Is the Left-Right Spectrum a Myth? A Conversation with Verlan Lewis

What if the basic way we talk about politics is fundamentally flawed?

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with Verlan Lewis, professor of constitutional studies at Utah Valley University and co-author of The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. Lewis argues that the familiar political spectrum dividing society into “left” and “right” oversimplifies political reality and distorts how Americans understand issues, parties, and even each other.

Lewis explains how the left-right framework emerged historically, why it became dominant in modern political discourse, and how it encourages ideological tribalism. Instead of seeing politics as a complex set of issues where people may agree on some topics and disagree on others, the spectrum pushes citizens to sort themselves into rigid teams. According to Lewis, this mindset can reduce intellectual humility, weaken meaningful dialogue, and contribute to the rising hostility in American politics.

The conversation explores how media ecosystems reinforce ideological identities, why political beliefs often cluster together even when they have little logical connection, and how faith communities can offer a different approach to civic engagement. Lewis suggests moving beyond ideological labels and focusing on individual issues, allowing for more thoughtful discussion and collaboration across differences.

For listeners interested in understanding polarization, political identity, and how faith might shape a healthier civic culture, this episode offers a thoughtful examination of the assumptions that structure modern political debate.

• The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780197680629

Guest Bio

Verlan Lewis is an associate professor of political science and constitutional studies at Utah Valley University and a fellow at the university’s Center for Constitutional Studies. He is co-author of the book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, which challenges the idea that modern politics can be accurately understood through a simple left-right ide

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:16

What happens, unfortunately, is people get taught by their college professors and by the textbooks that no, actually, there's this one line that we can put everyone on somewhere on this left to right line, and this explains all of politics. And so then they start thinking: well, if I'm a smart, philosophical, principled person, then I need to make sure that all of my issue positions line up with one of the two major tribes. And so what you end up happening is through a process of socialization, the more educated you become, the more likely you are to squeeze your own issue positions to fit one of the two baskets on offer by our two major parties.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. I am your political host, Will Wright, and joined by your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. What's going on, Josh? Doing great. Thanks, Will. And today we are joined by Verlin Lewis. He's a professor of constitutional studies and associate professor of political science at Utah Valley University and author of the book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, where it challenges one of the most basic assumptions in modern politics that our society is naturally divided into opposing ideological camps. And I am so excited to have you on the show. Welcome to Faithful Politics, Verlin.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

Thanks, guys. It's a pleasure to be on your show.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Yeah. And so, so just just just to make it official, I said this before we recorded, but I I want to make sure that I get this on record that I have recommended your book to more people in the past month or so than just about every other every other book. And we we talk to a lot of authors on the show. So your your book is is groundbreaking and it's it's like I don't know. I feel bad that I I didn't pick it up when it first came out in 2023. So I'd love for for you maybe just to uh talk a little bit about the book. We'll we'll we'll get down to more granular details, but like why did you write this book in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 2:15

Yeah, no, thanks so much. And just want to say how much I'm a fan of what you all are trying to do. When I saw the tagline of your Faithful Politics podcast, which is not left, not right, but up, I just think that's exactly correct. That's the in my mind, the solution for the politics that we have today for the problems in our politics. So, yeah, how did I end up writing this book? Well, I should first say that I co-authored it with my brother, Hiram Lewis. So he's the first author on this book. And this is something that we've been talking about for a long time. So he's also a professor, he's a historian, and this is just a conversation that we've been having for many years. And it's really something that he pointed out to me. That once someone points it out to you that the left-right spectrum is a myth, it's kind of like, well, yeah, of course it is. But why didn't I see that before? You know, it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes. Once someone points it out, we can all agree, yeah, this is not a useful way to think and talk about our politics. And he was kind of waiting for someone to write this book to point out the problems with the one-dimensional left-right spectrum, and just kept waiting and waiting, and no one was writing it. And he just decided, okay, I'm gonna need to do it. And so he enlisted me and I was happy to work with him on it. And yeah, so it was a fun project. I got to work with my brother on this one, but it's one that you know we've been able to talk to a lot of different groups about because I think it strikes a chord with people right now, especially with the way our political discourse is going these days.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yeah, and so so just to kind of kick us off, and I'm gonna try my best to try to explain what's in the book and have you kind of expand on it. So you propose or you describe kind of our current state of left-right spectrum as an essentialist theory of ideology. And and and what that sort of purports is that we there are these two groups, and through some random whatever, people have been sorted into these kind of two groups. Yeah. That there's this sort of essential core idea that is the separating line between the the left and the right spectrum. So to really say like something is far right or far left would have to admit that there is a a center point that can be gone.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Somewhere it can be compared to, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yeah, that can go left or right. Is is is that is that a a very rough summary of kind of like the the thesis of the essentialist theory of ideology?

SPEAKER_03 4:50

Yeah, maybe I'll just put it this way. So, you know, the left-right spectrum assumes that there's only one issue in politics, because a one-dimensional line can, by definition, only measure one thing, right? So a thermometer measures one thing, right? Temperature. So it can go up and down. It's a single flat line. That makes sense. But politics is multidimensional. It's not about just one issue. And we all know this, right? There's many issues in politics. So, you know, right now, what's in the news? There's immigration, right? There's international trade, there's foreign policy, there's taxes, there's abortion, there's gun rights. There's literally hundreds of different issues in politics. And when you point this out to people who use the left-right spectrum to describe our politics, they'll say, well, of course we know there's more than one issue in politics, but the reason that a single flat line is useful in modeling our politics is because all of the hundreds of issue positions can be collapsed onto a single line. They all flow out of one big issue. So your stance on the one big issue determines your hundreds of positions on the hundreds of smaller issues, is normally what people will say. Now, what is that one big thing? Well, that's the essence of left and right. That's what you're getting at. We call it the essentialist theory. We could also call it monism, the belief that there's just one thing. Now, one of the problems with the essentialist theory is that if you ask a dozen different people what the one big thing is, you might get a dozen different answers. You know, some people will say, you know, the most common one we hear, the one you'll read in the dictionary, if you say, like, you know, what is a progressive or a conservative? They'll say, well, it's your attitude towards change. Are you in favor of change or against change? But other people might say, no, the big difference is, you know, your view of equality. Are you in favor of equality or against it? Or your view of freedom, are you in favor of freedom or against it? Or big government versus small government. You know, we've heard hundreds of different essences of what bundles together all the issue positions of progressivism and all the issue positions of conservatism. So that's really what the essentialist theory is. And we go through in our book and we point out why this is actually not true. It's actually misleading and it's harmful to our political discourse.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

