Offline with Jon Favreau - Elizabeth Bruenig on Forgiving Trolls and Strangers

Episode Date: December 19, 2021

The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig joins Jon this week on Offline to discuss something the internet was never built for: forgiveness. Exploring faith, political polarization, and cancel culture, Jon and Liz investigate how finding the capacity to forgive the online transgressions of our enemies, strangers, or just our trolls has never been more important.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

I started thinking, okay, the person who's saying something nasty or being nasty, maybe they're just, you know, they just popped off a bad tweet. So why am I going to respond to that and then keep this whole cycle going? Right. You know, and oftentimes I'll tell myself, like, maybe they probably have a point. I probably am annoying on some level. Yeah, I try to do that too. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was an asshole.

Lena Dunham had a great quote where she said, I guess I'm not for everyone. Yeah. But I now think about that myself when people have valid dunks. I'm like, yeah, well, I guess I'm not for everyone. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Offline. Hey everyone, my guest this week is Liz Brunig, a journalist who's worked at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and now the Atlantic. I wanted to talk to Liz because she's researched

and written extensively about what she calls one of life's most morally challenging tasks, forgiveness. Forgiveness may not seem like a topic that's directly connected to the internet, but one of the things I wanted to do with this series is focus on issues that the internet has made more difficult to solve. And I actually think this is a big one, especially at a time when people seem unusually angry at each other all the time. You see it on planes, you see it at sporting events, and of course you see it all over social media. And it's not just about politics anymore. Nearly two years into this pandemic, people seem angry about almost everything. A lot of this anger is understandable, even warranted. And I don't think any of us want

to live in a society where we don't hold people accountable for the harm that they cause others. But I think it's worth asking what happens if we don't give people more space to learn from their mistakes, to change their behavior, to grow. What does that reluctance to forgive do to us as individuals? What does it do to the larger project of liberal democracy, which only works if we find ways to debate and disagree and live with each other peacefully and productively. Liz and I try to answer these questions as two people who are very online, very opinionated, and very familiar with dumb Twitter fights. We talk about all the spiritual and moral foundations of forgiveness, how the public nature of the internet makes it harder to forgive, and why a healthy democracy depends

on us solving this challenge. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Liz Bruning. So I'm doing this show about all the ways that the internet is breaking our brains. And one thing I worry about a lot is that it seems to be making us angrier, more vindictive, less empathetic, and less forgiving. And I think that makes living in a diverse, pluralistic democracy a lot harder.

So I wanted to talk to you about this for a few reasons. One, you've written and spoken a lot about forgiveness. Two, you're a progressive Catholic young mom who lives in a city and works in journalism, which means that you see the world from quite a few different angles. And three, you seem to be the target of a lot of inexplicable vitriol on Twitter. I see people lose their shit on you like every other week, and I have no idea why. Yeah, I like the idea of kind of having a kaleidoscopic view of the world. I think it's something all journalists should aspire to, just because if you don't see the world from a lot of different angles at the same time, you're missing something.

I would love to start just by hearing sort of how and why forgiveness became important to you. What drew you to this topic? Yeah, so it's a major part of Christianity. I am Catholic. I was raised Methodist in Texas, and I converted to Catholicism later in life while I was earning my degree in Christian theology at Cambridge as a Marshall scholar. I sort of became convinced during my research there and my time there that forgiveness is the single most challenging, morally challenging task of a Christian life. And it's this great moral and ethical riddle. And that's really what I became interested in. And as I became more and more focused on it, I became more and more convinced

that that is sort of the key to peaceful human life. It's interesting. I was raised Catholic, but raised Catholic in sort of a suburban Boston town. And that's when Catholicism was taught to me. It was more about guilt and sort of looking inward. And then I went to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and that's run by the Jesuits. And so that's where I really sort of got a different experience of Catholicism, which is much more related to social justice. And then forgiveness becomes something that's not just about you, but about what you do for others. And that shaped a lot of my social and political views. But I'm sort of wondering,

how would you make an argument about the importance of forgiveness to someone who is not religious? Yeah, I think it's odd, but it's easy to do. It's just a matter of setting up expectations at the top of the argument, which is, you know, what I'm aiming for here is peace. And what you have to understand about peace is it arises out of the ending of a cycle of retribution. And so when someone injures you and someone does something wrong to you, there is a very natural, completely understandable, and I'm not even sure morally impeachable urge to retaliate. Retaliation being politically important and important interpersonally as well. And so I'm not trying to argue for a sort of unsophisticated blank pacifism where you just never respond to injury. But when you do respond to injury with some kind of retaliation. It's never without a collateral.

