Beth Silvers & Sarah Stewart Holland
Beth Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland dig into political identification, a decline in church attendance, and the search for shared American values. With grace and curiosity, they host the widely-acclaimed podcast "Pantsuit Politics."
Transcript
Sarah Stewart Holland (00:06):
What does it mean to be a good person? What does that look like in my life? I want a place you go where you think, what are my values? Because if we don't have those spaces to think about it as individuals, when we get into conflict, that muscle is weak.
Ted Roosevelt (00:21):
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guests today are Beth Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland, hosts of the popular and insightful podcast, Pantsuit Politics. While they discuss politics, culture, and society, they do it with empathy and curiosity. They also tour the country as speakers for many live events and are authors of two books, including I Think You're Wrong, but I'm Listening. This episode is a truly thought-provoking conversation about everything from political party identification to declining church attendance to the search for shared American values. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. [music]
Ted Roosevelt (01:07):
Listen, I am so excited to have you guys both on, I'm a big fan of your podcast. I've listened to almost all of them.
Sarah Stewart Holland (01:14):
Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt (01:15):
I'd love to know from the very beginning, how did this come together?
Sarah Stewart Holland (01:19):
I had a blog. I had a parenting blog called Bluegrass Redhead where I would write a stroller review and then share my thoughts on the Syrian Civil War, like, I did not care. I just put everything on there that I felt like talking about and Beth reached out during her maternity leave and said, would you ever be interested in a guest post on Bluegrass Redhead? And I was like, for sure, because I'm doing this for free, so any posts I don't have to write, it's great. And she wrote a couple posts, one in particular called Nuance. And so it was sort of this idea, let's just hashtag things "#nuanced" to imply that maybe this is not everything I have to say on the subject and certainly not everything I have to say period. It was just really well received by my audience. And so I said, "would you ever be interested in starting a podcast?"
(02:05):
And she said, "what's a podcast?" 'Cause this was 2015. And I said, "I've got that part figured out." We just would sit and talk about politics and we did a test call. I said, let's just get on the phone and kind of talk about where we're at and what we think about things and see how it goes. And I'll never forget, I was driving around with my youngest son who was a baby baby at the time and he was asleep in the back and we talked for like 30, 45 minutes and I said, okay, we're not going to do this anymore unless we're recording it because we just had really good conversational chemistry. So we thought we would just start talking and maybe our moms would listen. And turns out a lot more people listened a lot more quickly than we expected.
Beth Silvers (02:44):
We always say we set out to make a podcast about nuance and the universe gave us Donald Trump. We really started and the Republican nomination for 2016 came roaring in. So by 2017, we had a sense of our audience and we had a sense of that desire to be more civically engaged. Everything in the country was feeling more political. So in some ways it had the characteristics of the time when I wrote that first blog post just saying, Hey, can we just settle down a little bit? But the mood was very much, no, we cannot settle down. It is important that we don't settle down. And so figuring out--now that we had an audience and we knew a little bit more about what we were doing--how to adjust to that time period was pretty challenging.
Ted Roosevelt (03:35):
And the sort of origins, it was a little bit, Beth, you were more right leaning and Sarah, you were more left leaning. Beth, you've moved a little bit to the left in recent years and I think you've re-registered parties as well. Is that--?
Beth Silvers (03:51):
Oh, twice. Listen, I'm very flexible in my beliefs. So I registered as a Democrat in 2019 and it was mostly because I saw in my local elections that the Republican party had moved so far right, that I felt like it had left me behind. And I also noticed in our audience that, just that tag of me as more right-leaning was a constant disappointment of expectations, that people who still considered themselves Republicans at that point would listen and find my perspective unacceptable to them. And I never want to be dishonest or anything other than completely transparent about where I am with our audience. And I also am not willing to say things that I don't mean on the air. So I registered as a Democrat and that was fine. The earth didn't come off of its axes like nothing dramatic happened in my life. And then I recently in December re-registered as a Republican so that I could vote in the primaries this year. Yeah, when I say to people, let's take off our jerseys and not be so stuck in party identifications, I walk that walk for sure with my own registration.