I mean, I I think that is so fascinating. And anyone who isn't interested, I don't think they're listening because we live in this world that says everything is divided into left and right. It's so funny how angry we get about binaries, and yet we've presented a binary at every essence at uh uh I guess uh pun intended of our life, right? Every part of it. That's what I'm really trying to say. Like it's always this left, right, binary. And it doesn't make sense, right? Because that's not how we really receive life. And I've often thought, well, I mean, what what is like, why is climate change a political issue? Why is that a political issue? I don't understand. Like, is it like I just don't get it? Like, if the climate is changing, do we know that? Do we not know that? How do we like if we do know that and we're causing it, like I understand money gets involved and all that, but why has this become a political right and left it just it makes no sense except that certain people have taken it and they've said this is now part of the cluster of beliefs that we've had. And I've often seen and been aware for quite a while, like there's these cluster of beliefs that really maybe have something to do with each other, some don't, but you believe them if you're in this group. And I I would I want to push on something here because I know it's within the book, but this sense of what if someone's hearing what you're saying and they're like, well, what about change? Isn't change the idea? And I think you addressed this right in the book, but it's it's pro-change as the left. Left wants change, they want progress. It's progressive. Yeah. And the conservatives, they hate change and they're old and crotchety and racist and no one likes them. Okay. So then you have the conservatives, right? And they hate change and they want to keep everything the same. Why is that too simplistic? Why doesn't that work?

SPEAKER_03 9:04

Yeah, well, I mean, I think our everyday experiences show us that that's not true. That each of our two major political parties, both the group that calls themselves progressives and the group that calls themselves conservatives, both want to change some things and maintain the status quo on other things. It just depends on the issue. And this goes back to the fundamental point that there's more than one issue in politics. Right? So, you know, right now it's you know, conservatives, people who call themselves conservatives, that want to say, change our international trade policy to be less in favor of free trade and more in favor of protectionist policy. So they want Sounds like change. Yeah. Uh huh. For for much of my life, it was people who called themselves progressives who wanted to maintain the status quo on abortion policy and not overturn Roe v. Wade. And it was people who called themselves conservatives who wanted to change the Supreme Court's interpretation on Roe v. Wade. And they actually ended up getting that, right? So it just depends on the issue. There is some things where people who call themselves progressives want change. They obviously want a change of who's the president right now. They want a change of the current immigration policy. But of course, five years ago, it was people who called themselves conservatives that wanted to change the country's immigration policy. So it depends on the issue, and it depends on what the status quo is in the country at any given time.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

I know in the book you you describe kind of like some of the origins of like the left and right. Can you kind of give us like the you know, the made-for-tv version of like what why do we call Democrats left and then Republicans right? I mean, it makes no sense.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So, of course, for most of human history, most of political history, humans have not used a left-right spectrum. In fact, for most of American history, Americans did not use a left-right spectrum. It's a relatively recent phenomenon. Of course, it first emerges in the 1780s in France, during the French Revolution, where you have people who are in favor of the revolution sitting on the left-hand side of the president of the National Assembly in France, and people who are opposed to the revolution sitting on the right hand side of the president of the National Assembly. And so they started using the shorthand as kind of referring to whether you're in favor of the revolution or against it, you're left or you're right. And again, to go back to what I said earlier, a one-dimensional line does make sense if you're just talking about one thing. If we are just talking about, are you in favor of the revolution or against it, then it would make sense to put people on a line. Oh, you're extremely in favor of the revolution, you're on the far left, you're extremely against the revolution, you're on the far right, you're more centrist, moderate. That would make sense. So that's where the term first emerges. The problem is when we use that one-dimensional framework to apply to a multidimensional political reality like we have today in the United States. So this idea of left and right kind of floated around Europe in the 19th century. It wasn't as popular as we might think it was. It was really used by Marxists who liked the idea of seeing themselves as the vanguard of history and being in favor of change and being on the left. And it really became popularized in the 1910s by Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, who again thought, well, what we're doing is simply the same thing that the French revolutionaries did in the 1790s. We're now doing this in Russia in the 1910s. And so they start using that language, and American reporters and journalists who are reporting on the Russian Revolution start using that, that, those labels, that framework to describe what's happening in Russia. And then pretty soon you have some American intellectuals, some elites in the 1920s and 30s start applying that framework to American politics. So it's a relatively recent phenomenon. It remained an elite phenomenon throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and kind of goes mainstream in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. And it's actually increased exponentially since the 1990s. You can track this, you know, using Google Ingram. It's like it's like a line: left, right, left, right. This is how people talk, and then it just takes off since really the 1990s. So it's last 30 years where it's kind of taken over our society. Now you can't turn on, you know, cable news or open a newspaper or go to social media without someone using this framing of left and right, progressive and conservative. And I don't think it's an accident that as Americans have relied on this vocabulary exponentially in recent decades, that our anger and vitriol and hostility in our politics has also increased exponentially.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

And when when did when did Rush Limbaugh start his show again? Wasn't that like Wasn't there some kind of like legislation that like got struck down where they didn't have to present both sides? And then now on radio, essentially now we have Rush Limbaugh who's only has to present the right, and now essentially we have this like explosion. I don't know if that's true or not. I just that is something that I had heard, and then I was kind of like looking at the data. What do you what do you think about that? I mean, that's not necessarily my question, but I'm just wondering is that.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

I think you're referring to the list doctrine. This was a you know, FTC policy. But you also had the splintering of media outlets in the 1980s and 1990s at the turn of the 21st century, such that instead of, you know, maybe a major network saying, hey, our best business model is to appeal to a broad as audience as possible and rely on a shared set of facts and try to present things in an unbiased way as possible. Pretty soon the business model came with the decentralization of media companies. The best business sense actually means convince people that there is a left-right spectrum, convince them that they are somewhere on this spectrum on the left or on the right, and then present yourself as part of their tribe. And they're the ones that are giving them the truth because we're not, you know, infected by the foolishness of the other side of the political spectrum, right? So this is how what MSNBC does, right? They really narrow cast to people who think of themselves as progressives or on the left. And this is what Fox News does. They narrow cast to people who think of themselves as conservatives or on the right. And so now you have increasingly people inhabiting ideological echo chambers where they just tune into the channel that tells them that everything they already believe is correct, or they scroll through social media, you know, based on algorithms that just simply tells them what they already believe is correct. And so we can kind of silo ourselves into these echo chambers and convince ourselves that our team on the correct side of the spectrum is correct about everything, and the bad team on the wrong side of the spectrum is wrong about everything.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