And it's almost never perceived by the person you retaliate against as proportional, justified, and a settlement of the matter. Yeah. Right. So the person you retaliate is never like, yeah, that's fair. I deserve that. Yeah. So because you have collateral collateral the higher likelihood item

is that you're going to get another retaliation and then another and then another and there's ample historical evidence that this is indeed what happens uh this is what romeo and juliet for instance is about these sort of endless uh know, so distant from the initial injury that it's hard to even remember what the feud is about. The Hatfields and McCoys, another famous sort of American example. And so these are real phenomena that happen. So peace, achieving peace, which is something that democracy relies on, a peaceful, civil society in which you have peaceful exchanges of power and so forth, relies on having some way to resolve conflicts, to deal with the fact that people are going to hurt each other without getting into these

endless cycles of retaliation. How are we going to deal with that? And I think as much as I've thought about this, the answer is we have to have a culture of forgiveness that stops that cycle right there. If somebody slaps you, you give something to them. Now, if you want to see multiple retaliations flying back and forth, you need to look no further than the Internet. To what extent do you think the Internet and social media have made forgiveness harder? say that the internet just highlights tendencies we've always had. But I don't think that's quite true. I think that the internet is something very new in the history of humankind. We've never been able to all talk to each other at once before.

And I don't think it's something we're actually entirely wired for. We're sort of wired to like live in bands of, I don't know, 20 to 50 and only travel within a few miles of where we're born. And obviously what we're wired for doesn't speak to morally what we ought to do. I think it's great and not morally wrong that we're able to all talk to each other at once and go lots of places and be lots of things now. I think that's great. And it's obviously led to many wonderful things. But I do think we haven't developed an ethic this technology in hand yet. We still have ethics that were developed in a time when this kind of technology was simply not available to us. And so I think that yes, the internet, the technology and our capabilities have developed much faster than our moral story about how to behave in these contexts have. I do think the paradox at the heart of the internet is this technology that was supposed to connect us and help us better understand each other by bringing us closer to one another

has ended up alienating us and sharpening our divisions. And I sort of wonder how that came to be. It's like a weird Tower of Babel thing, isn't it? Yeah. It's like, what if everyone in the world could talk to each other? They would probably get together and do something great. It's like, no, maybe they would just get together and do something really evil. There's a psychological phenomenon called group polarization.

You get together with your friends and you're all like, Green Knight's a cool movie. And your friend is like, no, it's a great movie. And then your other friend's like, it is the best fucking movie. And then pretty soon you're all like, there has never been a better movie. And, you know, you spin each other up and you all want to affirm one another's views. And so you end up coming to a more extreme conclusion than any of you went into this conversation with um the group polarization seems to be a major feature of what's going on online um there also seems to be something along the lines of it reminds me of kind of what

you see in road rage that everyone is together and yet everyone is actually alone. You're with a ton of people at once on the highway, but you're actually in a little bubble by yourself. So you feel like you're being affected by the actions of others and you are, and yet you're not face-to-face with them, dealing with them. I've thought about that a lot. And I actually think that the pandemic has made that worse because in normal times, you have that exact experience that you just mentioned about being on the Internet and feeling sort of alone on the Internet, but yet seeing everyone all the time. And you feel like it's easier to yell at someone or dunk on someone or make fun of someone. But then you go and you see your friends and you go out and you see your colleagues and you're talking to them and you're sort of pulled back into normal life where that sort of the attitudes that you get online don't really apply but over the last couple years we've basically just been home and having that sort of road rage

experience yeah absolutely and you i mean as people feel um you know the internet also has this weird effect of making you feel very close to power when in fact you're quite distant from it. So the fact that you can see the president tweeting and tweet back at the country but nevertheless you actually are still quite distant from the levers of power and so that leads to i think the kind of it encourages this discharging of emotions that's um not commensurate with the situation even though it feels like it is um and and so all kinds of people become symbols of situations, laws, conflicts that then provoke this discharge of emotion, even though getting pissed and yelling at them is not going to affect anything. It just makes you feel better. And the other difference is I think offline forgiveness tends to happen between individuals. You hurt me. I forgive you. Online, there are almost a lot more people involved who weren't the target or the perpetrator of the offense.

