(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by Merit Medical and by contributions to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Jason] Tonight on "The Hinckley Report," extreme polarization and its impact on our country.

Our panel dives into the current state of American politics.

What explains the rise in political violence?

Is the rhetoric more heated now than ever?

And is there still room for dignity in politics?

(uplifting music) Good evening, and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week we have Tim Shriver, founder of the Dignity Index, Natalie Gochnour, director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, and Boyd Matheson, host of the "Sunday Edition" on KSL.

Thank you so much for being with us on this special episode of "The Hinckley Report."

This is a very important topic we're going to get into tonight.

It's about dignity in politics, I guess, and contempt in politics as we sometimes see it as well.

You three are experts on this subject, but I wanna start with you, Tim, if that's okay, as the creator of the Dignity Index.

Give some context for this about the dangers of contempt and why you decided the other side of contempt is dignity.

- Well, look, I think everybody knows that the country's in tough shape.

Our relationships have been fractured.

The polls suggest that almost 100 million of us have ended a relationship in our families or amongst our friends because of politics.

We know that the levels of mental health distress, confidence in the future, they're all down, and they're all in precarious positions.

So I think we all know that there's something that's causing us to feel excessively divided, deeply polarized, to be treating each other in dehumanizing ways.

The response to that is to say, is there an alternative?

For us, we've identified this sense of dignity in each other.

Can you treat someone with dignity even when you disagree with them?

The answer is yes, but our invitation is to actually develop a practice and reward the people who do just that.

- Natalie, talk about the dangers that we may see if we don't start to shift that focus.

- Yeah, well, we're already seeing it.

We're not solving problems.

You know, we have tremendous problems as a world, as a country, as a state, and we're in this performative world of pointing fingers, calling people names, showing contempt.

We've normalized it, and I think that's unbelievably damaging to our republic, to our state, to our families.

And I guess I would just say this is not the America I grew up in, it's not the state I grew up in, and we have a responsibility here.

- Boyd, please, you've addressed this on your show, and I've heard you many times about it, sort of this normalization of contempt, which Natalie was just talking about.

Talk about how that seems to be happening, and in the political world, which you are such a great observer of, where sometimes it doesn't seem that people are rewarded for good behavior.

- Yeah, sadly, we continue to reward people for bad behavior.

We give them clicks, we give them likes, we donate to their campaigns, we watch them on national cable news, and that's part of the problem.

We've normalized that in such a way that everyone's kind of comfortable.

We've become comfortable in our contempt, and that's what ultimately leads to even physical violence.

Whether that's an assassination attempt or whether that's threatening a poll worker, that's the kind of things that this all leads to.

And then the really sad thing is you look at the aftermath of that.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on a former president, you had 52% of Republicans saying they were quite confident that Kamala Harris and her campaign was involved in it.

You had 48% of Democrats saying they were certain that the former president and his campaign had staged the whole thing.

And so we're getting so comfortable in that contempt that people aren't just wrong, they're wrong, they're unreasonable, and they're evil.

And then you can be very comfortable with it because then if I disagree with Tim, I can call him any name I want, I can light up his social media feed, and I can still sleep good at night.

I can go to church on Sunday and sit in the pew and feel really good about myself because I have contempt for him.

- Well, I'll just add that the behaviors become addictive.

- Yeah.

- And that's what really scares me, that these social media feeds, you know, we log on and we do it, and we know it's bad for us, but we still do it.

It's lighting up things in our brain, you know, that we wanna feel, and we need to do better.

And of course it's not just social media, but that's very much at the heart of some of this.

- When it comes to, and I wanna talk about your index in just a moment, Tim, but when it comes to that social media idea, it's absolutely true that our feeds give us what we want, you know?

It's, you know, we all want the sugar, none of the vegetables sort of thing.

- Yeah, but, you know, we're good at taking poisons out of our food.

We're good at stopping eating and drinking things that we think are bad for us.

Contempt is bad for us.

It's not only bad for us, but, to the point Natalie made, if you treat people with contempt, you make an enemy for your cause.

You feel like you're being an advocate for your cause, but what you're actually doing is making it essential for other people to oppose your cause.

