How do political ideologies like fascism take shape, spread, and gain power over the way we think and act? Justin Freebourn, Ph.D. tackles this big question in this episode. He holds his ph.D. in Political Science from UC Riverside and has published work in the journals of Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.

As Freebourn shares in his talk from Fall Flex Day 2025 called "Teaching Under Fascism: Ideological Framing for Learning and Science", he examinates how social sciences can shed light on how political shifts can lead to erosion of democratic competition making us fall into a system of exclusion and control. In this episode Freebourn explores how political ideology, persuasion, and knowledge itself is organized. Let's listen in.

References/Resources:

• Baer, J. A. (1983). Equality under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment. Cornell University Press.
• Bishin, B. (2009). Tyranny of the Minority: The subconstituency politics theory of representation. Temple University Press.
• Borg, M. J. (2009). The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a life of faith. Zondervan.
• Freebourn, J. P. (2023). Fiscal Policy Preferences in the US Context: Theory, Measurement, and Practice. University of California, Riverside.
• Freebourn, J.P. (Forthcoming). Imagining Tomorrow: Americans' attitudes towards basic income. The Social Science Journal.
• French, J. R., & Raven, B. (1959). The Bases of Social Power. Studies in Social Power.
• Golash-Boza, T. M. (2016). Race and Racisms: A critical approach. Oxford University Press.
• Mlodinow, L. (2013). Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Vintage.
• Oatley, T. (2018). International Political Economy. Routledge.
• Stewart, A. J., McCarty, N., & Bryson, J. J. (2020). Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline. Science advances, 6(50), eabd4201.

Run Time: 1 hour, 7 min

To Find the full transcript for this episode click HERE

If we're not fascists, which hopefully we're not, what are we? We are minimally Republicans in that most of us probably don't want a king, but we do have to deal with the influence of identity on our decision making.

Welcome to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast. I'm Chisa Uyeki, a Mount SAC professor and librarian, and I'm pleased to be your host for this season. Our goal is to you connected to our campus by bringing you the activities and events you may not have time to attend to share the interesting things our colleagues are creating and innovative ways they are supporting and connecting with Mount SAC students. Join me as we explore Mount Sac.

Today's episode features a talk by Justin Freeborn that tackles a big question about the way political ideologies like fascism take shape, spread and gain power over the way we think and act. Justin Freeborn has a PhD in Political Science from UC Riverside and has published work in journals like Party Politics and Political Research Quarterly. As Freeborn shares, the social sciences can shed light on how political shifts can lead to the erosion of democratic competition, making us fall into a system of exclusion and control. His Flex Day session entitled Teaching Under Ideological Framing for Learning and Science is about political ideology, persuasion, and how knowledge itself is organized. Let's listen in now.

This is Teaching Under Fascism, Ideological Framing for Learning and Science. My name is Justin. I am adjunct faculty here at Mount SAC in the Department of Geography and Political Science. The focus for today is learning how to construe your research and your teaching in ways that are easy to translate to others, depending on where they are in relation to you. They asked me to record this for a podcast, so they put this slide here. Our goals for today are to recognize fascism, explore ideology, and apply insights. So the way we're approaching today is to understand ideology as a tool, as a way of organizing behavior. Our outline for today will go over a basic framework and spend the bulk of our time going through mostly social science, starting in political economy, through political science and political psychology, with a few pit stops along the way.

And then we'll conclude with an elaborated framework of ideology that I hope ties things together in a way that is easy to use and understand. The basic framework for our discussion today starts with what is fascism? It is an ideology that is somewhat reemerging in prominence here in the United States today, which is probably why they asked me to speak. Fascism is a far right ideology on the left, right political continuum, think communism on the left, Fascism would be on the far right. Fascism is of course the Ideology, you might recall from the 20th century with Hitler and Mussolini, the famous fascists of World War II, who were themselves authoritarian, opposed democracy, and ultra nationalist. So fascism is quite often defined in terms of making politics about one group and elevating that group above other groups in society. And as we go along through our journey through social science, we'll get a sense of why these ultra nationalist appeals tend to be so effective. In more modern times, social scientists have decomposed the elements of persuasion into two routes. A central route that relies on logical argumentation.

So ideologies frequently will have systems of belief that cohere logically together. But beyond the central route to persuasion, there's also a peripheral route. The peripheral route to persuasion is all based on emotion and sentiment. So along the lines of cultivating emotional appeals towards your in group or ultranationalist appeals, peripheral persuasion ends up often being that sort of word salad that complements you or cajoles you into action. For our purposes, again, ideologies integrate the routes, the central and peripheral routes to persuasion, making them useful tools. Although fascists tend mostly to rely on the emotional peripheral route to sort of just get people excited and turned out for us, ideology has to include the central route too, of logical argumentation. The way I typically take the journey through social science for my students is I use the eigenfactor map of science here. And the way I explain this is I typically ask my students, what's the worst thing you can do in college? Plagiarize.