What does that do to the whole process? Yeah, I think that's really complicated. And that's one of the areas where, again, we have a moral story that kind of needs to develop along with the technology. So one thing that people ask me a lot is, well, what about, how do you forgive, for instance, someone who is sort of broadly canceled, who didn't do anything to you, but, you know, you are still responsible for letting them back into public life or not, right? You hold the keys in some sense because there's kind of, you know, when someone is to be or not to be uncanceled, it just kind of has to do with a critical mass of people deciding I'm going to laugh at their joke or not. Right. And of course, there's public risks to making that choice as well for the other people.

Right. Right. Absolutely. And so, so you know when they're weighing that out and deciding how am i going to justify this decision or not how am i going to tell a story about why i decided or didn't decide to forgive it's difficult when the person didn't actually injure you to which i say well it's strange because cancellation is is not a brand new phenomenon there's always been some sense of shunning or ostracism, but those typically took place in small communities of people who really knew each other, not communities of tens of thousands of people who've never met each other.

And so I tend to think, you know, the way to talk about cancellation really is more in line with the way that sort of prison abolitionists and criminal justice reform activists have talked about like banning the box, about reintroducing ex-felons into society, even though there's a lot of sort of hue and cry about suggesting a continuity between those things. But I think there is. I mean, no, I was going to ask that because, you know, I know you've talked about this before, but you know, conservative ideology tends to sort of line up with an Old Testament view of justice, right? Like your mistakes and failures and offenses aren't society's fault. They're your fault and your responsibility. They tend to believe in capital

punishment or locking people up who've committed crimes for years, if not life. But, you know, progressives tend to believe in second chances, rehabilitation. We don't like over-incarceration. We don't like the death penalty. We want re-entry and rehabilitation programs. Why do you think then that some progressives have trouble forgiving people who've apologized for shitty tweets or shitty views? I think that's a good question. I mean, I have heard all kinds of theories about this, some more inflammatory and some less. I have a philosopher friend named Liam Kofi Bright, and I want to credit him with this because it is inflammatory. He said, you know, it's hard to look at people who are completely comfortable with the reintroduction

of offenders who have committed violent crime, committed felonies, and say, look, ban the box, let them have jobs, let them have a shot at becoming a part of society again they've done their time uh but don't feel the same way about podcasters who had you know shitty opinions said shitty things slid into dms etc and not think they just don't care that much about the people against whom violent crimes are committed. Largely poor people, people of color. But they're very offended on behalf of people against whom shitty Twitter behavior is committed, which are largely people like them. That's a conclusion one could draw prima facie.

I don't know that that is precisely what I suspect. I think that the two things are just weighted differently. And, you know, in the case of criminal justice reform, that's weighted heavily and given serious moral consideration. You know, we need to buckle down and be adult about this. This is time, you know, serious time for serious talk as to where cancellation and sort of pushing people out of social circles and denying them opportunities. It's really difficult to get anyone to sit down and talk bunch of childish like cancel culture is not real. Like get a grip. Come on. Oh, I'm so sorry. You didn't get to do your comedy club. Like it's very difficult to get someone to talk to you like an adult.

Well, the argument that you hear and I do think there's, you know, I've thought about this a lot because I think there's some validity to it is that those okay cancel culture isn't real or it's certainly not a problem on par with racism or misogyny or inequality or the many other justices that we're all grappling with. And the reason they say that is, one, not a lot of people actually get canceled. It's a small group of people. It just seems like a lot because it's in the news all the time. And two, the people who do get canceled tend to be older, whiter, wealthier, and in positions of power that have traditionally shielded them from accountability for saying pretty shitty things or expressing pretty harmful views. What do you think about that? concerns about cancel culture that are on par with expressing concerns about, you know, a general

overly punitive and especially sort of permanently punitive culture at large, you have to stipulate that it's worse than any of our other social ills. You know, there's just not a zero-sumness to it. In fact, I sort of think the tendency to kind of be bitterly reproachful and hyper-punitive is contiguous with misogyny, with racism. It's part of being a society that just sort of reviles human weakness and prizes strength over all and kind of has a

