Fifteen Questions: Theda Skocpol on The Election, The Ivory Tower, and The New England Patriots

Theda R. Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology and a former Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: I’ve seen a lot of discourse online as to whether the outcome of the presidential election was something that was foreseeable or not foreseeable. I’m curious as to where you weigh in on that.

TRS: I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, and I thought it could turn out either way. Actually, it could have. The entire thing was within a very small margin.

FM: I watched a lecture that you gave earlier this year on the transformation of the Republican Party in recent decades and how this has fed into increasing the partisan divide. And I wanted to ask, do you see this being something that can be reversed?

TRS: It has to be survived at this point, because the party and the chief practitioner of democracy-challenging, socially divisive politics has just come to the presidency for four years. That’s a profound threat in the U.S. system, because a lot of damage can be done in that period of time.

FM: What would you anticipate some of those changes that democracy will have to survive would be?

TRS: I think we’re likely to see the politicization of the Justice Department, which means overt steps to use the criminal justice system to attack socially vulnerable groups that are out of favor and not perceived as likely to vote for the incumbents.

And you know, that’s not unprecedented in the United States. That’s certainly what happened in the post Civil War, post Reconstruction South. That’s how Jim Crow was installed.

I’m not arguing that this kind of thing has never happened before, but perhaps it’s never happened from the White House in a sustained way.

And that’s before we even get to the fact that America’s place in the world order is going to fundamentally change, and probably irretrievably.

FM: You’ve described Trump as a node upon which various interests that have remade the Republican Party in the last few decades coalesce. To what degree do you believe these interest groups exert influence over the decisions he makes, versus him operating autonomously?

TRS: I think he’s learned over the last eight years to pull together various networks of people who have their own extreme projects that align with what he thinks he wants to do, but you notice that he dumps people in groups very quickly.

But he’s surrounded by a series of policymaking elite groups that want different things from him. They want big tax cuts for the very wealthy. They want racially charged immigration exclusions. They want more Republican judges, and they don’t all want the same thing. So I’m not saying that Trump doesn’t matter. He matters quite a bit. But he wouldn’t matter individually if it weren’t for all of these other groups that have gotten on the bandwagon.

FM: How did political affiliations come to be regarded as something that is inseparable from a person’s identity?

TRS: Here’s how to look at polarization in the United States. If you look at the middle of the 20th century, what you’re going to see is liberals and conservatives in both political parties. So the Democrat-Republican label didn’t line up — when I was a young student protestor, there were liberal Republicans.

It began to change with the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement and the reorientation of the Democratic Party to be more of a northern-centered party and to be more committed to civil rights and full voting rights for African Americans. Then the next wave of change is polarization of the parties over abortion and women’s roles in society.

Abortion is really a question of women’s roles in society, and that unfolds in the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s — with Ronald Reagan becoming the one who moves the Republican Party in the direction of being against abortion rights, anti-feminist in many ways, and also foot-dragging, if not reversing, equal civil rights for African Americans. So you’ve got one division piled on top of another there. And then you get to the current period and differences of opinion across the parties over immigration are piled on top of all of it.

We’re now at the point where people literally line up all of their opinions.

FM: On this topic of the growing partisan divide, you mentioned before that you wanted to talk a bit about the implications of this on campus culture. So what are some of those implications — will it be necessarily harder to engage in bipartisan conversations on campus, or are there other potential consequences as well?

TRS: I hope it won’t be harder, because it’s been pretty hard already. Although I have to say, I think the things that we sometimes hear in the national media — that Harvard is a hotbed of antisemitism and Islamophobia, there are no conservatives here — that’s all balderdash.

I teach classes on topics that are highly charged. I’ve had students who approach these things from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, and haven’t had any trouble at all maintaining an atmosphere for rigorously factual and respectful discussions.

That said, I’m hoping that people will stop arguing about the details of student sanctions for library protests, and take a look at what’s coming, because after Jan. 20, the stakes are going to be a lot more than whether you have to check things out but not walk into Widener for two weeks.

It’s irrelevant once we face the actual threats to the University’s autonomy, to its endowment, and to people here who are vulnerable.

FM: I came across a quote you said before about not wanting to be too drawn into the “elitist propaganda of a place like Harvard.” What does avoiding that mean to you?

TRS: My husband and I go to breakfast to the diner every morning, where we meet people from all walks of life and many different backgrounds.

And we hear a little bit about their political perspectives, and believe me, the full range of perspectives is out there, and it’s better to hear what people have to say.

In my research, I’ve just made a point of actually going out and seeing face to face what’s happening in different parts of the country. And so I haven’t been totally shocked at the rise of Trumpism. I understand some of the popular roots of it.

I don’t have to agree with those at all in my citizen capacity, but as a scholar, I need to understand, and I try to do that in part by getting out from behind the computer and actually talking and listening and observing what’s going on in the Midwest and the Upper South and in all kinds of places. So that’s part of it, but I think the other part of it is just all of us have to realize that we have a lot to offer, but that we have to do it in a non arrogant way.

The universities and colleges, and particularly state universities like Michigan State, where I got my BA, are in great danger, but Harvard is also potentially in danger, and has to avoid making things worse for everybody by being symbolically foolish. And I’m going to say something that some people won’t like at all. I know that there have been a lot of analogies drawn between the pro-Palestinian protests now and the 1960s.

I was once part of that generation that engaged in the anti-war protests against the Vietnam War, and above all, in the protests against racial segregation and in favor of civil rights and voting rights for African Americans.

So I have some perspective on it, and I don’t see the analogy. I am thinking, what if the civil rights protesters on the campuses had pitched a bunch of tents and gone into the libraries and demanded that the universities divest from the South? How much change would that have produced for the country or for African Americans in the South?

They’re targeting the University when the University doesn’t control what’s going on in the Middle East, instead of targeting those who actually are responsible.

Tactical choices and the choices of protest targets make a huge difference in whether you actually change anything.

FM: How should we navigate platforming various ideas and perspectives while trying not to platform something that might be hateful?

TRS: Well, there certainly are hateful people. But I think one of the things I try to do in my classes is to take the focus off the use of words in isolation. I don’t think that prescribing correct words or going into a ladder if somebody mistakenly uses a particular word is the way to go.

I teach a Gen Ed with Mary Waters, and we had a discussion the day after the election, Lord help me. I think I said right out in class that somebody used the word “genocide” to refer to what’s happening in Gaza. And I said, “Well, you know, I don’t really think that’s the right word.”

Why don’t you want to call it, “Mass killing of civilians in a war situation?” That’s what it is. You don’t have to like that, or think that’s good, or fail to condemn it. It’s not good, but it’s not the same thing as systematically rounding up millions of people, putting them on trains and sending them to a gas chamber. Why not use a word that’s precise? So that’s part of it.

FM: We’ve seen the issue of election integrity and distrust in the electoral processes really come to the forefront of American political discussion, especially after the 2020 election. Do you think that this is a one-off issue or something that will continue to grow into the future?

TRS: We have to worry a lot that there will be further efforts encouraged by the new federal government, rather than discouraged by it — and playing out in the states which actually control the mechanics of elections — to make it hard for certain constituencies to vote, and even to not count the votes when they do.

I want to push back against the implication that this is a two-sided process.

Some of the things that everybody was afraid might happen this time — and I think people were afraid left and right — didn’t happen because Trump won. Now, he only won by what’s going to turn out to be 1.5 percentage points. He won by a lot less than Biden won in 2020.

All this talk about a landslide is hooey.

And you have not seen a whimper out of the Democrats about how this isn’t an election we’re going to accept the outcome of. They just don’t say that, because they believe that people should be able to vote and that even if they make what they consider to be foolish choices, those choices need to be respected.

We have a threat against democratic elections and accountability on the right. We do not have it — as of now — on the left.

FM: What do you think of the Electoral College system more generally, and how it isn’t necessarily as representative of that percentage of votes?

TRS: A very large number of Americans who could have voted did not, either by choice or because they thought they wouldn’t make any difference.

I’ll bet you a lot of people who don’t live in the seven states that were defined and constantly talked about as swing states in the media — a lot of those people probably thought, ‘Doesn’t matter if I vote.’ Well, it did matter. It affected the Senate races, the state legislature races, the House of Representatives races, but it’s asking people a lot to operate in this system.

What I think is that politics is not like Scrabble. You can’t just turn the pieces in and start all over again. You gotta start from where you are. I see no route to getting rid of the Electoral College in the near future. Much more effective is for the Democrats to build a stronger presence outside of college towns and metro areas and appeal to broader electorates.

But the consequences in a system where you install a president for four years — with the kind of powers that the U.S. presidency has, not to mention House and Senate for at least two years — the consequences are huge.

FM: So you think four years is too long of a term?

TRS: We could talk about changing these things, but you can’t change these things without changing the U.S. Constitution, and you can’t change the U.S. Constitution very easily. So I’m somebody who believes you should look for the levers you can actually pull.

FM: So what are some steps that you think that the U.S. could take to improve voter confidence or even just the percentage of people voting in elections?

TRS: I think people out there need to see a connection between who they vote for and what happens after that.

But Democrats in particular need to look for ways to actually deliver, and when they deliver, to make it visible that they delivered.

The other thing that’s obvious — and I think it’s been obvious to people on the right for a long time — you build from the bottom up in the American system. You have to have school board elections, you have to have local elections. You have to have state legislatures in particular, and then people get into Congress.

Instead of focusing all your energies on the presidency and assuming that a president can get elected and wave a wand and do all these things — that has not ever been true.

FM: Do you believe the U.S. is moving towards authoritarianism? Or do you believe there are sufficient mechanisms in place to prevent us from ever getting to that point?

TRS: There are no mechanisms in place, Most of them have failed. We are at the point of it being very possible that we could have a long-term soft authoritarian system.

We’ve seen it in other countries. Hungary would be the best example where electoral people come to power and then make elections less relevant, capture the media, use all kinds of corrupt economic patronage to push around media outlets, to push around corporations, to push around university presidents.

I think America is susceptible to that.

FM: You’re a New England Patriots fan. How has it felt watching them this season?

TRS: I think the new quarterback is proving himself.

Everybody at the diner thinks there’s real hope here in the next few years.

And I thought Mayo — I wasn’t sure, but I think he’s beginning to prove himself as a coach. And it’s not easy to follow Bill Belichick. So I hope to see the Patriots rise again.

FM: You say in your bio that you enjoy finding membership ribbons from unions and fraternal associations at antique malls. And I was wondering, how did you get into that? And have you found any good ones?

TRS: My big project, between states and social revolutions and the work on healthcare policy and the work I’m doing now, was about the development of civic associations in the United States.

In the 19th and early 20th century, these fraternal lodge groups were massively large.

I learned early on to look in antique malls for materials for that research, because you can’t go into Widener and find a lot of materials about this, and you can’t click on an internet site and find all this stuff. And then one day, I think I was in Maine, where I spend my summers, I saw one of these badges.

I have 3,000 ribbon badges in my collection. I have them for every ethnic group, every state, men and women, unions and fraternal lodges. And I have a collection for African American groups that is absolutely unique.

So I’ve got to write up on all these groups, and the pictures of my badges are part of it. Of course, I do statistics, I do maps, I do bios of the leaders.

Those are going to be on a website available to the whole world by mid January.

— Associate Magazine Editor Jem K. Williams can be reached at jem.williams@thecrimson.com.