Papers on Political Tolerance and Education

Abstract

America’s political culture is in rough shape. For the first time in America’s history, a former president (and leading presidential candidate) has been convicted of a suite of felonies related to his political career (Sisak, et al., 2024). Polling conducted in the wake of the conviction suggested the verdict had done little to undermine his support among roughly half of the voting public (Orth, 2024b), many of whom see the prosecution as politically motivated (Monmouth University Polling Institute, 2024). Not long after his conviction, a gunman with ambiguous motives (Stein & Barrett, 2024) attempted to assassinate him at a rally, wounding the former president and killing a bystander (Colvin et al, 2024). On the social media site Reddit, many detractors of the former president expressed little sympathy, with some going as far as to lament the failure of the attempt on his life and cast the deceased rally-goer as deserving his fate for his noxious politics. Meanwhile, dueling conspiracy theories — that the assassination attempt was a “false flag” operation engineered by the president to garner sympathy or that the assassination attempt was orchestrated by the current administration or organs of the “deep state” to stop the former president’s return to power — were widely circulated across a number of platforms (Sanders, 2024). While empirical studies have produced competing accounts of the depth and prevalence of Americans’ appetites for political violence (Kalmoe & Mason, 2022; cf. Westwood et al., 2022), there is a broad consensus that antipathy towards both political elites and everyday partisans of opposing affiliation is widespread. Unsurprisingly, political strife and partisan alienation have made their presence felt in our nation’s schools, as well. On college campuses across the country, a year of protests against the Israeli military operation in Gaza has divided the public on questions of tactics and substance (Orth, 2024a), toppling administrations at prestigious universities (Associated Press, 2024), whose responses failed to convince stakeholders that they were navigating the crisis with moral clarity and procedural evenhandedness. These conflicts have brought to the surface simmering debates about ideological bias at the country’s colleges and universities, mirroring the flurry of activism, lawsuits, and legislation aimed at addressing purported indoctrination in primary and secondary schooling. Some have estimated that the role of concerted influence campaigns in stoking divisive discourse aimed at weakening the country or advancing specific objectives through shaping social consciousness has been substantial (e.g. Elmas et al, 2021), but methods for empirically verifying this behavior are still being developed (e.g. Schoch et al., 2022). For many Americans, a general awareness of misinformation and propaganda has left them skeptical about the quality of information they encounter (Park et al, 2020), if not rigorous in applying their skepticism evenhandedly (Lyons et al., 2021) or immune to the effects of encountering inflammatory or inaccurate discourse (van der Lind, 2022). Faith in the country’s core institutions is low (Saad, 2023) and dislike of those with opposing politics is high (Pew Research Center, 2022). These circumstances are both symptoms and potential accelerants of affective political polarization (Iyengar et al., 2019): made less recognizable to one another by social and geographical sorting and enmeshed in a new world of stimulus thanks to the rapid reconfiguration of our informational environments, Americans have found themselves absorbed into partisan tribes who suspect the worst of their opponents. From within our suspicious and isolated social enclaves, our contacts with one another — often mediated by entertainers and other information brokers short on incentives for nuance— seem only to confirm our morbid suspicions. While much of the public remains apolitical or otherwise inconsistent in their views and while majorities recognize and wish for alternatives to the acrimonious status quo, these dynamics can seduce even those who wish things were different into behavior that props up the cycle of mistrust and alienation. Under these circumstances, bad information can more easily circulate and acute acts of aggression are more easily rationalized by the supposed moral depravity of our opponents. Leaders promising safety and radical changes to governance as preemptive strikes against the machinations of opponents gain traction and latent threats that might at some earlier stage of conflict have reflected paranoid misperceptions can materialize into reality as mutual suspicion accrues and tips into hostile action. For many proponents of democratic education, schools of all kinds and levels have an important role to play in developing both the epistemic and moral capacities of citizens required for peaceful, principled, and diligent political participation. As the snapshot of social and political dysfunction above suggests, I believe that there are significant opportunities to improve political education in America and that the need for scholarly attention to that end is pressing. This dissertation represents an attempt to contribute academic resources to understanding and mitigating political dysfunction wrought by social alienation. At the center of this project is a concern with tolerance, or our willingness to refrain from hostility against those we dislike. Rather than being a panacea warranting uncritical promotion, I believe that studying tolerance and its role in interrupting cycles of conflict reflects a promising foothold for both normative and empirical explorations of political behavior and the role of education in preparing the citizens for democratic life. In the context of our heightened intergroup suspicions, however, tolerance itself has been subject to increasing skepticism as either a normative ideal or a locus of empirical inquiry. In these pages, I offer a defense of using tolerance as both a lens through which to interrogate our political behavior and, when properly configured, as a normative ideal necessary but not sufficient for regulating civic conflicts. In chapter one, I offer a novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring political tolerance. I begin by advancing an argument that the composition of tolerance should be tied to behaviors that protect the cooperative relational standing of relatively equal opposing groups. I use this framing to offer a critique of one common approach to measuring political tolerance and propose that measuring what I call civic tolerance better reflects both the role of tolerance imagined by key liberal democratic theorists and the empirical insights of social psychology and related fields that demonstrate the interrelatedness of social mistrust and political attitudes. I then report on results of a pilot study for a novel measure of civic tolerance which I find better predicts selective withholding of resources on the basis of partisan identity in survey simulations than either a widely used measure of political tolerance or a measure of negative affect on its own. In chapter two, I extend the descriptive formulation of civic tolerance developed in the previous chapter to offer a partial normative account that can form the basis of an educational program to cultivate tolerance. I defend the legitimacy of tolerance education in public schools by attempting to show how my conception of tolerance meets the demands of Rawls’ restrictive justificatory neutrality and contend that tolerance education enjoys special prospects for reducing looming sectarianism by virtue of not just its substantive ambition to cultivate restraint in political conflicts, but furthermore in its political modesty, which marks it as a plausible site of agreement between otherwise opposed factions. In chapter three, I turn my attention to a problem of practice that arises when teaching under conditions of polarization. I offer guidance for embattled educators on how to deal with epistemic challenges involved in differentiating between issues that should be taught as controversial and those that should be taught as effectively closed for serious debate. I criticize the practicability of standard frameworks for distinguishing between open and closed issues on the grounds that they fail to account for the effects of non-rational influences on educators’ decisions, particularly under conditions of acute social and affective polarization. I argue that educators best respond to this challenge by shifting students’ attention to the socio-cognitive features of the decision-making environment itself, thereby hedging against bad calls about how to teach given issues and helping to advance students’ political and epistemic agency by making them more aware of the function of their own minds. Across these papers, I aim to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary work in addressing the challenges facing individuals and educators. The socio-political challenges of the present (and foreseeable future) require an orientation to political education that is normatively non-parochial, empirically grounded, and practicable. While the work contained in this dissertation provides only a tiny fraction of the intellectual resources necessary for rising to this challenge and can hardly be said to transcend controversy or resolve legitimate differences of value and perspective, by attempting to reach across both domains of inquiry and sites of controversy related to the broader question of how we should approach tolerance within political theory and civic education, I hope this dissertation exemplifies how understanding complex social problems can be served by broad interdisciplinary inquiries.