I I that completely makes sense to me. It's what I see and experience. It gives me a framework to really place my experience, which I love. What what is the alternative to the essentialist theory of ideology? What's the alternative there? What I know this is I'm cueing you for what you guys are doing in the book, right? But but I think it's important because that is a question of someone's mind, like, well, okay, if it isn't like something that is really the core issue, then why is this so effective and why does this keep happening? What's the alternative theory?

SPEAKER_03 16:42

So our alternative is is basically what human beings have done for most of human history and what Americans have done for most of American history, which is what we call pluralism. So if the view that I referred to earlier, the myth of left and right, this idea that there's just one issue in politics, we can call that monism, the belief that there's just one issue, then pluralism is the recognition of the reality that there are many issues in politics. There are a plurality of issues. And this is the way Americans thought about politics for most of American history. We've always had two major parties, of course, but citizens would see the two parties for what they were, which is coalitions of a diverse group of individuals, interests, factions, associations, and institutions that would agree together to work together to achieve certain common ends. And when you would look at the two main parties, you would realize what should be obvious, which is that each party is going to be correct about some things and wrong about some things. And that's okay. That's normal. And you're going to identify with or vote for the party that has more of the stuff you like than the other party, but you wouldn't come to the delusional conclusion that your party is correct about everything and the other party is wrong about everything. That's what is introduced by left-right thinking. Because the left-right spectrum tells us no, the the reason that the Democratic Party has all of its issue positions is because it is progressive, and all of its issue positions on abortion, on aid to Ukraine, on the Gaza war, on immigration, on climate change, all of their issue positions flow out of a progressive philosophy. And all of the issue positions of the Republican Party on gun rights and same-sex marriage and aid to Ukraine and tariffs and taxes and deficits flow out of a conservative philosophy. And so all you have to do is sign up for the correct side of the spectrum, and voila, you're omniscient. You are correct about everything. And all you have to do is sign up for the correct side, and then you know that the bad people are wrong about everything. So I think the alternative is just to get rid of the left-right spectrum, just to go back to what we used to do, which is just talk about individual issues. Go granular. Rather than saying, oh, that person is a, you know, a right-wing pro-lifer or that person's a left-wing environmentalist. Just say, oh no, they're in favor, they're pro-life on abortion policy, that person's environmentalist on climate change policy. Now let's talk about what that means and you know, whether we agree with that or disagree with that. But let's not pretend that just because someone is pro-life on abortion policy, then they also have to be in favor of invading Greenland, or they have to be against immigration, or they have to be in favor of protectionist tariffs, or they have to think that the 2020 election was stolen, or you know, on and off and all the other things. Those things don't have to be bundled together in those ways.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

I hope people are listening, by the way, Verlin. I hope they're listening. Who knows? These days. Anyway, sorry. That's so good.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm I'm I'm curious, like, everything you said makes sense. Totally, yeah, totally bought in, have the t-shirt, all that kind of stuff. But but it's like I I gone to, I don't know if you call it a conversation on social media, but like on Facebook the other day, I had posted something. A uh a sociologist who I respect commented about it, it was I posted something about the left-right spectrum. This is a sociologist that does this stuff for living, specifically kind of in the religious right. Um had kind of pushed back a little bit about the comment. And if I had a memory, I could tell you what it was. It wasn't anything crazy. But but it like, but like how how does sort of this left-right spectrum affect sociologists or posters, you know, people that, you know, do this stuff for a living that are tracking these kinds of trends. So like kind of kind of help put put sort of like your study, you know, and make it usable for a sociologist that might be listening to this.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