So the idea that we're making progress as we treat other people with contempt, and then we're going to church or we're going to our various tribal places, wherever they are, and finding solace there, we should be awakened to the idea that actually what we've done is create deeper and deeper animosity towards the things we believe in most passionately.

- No one's ever gonna build a bridge by driving a wedge, 'cause the harder you hit that wedge, the greater the divide becomes.

If you wanna build a bridge, you have to build a bridge, and you actually have to do what Tim is suggesting, and that is you have to remove the wedge completely.

And for a lot of these, in the political space particularly, you know, anyone who's planting thistles in the spring is not anticipating harvesting fruit in the fall.

But we keep buying into it or accepting it or becoming addicted to it, and that prevents us from getting to the real...

It keeps us a safe distance from the real conversations we've gotta have in this country.

- Well, and this is the power of the Dignity Index because it gives us words and tools, you know, language, techniques to start changing the way we're acting.

- Okay, let's get to how that works then, too, because you're the father of this particular project and so happy that the University of Utah's, through various places, been able to be connected to it.

Talk about what the Dignity Index is and how it's evolved.

You were on the show when you were starting this thing.

Talk about the evolution of it and what it is.

- Well, I'm very proud to be wearing a University of Utah pin, and we're very proud of the association with the faculty, with the students, with the administration at the university, with the Gardner Center and others who have helped us build this idea.

The idea is very simple.

We can actually score ourselves, we can score others on a scale of one to eight, where one is a call for violence and the dehumanization of the other, and eight is a call to see yourself in the other, and everything in between.

There are four grades on the index that are varying degrees of contempt.

Maybe the highest level of dignity in contempt is, "You're okay, I'm okay, but I'm better than you."

But we get quickly worse when we start to say, "It's us against you."

And then it's even worse when we say, "It's us or you.

You're evil," as Boyd said.

So the scale will show us how we score.

When you get to the dignity scale, you start to see people who call for equal time.

We have great traditions in this state of senators and governors and others who have been passionate about even higher levels of finding common values.

That's a six on our scale.

Seven, you're starting to look for not just common values but the places you disagree.

"How can I learn from you even on things about which I disagree?"

And at the top of our scale, an eight, "I see myself in you no matter what, even when we passionately disagree."

What's powerful about the index, Jason, is that it allows us to have a way of objectively seeing the way in which contempt operates within us and objectively seeing the option for dignity.

So it's not just a liberal telling me I'm operating with contempt or a conservative telling me I'm operating with contempt.

It's me objectively seeing my own contempt.

That has a way of kind of surprising us.

I'd say this is true on both sides of the ledger.

People will see it, and they go, "Ooh, I didn't think of myself as being contemptuous."

One woman said to me, "I don't know what to tell you.

I hate hateful people."

And she said, "After seeing the index, I realize I have become what I loathe."

That's, in a way, a synopsis of what so much has happened in our politics.

People don't think of themselves as being contemptuous.

They think of themselves as being self-righteous.

What has crept in is that we have become what we loathe.

We are too often resorting to dehumanizing contempt in order to advocate for dignity and change.

- Jason, there is a really important point here, and that is that there's a lot of ideals, things that we want to model in life and do, but dignity is one of those things that's inherent.

You know, we all have dignity as human beings, and, you know, you can't take it away, and you have to celebrate it.

And this is one of the most important things I've learned from the Dignity Index is we wanna be trustworthy, we wanna be all these great ideals, you know, attributes in life, but dignity's one of these things that's universal.

Even people that I violently disagree with in my heart or whatever, when I get to a dignified space, I make room for them because I love them as a brother and sister.

- Yeah, and I think this is so important, what Natalie is pointing out, because as we look at people, this is not about speech police, this is not about group hugs and kumbaya and glasses that are rose colored or half full or half empty.

This is about how we see each other and the dignity across our differences.

This country is at its best when we are a country of big ideas and open, roiling debate about the things we want to do together as a country.

And so, to Tim's point, this is not about me walking around, saying, "Well, you were only a seven, and, you know, you were really low on the scale there."

This is a me moment.

This is an opportunity for each of us to look in the mirror and say, "Where am I?"

Because the change that this requires and the change that I think this demands is, dignity is not a slogan.

Dignity is not a campaign bumper sticker.

Dignity is a national imperative, and it's a national imperative that I believe has gotta become a shared project of the American people.