might makes right, winner take all morality about it. And therefore, women, as we have traditionally been viewed as weaker, as capable uh you know that's your lot in life you have to deal with it men will dominate you just accept it and also if you fuck up if you do something wrong then you're a prisoner then you're a failure then your property of the state then you're a waste then your life is worthless right i mean that's that's kind of the mentality that ties all of these different types of oppression together, I think. sort of obscures one of the larger issues, which could be, you know, there's this much debated political science paper that polled people on the question, do you or don't you feel as free to speak your mind as you used to in 1954? Only 13% said they didn't feel free to speak their

mind. Today, it's around 40%. And I wonder if all the rest of us, as we're watching some of this, you know, social shaming that's happening online, the effect is, well, I don't want to express an opinion that is not part of the collective mindset of my team, whether it's my partisan team, whether it's my ideology, whether it's whatever it may be. Because, you know, it's not like I'm worried about maybe getting canceled, but I don't need a bunch of people just dunking on me on Twitter. So I'm just going to not say anything. And I wonder if that ends up sort of making the work of democracy harder is we're all trying to argue and debate with each other and find the best way. If you're always trying to weigh out whether it's even worthwhile to sort of enter your opinion into the discourse, right right considering the costs um i think that's something that we all do a little bit of right just because there are always sort of marginal costs to entering opinion whatsoever but when you look at again what the dream of the internet was that that one day we would all be able to sort of, you know, enter our opinions into the discourse and be a part of this deliberative democracy with relatively low costs, and it would increase the panoply of views, and America would, you know, become an even more sensitive democracy, growing ever closer to the, you know, multitudinous views and desires of its people and ever more responsive

i mean the opposite has happened and and uh you know it seems that we've become more and more polarized into um clumsier and clumsier iterations of what still remain quite complicated and nuanced views so you've been on the receiving end of quite a few angry missives from random people who are mad online. Sometimes you hit back, sometimes you don't. You're still there every day. You're posting. Can you talk about what your experience has been like and whether it's shaped your views about anger and forgiveness? Yeah. I mean, people often point out that I catch a little heat online. And I never want to say, yeah, you know, it's totally crazy. It's total bullshit.

Nobody has any reason to have a problem with me. I don't mean to stipulate that. There are completely decent reasons to dislike what I have to say. And I don't begrudge anyone that. You know, but then there are people who seem to have a problem with me, not as much politically as personally. You know, there's people who complain about the fact that I bake cookies a lot. What an offense. I know, I know. And I get that there's stuff that's kind of annoying to see on your timeline and so on but you can always just unfollow and um yeah it has it has shaped my my views on anger and forgiveness because i just had to find a way to deal with it. And it's an ongoing process, right? So it does make your inner world kind of crappy.

You know, you're minding your own business. You make some cool looking cookies or a cake or something and you post a picture of it and people respond super pissed off. They're like, this sucks. I hate it. Why do you X, Y, Z? They're very unkind. And you think to yourself, you know, what the hell did I do to you?

This is a cake, man. Like, all of this stuff that you're projecting onto me, it's not who I am. But after a while, you learn trying to convince someone that you're someone different than who they think you are, it's not who i am but after a while you learn trying to convince someone that you're someone different than who they think you are it's not a worthwhile endeavor well it's certain it's certainly a difficult endeavor on twitter twitter right it's like everything that you say to try you know and and it's just and so you know the the better thing to do, not that I always do it, I'm as subject to my emotions as anybody. I'm not, and I want to emphasize this, I'm not morally better or anything like that. I just, I think clearly about this. I try to. It doesn't mean that I feel any differently than anyone else. I am just as subject to my own shitty emotions as anyone. I just try to have clear thoughts about it, about what's happening to me. But what I try to tell myself is like, look, I have days where I have completely ridiculous responses to totally normal things

because I'm going through something. I just try to log off. There are days where I don't even go into, you know, we've all got our off-the-record friend slacks full of totally, you know, totally bullshit remarks where it's just our buddies talking about nothing. That is the valve. That is the valve. That's the pressure valve. And there are days where I'm, you know, preparing to go bitch in my friend's slack. And I'm like, you know what, they don't need my negativity right now. Like they're vibing in there talking about Speed Racer. They're like, you know, fan casting,