Yeah, no, that's a good question. So, you know, sometimes people ask us, like, okay, so there's this myth of left and right. Uh, how do we get rid of this myth? Is the solution that the people who know more, the academics, come in and tell us that we have this myth. The problem is that the myth is believed in by my colleagues in the academy more than it is by ordinary people in the American public. So that's you know, the left-right spectrum is. Yeah, I mean, it's something so stupid you have to have a PhD to believe in it. Like it's actually really interesting in the left-right spectrum because ordinary people who haven't gone to college, who have not been socialized into thinking in terms of left-right spectrum, do not naturally bundle their issue positions together in the ways that team red and team blue bundle their issue positions together. They just think, okay, I have my values, I have my faith, maybe, I have my life experiences, and this is going to lead me to have the following positions on gun rights, immigration, deficit spending, you know, whatever it is, the hundreds of issues. That's normal. That that to me is a sane way to approach life and politics. What happens, unfortunately, is people get taught by their college professors and by the textbooks that no, actually, there's this one line that we can put everyone on somewhere on this left to right line, and this explains all of politics. And so then they start thinking, well, if I'm a smart Philosophical, principled person, then I need to make sure that all of my issue positions line up with one of the two major tribes. And so what you end up happening is through a process of socialization, the more educated you become, the more likely you are to squeeze your own issue positions to fit one of the two baskets on offer by our two major parties. So this is misleading and harmful. One, because we misunderstand ourselves. We're not true to our actual own principles and philosophy in life. You know, you guys do a faithful politics podcast, which I love, because I think faith should be informing people's politics rather than the other way around. What we see so much today is people's politics deforming and distorting their faith. They look to see what the tribe is doing and they say, aha, I have to take all those positions. Now I'm going to somehow take the scriptures and wrestle them and take the Bible and twist it in a way to justify what my political party is up to. Right. So we have too much of the other way, which I think what you guys are calling for, which I think is really important, is we need more people of faith taking biblical teachings into the public square and saying, this is how it informs my view of human beings and how we should treat each other and how we should take the following positions on a variety of issues. So I think the, you know, the big misunderstanding that comes from the left-right spectrum, first is that it causes us to misunderstand ourselves. And it also causes us to lose our intellectual humility. Because, again, we assume that we're correct about everything. And so we're unwilling to engage in good faith conversation with people, realizing that, hey, they might be correct about some things and I might be wrong. And they're definitely wrong about some things, and I might be right. And so let's see if we can learn from each other, right? So I think we misunderstand ourselves. We also misunderstand our neighbors because when we try to place everywhere, everyone, someone along this line, then we say you're either 100% correct on my side or 100% wrong on the other side. And now politics is not about negotiation, persuasion, compromise, finding common ground. It becomes how do I defeat my enemy? It becomes about domination. And I think it ultimately causes us to misunderstand our relationship to God and who God is, because we try to put God somewhere on the left-right spectrum. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is not progressive. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not conservative. It transcends these man-made categories and is far above any of these man-made institutions or ideologies. Yes. But we try and shrink God down and put him into one of our boxes and say, yes, he agrees with my team on all of these things. So it's very confusing and it's very misleading and it's harmful. But unfortunately, my fellow professors in the academy are more caught up in this than anyone. Now, part of the reason is once you identify yourself as a progressive or a conservative, now you have an incentive to believe in the myth because it feels good to tell yourself that I'm on the correct side that has all the answers, and those other guys are on the wrong side and they're wrong about everything. And it gives you a sense of self-importance, self-worth, moral superiority. And you can also see why this would be particularly appealing to people who don't have a strong religious faith in their own life. Historically, traditionally, throughout human history, religion has given people that sense of identity, their understanding to their relationship to the divine, their sense of self-worth, their sense of morality. But now people, increasingly, as they leave traditional religion behind, are trying to find it in politics. Politics becomes their new religion. And this is the case, unfortunately, for many of my colleagues in the academy who think of themselves as progressives and think, well, this is what makes me a good person, is I'm a progressive. And I'm not one of the bad people, you know, those conservatives. So it's something that we're trying to inform our colleagues about in the history discipline, in the political science discipline. There's actually some good work that's been coming out among some political scientists who are trying, who are starting to kind of point out, oh, look, actually, there are some big problems with the way that we conceptualize left and right. But I'm afraid the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe in this myth. In fact, there's this group called the More in Common Foundation. They do something called the perception gap. Have you guys come across this at all? So they ask to take a survey and identify as Democrats or Republicans, and then take a survey where they list, okay, what do you think the Democratic Party's position is on all these issues, and what do you think the Republican Party's position is on all these issues, right? A dozen different issues. And what they find is that people are pretty good at knowing their own party's issue positions, but they're pretty bad at knowing what the other party's issue positions are. They think that the other party is much more extreme on a variety of issues than they actually are. And what the more a common group has found is that actually the more news media you consume, the dumber you become, the more likely you are to misunderstand what the opposing party actually believes, and the more education you get, the dumber you become, the more likely you are to mischaracterize what your political opponents believe. And I think partly the reason is that almost every media outlet and almost every educational establishment is seeped in the left-right spectrum and teaches that to their readers and to their students. And this is actually making us collectively dumber as a society.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

And beyond that, I mean it's a coherent, you know, claim you're making, but I'm just saying there's so much just really good material in there. Like I'm trying to figure out, okay, what what do I want to talk about? But I did want to mention that me and Will were talking just this morning, and we started to talk about this idea, like we have way more in common than we do different, right? And then then we have like differences between each other. And actually all agreement is built, all disagreement is built on agreement. So actually the first thing we should be doing is figuring out all the ways in which we actually agree, which would probably be way more surprise. And then you actually find the point of controversy, which is the place where the disagreement actually exists. And we gave an example of like, when does life begin, right? When it comes to abortion. And then I said, well, even more specifically, when does personhood begin? Because life clearly begins when the biological life, you know, it's some kind of organism, it's a human fetus or whatever USI goat and all that. So we but we got into that discussion. But even asking some questions already sharpens our definition and gets closer to where the controversy actually is. And it's actually so enjoyable to do that instead of feeling threatened by it like I used to feel all the time. But the reason I felt threatened is not because it was a real threat. It was because I was told I should be afraid by people I trusted. So you're we have people listening, right, and watching this, and they really like what you're saying, but something in them is like, I just somehow though I just don't buy it. There, there's gotta be an authentic right or left. You talk about this, I want to bring this part, the book in, the chapter, because I'm so fascinated by it. But this idea of like authentic right or left and these essences that people go back and forth, like and even like setting us up for the correlation versus the causation issues in this. I would love for you to kind of explain that. Like some people are wondering, it there's gotta be a deeper reason, gotta be a deeper essence besides just tribalism. I would really love as best as you can to put that to rest, that idea. Um because I think you do a good job of that in the book. So yeah, good.