And so dignity, it can't be a slogan.

It is an imperative, and it has to be a shared project.

- I love what you're saying, Boyd, and I also love that it can start here in Utah.

And I'll just say that as a native Utahn and someone who spends my whole career, you know, thinking about the Utah economy, Utah demographics.

but we have characteristics that make it so we can be a national leader here, and I'd love to hear you just comment on that as someone who lives out of state, Tim.

- Well, you know, I think a lot of your viewers are watching this and going, "Oh, that's all nice, but that's not politics."

Politics is blood sport, politics is vicious, politics depends on aggression and fury and hostility.

- Bone on bone.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Yeah.

That's just not true.

And I think we gotta be a little bit just told the truth here.

That does not have to be the model of leadership in the country.

I'm not saying it's never been before, I'm not saying it's only now, but it doesn't have to be that way.

And the reality is that if we wanna make progress on big issues, including issues that are of deep moral value to us, of deep personal value, if we wanna make progress on big issues, we can no longer do it, we've seen this, we can't get there by dehumanizing the other side.

It just won't work.

So no matter how passionate your beliefs are, no matter how jaded you may feel about politics, this is a challenging moment to say we gotta try a different strategy.

- Yeah, and this politics actually goes back to the founding of the country.

So if you go back to Philadelphia in 1787 and all that they hammered out and all that they hashed out to create that Constitution, I think one of the most important things was the letter George Washington sent with the Declaration because it gave the secret sauce to the miracle of Philadelphia.

First, he said that everyone was willing to allow those minor things to be minor, not so rigid on inferior things.

But then he said that the real secret sauce of Philadelphia and the Constitution was the way all of those people around the table approached it from a position of amity, mutual deference, and concession.

So amity is friendship.

Mutual deference is the Dignity Index.

Who knew it started in 1787?

And concession, the integrity of compromise, that compromise is not a bad thing.

It's the integrity of compromise.

And so we've been doing this since the beginning.

We sort of lost our way, but that's a pretty way to get to the Dignity Index and how we can do it better.

- And key to that is the ability to listen to people who have different life experiences.

You know, you form your opinions, your worldview from your life experiences, but you have to respect people enough to know that they have a different path and they've come to different conclusions.

And by listening to them, you take a step closer to them.

Now you've respected them, and they might take a step closer to you.

- Tim, I wanna get to some practical applications of the Dignity Index.

It pulls all this together.

You've done some coding on some recent debates.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Maybe just give us an idea.

So how does this put into effect when you're listening to certain phrases and you're giving it sort of, you know, giving it a number?

- Yeah, well, we scored the presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Harris.

We scored the vice presidential debate between Governor Walz and Senator Vance.

The first debate, the presidential debate, and neither candidate, I'm sorry to say, scored very high, both candidates.

And you can see these scores on our website at dignityindex.us.

You can see that both President Trump and Vice President Harris both used what we would call three language and occasionally two language, which two is just north of a call to violence.

So it's kind of disappointing, I would say, not in a partisan sense but in a national sense.

When you get to the Walz/Vance debate, we found a seven, which is almost an eight.

We found both of them acknowledging the potential that they were wrong, acknowledging the goodness and the good intention of the other.

Listening... Not always, by the way.

There were some threes in the vice presidential debate too.

But what I think is that, you know, when people say, "This can't work in politics," I say, "Well, look at the vice presidential debate."

These are pretty senior, you know, leaders, two people, candidates for national office who are showing us, and my view is somebody in politics told them, "It's time to show some dignity because that's what swing voters care about."

This is the other, I think, kind of secret message here, Jason.

Everyone in the national race is...

Sadly, they're not looking at Utah.

You're not gonna get a lot of political ads here.

But in the swing states, they're trying to advertise into undecided voters.

And the question we've asked is, why are they undecided?

Here we've been in this race for, depending on how you count it, five or seven years.

Why are they undecided?

The reason we believe they're undecided is 'cause they're disgusted by the contempt in politics.

If you wanna win an undecided voter, and I think both Governor Walz and Senator Vance know this, if you wanna win an undecided voter, you're gonna have to show them that you can change the tone of the debate and actually work with the other side to solve problems.

That's their second conviction of the undecided voter.

