Politics Vs Parenting: Why Control Breaks Trust, Relationships, & Democracy w/ Lura Forcum

Watch the full episode: YouTube

Episode Summary

Marketing research expert Lura Forcum explores the parallels between politics and parenting, examining how control dynamics break trust in relationships and democratic systems, and offering insights into building healthier connections.

Key Topics: politics vs parenting, trust relationships, control dynamics, democracy, Lura Forcum, psychology, relationships, political psychology, trust building, behavioral insights

---

Table of Contents

• Introduction and Guest Welcome
• Politics and Parenting Parallels
• Control Dynamics and Trust
• Relationship Building
• Democratic Implications
• Practical Applications
• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

---

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Evan Meyer: 00:03 What a day. Hi Laura.

Lura Forcum (00:05.72) Hi Evan, thanks for having me.

Evan Meyer: 00:08 Do know why today is a great day?

Lura Forcum: 00:10 because we're going to talk about research and data.

Evan Meyer: 00:15 Yes, and also I realized that today is about the four year anniversary, little short of it, but this is like a celebratory podcast today because it's been four years of destroying the us and them narrative on Meyerside Chats and with all the work you do in working to get people to think independently and rationally about all these difficult problems, I feel like it's a great celebratory episode.

So thank you.

Lura Forcum: 00:46 Yes, four years is really impressive. I know how much work goes into these things. So congratulations, that's a huge milestone.

Evan Meyer: 00:55 Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it. Let me do a AI drafted intro to you and then, and I'll pretend that it's not AI and that I'm not reading it either. But I should give an overview and then tell me how I do, all right? All right, here we go.

Lura Forcum: 01:09 Okay.

Lura Forcum: 01:13 All right.

Evan Meyer: 01:20 Laura Forcom is a political psychology practitioner and organizational leader with a PhD in consumer psychology, currently serving as president of Independence Center. She combines her academic training and marketing expertise, including seven years as a marketing professor and previous service as director of marketing communications at State Policy Network to understand how people form beliefs, how to motivate healthier civic engagement.

And her career spans policy organizations, public education, fundraising, PR, and strategic communication, all centered on political persuasion and the psychology of decision making. Through her relationship, sorry, through her leadership, she runs initiatives aimed at reducing polarization by promoting cooperative governments, encouraging civic participation, and elevating pragmatic independent voices over partisan extremes. We think so much alike on so many things, it's so excited to...

Lura Forcum: 02:20 Thank you. That was a nice intro. I like that one. sound, yeah, the facts are right. I'm like, what does AI think of me? This is interesting.

Evan Meyer: 02:23 Did I get all the facts right?

Evan Meyer: **[02:30](https://w

Politics and Parenting Parallels

ww.youtube.com/watch?v=mYZ74qQYNBQ&t=150s)** Well, I plugged it in to get some, you know, I had to do a little plugging. wasn't without some guidance, but I think it thinks highly of you.

Lura Forcum: 02:33 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 02:40 I sound good.

Evan Meyer: 02:41 You sound good. So just brief anything I missed on there. Tell me just to kick things off a little bit about yourself and Independence Center and what you're up to.

Lura Forcum: 02:50 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 02:54 Yeah, so I came to this work in kind of an odd...

direction, I guess. I guess I did a PhD in consumer psychology a long time ago at this point, but my interest has always been in how you reach people with complicated ideas, like public policy ideas, and how you understand what they think and get their values and preferences incorporated into government. So it's really important that we

understand information about people's daily lives and their experiences and the things that are important to them and not when we're making public policy because when we get that wrong, you can really mess up people's lives with public policy. And I've seen firsthand some really big messes. When I was in high school, I actually was an intern working for the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, who at that time, North Carolina had passed this law where if you were

a repeat drunk driver, they would seize your car and sell it and give the money to the school district, which sounds fantastic, right? Like win-win. Money for the school district, punish drunk drivers, stop them from being destructive. Sounds so good. My job that summer was to call sheriffs from every county in the state and hear why they were so mad. And the reason they were mad is because they were paying months of impoundment

fees for cars that were worth nothing because people who are repeat drunk drivers are not taking care of their cars. They have a problem and they weren't making any money. They were losing money and they were pissed. And so like that was my first sort of introduction to the idea that you could have really good intentions and have a bipartisan policy that like just didn't do anything useful in practice.

Evan Meyer: 04:48 Wow.

Lura Forcum: 04:58 And of course, there's like a million examples of those things. I care about good public policy. I think it can make people's lives better. But I think first, we have to really understand where people are and what they need. And that's what we try to do at the Independence Center by enfranchising people who are

usually kind of politica

Control Dynamics and Trust

lly homeless. Like that's what they would say about themselves. They don't feel attached to either party. Sometimes it's because they really dislike both parties. Sometimes it's because they say like, don't really see a difference or they say like, there are pieces of both that I like. But the bigger concern we have is, well, if they get the message that they don't belong in politics because they're not a member of a party, then we're missing their votes. And right now, 43 % of Americans say they're

independence. So there's 43 % of Americans who are kind of hit or miss on voting and elections or just engaging politically. Like that's a serious concern for democratic representation, for good public policy making, a lot of things.

Evan Meyer: 06:06 Well, just you mentioned something interesting. That's just any policy you make is going to have byproducts that are unexpected, unknown unknowns. When you're forcing people down a certain path, they find loopholes. There's consequences. That's with every policy. And any time you change a course of action,

Lura Forcum: 06:19 Yes.

Evan Meyer: 06:27 I guess ever, right? If you tell someone, nope, now we're gonna take, you're gonna go from here and we're gonna go this way, they're gonna be like, well now I have to adapt to that. So everything in the round the world has to adapt to this new thing. how do you, I guess the first thing is how do you, I can't even imagine that's been done right perfectly, at least a lot, because you just can't predict.

Lura Forcum: 06:34 Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 06:53 The world's too complicated to predict those things. How do we deal with some of this?

Lura Forcum: 06:56 you

You know, that's a really interesting question. Like how well can we actually predict the failures of policy? A lot of times, like a lot of times I have the same question you do, which is like, did we really not know that's how things were going to go or did just nobody cared? They wanted a win for their side. There's, you know, there's support from somebody who that's driving this, right? Like I, I'm genuinely curious about that. It's kind of like tariffs right now, right? Like I think most,

mainstream economists were like, this will definitely increase prices. you know, we did it anyway, and now we're seeing like, we're seeing prices increase. So, you know, I don't know if the answer is like, we should listen to the economists more. I think, like you kind of were alluding to, people adapt their behavior in really like brilliant ways. You know, that's one of the things that's so remarkable about people's response to publi

Relationship Building

c

policy is they're ingenious at continuing to do the thing they were already going to do. So the mindset I bring to it is like my default assumption is that we probably can't change people's behavior.

And I think if more people work from that assumption, we might be a little more circumspect about what we could accomplish with laws. There are some things you can't fix through legislation. Everything can't be solved with a new law. But I think that this idea that you can just pass a law and change behavior, I think we kind of saw the limit of that during COVID, where you were like,

Lura Forcum: 08:38 We're, right, health systems are like, we're trying to keep you safe. We need you to do these things to keep you safe. And people are kind of like, well, you know, okay, but I'm also gonna continue doing a lot of the things just like I was before. Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 08:53 make my own choices in that position was more like I remember the big thing was like wasn't so much about

It was a lot about you're forcing me to take a new technology. I remember that, like mRNA, was, yeah, and I think people felt sensitive. And I actually understood that mindset. It's not about agree or disagree, but there's this, when someone tells you to do something, how far are you breaking past their comfort zone of what's acceptable? Sure, you wanna give vaccines to people? Go for it. You're gonna force me to take this new vaccine type?

Lura Forcum: 09:05 You mean the vaccine?

Lura Forcum: 09:16 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 09:20 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 09:26 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 09:28 that you're experimenting on us now. like, you know, some people had issue with that, some people didn't, better for the whole society. Don't tell me what to do at the same time. Like it was a weird, you know, it made both sides I thought had some good understanding. And that was, I think that was the thing. It wasn't like all those people are anti-vaxxers. Because what started to happen was that a lot of those people got called anti-vaxxers. They weren't all anti-vaxxers, some of them were. But they were just like.

Lura Forcum: 09:34 Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 09:48 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 09:53 Right.

Evan Meyer: 09:55 You're forcing me to take a booster every two weeks. It's getting weird.

Lura Forcum: **[10:00](htt

Democratic Implications

ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYZ74qQYNBQ&t=600s)** Yeah, I agree. So I was thinking of even prior to the vaccines, right, when they're saying, well, we need social distancing, right? You know, people's initial response to most policy is reactants, right? Like reactants is this psychological phenomenon that's like really well studied because basically the more you push somebody, the more they dig their heels in. And so, you know, like if you're a parent, you

I feel like that parenting is your graduate education and what reactance is really like, right? Like reactance is your two-year-old when you're trying to hold their hand in a parking lot, like yanking it away, right? And they're like, I'm going to run through this parking lot, right? Like adults have the same thing. And when you're like, no, you're going to get a vaccine, they're like, hell no, we won't go, right? Like you suddenly see everybody in America kind of bristling about being made to do something.

Evan Meyer: 10:54 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 11:00 And the conversation, the national conversation that we had about the vaccines, feel like was kind of dumb. And I think actually a lot of policy conversations, when they break down into a left-right policy conversation, they get really dumb because you're either an anti-vaxxer or you're sheeple. And there's no nuance, there's no complexity, there's no space for the person who's like, well, actually, I have a medically complex

Evan Meyer: 11:21 Right.

Lura Forcum: 11:30 complex kid and I don't think that I understand this well enough to, you I don't feel trust. What would it take for me to feel trust? And we are just going to call them an anti-vaxxer, right? And just like the people who are very enthusiastic about it, Like, you know, sort of dismissing their willingness to take the vaccine as being like, you know, uncritical or gullible.

Evan Meyer: 11:39 That was it. You nailed it. Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 11:58 It's not helpful either, right? Like they might have reasons why they really are willing to try anything to stay healthy. No, it doesn't.

Evan Meyer: 12:06 But that stuff doesn't sell on social media. That stuff doesn't get a lot of clicks and eyeballs. You need the anti-vaxxers versus the sheeple. that's what, all of a sudden, you categorize them all that way. But you made a really good point about parenting as well. And it's worth trying to understand that core psychological element that gets people thinking about

politics, right, we discussed this actually a little bit, the similarities between raising kids w

Practical Applications

ith self-discipline and cultivating a healthy democracy. This is, right, like, and how do you, there's so many of those innate primate,

Lura Forcum: 12:45 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 12:53 mechanisms that are reacting to how we see the world and the way that we react to stimulation that sometimes bubble up from underneath and COVID maybe have been a good example of that. The way people feel potentially about people like Donald Trump or Biden if you don't like him or whoever, know, there's like something core and they start reacting like children. So question, what are the parallels that you see between raising kids and cultivating a healthy democracy?

Lura Forcum: 13:10 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 13:14 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 13:23 So the thing that I think about the most with...

both my parenting and government, right, like civic life, is that the parallel I see is like, you can have a relationship or you can have control, but you can't have both, right? So like when I'm thinking about, you know, getting my kids to behave in a way that I think is gonna lead to good outcomes for them over their lives, right? Like me having rules about every single thing

that happens in the household isn't having them rely on their internal values. What I really want to do is have them develop an internal sense of what's right and what's good. And I'd like to shape that, but I know that I can't control it. And I know that my ability to work cooperatively with them and have trust between each other, that comes from the relationship we have.

what we're seeing in American society is the fact that...

as trust breaks down for a lot of different reasons, right? Like a lot of really complex factors that are all coming together, converging. When we look at that lack of trust and think that we can fix it with our political party being in power or more severe punishments for people who break laws or more laws to regulate behavior, I think we're just, we're missing the point. We're creating a society where there's a lot of...

Lura Forcum: 14:58 surveillance, there's a lot of restrictions on behavior. I think it was Neil Gorsuch recently, the Supreme Court Justice, who wrote a book about this, and he claimed that probably people, most Americans were breaking a law every day of the week without knowing it or intending to because there's so much law, right? So this is just, is this really

Evan Meyer: 15:21 Ha ha ha.

Lura Forcum: 15:28 how we want to live our lives. And I think there's a place for

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

civic relationships that keeps us safe, Like promotes well-being, helps us act collectively in a way that's good for us as individuals and good for our communities. There's a way to accomplish that, but it's probably not through top-down control. I just don't think that that's feasible. And I don't think people flourish under those conditions. Just like my kids.

Evan Meyer: 15:57 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 15:58 wouldn't flourish, you know? Like what I'm trying to get is flourishing for my kids.

Evan Meyer: 16:02 Yeah, well let's come up with an example of something that would work.

Lura Forcum: 16:09 So I think one of the primary things, like if I could kind of wave a wand.

it would be getting people more engaged in local government because I think there's a lot more ability for local government to be responsive to people's needs and their daily lives. Right? Like if you're like, hey, the trash isn't getting picked up or like that house is empty and there are people squatting in it. Right? Like fixing these like local things is something that you can actually do that materially changes your wellbeing. And it gives you an opportunity to work with people.

of political differences that you don't get when everybody's focus is on Washington DC. And when everybody's focused on national politics, a friend of mine calls this pseudo politics because it's like, it feels like you're politically engaged, but all you're really doing is being really outraged or critical or negative. It doesn't actually do anything to build the relationships with the people around you.

relationships with people in your community, you guys can do stuff together, and you can also cooperate with people who are different from you. And I think like the more we're locked into the tribal two-party narrative that's focused on Washington's faraway, you know, the more you think that it's not safe for you to cooperate with people who disagree with you, and I think that is really damaging for us because the less

we interact and cooperate, the more we just sort of have a mental image of these people as being less than us or opposed to us or dangerous for us. So yeah, would, if I could wave a magic wand, would have everybody at their town council meeting, everybody at their neighborhood watch meeting.

Evan Meyer: 18:04 Yeah.

Yeah, mean, actually, one of the things we've previously even spoke about was, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you generally believe that policy views are based on relationships, community, and upbringing more than a thoughtful analysis of facts.

Lura Forcum: 18:23 Yeah, I mean, I think most people's policy views are probably...

and just sort of you put it on like you put on a coat, right? Like it's like, this is the Democratic Party says that this is how we do environmental policy and I'm just gonna adopt it whole hog, right? Cause like that's what you have to do to be a member in good standing. Like if you look at somebody like Joe Manchin, right? Like just became persona non grata for questioning the, I don't know, it was the Green New Deal or if it was,

I feel like something about electric cars.

Right? so like, at this point, if you have questions about what your party is advocating for, you are not part of the party anymore. And that's true on both sides. And this is kind of crazy, right? Like, is not, you know, politics has always been based on coalitions of people and coalitions don't move in lockstep. They're people who are like, well, we agree on enough fundamentals to work together, but they're not like 100 percent in a

agreement, right? Like there's variation there. And I think that variation is actually really helpful to finding effective solutions.

Evan Meyer: 19:41 There's been the buzz term, you know, identity politics. It's floating around now for a couple years at least. And I think that's an important thing to think about here. But the way that I, when I hear that, it goes, I guess it goes a little further than the traditional belief. that's separating belief from identity. This is something I think people have a really hard time doing. It's once something becomes a belief, they...

They make it about the, they don't realize it's actually coming from their relationships, their community, and their upbringing. And they think that you can very easily dislike something you hear. It doesn't necessarily means that you have to internalize that and be like, now it disrupts everything I've ever stood for in my whole life just because I feel this way on the president or the vaccines or the, or.

Lura Forcum: 20:12 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 20:30 Mom Donnie, if you're in New York now, he's like second to popularity of Trump out of almost nowhere, which was fascinating to watch. you know, like, you almost, and that's not just the individual who comes up with the belief and turns it into their identity, it's other people assuming their belief, that someone else's belief is also their identity and it's attacking their identity.

Lura Forcum: 20:49 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 20:57 Mm-hmm, great.

Evan Meyer: 20:58 It's like identity versus identity instead of like, watched a thing that a guy reported on, I like this guy, and he told me based on his research. And we don't do that. It's like, you think like, like they were sitting in the room with, you know, the president, the presidents of two countries behind closed doors and they have all the information and they're not four chain links removed, right? And then somehow that becomes an identity conversation. It's so irrational.

Lura Forcum: 21:29 Yeah, because you can't have a...

Evan Meyer: 21:29 Yeah.

Lura Forcum (21:33.88) consultative policymaking process when we're talking about two identities, right? It's like you can't take Catholics and Protestants and get them to agree on stuff so that they can have a merged religion. Like wars have been fought, people have died. know this, we already like tested this. So when it's an identity, like there's no room for anybody to move. And that's fine if we're talking about

Evan Meyer: 21:51 Yeah. Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 22:03 religious belief, we're talking about how we're going to manage things like healthcare, the immigration system, entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid, right? Like these are actual problems we have to solve. They are not identities. And they're problems that like we keep kicking the can down the road. The problems are gonna represent themselves at some point, right? Like the problem of...

Protestant versus Catholic is not something that needs to be solved, right? Like we can just agree that they're separate identities. But when we do that politically, which I really think is how government is functioning right now at the federal level, then we're left with an impact on people's daily lives.

Evan Meyer: 22:51 Yeah, yeah, it's scary. And you know, it's interesting. I don't know, it's one of the mental conundrums I always get into is like, is this the worst time it's ever been around? You there's a lot of that talk too. And then you're like, no one really knows, because no one was alive throughout the country. you don't really, and the documentation wasn't quite there. We don't have video proof of things from the late 1700s to know if we were almost at the point of collapse in 1790.

Lura Forcum: 23:20 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 23:20 you know, versus 1810 versus 1830 versus the Civil War and like how far, how bad have things really been versus now? And, or is the answer just people are angry and we're solving, you know, this existential crisis against with two parties instead of working on the things that we've.

Lura Forcum: 23:26 Great.

Evan Meyer: 23:45 really that we've agreed that they mostly agree on. And we talked previously, I'd love for you to go into that. What is it that most people agree on in these parties or in Congress, but we know the extremes are dominating the conversation, but there's so much agreement, but we tend to focus on the things we don't. Tell me a little bit about that.

Lura Forcum: 23:48 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 24:02 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 24:12 Yeah, well, so.

I have some research that I did while I was at State Policy Network with my colleague, Aaron Norman. Aaron Norman is now at Heart and Mind Strategies, but we put together this research because what we were seeing was there seems to be some real confusion within the two parties on things that used to be more cohesive. If you think about it like this, if you meet

somebody on the street who tells you I'm a Republican and you were gonna guess their position on something like free trade.

school choice or abortion, right? Like how sure would you be that you'd get it right? And increasingly, I would say not very, because there's actually now quite a bit of variation across people who are registered Republicans in terms of all three of those things and even more, right? So what used to be a little bit more cohesive has gotten less cohesive. So our question was, okay.

If you assume that these two parties are made up of people with really different values and different preferences, which is what the members of the two parties will tell you about themselves, right? They would be like, I'm a Republican. I have nothing in common with Democrats. Those people are terrible.

Lura Forcum (25:38.75) I have nothing, we have no similarities, right? So we were like, well, we'll test this. And what we did was ask people questions about things like, do you feel like you have a community? Do you feel connected to the people around you? Do you feel like you have enough resources, like financial resources, but social resources too, you know, for your daily life? And then we also asked them questions about harm and morality. So my training is in social psychology,

and I think most social psychologists would say, those are kind of the bedrock things that guide our perception, right? Like, we need resources, we need other people, and how we think about what is harmful or damaging to other people is kind of the basis of government. So we asked them the building blocks, but what we didn't do was ask them about their political party until the very end of the study. And we tried to ask any political questions in ways that just left out partisan buzzwords.

so when we had the set of questions, what we did was feed it into a statistical model that actually looks for groupings in the data. And our thinking was, if there's really two separate political parties, you ought to end up with these segments where we can roughly see. Maybe there'd be some subsets of Republican, different flavors of Republican, different flavors of Democrat. But you ought to be able to see some natural breakdowns there. And we really didn't see that at all.

seven segments, only one of them was a partisan segment. There was a group, like one of our groupings we found was predominantly women, predominantly Democrats, and like pretty far left. The rest of the groups were all evenly broken across political parties. And so what that suggests to us is that when we're talking about people's values, their understanding of the world around them, there is no obvious like Democrats,

like this, Republicans like that. And I know we have like a lot of political rhetoric about what it's like to be a conservative, what it's like to be a Democrat. And there's just a lot of places where that doesn't hold up. And if you look over historical, you know, the U.S.' political history, like these breakdowns and the alignments of who is in favor of what, these have shifted over time. Like we're talking about them like they're set in stone, like they were handed down by the founding

Lura Forcum: 28:08 fathers and it's just not true. There's lots of examples of this. I always think about environmentalism, right? Having concerns about the environment actually makes a lot of sense as a conservative position because conservatism is about stewardship and things that are valuable just because they existed before us, right? They get value and meaning just because they're old, right?

Evan Meyer: 28:08 All

Evan Meyer: 28:36 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 28:37 And so like, that is, to me that suggests really strongly that these should be people who like the idea of conserving the earth, stewarding the earth. And of course we...

Evan Meyer: 28:48 Well, if you look at the people who are naturally conserving the earth, it would be people who manage large lands in rural areas, right? rural tends to vote red, and urban almost always votes blue, even in Texas, all the four major cities, right? So they're like, okay, so you have them, and then you're like, and those people are also growing the food that you eat.

Lura Forcum: 28:57 Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Lura Forcum (29:12.93) Mm-hmm.

Well, and if you're a you do need to conserve the earth, right? Because you don't want to ruin this resource that is your livelihood. It's the same with hunting, right? If you're a hunter, you want game populations to not be exhausted, right? You want them managed to be healthy. So it's funny that you have these kind of pockets of environmentalism that don't make sense if we continue to talk about it in the left

Evan Meyer: 29:23 precious.

Evan Meyer: 29:41 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 29:43 right way.

Evan Meyer: 29:44 It's, yeah, that's one of the most interesting examples that I can think of is like, you know the people growing your food and managing all your favorite places to go visit on the weekend are all, for the most part, that's the Republican like place. It's this, and...

Lura Forcum: 29:58 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 30:00 the Democrat-Republican conversation tends to lean in urban versus rural more than anything else. It doesn't even matter the state. So even the conversations on like state politics, we're like, you know, the Prop 50 thing with California where it's like, we're going against Texas and Donald Trump. And it's like, you know, all those big cities tend to vote blue and those people don't necessarily feel the same as the way the government is handling things right now also. So you're fighting, it's like,

Lura Forcum: 30:18 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 30:30 state to state government wars that don't even consider the people in the states. It's like irrelevant. They're not even important, it feels like in these conversations. I've been amazed by that lately.

Lura Forcum: 30:33 Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 30:41 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 30:44 Yeah, it's letting elected officials pick their voters, right? Like this is completely backwards. That entire conversation has been shocking. And I think that's a really good point you raised that like, I don't remember a previous time in American history when we had Texas and California like going at it, right? Like in competition or like, right? In opposition to one another.

Evan Meyer: 30:52 Bye.

Evan Meyer: 31:10 Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 31:11 Like that's really strange. Like I suppose we did around the time of the founding of the country, right? Like we had some state versus state, right? But like that's not a common dynamic within the country. And it's, I think, very short-sighted. And yeah, it leaves out the concerns of the voters who live in these states.

Evan Meyer: 31:19 Right, I suppose. Or civil war.

Evan Meyer: 31:36 It's also not saying what is best to make sure my state is prosperous. What is going after Texas, like if you're California, what does that have to do with making sure you're solving your most important problems right now? Like that, was so, you know how expensive it is? Sure you do. To create something like Prop 50 and distribute it.

Lura Forcum: 31:57 I haven't seen figures. I'm sure it was very expensive, right? It was a special election, yeah.

Evan Meyer: 32:01 the ballots and the thing. I don't know how many millions of dollars it costs to do something like that, but that all could have gone to getting X number of homeless people off the street or putting them in facilities that can be supportive for their mental wellbeing or whatever. And like, and that's what I see happen so often. It's such a waste of human resources to focus on what other people are doing wrong instead of what you can do better tomorrow.

Lura Forcum (32:11.99) Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 32:21 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 32:27 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Trying to stop other people is a really... Right, like it's back to this tribal dynamic. And one of the other things that I think...

we should draw more attention to is the fact that there's a reason, we evolved to have these tribal dynamics and in-group and out-group dynamics. They kept us safe over evolutionary time because we needed our tribe to keep us safe and we needed to protect ourselves from people who might try and take our resources or harm us. That's what, yes.

Evan Meyer: 33:03 The unibrow people. Those people with the clubs in the unibrow.

Lura Forcum: 33:10 Right, the Neanderthals.

But that served an important purpose, but in modern life, it really doesn't. We get more by being cooperative, but we have this mental architecture that's just so easy to elicit. And what it tells us is compete instead of cooperate. And that's the thing that I think a lot of it is actually happening outside people's conscious awareness.

Evan Meyer: 33:17 Sorry.

Lura Forcum: 33:43 And I think it's really important instead of just kind of saying to people like don't be so polarized, right? Like stop yelling at people on social media for their political beliefs. you know, that's fine. I don't know that that works. But I do think it's really important to make people aware of that tribal inclination that we have because it is rooted in dehumanizing other people so that you

can kill them and take their resources. And I think that that actually might concern people if they were able to identify it in our political discourse, know, in the way that parties are behaving. I feel like that's a lot more persuasive message to be like, hey, I know it seems like you're being rational and the other side is not. But that feeling is all kind of like an illusion that your brain produces that makes it easier

to be very tribal.

Evan Meyer: 34:45 Well, it's also there's a couple of things where competition works quite well, right? Sports is one of them and business is another way. We've pretty much, most of the people agree that a refined version of capitalism is the best system we've come up with so far. It's better than the other ones for a lot of reasons and it needs plenty of refinement and plenty of socialist programs and all that. But most people generally agree that that allows for most people to...

Lura Forcum: 34:49 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Lura Forcum: 35:01 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 35:14 to be their best selves and create, really, at the expense of others. Every time you create something new that takes a piece of the market share, you've put someone else out of work. That's the nature of capitalism, unfortunately. It's an intellectual form of it. We sort of all have agreed that, like, hey, you gotta play, you gotta wake up and fight in this capitalist world, and same with sports, right? We do it in a very friendly way. We figured out how to, for the most part, make that very friendly.

Lura Forcum: 35:16 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 35:22 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 35:33 Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 35:41 Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think in sports, right, like that comes from norms that are around sportsmanship or sportsmanlike conduct, right? Like you have to have rules that say like, no, you you can't grab people's face masks or I don't know, the football rules are. But that's a really important part of having conflict that is sporting and productive instead of

just a brawl. And maybe we've lost those norms in politics. And maybe I should use a word besides competition, because I agree with you. Competition, and I'm a big fan of political competition. I want us to have more choices.

at the ballot box because I think that competition will make voters better off. So maybe a better word is conflict, right? Because I think there are productive forms of competition, but what we're getting in politics is not a productive form of competition. It's conflict, right? And instead of being like, well, there's competition here and it's helping us find the best public policy, it's pure conflict. It's like obstruction, right? It's like, I'm not going to work with the other side.

because I would rather continue to be able to motivate voters about problems with immigration, problems with health care, problems with abortion access, right? Like I'd rather have those as tools to motivate voters instead of solving them.

Evan Meyer: 37:19 Right, we, this is actually one of the points I wanted to bring up is it's more productive to not fix those issues, right?

Lura Forcum: 37:27 Mm-hmm. They're valuable, unfixed.

Evan Meyer: 37:32 Well, so, boy, so many questions here. What is not valuable unfixed, if that's the case, right? And what is the motivation to fix those things that are not, let's say, big, you know, immigration, abortion, et cetera? Well, people could lose their jobs, of course.

Lura Forcum: 37:35 You

Lura Forcum: 37:40 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 37:48 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 37:53 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 37:53 People could lose their voters who support them on that reason. is this what, is it really about staying in power mostly about getting money for your next campaign from these groups that keeps these issues unsolved? Like you'd think that the biggest issues would get some better policy. What's going on here?

Lura Forcum: 38:18 You know, it's a really complex system, right? Like there's so many arcane things that go on on the Hill, just about expectations for fundraising and committee assignments, right? Like there's so many little rules and nuances. And so, you know.

I don't know quite, I think it's like the party is sort of like setting up practices that helped them consolidate and maintain power, right? Like they've done that really effectively. And then because they've sort of turned off the feedback mechanisms that would make them have to adjust their behavior to be more responsive to voters, because of that, they've gotten further and further afield from what voters actually care about.

because there's no corrective mechanisms, right? Like nobody's holding town halls right now because they don't want to be yelled at by constituents because they're afraid to do anything, especially if they're Republicans, that goes against the White House, right? So like, right, well, that's an entirely other, you know.

Evan Meyer: 39:25 lest you get shot.

Lura Forcum: 39:33 level of threat, right? Like if you want to talk about what would bring people into public service who are good, right, like decent principled people who are going to do what voters have asked them to do, you know, the threat of political violence is going to just ensure that we have people who are serving in elected office for really mercenary reasons. And, you know, I think that, I think that like,

one of the problems we have with the partisan system is the fact that when you have the two parties, people don't cross the aisle because their candidate isn't performing. If you're a Democrat or you're a Republican and the person you sent to Washington isn't doing what they promised, is having ethical breaches, is showing themselves to be really unprincipled, engaging in illegal behavior, whatever you want to say, you're not going to say, I guess I'm going to

throw my vote to the other side now, right? Like you might stay home, but in a lot of cases, you may just go and pull your straight party ticket lever, just like you always do. So the people that we actually need to engage are the politically homeless people. Like we need those nonpartisan voters, we need those independent voters because they're the ones who look at elected officials and say, that person seems more aligned with my values. I'm gonna cast my ballot in support.

of them. And when you don't do what you said, they send you home, which is why the parties don't like them. And they spend a lot of time talking about independent voters being fickle, uninformed, disengaged. But no, they're people with standards.

Evan Meyer: 41:23 Yeah, well, at different levels of government, in different states have different policies. But for the most part, once it's very difficult to get thrown out of office unless you break a real serious law, from local to federal, it gets, I think, harder as you go up. you can, it's almost impossible. Like it doesn't happen.

Lura Forcum: 41:36 Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 41:50 recalls on people or referendums to get them out or whatever or their own colleagues have to vote them out. mean, it's such a rare case. You have to commit of the worst crimes for your colleagues to go against a person in their own party and get the party poll. So it's like one of the mechanisms that doesn't exist is

Lura Forcum: 41:53 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum (42:03.2) Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 42:09 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 42:17 Hey, you're not doing a good job. Hey, you treat your people really bad. You have a staff of 10 on your team. None of them like you and have reported you to the authorities and the authorities can't do anything. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. You need no leadership, management, or kindness to be the leader of a team or effectiveness. None of that matters.

Lura Forcum: 42:19 Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 42:26 Mm-hmm.

Lura Forcum: 42:32 Mm-hmm. No, no, there's very little.

Lura Forcum: 42:42 or effectiveness, right? I mean, what would make an elected official effective? know, like how's the Speaker of the House being evaluated right now?

based on, right, he's not. I think our expectations for elected officials get really low if everything is a left-right discussion, right? Because it's like, no, they can always say, like, now I was just holding back the hordes of the other side. They're terrible. I kept them at bay, right? And then the expectation's really low, because when they say, like,

Evan Meyer: 43:18 Yeah. Yeah.

Lura Forcum: 43:25 I couldn't do anything for you on health care, affordability, immigration, all the things I promised you, but I did manage to stop the Democrats. That's enough for a lot of voters. And I think that's the mindset where we need to say, no, but what have you done for me lately?

Evan Meyer: 43:34 Yeah, you're like, great. That's where we're at. Yeah, it is. Uh-huh.

Evan Meyer (43:46.29) Sure. Well, I want to thank you for all your great work that you're doing to try to fix some of these very complicated issues. think your approach around psychology and being, I use the word, more philosophical around the problem is so important. As our mutual friend said, Shannon Watson, we need more, we need more

judges and less activists and people who can think through and weigh these things in a very nuanced way and carefully and not just trying to you know, activate. Right.

Lura Forcum: 44:17 Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Lura Forcum: 44:31 Get their way.

Right? Like you have, if you want to solve a problem, you're going to have to compromise and compromise has become a dirty word. So in that environment, what we've done is sort of agree that we just won't solve any problems. So we don't have to compromise. yes. Such a big fan of Shannon's work. Shannon, I think is her the best description I've heard of her is that she is gentle parenting elected officials. And I think like

Evan Meyer (44:45.74) Hey, shout out to Shannon Watson, by the way.

Lura Forcum: 45:02 That is, we need more of that, right? Like we do need more people saying like, hey, I think you can do better, right? Like, hey, is that really aligned with your values? And so, you know, that's the conversation we all need to have, because yelling at them is not gonna help, just like your kids, right? I mean, it's back to the kid model. Yeah, they just dig in, so.

Evan Meyer: 45:13 Right, right.

Evan Meyer: 45:21 right. It makes it worse. It makes it worse.

Any last words you want to tell everyone today?

Lura Forcum: 45:32 Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the work that you're doing. It's so important. It's fantastic to keep meeting people who are working in the space of trying to make things actually function instead of making it a pitched battle. So if anybody's interested in learning more about the Independence Center, we're at www.independencecenter.org. We have a newsletter, which we send out bi-weekly.

In the coming year, we'll be doing some in-person meetups.

The PAC that we work with will be supporting some candidates for the US House. So if you're interested in that, I can connect you with the PAC. yeah, I have a podcast called We Made This Political, where we talk about a lot of this parenting and government themes. And I also write at How to Human. So my whole mission is like, let's get more people, more normal people engaged in politics.

because these are people who want to solve problems, right, and who want life to be better for everybody instead of people who are just rooting for their tribe.

Evan Meyer: 46:47 Awesome. All right. Well, we know how to find you. I loved this conversation. Thank you. Keep up all the amazing work you're doing. Appreciate you.

Lura Forcum: 46:50 Thank you.

Likewise, thank you.