How do you avoid the sin of plagiarizing citations? So for my students, say your professors have to do the same thing when they are writing their research papers. They also have to cite where they got their ideas from so as not to plagiarize. And what this map does is that it just counts citations. So the circles represent different disciplines within social science. And the size of the circles gives a rough indicator of the amount of citations within each discipline. Economics over on your left, political science towards the middle, Psychology over on your right. And the arrows give a sense of how different disciplines are in communication with each other by, again, the simple process of counting citations. So this provides a pretty literal roadmap for us to understand the different perspectives within social science and get a sense of how these different perspectives are in communication with one another.

As I mentioned, we'll start our journey through social science over in economics, and in particular the connections between economics and political science, where economists really like to think of the world and the people in it in rational terms. People are rational maximizers of Individual utility. And economists are concerned with translating those assumptions about human rationality into solving problems in the real world, and in particular, solving collective action problems, often through the lens of ideological analysis. So our first major stop then will look at how economists see things like collective action problems and ideology when it comes to coordinating behavior. So collective action problems are just when you have a group of people and you are trying to organize their behavior around some goal or some task, trying to get something done, Think you're trying to go see a movie with your friends, you have to solve problems. Challenges related to coordinating your behavior around the goal of seeing a movie. You have to resolve conflicts. What genre of movie do you want to see? Do you want to see an action movie? Do you want to see a romantic comedy? Do you want to see a psychological thriller? That's one of the first things you have to overcome, one of the first challenges you have to overcome in solving this collective action problem to go see a movie.

Let's say you have picked your genre, you're going to go see an action movie. Great. Now you have to coordinate your behavior. How are you going to get to the theater? What theater are you going to go to? Is one person going to drive everyone, or is maybe one person gonna pay for the Uber and you're gonna Venmo each other? You have to coordinate your behavior. Once you have sort of picked your initial goal, even after you've done those two things, let's say you're gonna go see an action movie at a particular time. There are still transaction and conformity costs. Maybe you have a friend who has extreme preferences, although in principle they've agreed to go see an action movie, they won't see any movie with Tom Cruise. So there are conformity costs to coordinating your behavior as a group, where you have to accommodate the extreme preference of your friend and pick an action movie that in this case doesn't have Tom Cruise in it.

So even though you've done all those things, you still might run into the problem of free riders. Where you've picked a movie, you picked a time you figured out how you're going to get there. You still might have your friend who always manages to forget their wallet and it becomes incumbent on another friend group member to pay for their movie ticket or pay for their share of the Uber. In the real world, politicians, people in business face collective action problems too. And one of the ways we address this is through ideology. Ideologies do things like reduce conformity costs and help coordinate behavior by getting everyone on the same page by Creating a system where people have fundamentally similar assumptions about the world. So fascist ideologies solve collective action problems, like we mentioned, mostly through peripheral persuasion, telling you your group is the best. For us, though, being academics at an academic institution, we need a little bit more sophisticated understanding of ideology to pull in that central route to persuasion, the logical route to persuasion as well.

For that we will see how economists treat ideology. So economists trace the evolution of economic ideology at least all the way back, starting in the 1600s with the emergence of mercantilism. Mercantilism is this ideology that privileges a person's own country, their own state above other countries. So in the 1600s, the mostly European powers were very much characterized economically by mercantilist economic ideas, where you want your country to be the richest, you want your country to export the most, sell the most to other countries, and buy the least from everyone else. So mercantilism is about making your country the richest, even if that comes at the expense of everyone else. Liberalism emerged in the 1700s a little bit as a counterpoint or reaction to mercantilism, where mercantilism construes the international system as conflictual as each state out for itself, each state trying to become the richest. Liberalism construes international relations in positive sum terms, where trade among countries is seen as a good thing because it makes everyone a little bit better off through the logic, as we'll see in a second, of comparative advantage. So in contrast to mercantilism, liberalism sees trade as inherently good.

Trade makes people better off, the thinking goes, because it makes more products available at lower prices, benefiting you all consumers, people who buy things in stores. And then finally, Marxism emerged in the 1800s as a reaction in part to industrialization. Karl Marx noticed that when you take a bunch of people from their pastoral lives on their farms, stick them into factories, they're going to start talking to each other. And these farmers turned factory workers are going to realize that they have more in common with each other than the people who own the factories or manage the factories. For Marx, economics is construed very much in terms of conflict between groups, between workers, in the 1800s, at least, owners of capital, owners of factories. As you might imagine, mainstream economists tend to privilege liberalism in part because of this notion, that of the three perspectives, it's the one that explains how intergroup or interstate relations can be positive sums. So you don't have to necessarily agree with liberals that trade is good or that liberalism is the best of the three. But it is useful to understand why Liberalism occupies the place of privilege that it does for mainstream economists.