They're disgusted by contempt, they wanna solve problems, and they think we have more in common than that which divides us.

So there's a hidden constituency for this work.

It's not on the wings.

It's in the vast 60, 70, 75% of the center.

But we saw, in these two debates at least, evidence that there's still those who believe that contempt wins, but there's also some signal in both parties that that may be changing.

- We've had some interesting conversations with elected officials in Utah to try to get to this reality.

And, Natalie, you were connected to one of those speeches that was given by our lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson.

She was talking about political violence and threats.

And in the context of what's happening with her, she's getting threats, but she's kind of taken the discussion a little farther than just threats to her.

I'm gonna show a little clip and then kinda through the lens we've just been talking about, evaluate her message that she has for voters in the state of Utah.

- These are threats that are intended really to disrupt our system, to disrupt our processes.

They're really threats to the voters.

They're threats to our democracy.

They're threats to the systems, the political institutions that are in place to preserve individual rights and secure a free government.

And that is the message that I hope people take.

Threats to me are one thing.

But this is not about threats to individuals.

These threats matter to the whole system.

- Wow, I mean, I praise Lieutenant Governor Henderson to the rooftops.

Think how lonely it is to stand out there and speak with candor on this issue in the Republican Party as the only statewide elected woman in our state and to do it with such eloquence and, you know, very articulate.

She got an envelope with white powder delivered to her office.

That's how bad this is.

And yet she stood in front of a group of students at the University of Utah.

And that was not lost on me.

She was talking to the younger, rising generation.

"We are better than this, and it's time we change."

So I think it's terrific, and I'll just add that I'm watching as women in this state, whether it's the League of Women Voters, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, our lieutenant governor, the female majority on the Utah Supreme Court, and the large voting bloc that is women, what they're doing to affect public policy in the state.

- Boyd, just one more comment on this too.

She talked about the threat is to individual rights and our freedom as Americans and as Utahns.

She put the pretty big lens on the danger there.

- Yeah, and she's absolutely right.

And ultimately it undermines our trust in the system.

We've stress tested our nation under pandemics and world war and economic collapse.

We've never totally stress tested it in the absence of trust, and whether that's the trust in the institution or, more importantly, the trust that we have for one another is the real challenge.

And I just wanna echo what Natalie said in terms of the role of women in this process.

I believe the First Lady of Ukraine was right when she said that the future of freedom will have a very feminine face in Ukraine, and it's because of what those women are doing there and the voices that they're raising.

It's the same in Afghanistan.

It's the same here in terms of, how do we get to the issues that matter most, not the emotion that matters least?

- Yeah, well, and one other quick point, and, Tim, you need to weigh in, but we need it from our own actions, but we need it from our leaders.

And that's what she's emulating.

She's leading.

- I think the other point I'd make here is that some people will hear this and think their passions are being told, we're telling them to tamp down your passion.

If you're stridently believing something is incredibly important, if you wanna burn it down, you know, if you're on the fringe, you know, in the more extreme positions, you are just so passionate, you wanna just burn the whole thing down, I don't want you to hear us saying, "Don't be passionate."

I don't want you to hear us saying, "Don't follow your beliefs."

I don't want you to hear us saying, "Just relax a little bit.

Take the stress out of..." No, that's not what we're saying.

What we're saying is most passionate people are passionate because they see contempt in charge.

From the right, you see contempt in charge in certain institutions.

From the left, you see contempt in charge in certain institutions.

The goal here is to reduce the malevolent force that contempt has in...

So if you wanna burn it down, what you probably wanna burn down is the presence of contempt in this country or in your state or in your local community.

Don't use contempt to attack contempt, not because it's not nice, but because it doesn't work.

- Yeah, that's the point.

- That's the point.

That's the point, that by being more loving in your discourse, you actually get more of what you're passionate about.

- Let's give some of these ideas that you have... And by the way, we're gonna link the Dignity Index on the "Hinckley Report" website so people can follow with this.

But you have been proposing some ideas, what you call building skills for dignified disagreement.

I just wanna hit a couple of these.

These are practical tips for those of us who are watching and listening about what we can do.

The first one, I think, is interesting.

It's be curious, not furious.

You know, sometimes it's hard to be curious when you are furious.

- Yeah, well, the problem we all have is that when we're in a debate...