SPEAKER_03 30:41

Yeah. So, you know, one of the misperceptions, and this is the fault of our writing in the book, and we should have been clear about this, one of the misperceptions of our book is people think, oh, well, you're saying people can't be philosophical or principled. You don't believe that there's any real core principles in politics. We believe actually just the opposite. We believe that to the extent that you give up left-right thinking, you will be philosophical and principled in your politics. The reason people are giving betraying their principles and giving up what they actually know to be true in their heart of hearts is typically because of left-right thinking. They think, well, there's this left-right spectrum, I'm on the left or I'm on the right. And if my party does X, Y, or Z and they're on my side of the spectrum, then I have to justify everything that they do. Because if I don't, then maybe I'm not a progressive, or maybe I'm not a conservative. You know, and you have this identity crisis. So you think, okay, I have to justify everything that my party does and all that my party leaders do, even though we know in our heart of hearts that it's wrong what they're doing. We try to, so then we change our position on, you know, the hundreds of issues. I could give you lots of examples. So actually, I think giving up left-right thinking makes you philosophical and principled. Adopting the left-right framework makes you a partisan lemming. It it makes you twist yourself and contort yourself into so many knots. Now, to the point of, well, why is it that people who call themselves progressives or call themselves conservatives do have this correlation that we find among the issue positions? Okay, so the first thing is, well, we do see a correlation. It's not 100% tight. That's the first thing to say. And the second thing to say is that this correlation is a product of socialization. It's not philosophical. Now we know this because we can see this with our very own eyes. The two major parties today are taking issue positions that are the opposite of what they were five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, right? And 20 years ago. Depends on the issue, we can go back to different lengths. But there's no issue that is taken by team blue that wasn't the issue position of team red at some point in the past. And they've probably flip-flopped multiple times on that. So we know that even though there is correlation, what correlates is always changing. That's the first thing. That we can all see this with our eyes, and we've historically seen this. Secondly, there's really interesting survey data that backs up what we kind of anecdotally believe to be true. That if that political scientists have actually been asking Americans for about the past 50 years what their views are on a variety of different issues. And you can see how these issues have changed over time. One of the ones that's most striking is in the 1990s, when I was growing up, there was a question asked of American citizens you know, how much do you think character matters in elected officials? And as you might remember from the Clinton days, it was people who called themselves conservatives that overwhelmingly believed that character mattered in elected officials. This was a very important thing to take into account when talking about politics or voting for people in political office. And it was people who called themselves liberals who had a much lower percentage, right? It was like three times as many people who called themselves conservatives thought this than liberal. Well, fast forward to today, surveyors are still asking people this question, and it's completely flipped. Now, by in a way, it's three times more people who call themselves progressives or liberals that think character matters in elected officials as compared to conservatives. Well, did the philosophy change? Well, no, the people just in power changed, and you want to justify your group, and so you change your own issue position. But we can go through that when we're talking about international trade or foreign intervention or immigration or on and on and on. There's a hundred issues where they've changed. So I think that's one of the interesting things. The other interesting thing about the survey data is what I alluded to earlier, which is that this phenomenon of correlation, that why is it that if I know someone's position on, say, tax cuts, I can guess their position on abortion and tariffs and aid to Ukraine? You know, why is that? That's a weird thing. Those seem like very different issues. Why, knowing what they believe about income taxes, I'm able to predict all these other things. Well, again, I can't predict it perfectly, but among a certain group of people, I can predict it. Why is that? Well, what we what we find in the survey data is that it's only people who have been told that those things go together who exhibit that correlation. Right? So people, this is basically a phenomenon among college-educated whites, is basically what the demographic data says. This is the group that correlates their issue positions in the way that they are told to by team blue and team red. Other people don't have this problem. They say, yeah, I can be pro-life on abortion policy, and I can be in favor of immigration, and I can be in in favor of environmental regulations, and I can be, you know, opposed to aid to Ukraine, and I can, you know, whatever your bundle happens to be. Ordinary normal people don't have this problem. It's only the people who have been socialized into believing in the myth of left and right who exhibit this correlation. So maybe I can give you an analogy to something else that is a myth in life that we all recognize as a myth. So astrology is something that we know is a myth. You know, astrology is the idea that depending under the sign in which you're born. Sorry, sorry to break that to you, Josh. This is gonna be hard for you today.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

Hey, you know, it's life lessons every day, man. It's okay.

SPEAKER_03 36:17

So yeah, all of your mental frameworks are being collapsed. Sorry, this is gonna be so hard. But yeah, so the idea that, you know, what month you're born in determines your personality and your behavior and all this. Now, most people say, oh, that's funny, that's silly, and pay no attention. Well, what if you find started finding a correlation among the behavior traits that go along with a particular horoscope and your astrological sign? But it was only among the people who read their horoscope on a daily basis. So they say, oh, well, I'm a I was born in August, so I'm a Leo, and I'm told I have to be brave, so then I start exhibiting brave characteristics. And then people say, aha, astrology is real. Look, there's a correlation between the behavior of these people and the sign under which they are born. When really all that's going on is they are being told that these behaviors go together with this particular thing, and therefore they act it out. But there's nothing in nature that's going on here, it's simply socialization. Well, that's very much like the left-right correlations that we notice. It only happens among people who believe in the left-right spectrum. If you don't believe in the left-right spectrum, your issue positions do not map up or map together in this particular way. There's some really interesting, this is the last thing I'll say. Sorry, this is a long rambling answer. Uh, there's some interesting experimental data that's been done by political scientists where they'll bring people into a room and they will give them a paper to fill out and they'll ask them, do you think of yourself as a Democrat, a Republican, or something else? Do you think of yourself as a progressive or conservative or something else? And what are your issue positions on the following issues? And they have a treatment group and a control group, and what they do is they have different treatment groups where they give them a series of quotes from a political leader, a partisan leader, and saying different issue positions on that issue. Now, normally when political scientists do lab studies with subjects, like an experiment like this, they have to lie to them. They have to make things up to come up with a control group and a treatment group. What they were able to do in the case of Donald Trump is because he has taken different sides of every issue, they actually used real quotes from Donald Trump saying Donald Trump is in favor of raising the minimum wage, you know, and he has some quote about it, or he's in favor, he's against raising the minimum wage and then different quote about it, or he has this stance on gun rights, and he has this other stance on gun rights, and actual quotes that took the opposite position on all these different issues. And what the political scientists expected to find is they thought, well, there's going to be a difference between partisans and ideologues. So partisans are the people who have a strong partisan identity, Democrat or Republican, and ideologues are the people who have a strong ideological identity. They think of themselves as progressives or conservatives. What they thought they were going to find in this experiment is that the partisans would be the ones who would most likely change their own issue position from the broader group of people who call themselves a member of that party based on the social cue. Because while you're a partisan, you want to justify the party. And so you're all about the teamsmanship of politics. And then they thought what they would find is that the ideologues would not be swayed by the political cues, because what they really care about is the ideas, they're ideological, they're rigid in following their principles. But that's not what they found. They found actually that ideologues behave exactly like partisans. That the more the more strongly you identified yourself as progressive, or the more strongly you identified yourself as conservative, the more likely you were to change your own issue position on immigration, gun rights, minimum wage, et cetera, based on the cue, right? So if you're a conservative, you think of yourself as a conservative and Donald Trump is in favor of something, well then I have to as well. Or if you're a progressive, think of yourself as a progressive and Donald Trump is in favor of it, then I have to be against it as well. And so there's actually no difference between the party and the ideology. Left wing is simply whatever the Democratic Party is up to. Right wing is simply whatever the Republican Party is up to. And as the two parties change their issue positions, the meanings of left and right change right along with them.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

I mean, all of that is just simply fascinating. And I and I want to read a um a quote from your book, kind of on the topic of ideology. You wrote the main reason ideology hinders thinking is that the ideological mind is a dogmatic mind. The more ideological someone is, the more they are given to unjustified certainty, rigidity, and imperviousness to evidence. And it's it's almost like when you look like at the news today or at the news in any other period of time, like there are things that I think our eyes objectively see as being a certain way. Like you could Biden's mental health, you know, Trump's mental health, you know, like and and you've got the partisans on each side being like, I don't know what you're looking at, you know, and and it just it really kind of just speaks to like this ideology, this ideological mind almost like makes our ability to see the other side that much more difficult. And I don't think that is something that's particularly healthy for our company or for our country. It's like we're growing our cognitive dissonance. We are, you know, not seeing views from the other side of the of the political spectrum, and that will have long-term consequences. So I'm I'm curious to kind of just get your assessment on like, like, what is the consequence of us sort of maintaining this, this, you know, right, left spectrum. Yeah, I'd love to just get your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

Yeah, so I mean, it harms our brains. You know, this is your brain on ideology, is it makes you, you know, you're literally losing IQ points by approaching the world through a left-right spectrum. And there's some really interesting studies that have shown this. Philip Tetlock and others have shown that the smartest people, the people who are most likely and able to solve problems in their experimental design settings, are people who don't approach a problem through a left-right framework. They just look at the problem and see how we can address this. But to your point, once you put on the left-right blinders, I'm gonna call them, then you are not seeking truth anymore. You're seeking victory, you're seeking domination. So you're always looking for ways to justify your tribe and destroy the other tribe. And so to your point, we can watch the news and we're not looking objectively at these things. We're looking at it through a very partisan lens. Now, we're not, this is another misperception of our book. People think, well, you, and this is our fault for not writing better, you're against parties. You think partisanship is bad. No, we're not against parties or partisanship. There's just healthy partisanship and there's unhealthy partisanship. And the left-right view of the world leads to unhealthy partisanship. It doesn't allow us to keep our parties at an arm's length and say, hey, when my party does something I like, kudos, thumbs up, I'm gonna praise them for it. And when my party does something I do I don't like, I'm gonna criticize them and I'm gonna condemn them, and I'm gonna be very honest and forthright about where I think they go wrong. That's what a healthy partisanship looks like. An unhealthy partisanship just says, my party can do no wrong and I justify everything they do, and the other party can do no right, and I criticize and condemn everything that they do. And so we can't even look at the same set of facts in a way. You know, it's almost like the way sports fans watch a football game. Okay, so I don't know who your team is, who you're rooting for, and the Super Bowl coming up. Oh, okay, maybe Seahawks. Okay. Seahawks. Yeah. So, you know, we we all do this when we watch football on TV, right? We're we're a fan. We're a Seahawks fan or a Patriots fan. And there's a pass interference call, and that flag goes on the On the ground, and they show the replay on the TV, and every Seahawks fan is like, Well, that was crazy, what a terrible call. There's no way that was past interference. And every Patriots fan, oh yeah, of course that was past interference. There's no question, right? Because we're viewing it through a very partisan, but we kind of laugh about it because we know what we're doing. We know we're being sports fans. We know we're just having a tribal outlet for our passions, right? But in but it's a danger when we do this in politics, when we can't have a shared set of facts or objective reality with which to discuss what's happening in the political world.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

I uh Oh, sorry, go ahead, Will. Were you gonna say something?

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Well, what I was gonna say, what I was gonna say, I was gonna suggest. I I highly recommend everybody to uh to do like a congressional committee hearing party if you want to simulate like the Super Bowl experience. Because I don't know, I think there's some some value in that.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Yeah, let's do that. You know, I was thinking this is so, so relevant. And I I see the harm, right, to our brains, which I actually think is the less obvious one, because I think right now we can look out and we can see the political consequences of what's happening. And I would love for you to even paint a more vivid picture of the political consequences of allowing this left-right binary to continue. And, you know, I hope that it can get to almost the visceral part of people as they're listening that this is not the world we want to live in.

SPEAKER_03 45:54

Yeah. So, you know, I can speak from my experience as a person of faith, as a Christian. I think my religion teaches me that when I enter the public square, I need to view each of my fellow citizens as my brother or my sister, who's also a child of God, and is is worthy of equal dignity and respect, that I should love this person and care for them and try to understand them. I think that's what the injunctions of Jesus are. So unfortunately, uh the left-right spectrum suppresses that tendency that we might have to enter the public square and recognize: look, we're all fallen human beings. Each person that I encounter, whether in my neighborhood, at the school, in my workplace, in my neighborhood, online, each person I encounter is going to be correct about some things and wrong about some things when it comes to politics. That's okay. That's what it means to be human. But the left-right myth blinds us to that reality and tells us, no, there's not many issues in politics, there's just one. And where you stand on that one big thing determines whether you're correct about everything or wrong about everything. And so now we enter into the public square not wanting to engage in good faith conversation where we can learn from someone and maybe persuade them about something else. But now it's simply, why have conversation? Either you already agree with me on everything, if you're on my side of the spectrum, in which case I don't need to talk to you because we have nothing to talk about, or I disagree with you on everything. There's no we have no common ground because you're on the wrong side of the spectrum, in which case you're not even worth talking to, because I can't learn anything from you because I already know I'm correct. So I just need to defeat you and dominate you. And so we can see how this leads to the kind of authoritarian politics that we witness in our politics. It leads people to want to abandon commitments to constitutional government. So, in my position at UVU, as you mentioned in the beginning, I work with the Center for Constitutional Studies here. And the constitutional principles that we try and help our students and the public more broadly understand and appreciate are things like popular sovereignty, the rule of law, individual rights, the separation of powers, federalism. All of these things divide and limit power so that the state does not control every aspect of our lives, so that we are free to pursue happiness, so that we are free to exercise our religion, to pursue our economic pursuits, our cultural pursuits, whatever they might be. But when you approach the public square with a left-right framework in mind, now it's not, well, I recognize every person's gonna be different. We're a society, a plural society composed of lots of different groups, each pursuing their own religious beliefs, their own economic pursuits, their own cultural ideas. And I'm let I want to leave them free to practice their religion as they see fit or to make the economic decisions that they see fit. Now I want to constrain them because I know they're wrong about everything, and I know my tribe is right about everything. So why wouldn't I? I mean, it's good for them that I dominate them and bring them to heal and make them do what I believe in. And so you can see how that way of thinking about politics leads to authoritarianism and statism in our politics that we're seeing more and more, where people are not saying, well, I don't want the government to be too powerful because I know they could always use that power against me. It's like a ratchet effect. We just keep amping it up and say, yes, give the president more power, give the national government more power more power, centralized more power in Washington, as long as I have it. And then I want to destroy my opponent. So increasingly, Americans don't have as much regard for the things that I care about as a constitutionalist. They don't care about the rule of law, the separation of powers, federalism, individual rights, and popular sovereignty. So I think this is a huge problem for what's happening in our political discourse. I also think it's leading to a lot of the political violence that we're seeing increasingly in our society. This hit very close to home. Last semester on my campus, we had political violence, where, as you probably remember, someone drove onto our campus from several hundred miles away, knowing that a controversial speaker, Charlie Kirk, was going to be on our campus. And to his credit, Charlie Kirk was someone who talked about the importance of debate and discourse and using ideas and arguments rather than violence. But this disturbed person, caught up in the left-right framework, could not allow a dissenting voice to be heard. And we know this because the shell casings that were found at the site of the assassination had different things written on them, like, hey, fascist catch. So in the mind of the shooter, because Charlie Kirk was pro-life on abortion policy, that somehow made him like Hitler, that he was a fascist, because we know that fascists are on the right, and we know that conservatives are on the right, and so they're all of a piece. They're all the same kind of person, they're all on the bad side. And so in his mind, he's like, you know, an American soldier storming the shores of Normandy and shooting Nazis. Because in his mind, someone who believes in traditional marriage is somehow like Hitler or like Mussolini and is somehow a fascist. So we have this kind of insane political violence happening in our society because people can't take off the left-right blinders and say, you know what, every person is a child of God, deserving of equal dignity and respect. I'm going to agree or disagree with every person I meet on some issues, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