whatever film they want to make the next James Bond or something. And they don't want to hear me complain. And I just log off. I just get off and do something else with my time. But that's where I try to refocus my energy because it's just not productive. It's not helpful. And like, you spend too long just kind of wound up in the worst things that strangers think about you and your internal climate. It's like the world inside you, it becomes like dark and shadowy. And you would just rather that not be the case. No, I mean, I loved your point about, you know, you can often pop off when you're like going through something. And one of the things that I've tried to learn, you know, when I first, I was always on Twitter when I was in the White House, but I was just looking at tweets. I wasn't tweeting myself because we weren't allowed to back then. When I left, I sort of like went crazy. Now I'm tweeting and I'm arguing with people on Twitter and I'm doing it all and I'm looking at all the mentions and everything. And it's what you said. First of all, I popped off way too much back in those days. And then I read too many mentions and you read like and and you know, the mentions where it's funny,

the mentions where like a bunch of Republicans say crazy things about me, I've stopped caring about it. It's more the mentions when it's like people on your own team, right? People in your own ideology say something bad about you. And then, then that, that hurts a little bit more. But first I tried to stop looking at my mentions so much. And second, I started thinking, okay, the person who's saying something nasty or being nasty, like maybe they're going through something too, right? Or maybe they just popped off. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they are not a bad person who's an asshole. Maybe they're just, you know, they just popped off a bad tweet. So why am I going to respond to that and then keep this whole cycle going? Right. You know, and oftentimes I'll tell myself like, maybe they probably have a point. I probably am annoying on some level.

Yeah, I try to do that too. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was an asshole. I'm sorry. You know, shit. I mean, it's probably obnoxious to sit around and see a bunch of cakes or something like that. My bad. Like, I'm still going to post them. Like, I'm sorry. But, you I, I know that I, you know, Lena Dunham had a great quote. There was that fantastic profile of her that I think ran in New York Magazine. It was very, very humanizing. And it was like after all of these years of people hating on her, a lot of which was just jealousy, a lot of which was for politics, a lot of which was just stuff she said or did when she was young. And like I participated in a bit of that. And then she had this great quote where she said, I guess I'm not for everyone. And I sort of felt bad about all the times that I had given her a hard time. Not that, you know, my private shit talkingtalking among friends

would have ever reached her. But I now think about that myself when people have valid dunks. I'm like, yeah, well, I guess I'm not for everyone. Isn't that interesting that the way, the structure of the platform, especially Twitter but also Facebook, sort of forces you you try to say what you really believe or just be who you really are. And necessarily, that's going to piss off some people and you're not going to be for

it. No one's going to be for everyone, right? Right. No, absolutely. So, you know, you've written about death shaming during the pandemic where some media outlets will cover the deaths of people who aren't vaccinated with notes of shame or contempt. And then people on social media just pile on. And that strikes me as a very online phenomenon, because if you had an unvaccinated friend or family member who died of COVID, you might harbor some anger towards that person for not getting the shot, but you'd also mourn them. And at the very least, like you wouldn't drag

them on Twitter after they died. What do you think sort of leads to the death shaming? Yeah, I mean, there's so much genuine anger about people who choose not to be vaccinated, who had the chance, let's say, who are completely capable of being vaccinated, who were in places where vaccines were plentiful, but who were hesitant and refused, and now they've passed away. I think people who are in those areas feel like they are still under pandemic restrictions precisely because of these people who are vaccine hesitant despite all the evidence and despite having had every opportunity

to go get vaccinated. I think they feel like they're still at risk because there is still relatively low vaccine coverage in some areas of the country because of these vaccine hesitant people and so you know they're mad at people who are unvaccinated but it just becomes very clear who is unvaccinated when these people pass away. And then when unvaccinated people pass away, that's very attractive to media outlets to cover because it seems like a good opportunity to sort of do a little public service journalism and make the point, you know, now, now, remember, you can still die of COVID-19, even if you're otherwise young and healthy, et cetera, et cetera. So you

should really go get vaccinated. I mean, that seems to be what the point of these stories is, is, you know, go get vaccinated because it is still very dangerous. And then you get, you know, again, this sort of shaming that kind of leaks into it because people are angry. People are angry. Well, it's like you said before, though. I think anger in response to that is a completely valid emotion. Sure. You know, and I think it's okay to be angry at those people. I just, I wonder, you know, I think I was tweeting about it once