This is only about what you do when you disagree.

So if you and I are in a disagreement, I'm starting to marshal my argument about how I'm gonna oppose you as you're talking.

All we're saying here is, before you marshal your argument, first dive deeply into the other person's argument.

Before your fury takes over and derails the possibility of actually understanding, let your curiosity marinate a little bit.

Ask a few questions.

One of the best questions we suggest people ask is, just say, "Tell me more."

"Jason, I don't understand your point of view.

Tell me more."

As opposed to, "I don't understand your point of view, you fool."

You know?

- And, Tim, that's an expression of humility, is it not?

- Yes, intellectual humility.

- It's an expression of humility, and it's also an expression, if you're just...

I wanna appeal to people who are really Machiavellian about this.

It's also the capacity to find out what really is motivating you so I can convince you that my position's better.

So you can look at this from the point of view of being, you know, more blessed or more kind or more compassionate, but you can also look at what's gonna advance political discourse for your side.

You know, one of the things that politicians will say, and I've recently heard a politician say, "Look, you say be curious, not furious.

I'm furious!"

He said in the meeting, "I'm furious."

I said, "Okay, all right, you're furious."

He said, "But I like this idea of challenging ideas and not people."

Another one of our skills.

So what we will say to people is when, "I wanna hold you accountable for your terrible position."

Challenge the position, the policy, the outcome, the data, all fair game.

If you wanna disagree about the border or education or tax rates or schools, challenge the policy, the program, the outcome, but don't attack or dehumanize the person, again, not because it's nice but because it will backfire on you.

- Go ahead, Boyd.

- And you gotta have not just curiosity.

I think you have to have radical curiosity.

You have to wonder, "I wonder why she thinks that's the best solution."

- He's so good.

- Yeah, you have to take it to that next thing.

- He's such a good man.

- And then if you must speak, ask a question.

As Tim pointed out, "Tell me more."

Get a little bit deeper and really listen.

We always say, "Speak in anger, you'll give the best speech you'll ever live to regret."

And anyone who's married has been there and done that.

But I think the other component to this is the intellectual humility of approaching people with an open hand rather than the fury of a closed fist because that changes everything in that conversation.

If that person feels like I'm coming at them with a two-by-four, they're gonna be in a defensive crouch.

They're completely unpersuadable, unmovable from that position.

So if you're coming with an open hand and a series of questions, you're genuinely listening, and you're radically curious, you're gonna have a very different conversation.

It doesn't matter what the issue is.

- This gets to, as one of your skills, too, Natalie, is one of these points here is, listen to hear, not to respond, which is kind of connected to these points we've just mentioned.

- Right.

Well, if you're listening, you're learning.

And we need to learn there's reasons why people feel the way they do.

Their life experiences led them to a different spot than you.

And so I think listening's a skill.

I also think regulating's a skill.

We have a regulate, then debate.

- Yep.

- Very good.

- And regulating is this thought- - [Tim] You're paying attention.

- of I'll call it metacognition or thinking about thinking about trying to understand what's putting your emotions in the place that they are.

And I'm doing this with my hand 'cause it's like, get to a higher place in your mind where you're actually thinking intellectually about something rather than emotionally.

- Tim, we have about one minute left.

Give us where this Dignity Index is going, what we should be looking for in the coming months, maybe just how we apply it in the next month.

- Look, everybody watching this is interested in politics.

First thing to do is tune out contempt-based sources of media.

And I know people say, "Well, I gotta get it from Fox," or, "I gotta get it from MSNBC," or, "I gotta get it from here."

When you click on contempt, you are paying for it, and you are enhancing it.

Stop.

We can all curtail our intake of contempt.

And everybody knows where they find it, and everybody knows what it does for us.

We can reduce it.

Second thing is talk to your own party.

Talk to your own and say, "I love you as a candidate, Natalie, I'm so supportive of you, but the last email I got from you is full of contempt.

I'm not gonna give to that email.

Send me another email that reminds me of why you're the best candidate or what's good about the other candidate, and I'll give."

So these are things that can practically give us all the power as constituents and as politically invested citizens to make the difference.

- Great insights from all of you.

Thank you for this important discussion.

And thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast on pbsutah.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

- [Announcer] Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by Merit Medical and by contributions to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues)