Image by John Ritter

It’s not just that Americans can’t find a middle ground on tax policy or abortion rights anymore—political polarization has sunk to a depth from which Americans can no longer see eye to eye on what is fact and what is not. In their case about the 2016 US presidential election, “Everybody Knows: Russia and the Election,” Professors Rawi Abdelal and Rafael Di Tella examine the shifting media landscape and geopolitics that contributed to this moment. Di Tella is an economist who has studied Latin American populism, the media, and the collapse of political conversation associated with populism; Abdelal is a political scientist who has studied Russia for the last 25 years and directs Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Here, they sat down over Zoom to talk with the Bulletin about the prospects for navigating a way out from the chaos of polarized politics.

The fact that Americans can’t agree on facts right now isn’t a unique experience. What does historical context suggest about breaking the cycle of misinformation or finding a way to move forward?

Rawi Abdelal: I think that pushing against the idea of American exceptionalism on this point is really, really important. Hannah Arendt, the German-born American political theorist, described a very similar phenomenon in the 1930s, and she had this wonderful quote about how people believed everything and nothing at once. They simultaneously believed that everything was possible and nothing was true, which sounds a lot like the moment through which we’re living, but they managed to get there without Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.

I do have a certain kind of hope for generational change in two ways. Enough mayhem was created by polarization in the 1930s—and we’re talking about economic calamity, world war—that there was a collective, societal, postwar understanding that what we had done in the 1920s and 1930s was so dangerous and so harmful, we just needed to agree to live in the center of the political spectrum. The center left and center right became very strong in the West, at the expense of the extremes. Which is eventually why some people felt disenfranchised, and the populist left and the populist right figured out that there were a lot of people who felt their views were not being expressed in the system. So it could well be that we create enough mayhem out of this layering of political polarization that we will collectively come to our senses in the next generation.

The other generational hope that I have is for the younger people. Kids these days are not on Facebook. That’s for grandpa. They don’t interact with social media in the same way, and the social media with which they do interact mostly doesn’t have putative news on it. The first generation of social media users, by contrast, didn’t have the proper training. My generation just assumed that anything we read on Twitter and Facebook is probably true. So I’m hopeful that we will either educate the older among us; or, if we fail in that, at least the younger generation will have grown up with a presumption of incorrectness for the things that they read online.

Rafael Di Tella: What Rawi is describing, with the center left not being very different from center right, that’s in the context of a very successful economic development moment for Europe and Western countries. Poorer countries have had a much more difficult time, and lots of voices emerged with lots of disorder. We’ve been trained to understand that bias on the left or bias on the right is the main danger, but there are other ways in which this new media landscape is making demands on us. That has always been the case outside the United States in smaller markets. The biggest source of bias is not that it becomes more left or more right; it’s whether the government intervenes in the media or not. I’m interested to see how this changing media landscape is going to be resolved in the United States, and I think the interest in trying to regulate the big social media companies is all related to this part: We don’t know exactly how to think of them.

It also used to be that there were people on the left and people on the right. Now there seems to be a third group, which is just trying to figure out what is going on. That group hasn’t been served very well by this tendency for people to interpret information in this heroic way, to make everything more extreme. Even people I admire in many other dimensions do this all the time, catering to the extremeness of the conversation. Paul Krugman is an example of that.

My thoughts these days are about how we can leverage the moderates much more than before. In the old days, when the disagreements were about relatively narrow issues, and it was more about preference, it was good to have the voices on the left or on the right to make it clear why one direction would be preferable to another. But now, when the extremes are disagreeing over facts and they’re shouting, they don’t give me time to understand whether evidence is actually convincing. The moderates are carrying the conversation for me, and I think our failure is that we haven’t found a business model or a way of hearing them more.

RA: Make the center cool and sexy again!

I think the challenge that we have is to think about the different kinds of problems that have been created. Some people are just living in little, closed-information bubbles and echo chambers. They would be open to things that were true, or at least more true, if only they were exposed to them. That’s the easier kind of problem to solve. The harder problem is when people are seeking out information that confirms their existing beliefs, and they have become so paranoid about the authorities and truth, and being lied to, that they’re willing to believe a number of improbable things. It’s not really just giving them better information or giving them access to better information. Breaking a cycle is a harder thing to resolve.

RDT: I’m part of a team studying some of these topics, so I’m constantly thinking about possible solutions. In my paper, we’re looking at what happens when you allow people to watch a debate with access to Twitter and without access to Twitter. It seems that for people who are already in echo chambers, when you don't give them Twitter access and you take away their cell phones, they become more polarized, not less polarized. The reason appears to be that, for many people in these echo chambers, Twitter has become a part of their education, and the echo chamber is part of their psychological containment.

Where did your thoughts on this story land, after researching, writing, and teaching the case?

RA: Where I came out is that truth-space dysfunction in the United States—which also exists in many, many places outside the United States—was not a creation of a Russian disinformation campaign. It was that the “Russians” discovered this dysfunctional truth space and then took advantage of it. I think that whoever was responsible must have been absolutely shocked by the outcome. There was not, as far as we can tell, a plan to put President Trump into the White House. In my own view that can’t have been the plan, because nobody thought that was possible. But someone spent tens of thousands of dollars—that’s a rounding error in grand strategy—posting nonsense on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and the so-called paragon of democracy in the world collapses into a heap of uncivil discourse and an inability to agree on what’s true and what’s not true.

If we think about it that way, it makes the question of what the United States could do about it much, much harder. This is just a weakness. Are we supposed to ask other countries to please not take advantage of it? If we want to fix the problem in geopolitics, it’s not going to be by begging countries to leave our weakness alone. We have to resolve the weakness.

RDT: The information landscape used to be something that was controlled by each country. It was ours. We had a couple of newspapers, TV channels, radio, and we knew which person did what. And then we said, okay, let’s democratize the media. Then there’s many more players, it’s pretty chaotic, and there’s no longer the presumption that the national borders contain the conversation. Before, there was just no chance for an Argentine to have their opinions heard on the American elections; but, now, perhaps there were a few Russians who had a ridiculous audience in the United States. It’s like we’ve invited more people to our little conversation, and it is a much more serious problem. And they’re private actors, so it's an extraordinary thing, depending on what you think about democracy and information.

If a company from Ghana invented some kind of nuclear missile and wanted to bring nukes through the United States on their way to Canada, you wouldn’t think that was okay. You would say, “Let’s regulate that. It’s an important thing; we want to know who’s doing what.” I think this new information landscape has gotten completely beyond our understanding. The main actors running the show are private companies that work in ways we don’t totally understand, and I think the capacity of the United States to understand it is stretched.

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