And I'll I'll I'll give you just a real quick example of just myself. Like I voted for Obama in 2008. Wasn't particularly political at the time. I I didn't want to go back to Iraq. That was a big, big reason I voted for him and healthcare. So, but as a result of like voting for him and you know, kind of quote unquote becoming a part of the Democrat Party, you know, it's like they had views about other things that I weren't necessarily I wasn't necessarily tracking all that, all that closely, like gun control. Like I'm a gun owner, I like guns, former military. Yeah. But I didn't necessarily like the stances my my political party was taking on guns.

SPEAKER_02 52:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:37

Additionally, I joined a church that same year. I became a Christian and started feeling the tug of the church's demands on me politically. You know, like they're like, oh, you voted for Obama, you're one of those, you know. But also, like, I would wear hats in church. You know, I mean, I was very much like a what's the not wolves. I was a black sheep, probably a better term, literally and figuratively. So, like, you know, I I know those pulls that we get from these social groups, and those pulls kind of like make us want to be a bigger part of the group. So then we kind of either adopt or don't speak out, maybe, you know, certain certain things, you know, and and you using real life examples again, I'm just thinking like, okay, so we had a we had a shooting in Minneapolis, or we had a shooting in Minnesota, American Citizen, tragic. We also had a shooting of an American at January 6th, tragic. So like both shootings were by the federal government. Yeah. And you look at sort of like just the media coverage of the recent shootings, you know, and and you and you think, oh, well, that seems kind of disproportional from the January 6th shootings. Okay, I got it. You know, like like and I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to correlate or make each of the you know, reasons that that the person got shot in each of those scenarios equal, but but it's like you can see the reaction from people. So I'm just curious, like, like what is it about us as humans that will make a a issue not that important to us, but important to sort of our identity. I don't know. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 54:13

Yeah, so I think you know, this is another good question that we get, which is people say, well, people have to get their sense of identity from somewhere. And wouldn't it make sense they get it from politics? And we agree that human beings are by nature tribal. We have to belong to groups. That's part of what it means to be human. We have to get our sense of self-worth, self-understanding from our group identities. That's inevitable. We can't eradicate that from human behavior. And in many ways, group identities and associations are really healthy, right? There's many good things that come from that. The the question has to be what tribes do we sign up with? Are they healthy tribes or are they unhealthy tribes? Right? Are they tribes that cause us to want to serve our neighbor and love our fellow citizens? Like a church congregation might do. I think at its best, a church congregation teaches us that our fellow citizens are children of God that we should serve, right? And the stranger, you know, in this in the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we take care of both our own and those who are outside our group. You know, that I think to me is is true religion. But there's other tribes that are unhealthy. There's other tribes like the left-right tribes that tell us there's the world is divided up into just two groups, you're either on the left or on the right. Every individual, every association, every institution, every church, every religion, every company can be placed somewhere on this left-right spectrum, and you're either one of the good people or one of the bad people. And so I think that is the struggle, is once we identify ourselves with one of these groups, well, we do get that sense of belonging. And it kind of feels nice, especially in a world where increasingly people are not going to church, where people are not getting out and having face-to-face conversations with their neighbors, where people are not getting involved in their community, where they're not doing community service. As those things decline in our society, people are looking for meaning somewhere. And what do you know? There's a pre-packaged ideology that gives you all the answers. Sounds pretty nice. And you don't have to do anything. You don't have to be go out and serve anyone or be kind to someone who you otherwise wouldn't get along with. You just have to go online and get on social media and fire off insults from behind your keyboard to signal to the other people in your tribe that you're one of the good guys. Because look how I'm taking, I'm owning the libs, or I'm taking on, you know, the Trumpers or whatever. Like, that's all you have to do. You just signal to your group that you're one of the good people in that way. And the way you signal it is by adopting all of the ancillary issue positions, right? So if what you care about is, you know, the Iraq war is bad, and I agree with you on that, then okay, that's fine. You come to that determination. But what does that have to do with your stance on transgender surgeries for minors? Or what does that have to do with your stance on abortion policy or deficit spending? Right? These are just different issues. And that's okay. And we can take each issue on their own. But the tribalism in us wants to say, well, I've adopted my identity with this one tribe. Now I have to take on all the issue positions against my better judgment, against what my faith teaches me, against what I know to be better.