We'll spend a second or two going over that. For economists, liberalism explains the logic of trade, why it is preferable to remove tariffs, remove barriers to trade, and liberalize the economies of countries. So think, if there is only one country and it has no trading partners, in this example, the United States, under these conditions of autarky, where this country has no trading partners, it must produce all the stuff that it needs to consume. For the sake of this example, that means it has to produce all of the computers and shirts that it needs. However, the logic goes that if the United States, in this example, is allowed to take on a trading partner, say China, then each of the two countries that trade can specialize in producing only the good goods. Well, in this case, good, there's only one of only two of them producing the good that it is comparatively better at producing. So for this simplified example, that means that the United States, being a rich country, has lots of money, can spend all that capital building expensive computer factories. The United States, in this example, should specialize according to its comparative advantage in producing only computers.

And China, in this example, because it has lots of people, can staff textile factories, and should specialize only in making T shirts. Through this specialization, according to comparative advantage, the thinking goes jointly, these two countries can produce more, more stuff at lower prices. In the language of economics, the production possibility frontier has been expanded through trade liberalization. People in China can buy more computers per T shirt produced, and people in the United States can purchase more T shirts per computer produced. So, in a nutshell, that is the logic of liberalism. Why mainstream economists at least think that trade should be freer and easier between countries among countries. That is not, again, to say that you necessarily have to agree with mainstream economists. And you yourself do not have to privilege liberalism.

And in the United States, we certainly tend to. Ideologies like Marxism tend to be explicitly marginalized with denial of things like equal protection under civil rights law for politically active Marxists. But for us, our sort of next step is to begin to pick apart the underpinnings of liberalism. Economists rest on this assumption that much of our behavior is rational. We are rational maximizers of individual utility. So for us as academics, social scientists, physical scientists, whatever, we do have to begin to understand the contexts in which this presumption of rational action tends to fail. The first place that we're going to do a pit stop is the domain of law. For a quick look at the notion of intersectionality, this legal perspective, rooted in critical race theory that begins to deconstruct our relationships in terms of jurisprudential and power dynamics.

At its core, intersectionality is just an examination of how different facets of people's identity overlap and intersect to structure their experience of the world. How things like race or sex or gender identity, religion, whatever, have been privileged or marginalized through law, through cultural norms over the course of history, and how that path dependence structures experience today. Women, for example, weren't allowed to take out credit cards in the United States nationwide without their husband or father's permission until the 1970s. That's one of the many ways in which group identity has been incorporated over time into our law and is a focus in the study of intersectionality. This perspective, which begins to say, well, maybe facets of our experience, our motivation and behavior, aren't as rational as the Enlightenment and mainstream economics would require us to believe. Along those lines, our next pit stop is the domain of management. For a quick look at psychological power. If it's the case that we are motivated by things other than rational economic interest, Power provides a way to construct a model of the world that allows for very parsimonious integration across levels and units of analysis.

This theory of power goes back to French and Raven in the 1950s. And psychological power decomposes our experience of social influence into five bases of power. Five types of power that I think are pretty easy to understand. For the most part, there's reward power, which is the ability of an asker to reinforce a positive consequence. Coercion, which is the ability of someone asking you to do something to reinforce a negative consequence. So with reward, think giving you your paycheck or a bonus coercion, the threat of termination, maybe legitimate power, which arises from the position of the asker in society. So think, if you're a professor, you have legitimate power over your students. If you're the president, you have legitimate power as commander in chief over the military.

Expert power, which arises from a shared mental model of what the asker and the askee know. So if you are operating a nuclear plant and someone tells you shut it down, Odds are you're not going to listen if that person is some random off the street. But if you know that that person has a degree in nuclear engineering, you are much more likely to comply when they ask you to turn off the reactor because of their expert power. And then finally, referent power is probably the most nebulous of the five. And referent power just gets at the notion of who you want to be or who you want to become. So you think as a kid you probably had role models, be that your parents or teachers, popular culture, figures, whatever. If you look up to your parent and they ask you to do something, odds are you are much more likely to comply if you eventually want to become like your parent or guardian than if you don't like them. Right? So again, referent power gets at who you want to be or who you want to become.

I said that this was a good way to conceptualize the world because it allows us to build a mental model of the world, starting from the very small and proximal of your first experiences in the world, probably in your family system, in the relationship between parent or guardian and child, where you can probably think experiences in your life as a child of being rewarded for good behavior with something like an allowance, or being coerced through the threat of grounding if you, I don't know, violated curfew or something. We can build up this model of the world outside of the family system. Your next sort of experience of power in the world was probably at school. School in the relationship between teachers and students, and then outside of school in the workplace. Whereas we hinted at the relationship between, say, boss and employee, where again, you are rewarded with paying bonuses, coerced through the threat of termination. The roles we inhabit in the workplace tend to be legitimized in the west, at least through contract authority. You sign something with your employer prescribing your job duties and the consequences if you fulfill those duties or fail to fulfill those duties. Then at a bigger level, we can begin to understand the relationships of power between governments and their citizens or people who live there, residents, where, if you mostly follow the laws, you are rewarded with relative freedom.

If you don't follow the laws, you speed a bunch. Maybe you are fined or imprisoned. In many countries like ours, although not all these roles are defined and legitimized through things like constitutions. We know who the president is, who the governor of California is, because the constitutions of our country and our state define who that gets to be and what powers the governor or president has. Up until recently, there was a pretty large role for expert power in our government, where, you know, you'd want public health experts making decisions advising policy, although as you can imagine, that has fallen by the wayside somewhat of late. And then in terms of referent power, think who do you want to be as a citizen or a resident, and what virtues or values do you want to hold as a result? And then at the biggest, broadest level, we have interactions between governments and other Government, where governments might reward other governments with trade deals and investment. They might try to coerce other governments with the threat of war or tariffs. For much of the 20th century, relationships between countries was legitimized on the basis of international law, although that has somewhat fallen by the wayside, too, of late.

And of course, in the relationship between countries, at least historically, there was a lot of value placed on strategic knowledge. For much of the 20th century, national ideology, we held up the United States as sort of a paradigmatic exemplar of the democratic and capitalist values to which other countries ought to aspire. So in terms of referent power, for much of the 20th century, we saw this alignment between individual valuations of things like capitalism and democracy and national valuations of the same. For us, of course, our focus is on the more macro side of power, understanding how especially the United States Constitution sets up roles and rules for our society, and how ideology reinforces and arises from things like constitutions and the individual values and virtues that people hold as important. So our next major stop, then, is in political science, where political scientists tend to care a lot about constitutions and the institutional structures set up by constitutions. Our constitution, current constitution, is, of course, our second stab at a constitution. If you remember from high school or college civics, what was our first take at a constitution? Articles of confederation. Right.

The framers of our constitution, having just fought a war for freedom from monarchy, were understandably wary of centralizing too much authority in one place. And the Articles of Confederation sort of took that to an extreme. The Articles were not at all successful at solving collective action problems because they did not give very much power to the central government. Every state could mint their own currency. So the Articles didn't let us put down rebellions or pay back our revolutionary war debts. When the framers got together to write our current constitution, their goal was initially to amend the Articles. But they quickly realized that that was unworkable and decided to scrap them all together, giving us the constitution that we have today with our three branches of government. What do we call this? Thinking back again to civics, from high school or college, what do we call this? Checks and balances, separation of powers.

All of that is good and accurate. And from an ideological perspective, this gives us a hint at what the ideological purpose of the Constitution is. These folks were again rebelling against monarchy and wanting to create a republic. You probably remember from high school or college, civics wanted to split up the powers of government to prevent any one person or any one part of government from having too much Power. So through the separation of powers, through checks and balances, one person or one part of government was in principle at least, prevented from having too much power. Ideologically, the function or purpose of the Constitution is to prevent autocracy, which is ruled by one person. Monarchy, dictatorship. We are again a republic, not a monarchy.

So thinking back again to our table of economic ideologies, we can think of how at least some of these ideologies made their way into our current Constitution. Ideas about state strength and making the federal government slightly more powerful bring us a little bit of the ideals about state strength from mercantilism. And we also see a lot of influence from liberalism. The folks who wrote the Constitution were very strongly influenced by the Enlightenment, thinking that people had inherent dignity and were rational, kind of like economists today think. So we see things like the Commerce Clause, which gives the federal government the ability to regulate trade between states, more power in pursuit of trade. We don't really see anything from Marx, as Marx wasn't born yet, although it is pretty straightforward to identify parts of American ideology that correspond to the focus in groups that we see in Marxism. So, extending the table of economic ideologies, we can get a rough correspondence of eras and concepts in American political ideology, starting with what I call institutional republicanism, which construes us not as a monarchy, but as a republic that functions to prevent autocracy. The folks who wrote the Constitution were again wary of centralizing power.

So from an institutional perspective, the purpose of our Constitution and the purpose of giving the stated strength is to prevent autocracy. The corresponding perspective to liberalism would be commercial republicanism. This notion that free trade among the many states regulated by the federal government through the Commerce Clause empowers consumers, makes us more economically strong. This is where a lot of our thinking about how we treat citizens, at least as equals, treating people equally. Of course, as we hinted at in our pit stops in law and management, not everything was super peachy and cool in the period between the adoption of the Constitution and the Civil War. Right issues like slavery especially, created huge problems that ultimately erupted in the Civil War. Radical republicanism emerged as a social, religious, and ultimately political movement that in the lead up to the Civil War and its aftermath, advocated for abolition of slavery and through the adoption of the 14th Amendment, especially the equal protection of all persons, not just citizens, under law. This transition or inflection point is the focus of Texas A and M political scientist Judy Baer's book Equality under the Constitution, where she traces the ideological development of the United States from its origins in A more institutional and commercial republican form to the rise and dominance of the Radical Republicans in the Civil War, where before the Civil War, ideological norms of equal treatment dominated equal treatment among citizens.

At least it wasn't the king or queen or ruling family that coordinated economic behavior. In the states. Everyone, well, not everyone, citizens were equal under law and deserved to be treated equally. Of course, that meant that citizens were free to structure their values so such that individual prejudices superseded the concept of merit, which is something we began to take seriously as a country after the Civil War. And the Radical Republicans passed the 14th Amendment, which transitioned our ideology from thinking in terms of equal treatment among citizens to, again, equal protection for all persons. When we think equal protection, this fits in with the notions we saw in intersectionality, where because different people have different experiences based on their group history as consolidated by law, equal protection motivates the logic of policies like affirmative action or minimum wage laws or union protection, where group marginalization over time necessitates differential treatment to ensure equality of opportunity. After the Civil War, we tried to take seriously the notion that merit should be elevated above prejudice with things like the Pendleton act, which sought to make our civil service merit based. But this didn't really take off until a century later with the civil rights movement era.

So in many ways, this transition from the revolutionary era to the post Civil War era marked an inflection point from an ideological focus on equal treatment to equal protection. But you might ask yourself, if the framers of the Constitution were so influenced by the Enlightenment and so called scientific values, rationality, inherent human dignity, where then did they get the idea that slavery was okay? One of the ways I like to think about that question is to extend this table of ideologies back in time a little bit or a lot, I guess, to the imperial era of the Roman Republic, which, as we'll see in a second, the Romans practiced slavery, but did so before the invention of our modern idea of race. We inherited a lot of our ideological and institutional features for managing a large, geographically large country like a senate from the Romans. But along with that came bits of ideology that were pre Enlightenment, pre American, that were used to. To legitimize slavery for completeness. We can extend this into the present and look at the Taylorism that emerged as an economic ideology in the 20th century. This notion of scientific management and that science should be used to enhance the meritocracy of organizations, of corporations. So you should hire based on job relevant knowledge, skills and abilities, not hire on the basis of being, say, the boss's son.

And then I somewhat aspirationally characterize the 20th century as motivated by a population centered feminism. This notion that the whole must be considered in relation to its parts. And only through a holistic and integrative conceptualization of the world can well being of the population as a whole be maximized. That gives us a starting point for a positivistic conceptualization of ideology. If we're not fascists, which hopefully we're not, what are we? We are minimally Republicans in that most of us probably don't want a king. But we do have to deal with the influence of, of identity on our decision making that we saw a little bit in our stop in intersectionality. So our next pit stop will be in the domain of sociology to get a little bit of a better sense of how social scientists conceptualize things like race narrowly and identity broadly, and begin to understand how and why identity is so important in understanding human motivation. Sociologists generally think of identity as a social construction where you take things that are observable indicators of difference, like skin color or hair texture or ancestry, and you use these markers of difference to put people into categories, into mental bins.

This is not to say that race is unimportant because it's a social construction. Money is similarly a social construction where we take pieces of paper or chunks of metal and ascribe them value. And although money is likewise a social construction, most people would say money is hugely important for their lives. So for sociologists, race as a social construction begins to conceptualize race as an ideological tool of marginalization and of privilege. Race as an example of identity is used to, for example, decide and define who gets to be counted as a slave and who does not or did not. Starting with the slave codes here in the United states in the 16 and 1700s, which began to define slavery in hereditary terms through things like rules of hypodescent. So if even one of your ancestors was enslaved or of African descent, you yourself were categorized as African and could be kept as a slave. Early in the history of this country, race was used as an ideological tool of marginalization.

And we didn't really see the emergence of race as a specific tool of privilege, the construction of white identity until the 20th century, where up until the 20th century, sociologists explain that white people thought more in terms of ethnicity. You were Irish, you were English, you were Italian, you were Jewish, you were Catholic. And it wasn't until the emergence of more civil rights oriented ideas that political elites began to construct whiteness as an identity, a pan ethnic identity kind of Like Hispanic identity today in order to solve collective action problems facing politicians. To say, you are not Irish, you're not Italian, you are now white, so go vote for me. So in the United States at least, race is a very categorical thing. You put people into bins and elites use those bins instrumentally. This doesn't necessarily get at how race is understood in the Americas more broadly, though. Outside of the United States, colorism tends to be more dominant way of thinking about race and ethnicity.

Where much of the rest of the Americas was colonized by the Spanish and their goal wasn't necessarily cash agriculture, like here in the US So identity in much of the rest of the Americas is much more about the nuanced category categories of your indigenous ancestry, your European ancestry and your African ancestry, with the goal of incorporating indigenous people into Spanish culture. However, that still ends up putting white people, lighter skinned people, at the top of a hierarchy of privilege and marginalization. It just means that the system relies more on a continuum than on binary thinking. And sociologists identify colorism as prevalent in places that predate European colonial contact, like India and Japan. So colorism itself isn't necessarily a product of colonial contact. But for us, colorism and color as a latent dimension of comparison serves as a way to understand other phenomena like sex and sexism, or class and classism, where if you have, for example, racially ambiguous features, it's difficult to put you into a binary category. You might get the question of, well, what are you, where are you from? And similarly, you can think of sex as a continuum where if you have more masculine behaviors, you have, say, more body hair, it's easier to categorize you as male. And we as people like binary thinking.

It makes the world a lot simpler to navigate. But if you have ambiguous sexual features and fall towards the middle, do people like ambiguity? No, they tend not to. It makes the world less easy to navigate. And for some people at least, when folks don't fit into a racial or sexual binary, it can evoke discomfort. So for sociologists, identity was and is hugely important. And because of its historical importance, we can begin to incorporate identity into our table of ideologies. So we have a market based economic system, right? Our economic system is not purely economic, not purely economically based. We weight our economics by our political systems.

We say that it's not just laissez faire, everyone can do what they want. The state steps in to regulate prices, to offer subsidies, to raise taxes. And how do we do that in a system like ours? Democracy, which is another form of market, where it is in some ways of thinking, an epistemic market. In a democracy, we tend to think of voting as a marketplace of ideas where the best ideas are win and then influence the economy by saying what economic actors can and cannot do. Of course, our Constitution, when it was written as we mentioned, had to deal with the issue of slavery. And one of the ways we did that was by taking ideas of humanism, democratic humanism from the ancient Greeks and saying what it meant to be fully human. That meant of course, excluding people who were enslaved. Although the slave owners in the south mostly of course wanted to count slaves towards their population, giving us the three fifths clause which weighted our democratic systems in favor of the slave holding states.

So up until the Civil War, the South and the slaveholding states had a strong vested interest in democratic capitalism, using their outsized influence in our Congress to maintain liberal access to the world to export the cash crops that they grew like cotton and tobacco. After the Civil War, though, this ideological underpinning didn't work so well. If there now were no more slaves and all former slaves were citizens, we needed or market liberals needed new legitimations for their ideology. Again we see the emergence of modern liberalism and an embrace of this notion of equal protection from the 14th amendment where modern liberals probably most Democrats today, although I think Pete Buttigieg considers himself a a democratic capitalist. Modern liberals think that equal protection legitimizes things like affirmative action, minimum wage laws, union protections on the basis of group identity and the differential treatment of people over time under law that we see now as wrong and requires remediation. The 20th century saw the rise of democratic neoliberalism. This notion again that the United States held itself up as the paradigmatic referent exemplar of democratic and capitalist values through our Article 2 treaty making and wartime powers. The United States projected its power and tried to get other countries to be good democratic capitalists like us.

Then, somewhat aspirationally, I characterize the 21st century as motivated by international liberalism, where ideally we will rejoin the international community living into Eleanor Roosevelt's ideals for the UN and see a transformation as more women hold political power granted them under the 19th Amendment. That provides a perspective on how and why identity influences our decision making and begins to incorporate identity into ideology to use as a tool to structure discussions, teaching and research. Knowing where you are helps connect with others. In psychology, which has devoted a lot of time and effort over the past half century, it's longer now to understanding the role of identity in influencing our cognition. We See Identity Incorporated into the Study of politics by Dr. Bishon at UC Riverside. Dr. Bishon builds on social identity theory to incorporate a lot of the ideas that we talked about about how elites think candidates for office use identity and ideologies of identity instrumentally as a tool in order to solve their collective action problems.

What do politicians want? Power. How do they get power in a democracy? Elected, but money, right? So the thinking here is that to win elections, elites use identity instrumentally to mobilize people to vote. It's a lot easier to say, vote for me, I'm white like you, than it is to bore people with the specifics of your policy platform. So this sort of plays on how we as humans evolve. We evolved an automatic non conscious capacity for categorizing people and things kind of like we talked about before, because it makes the world a more simple place to navigate. If you had to treat every stranger on the street you met with the same attention and emotional tenderness as your friends and family, you would quickly be overwhelmed by social connections and irrelevant considerations. But we unfortunately can take our capacity for categorization too far and can dehumanize people based on the category into which they fall. What was the big example of categorical dehumanization in the 20th century Holocaust? Right.

Where the Nazis, the famous fascists that we saw earlier, used identity as a tool to mobilize people and said that folks who fell into particular categories, like being Jewish, LGBT Roma, were not as human as the in group as the ultra nationalist Germans. Although there's a pretty robust evolutionary basis for our capacity for social categorization, it does occasionally lead to these negative externalities. Bringing back our example from intersectionality, Dr. Bishon explains how people, politicians, micro target people on the basis of identity, seeking to ascribe positive or negative valence based on who they're trying to mobilize and how. So if you're lgbt, odds are you can think of some time in your life where you have been micro targeted on the basis of that LGBT identity by, say, the Human Rights Campaign, seeking to ascribe a positive valence to that LGBT identity, saying, we support that, so go and vote for us. Or conversely, if you're lgbt, you can probably think of time in your life again where you have been micro targeted on the basis of that identity, to ascribe a negative valence, saying, you're not part of our group, so don't vote, or something, something to that effect. Again, in the broader scheme of things, kind of like what we talked about with colorism, it's not just that we put people in categories and bins, it's also that we arrange those categories along some latent dimension of comparison. Most simply this notion of social distance where we tend to think of our friends and family, people that we like, as extensions of the self.

We are sad when our friends and family are sad. We are happy when our friends and family are happy. Unless you're a psychopath, I guess. But we don't extend that same level of consideration, as we mentioned, to people who are more socially distant from us, people who don't fall into our in group, people we randomly encounter as acquaintances. It would burn us out if we couldn't put strangers into a bin and again had to wonder how good a day or bad a day the random stranger on the street was having and wondering whether they liked broccoli as much as our mom or whatever. So we benefit from our ability to categorize by having the ability to extend our social circle without doing too much more work. But we can also put people in the most distal category and say that they are our enemies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But sometimes we take it a bit far, as we talked about with things like the Holocaust, where if you say that entire groups of people are your enemy, are not part of yourself or even the body of humanity, then it's pretty easy to prune them from your social network.

So that sort of wraps up our journey through social science. We are going to take a little bit of a broader perspective on science as a whole to get a sense of how all of these pieces fit together. One of the ways I like to talk about this is in terms of neuroscience. Neuroscientists decompose your reaction to stimuli, everything in the world across two dimensions, where there's the vertical axis of physiological arousal, where if you see a tiger in the streets, you need to prepare for fight or flight. But if you see a car on the road, you're probably not going to care very much. There's no arousal and a horizontal axis of valence, where if you see the love of your life, you experience arousal as a positive thing. You are delighted, overjoyed. But maybe you see someone on the television who you disagree with ideologically and you feel aroused, but in a negative way, you are angry and frustrated.

So this begins to simplify the world very much so into only two dimensions and provides a basis for, for physical scientists for complicating the straightforward conceptualization of people that we see in economics as sort of atomistic and interchangeable rational actors. Instead of being atomistic and interchangeable. I like to borrow from temperament, which conceptualizes identity in positivistic terms. Kind of like what we see with ideology, where instead of just being atomistic and interchangeable, There are people with different qualities of experience, and no one group is better or worse than the other. It's mostly just about how people react to and appraise different stimuli. So again, the totality of human experience is decomposed across two dimensions. The vertical axis of temperament Is your default attitude towards tool use, tools, construed in a broad sense. Are you cooperatively oriented, where you're more motivated by what other people are doing, the norms of society? Or are you more utility oriented in the classic sense that economists like to think of? Are you more concerned with maximizing your individual utility, even if it means defying social norms? And then the horizontal axis decomposes people into how abstractly they tend to think.

Are you idea oriented? And do you think of the world in terms of philosophies, scientific theory, or are you reality oriented, tending to focus on the concrete, the money, the things that matter to your influence and power? So, kind of like our discussion with ideology, temperament begins to provide a positivistic basis for conceptualizing individual difference and understanding why people might construe the world in different terms. Because, well, we aren't interchangeable. Our experiences of the world are not identical. It also provides a basis for extending our table of ideology to our parent country, the United Kingdom, and the emerging concept of neurodiversity. So the United Kingdom, famously still a monarchy, still have a king. Now, unlike the United States, monarchies are feudal, usually hereditary. They privilege the family system and particular families above others. The United Kingdom, though, after their civil war, elevated their parliament, their legislature, above their monarch, and gave us the emergence of parliamentary sovereignty.

In the 1800s in the United Kingdom, we saw the emergence of the Labour Party, which is motivated by an ideology of democratic socialism, to do those sorts of things that we think are associated with Marxism, but also in the United States, things that we associate with modern liberalism, like a strong welfare state, universal health care, equal protection for those who are poor or sick. Then, in the late 20th century in the United Kingdom, we see the emergence of neurodiversity as a salient dimension of political conflict. In the United Kingdom, neurodiversity, a lot like temperament, conceptualizes human difference as innate and of intrinsic value. So neurodiversity includes things like autism, adhd, neurological conditions like Aphantasia. If you think, if I ask you, most of you can probably picture an apple in your head if I ask you to. Not everyone can. Some people have aphantasia, which means that they cannot generate internal mental imagery. You ask them to think what an apple looks like, they will recall descriptions of apples they've seen, but they can't mentally picture an apple in their head.

The British intelligence has characterized attributes of neurodiversity like dyslexia as mission critical to national security. And then finally, we see the emergence of issues of transhumanism in UK politics, which is inclusive of things like transgender identity, but meant to be more broad body modification through technology. In a general sense, this has emerged as a pretty contentious and very recent political issue in the uk. So this table begins to explain and identify how you can use ideology to mobilize people not just within political parties here in the United States, but also internationally. And we'll extend it one more time here in a bit as a thought experiment, to extend ideology independent of place. But before we do that, just think you all, as academics at an academic institution ostensibly opposing fascism, need to be able to use ideology effectively as a tool to advocate for for public goods, most especially public education. That means understanding not only where you fall, in a positivistic sense, in terms of your personal ideology, but also cultivating an understanding of where other people fall in terms of their ideology, and beginning to align their goals to your own. And for us, again, that usually means advocating for more things like funding for public education, convincing others to provide for the general welfare, to give us a final sense of how ideology can operate in a way that is independent of place, independent of specific country.

The final extension to our table of ideologies is what I call an eschatological perspective. Eschatology has to do with the end times and final judgment of humanity. Thank Ragnarok for the Vikings. End times for the Christians. As a thought experiment, the eschatological perspective asks you to consider your ideology, consider your values, independent of, of your national identity. So Oregon State University professor of Religion and culture Marcus Borg conceptualizes early Christianity, for example, as a reaction to experiences of oppression and marginalization under Roman rule. So as an exercise in self concept, independent of national identity. In this perspective, Christianity asks the individual to imagine their identity when the unthinkable happens, their country, their empire, goes by the wayside.

Of course, Christianity was later reconsolidated as the state religion of Rome. In more modern times, we see medical internationalism, especially in Cuba, where sanctions have in many ways eroded the state as a meaningful international entity. So people who care about other people's lives lean into serving humanity through medicine. In the 20th century, here especially, we saw the emergence of Star Trek. In the universe of Star Trek. The though the reason that they go on these missions, that they have these prime directives, is because the world was destroyed in World War 3. So in many ways in the 1960s, 1980s, Star Trek asked this eschatological question as a thought experiment and said, well, think if the United States and Canada and all these other countries from which we get our sense of identity today go away, who are we most essentially, as you all asked, and what values do we want to have as an eschatological thought exercise? Star Trek does that today. For our purposes though, I identify what I call non eschatological policy outcomes with the different ideological perspectives.

For republic such as ours and say the French, that means basically income. For the uk, that means basic services as the monarch provides for their people. Then if you're a Star Trek person, money is obsolete. So you need a new way of thinking about economics. And good luck convincing economists that you can replace the instrumental purposes of money. So to recap, we talked about fascism. It is again that perspective that really emphasizes the emotional appeals to group identity. We examined the central elements of ideology as discussed by different perspectives within science and then finally elaborated our framework of ideologies to include even eschatological ideologies.

Get a sense of what people believe and why we have our integrative framework sees again fascism as this far right ideology where to defeat the fascists, the far left and center liberals needed to align in the 20th century. So that may be necessary again then takeaways. Hopefully you can use these ideological tools to structure discussions either in your teaching, your research wherever, communicate across different styles of temperament within the broader framework of of neurodiversity and having had some exposure to what different people in different fields of science think, communicate in an interdisciplinary way as well.

Thank you for listening to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast, brought to you by Mount sac's POD office and created in partnership with Avant Haüs Media. Original music created and edited by Nira Azira. Be sure to check out our growing library of over 230 episodes and let us know your thoughts. You can reach me, Chisa Uyeki at c u y e k i at mtsac.edu. wishing you an amazing year and happy listening.