and people got really mad at me that I just said, well, it's sad, it's heartbreaking that people are dying. It's sad. I might be angry at them for not getting vaccinated. I'm angry at them for putting all the rest of us at risk. But the death of someone is still a tragedy no matter what. And I do sort of worry about what it says about society that we're even treating a death like that as something that we can also sort of score political points on or at least make a political point or at the very least and you brought this up in your

piece like is that the best way to persuade what's our ultimate goal here right which is to persuade unvaccinated people to get vaccinated to save all of us that's our ultimate goal so is this the best way to persuade them right and and here's here's sort of my through the looking glass point that I make about happen to you has already happened. It is always going to have happened. By the time this person is dead, because they did not get vaccinated, they are dead. They already refused to get vaccinated. They already got COVID-19. They are already dead.

And you are angry about it. But the bad thing that was going to happen, the bad thing that they did, and the bad outcome that was going to result from it, it has already happened and is in the past and forever and ever going forward in the history of the universe. It will already have happened. So what good does it do to be angry about it now? People emailed me after that piece saying, you know, they would send me links to caseloads or spikes in weekly caseloads. Say, is it okay if I mock the unvaccinated dead now? And I would just email back, who's stopping you?

Right? Like, they're dead. What are they going to do, kick ass like go ahead but they're dead and they're always going to be dead so the question before you now is what can you do and that's what makes anger over being hurt such a fucked up emotion on some level because you are already screwed and you're always going to be screwed. When you retaliate after someone has hurt you, I've got news, you're still screwed, always going to be screwed. That bad thing that's happened to you, it will always have happened to you. Another reason that I thought about this a lot in my life

is because I had some violent things happen to me in my childhood. Those things are always going to have happened to me, right? And it occurred to me at some point in my adult life, no matter what I do, no matter what path I take, I could settle scores, I could lash out, anything I want to do, I could tell everybody, right? Always going to have happened to me. That's just a fact, right? And so the only choice I have before me now is what is next for me. And I have some measure of control, not total control, unfortunately, over where I go from here. And so for people who are angry about people who choose not to get vaccinated, and the effect that has on the overall pandemic, like you said, totally justified,

completely justified. Coming from my point of view, for me, I would say the best response to that is to try to persuade people to get vaccinated. And I'm not sure that making fun of dead people is, you know, particularly useful in that, in that vein. next door and I offered to make a cake or cookies for anybody in my area who has not yet gotten vaccinated but is looking for a reason. I also offered to go with anybody who just wanted some company. I was like, I'm already vaccinated and I already got it. And if you just want somebody to go with you and people took me up on it. a lot of people are just scared of needles or they're lonely or they live alone i mean you know or they want to know somebody personally who had the vaccine and is okay But I think that impulse to persuade and how do I best persuade, asking the question, how do I best persuade? One of the reasons that I care so much about this topic of forgiveness and anger online and what it means for all of us is not necessarily when you typically hear the cancel culture conversation about the individuals who go through this, though I think that's something to talk about and debate for sure. But again, it is, you know, democracy is based on sort of believing that each of us operates in good faith, right? That's like sort of the foundation of democracy that we can have good faith debates with one another and have

disagreements and have debates and vigorously disagree, but somehow come to an agreement. And I worry that the internet and specifically social media is telling us that maybe we don't have to persuade or maybe persuasion isn't possible because we are used to seeing the people who are way on the other side of the spectrum from us because they're the loudest voices and they're online yelling all the time. And so we think they stand in for everyone else and clearly they can't be persuaded. So now maybe no one can be persuaded and maybe now it's just a power struggle. And, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to be too Pollyannish about this and think like, oh, red states and blue states, we can all come together and find unity. But I think if we don't, if we don't approach a lot of these challenges and problems

with the question, how do I persuade people to see it my way? Or how do I persuade people to compromise? Or how do I persuade people to think differently? And if we don't think like that and put ourselves in people's shoes, I don't know how this project works. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a great book about this by the oxford professor theresa veijan called mere civility which is about the kind of civility you need in a liberal democracy to keep it functioning which is not like the most highfalutin uh uh uh you know good day to you sir like friendly conduct but you do need the type of speech that keeps a conversation going and does stop short of, you know, violence and does, you know,

continue discourse flowing. Right? It doesn't just completely terminate. And again, I know you run into a lot of people who will say things like, yes, but when has the United States ever had actual discourse? Haven't we always been like this? But the answer is no. There have been periods of greater discourse and lower polarization, and it's not just the Cold, consensus. It's not just the immediate period following the world wars that we had that there have been, you know, periods of vigorous debate, but in which there were, you know, interesting, you know, in which, you know, you might say history was still happening because there was lively discourse and then the democracy was still very active and not as sclerotic feeling as it is today. And I'm not sure how you get people to aspire to that again. Part of the rot is the rot in aspiration, right?

I mean, democracy is reliant on this kind of imagined community of people, right? America more so than anywhere else. There's a great essay on nationalism. And I can't remember the author off the top of my head right now, but he says something like, whatever the American people are, and they may well be a sui generis phenomenon. Like there may be nothing else like us before in history. And I think that's true. But we are a nation in that we imagine ourselves to be. And so much of that imagination, imagining ourselves to be this liberal democracy, is actually what causes us to hang together, is what allows this to work. Yeah. Yeah. People completely give up on that just claw, claw, claw until you get caught.

You know, that seems like a real, you know, death spiral. Well, and I mean, I think a lot of progressives would say, look, we're in an existential struggle to save humanity here. The Republican Party is extreme and dangerous. We should be focusing on justice, not forgiveness, not this other, you know, higher kind of civility or solidarity. Like, it's about justice. And that's what we have to do. And that's how we have to fight for. And I get that that's tempting. But I just, I don't know what to do with the other half of the country. Right? Like, we're not going to, they're not going to just go away. go away right we like we kind of have to learn to deal with them somehow yeah i mean i think for those people who say look we're in an existential uh struggle for the fate of humanity and we're beyond the point of forgiveness and we're beyond the point of process and sort of legitimacy in the sort of liberal democratic machinery and we

just have to conquer, um, the Republican party because they're an evil existential threat. Um, then I just say they make a different judgment than I do about where we are in history. If you think that's the case, then what you have to do with the other half of the country is conquer and subdue them. And we have already passed the point where we can preserve our liberal democracy and i don't know what you want to do next i will say that typically liberal democracies are kind of like radioactive material right they're great when they're working well in contained facilities when they start to degrade and the materials that support them break down, they become very dangerous. And I don't really like generally what they degrade into. Um, and so I would think very

carefully about, um, wishing us to be in that stage where, you know, the only thing left to do is try to conquer half the country. I sincerely, sincerely hope, I hear this all the time, even from right-wing relatives in Texas as well, you know, we're on the brink of a civil war, we're on the brink of a civil war. And I say, I cannot tell you how sincerely I hope that's not the case. Oh my God. war. And I say, I cannot tell you how sincerely I hope that's not the case. How awful, how catastrophically and apocalyptically terrible, beyond the worst possible thing that would be. I sincerely hope not. And look, I'm a Democrat. I've been in electoral politics. What I want to do in the short term is win and hold power for sure. But I don't think that those victories are going to, like Republicans in response to those victories are going to be like, oh, you got us this time. We're either going to

change our minds or we're going to go away or we're not going to bother you anymore. Like that's not going to happen. Like I still think I'm going to fight like hell to win, but there's got to be long-term, this is not a solution, right? Unless like you said, we're going to have like dissolve liberal democracy, which is you know, a Bernard brother includes a chunk of the Democratic Party. I want them. I want them to stay. I want them in this. I want them badly.

I want them more than I want the Bernie bros because the Bernie bros already agree with me. I want them more than anything. I want them to agree. I want the chance to persuade them. But to have that chance, I need their buy-in on this project right and so you know anytime i get an invitation to go on a right-wing talk show i've been on ingram uh for instance i've been on fox a couple times matt my husband has done fox business i think several times anytime I get a chance to be on a right-wing talk show you know, a Catholic far-right conference or something,

I take them up on it right off the bat because I want my chance to talk to them. And if even one person emails me after that and says, you gave me something to think about, that's a win. You know? And all I do is I show up, I laugh at the jokes, I don't take myself totally seriously,

and I do my very best to hear them out. You know, it's like any negotiation. You go with a hundred things you want and two you've absolutely got to have. And it's, you know, that's what it is in my mind to be a part of a liberal democracy. But I think more than anything, you've got to want the thing to hang together. Earlier this summer, you wrote, as a society, we have absolutely no coherent story, none whatsoever about how a person who's done wrong can atone, make amends and retain some continuity between their life before and after their mistake. What do you think a coherent story should sound like? That's a good question. I think there's always this sort of weird expectation that if somebody makes a mistake, to talk about a specific, Freddie DeBoer, who is, in my opinion, a great writer, and

he has written extensively about this episode publicly. So I feel like there's no problem with me mentioning it here. But Freddie had a sort of protracted psychotic episode in bipolar disorder. He was off his medication. And he made a false allegation against someone in public on Twitter, which he knew was false at the time. And he retracted it. Shortly thereafter, he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. He got on a medication regimen, pretty high octane medication regimen, which he has sustained ever since. He stepped away from writing for a long time. He publicly stated and has left this post up that it was a false allegation. He knew it was false at the time and so on and so forth. And then after a few years,

he came back to writing. And when he did, I talked to him about it a lot of his friends talked to him about it you know will this be good for you is this what you want to do and you know we i think all mutually agreed what had been bad for freddie was social media writing was always good for him social media was bad for him it's bad for all of us but it affects different people in. Social media was bad for him. It's bad for all of us, but it affects different people in different ways. It was bad for him. And I have the keys to Freddie's Twitter account. I have since he logged off for the last time. Somebody else has the keys to his other stuff.

And so there was an understanding that he was not coming back to social media, just writing. And he has done that. And we, his friends and people who genuinely care about him, and I think friends of people who are canceled play a really important role in sort of mediating between the person and society. But part of society's response to Freddie when he began writing again was, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't get to just come back to what you were doing before. And I thought, well, but this is what he does, right? Like this is his craft. This is his work, right? And he's good at it.

And this is his identity. Does he not have some right to some continuity between what he was before and what he is now? I think so. I think of friends as being another example of the continuity. People perhaps have some hope of holding on to. Now, no one's obligated to be friends with someone. But if someone wants to remain friends with someone who's made a mistake, I'm not sure that should earn them instant social censure, right? Oh, you still know that person? Right. Yeah, well, maybe they're trying to change. Maybe they're changing. But, you know, the stripping of someone's identity in a wholesale way, everything they did, everyone they knew, maybe even where they lived, their line of work, that's a major penalty in line with going to prison. And all I would suggest is if there are ways of mitigating harm or making amends or suggesting a real change outside of that total stripping away of the identity, I would be open to that.

Yeah. Well, it seems like a full public apology is the prerequisite to that. But then after that, a lot of the work you're talking about, again, is work that happens offline with friends and family and having a lot of, I'm sure, as you did, like difficult conversations with the person, right? Like I think that, and that's the kind of sort of nuance that doesn't, that can't really happen in front of everyone in public all the time. They're like, how do we know you've changed? It's like, well, it's something that happens every day. Every single day he doesn't do the things he was doing before. That's how you know. There is no dramatic reveal like a makeover where you like

pull off the mask and it's a whole new you. This is something that you have to see revealed over time. And that's why just as it's very, it's very weird for so many people to be invested in an injury to an individual in that way because um just like you're not actually going to be angry every day like the individual who was injured probably will be you're also not going to care every day like the friend of the person will right so i mean there's a lot of i think uh social media provokes a lot of pretense of emotion where there's not actually that much emotional investment. Yeah, well, I've heard you say this before too, which is forgiveness, much like a 12-step program, it's a one-day-at-a-time thing. Every day you wake up and choose to forgive again.

I think that's probably the case with people who are trying to make amends for some harm that they've caused. Every single day you wake up and you make the choice to be a better person than you once were. And that's all we can all do, I guess. That's it. Yeah. Last question I'm asking every guest. What's your favorite way to unplug from the internet and how often do you do it? Oh, wow. Yeah, I like to do stuff that requires me to use both of my hands because hands that can type are the devil's workshop. So I love baking. I make macarons. I make sugar cookies that are sort of intricately decorated. I'm still learning to do that one. So it's a favorite right now. And I make cupcakes

and layer cakes. And I try to do a little baking pretty much every day. That's good. That's a nice way to sort of unwind and relax a bit. It's really nice. Liz Brunig, thank you so much for joining Offline. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau.

It's produced by Andy Gardner Bernstein and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Holman, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.