SPEAKER_01 57:34

Yeah, I mean, I think this whole conversation is so important right now. It's so funny, because even why, like I couldn't, I couldn't resist. I posted on Facebook and I basically said, I'll I'll tell you what I said right now. Let me get to it. Because it was about this conversation, and it's gonna be interesting to see how people respond. I said the left versus right binary is false and a tool of manipulation used by people in power to make us hate the other and triggers our most tribal instincts. Prove me wrong. So we'll see. It'll be fun. I'm sure we're gonna get all sorts of hate about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I'll just say, hey, read this book and then let me know what you think. So, but this is such an important conversation because I truly feel like it, it, it does, it makes no sense what we've been sold. If you take a couple steps back, you go, yeah, what what what does uh what do terrorists have to do with transgender surgeries?

SPEAKER_02 58:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:36

And why do I have to have an opinion on one? And then that automate automatically makes me have to have an opinion on another. Yeah. Like that makes zero sense. And I've been telling people to get out of the matrix, and I think the matrix is the left-right binary. Like I have felt this, and you know, I guess I need to guard myself from my own, what would you call it, like uh uh confirmation bias. Like you're just, you know, saying things like finally someone's researched, and look, this is we've been saying this, we've been feeling this, and look, here it is. But I it's such a compelling story because I think it just it if it does feel intuitively correct when you take a step back and look and see, yeah, we're in the midst of this. Like it doesn't make any sense why all these beliefs are cluster clustered together with no real logical connection between them. Right. Except that my group says I need to believe this.

SPEAKER_03 59:35

Yeah. And even in particular issues, if I could give an example, like please, yeah, you know, you mentioned at the beginning about you know the pandemic. So we all went through this together. And this to me was a strange manifestation of left-right thinking, because you had a public health pandemic where people decided that they had to bundle their issue positions on the pandemic in particular ways, and no other way of approaching things would make sense. So my own view was, based on what I was reading in the best scholarship that I could see, is that the COVID the coronavirus uh did not affect young people very much at all. It was like a flu for people who were young and healthy, and that vaccines were helpful in preventing the worst effects of COVID among elderly people who are particularly at risk. So it seemed to me that the best policy would be okay, let's let's have people get vaccinated and keep the schools open. That would make sense to me. Now you might disagree with me, whatever. But what ended up happening is our two parties decided you either have to be, you know, in favor of vaccines and in favor of lockdowns, or you have to be against lockdowns and against vaccines. It's like, but why? Why do those two things have to go together in that way? Well, it's because our tribes signal, well, if you're one of the good people, you know, on the left, then you know that this is like the bubonic plague, and we have to shut down society and keep schools closed and stop, you know. Or if you're one of the good people on the right, you have to know that, you know, the vaccine is a chip being implanted into you by Bill Gates or something. Like it's just the most insane uh reasoning. But this is where left-right thinking takes us.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

Yeah, it absolutely takes us there. And I just appreciate this conversation so much, Verlin. How can people connect with you, your work? How can they like is there a preferred vendor for the book? And even more, like, how can they just take this and implement this into your life? Like, how do you want them to get involved with what you guys are doing? And and how can they follow you if you want them to?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:41

Yeah, no, happy to have people reach out to me at Utah Valley University. The first thing I would say is if you're wanting to do more with this, keep listening to the Faithful Politics podcast. You know, these guys are doing it the right way by saying it's not left, it's not right, it's up, which is if you're a person of faith, look to heaven for guidance. Pray, get in touch with what God is trying to have you do in your political life in a way that will best follow the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. So that's the first thing I would say. You know, at the end of the day, all this other stuff, I think Jesus is the answer. That's my own bias on this. But in addition to that, as you engage with your fellow brothers and sisters who are all children of God in the public square, just go into that public square with the mindset that this person isn't left wing, this person isn't right wing, I'm not left wing, I'm not right wing. There is no left-right. There's just people who have their bundle of issue positions that are inevitably going to be correct about some things and wrong about others. And let's see if we can have a good faith conversation and learn from each other, find some common ground and see if we can pursue some policy or some programs that can build on that common ground. We don't have to agree on everything, but maybe there's a few things that we can agree on. So I I would encourage people to do that. The way to do that is to recognize that the left-right myth is a myth. That's the first step, is recognize we have a problem. And then secondly, I would just encourage people to go granular. When you're talking about politics, instead of bringing in the inflammatory language of left and right or progressives and conservatives, just talk about the issue. Okay, let's talk about gun rights, or let's talk about taxes, or let's talk about aid to Ukraine or Greenland or the Gaza War or whatever the issue is, but don't bring in all this extraneous stuff saying, well, if you, you know, if you're in favor of, you know, protective tariffs, therefore you think the 2020 election was stolen, and therefore, you know, you think X, Y, and Z and all these other. No, no, no. Let's just separate these out. Doesn't mean that you have to agree with everything in either party. So go granular. And then I would encourage people to do what I was saying earlier, which is to find healthier tribes. So I think one of the best things we can do many times is to turn off the TV, unplug the screen, even though I know I'm speaking to you through a screen right now, but turn it off, shut the laptop after this, go outside and have a conversation with your neighbor. Serve your neighbor, do something good in your community. Because I think as you have face-to-face conversations with people, you learn to recognize their humanity, their basic decency. When we only engage with people through the screens on social media, it's easy to create boogeyman, heroes and villains, and just hurl insults and act in a horrible way towards each other. So I think that's gonna be good for us. And then find these healthier tribes, get involved in your local church congregation. That's gonna be healthier for your soul, it's gonna be better for your brain, you're gonna be happier, the world will be a better place if you do more of that. Uh, we need more people of faith, making our politics more faithful rather than having political ideologues making our faiths distorted and deformed by politics. So that's what I encourage your listeners to do. If you happen to be in the Utah Valley area, please get involved with our Center for Constitutional Studies. We're always doing work here at CCS to try to promote the principles of the rule of law, separation of powers, federalism, the things that I talked about before.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:11

Well, thank you so much, Verlin. It's been like uh a real uh pleasure to have you on here and connect with you. It's such a great conversation, man. Thank you guys. Absolutely. And to our viewers, guys, thanks for joining us. Uh again, if you've already listened this long, you've liked and subscribed. So thank you. Now send it to someone else and encourage them to do the same. Get on our Patreon, join our Substack. We like to get those uh extras out to you guys there. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. God bless you.