, as we might say.

They're not the English departments or ethnic studies departments, which are the places that when they think about out of control leftists and college campuses, those are the places.

Rather, he's attacking the hospitals and the natural sciences and the things that have very little ideological content and in many ways are just places doing basic scientific research. So he's trying to attack those to punish universities.

And this is in the same way, and this is the part that I think is important to keep in mind, as I mentioned before, that these authoritarians across the world have attacked universities. You know, they did in Hungary, in Turkey and Venezuela, and all these places where they did not have a uniformly left wing ideological culture.

Universities tend to be left wing in this day and age, one way or another, but they certainly, it would be hard to look at all those places and say they all had it coming, that it was all the fact that they were on the.

That they all had some kind of, some kind of common feature that led them to be attacked, other than the fact that authoritarians like to attack universities.

So all that being said, the thing that I don't think we should ultimately lose sight of now, it's not something that should cause universities to capitulate to Trump now, but something that we ultimately shouldn't lose sight of is the fact that universities are places that have a largely homogeneous left wing ideological culture. It's not as extreme as people think it is. And that's something to be really clear about.

You know, most of every day at Harvard, which in some ways as people think of as this, like, symbol of this sort of like left wing academia in the United States, it kind of looks like everywhere else in the world. You know, it doesn't.

I don't walk around there and see people protesting every moment or like trying to tear down the establishment or something like that. It just feels like any other place.

But at the same time, it is a place where if one was a Republican on campus or a conservative, they certainly did feel like they were marginalized. They felt like they couldn't express their views. They felt like they were making be socially ostracized for that.

There's a deep question which is, you know, would take even more nuance to ask, you know, how does something like that happen? How much political diversity should there be in institutions in a place like the United States?

But nevertheless, it is absolutely the reality that it was a place that was overwhelmingly dominated by liberal ideology. And I think that is a problem for education because we serve everybody better when we have more diversity of thought.

You know, we can challenge our own ideas more. We can present more ideas to students. We can question our own approaches when we talk to people that are different from us.

And so, simply, as part of our mission to find, to educate students and to try to pursue the truth, we should demand that our ideology tries to be more diverse. And I think Harvard and other academic institutions in the United States had drifted away from that in a way that hurt their underlying mission.

And so I think both those things can be true at once that we were not pursuing. We did not have the ideological diversity that would help us to pursue the things we wanted. And in many ways, we fooled ourselves about that.

But at the same time, that is not what led to Donald Trump attacking universities. He was attacking universities because they were.

Places of dissent, Places of dissent, centers of dissent. How can they remain strong during the coming three and a half years?

I know, because it seems like it's been years already, and that's a really good question.

I think that one thing that we have realized that the United States has going for it in some ways, and when I say going forward, I mean compared to other places who have come under these sort of authoritarian attacks, places like Hungary, places like Turkey, is. The United States has a very, very strong civil society. You know, it's very rich. It's very. It's very. I mean. I mean, literally rich.

You know, it has a lot of resources. It's very thick in the sense that it penetrates almost every town and almost every city in the United States.

A lot of people are involved in these civil institutions, and those are things that provide, in many ways, opposition to something like the central government of the United States, something we often forget and makes the United States different compared to a lot of democracies is the central government is very weak in some ways. It has limited powers, and it has limited powers to sort of coerce people and to coerce institutions.

So that's why Donald Trump relies on things like lawsuits and things like this to try to get his will.

And so when it is under attack and when university is under attack, I think relying on the sort of robustness of civil society by realizing that they're not alone is something that's very helpful. So I spent several months sort of trying to agitate around Harvard to say, you know, what? Harvard needs to stand up to Donald Trump. And.

And one of the predictions that myself and other people that were writing about this made at the time was we said, if Harvard does stand up and push back against Trump because we knew these attacks were coming, that other places in civil society will sort of rally to Harvard's side and they'll stand up together.

And we were not 100% sure we were right about that, but we made that prediction anyway, and it actually turned out to be true in a way more than we anticipated.

Because when Harvard stood up and said, we are not going to comply with these demands Donald Trump was making them, all of a sudden everybody got really excited about Harvard. Right? And that was kind of odd because, you know, most.

Because Harvard's this very elite institution that people, you know, a lot of Americans kind of, you know, find reasons to not like, which is understandable. And all of a sudden, everybody was loving Harvard.

You know, they were talking about it all on, you know, on talk shows and basketball coaches were talking about it, and all kinds of people were really excited about this. And I think it's because civil society was looking for something to rally around.

And when Harvard, this very prominent institution, stood up and said no to Trump, that it was a signal to the rest of civil society.

And now that that's happened, I think that if universities realize that they're stronger when they stand together and that these other institutions of civil society, like law firms and the media and even local clubs and nonprofit institutions and all these things, if they stand together, they have a better chance of standing up to Donald Trump than if they stand alone.

That's a wonderful note to end on.

But before we close this conversation, first of all, thank you, Ryan, for joining us and sharing your insights into US Politics and the spaces that unite and divide Americans. As a final recommendation, of course, your book should be on everyone's bookshelves, the space between us.

But do you have other recommendations, what people should read, listen to, or watch to better understand the American political space at the moment?

Yeah, I do. And I think as a. As a political scientist, I do like to recommend some works of political science that I think help us to understand things.

One is a somewhat older book at this point, but I think it's something that really helps us to understand how people get their political information and get their political ideas and how people can ultimately get the same information but disagree on things a lot, which is something we see in American politics now.

And this is a book by John Zoller called the Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, and it's a classic in political science and very accessible, and I think people would do well to read that.

Another one is a more recent book, but it talks a lot about how American politics has largely come into a system now where we used to be in this big country, we talked about where politics was very diverse and sort of scattered across these sort of more local parties and local institutions, and now is centered around these two national parties in a way across this really big country, in a way that wasn't always the case. In the United States is a book by the political scientist Dan Hopkins called the Increasingly United States.

And so those two are great works of political science.

And actually there's one more that I would recommend now that I'm talking about it, which is a little bit more of a wild card, let's say, but is what I consider to be a classic book in the space of social psychology or political psychology is a book called Social Dominance by James Sedanius, who was a now deceased social psychologist at Harvard and was a wonderful, a wonderful person and a wonderful interpreter of society. And this was a book about how hierarchies shape people's psychology.

And often when I talk about what I think is an animating feature of American politics now, it is this idea of social dominance where some people seem to be motivated by maintaining these hierarchies, other people seem to be motivated by trying to tear these hierarchies down. And so that's a book that can help people to understand the sort of basic psychology of this idea of hierarchies and how they shape our society.

And so I think if people read that one, a lot of light bulbs, as we would say, would go off about what's going on in American politics right now.

I think a lot of them have already gone off thanks to your explanations throughout this podcast. Thank you so much, Ryan, for joining me. And thank you to everyone listening. I look forward to having you back for the next episode.

Ufida Losse Pretzia Merica Views from the Sister Republic A University of St. Gallen Podcast by Claudia Privila.