Ted Roosevelt (05:04):
It's so unusual for people even when they I think feel like the party has left them to actually take that step and re-identify as associated with the other party, whether that's in terms of their registration or just simply how they describe themselves. What was the emotional experience of coming to the conclusion that you wanted to re-identify and re-register?
Beth Silvers (05:29):
I think that it was less, "I want to re-identify" and more "I want to put this label in its place in my life." I hope that my partisan affiliation is the least interesting thing about me. Now look, that's pretty easy for me because I haven't been a Republican elected official. I haven't been attached to the party's efforts to organize or fundraise in my community. All of my community service has been nonpartisan, so I understand why this is a harder call for some people than it is for me, but knowing that I didn't have those stakes attached to it and that the most important thing given my work was to have a label attached to me that would most clearly tell listeners, "this is where I am right now." And now I would say I am probably a center left Democrat, but very independent in how I view most of the issues. And I think the issues that are coming down the pike, the most important challenges that we're going to face as a country, the two party system and even the left right spectrum don't do justice to those issues. So I think this will become even less important to me in my future than it's been in the past.
Sarah Stewart Holland (06:46):
A lot of our audience went through that similar journey with Beth and it was so interesting and illuminating to hear how much that party identification was tied up with religion that they had been raised, "You cannot be a good Christian and vote Democrat." How much it was tied up with family dynamics, that parents and grandparents and older generations felt disrespected if they changed their party or identification, felt rejected. And it's not just on the right, I was raised conservative evangelical and probably would've told you I was a Republican until I went to college and I went to a liberal arts university and it was every evangelical parents nightmare. I went to college and got really liberal and registered as a Democrat and I've been a Democrat my whole life since. And when we started the podcast, I decided to walk the walk and was like, lemme just try voting for a Republican one time just to see what it feels like and voted for Rand Paul last, his last election or maybe election before last, and I don't know, time is a flat circle and I mean almost got kicked out of the Democratic Executive Committee in my county because people found-- like, I talked about it openly and people were livid that I would say as a democrat, as a Democrat who'd been held elected office, that I had voted for a Republican, I had to go on a little trial. It was ridiculous. I won for what it's worth, but after years of this journey with Beth changing and us changing our tagline and really not putting that bipartisanship label on ourselves anymore because we don't really consider ourselves partisan analysts at all, that people still all the time roll up in our reviews disappointed, "they're not balanced, they're not this, they're not that." It's never going to be good enough for a certain subset of the population. I'm not sure what they require, but I'm also not sure it's achievable.
Ted Roosevelt (08:41):
When I was growing up and at my family table, the disagreement was the enjoyment of the conversation that we could all sit around a table and disagree about party politics. My father's a Republican, my mother's a Democrat. I sort of toggled back and forth as I was growing up for a while and everyone in my family was aligned with a different party and this sort of joy of the conversation in my memory was that we all disagreed and we could sort of figure it out together and occasionally maybe you'd back someone into a corner and that would be sort of fun that they would sort of intellectually have been like, oh, well maybe you had a good point here, but it was never tied to this idea of identity and your group and your circle so tightly the way that it is now. Do you guys have a sense in your conversations, because I know you've been trying to break this down on your podcast, why that is so potent today, that sort of sense of identity and your party affiliation?
Sarah Stewart Holland (09:35):
Well, I think one of the big things that's changed is that it's just a sense of threat. There's a sense of threat coming from the other side. It's not just that we disagree, it's not just that you're proposing a different solution than I am. It's that you are a threat to me, to my people, to this country. I mean, it's the language of lots of leaders that the stakes are so high and if you don't vote for me, America is over. Your children's future is over. And so the heightened stakes, sometimes real, sometimes fake. I think under the rubric of basic human psychology just put us in this posture that there is no room for discussion. And look, I mean we saw a lot of that I think on the left with Donald Trump. That's where you start policing your own group because the stakes are so high you don't have control over the actual threat, so all you can do is police the threat from the inside, which I found very discouraging. It felt very much like being a Baptist. You were just never quite good enough. And so I think that you can see that psychology play out, not just right left. You can see it play out within the parties themselves. In order to sustain this tenor, we have to turn on each other.
Ted Roosevelt (10:50):
What is the sort of solution to this now? Is it more than just sort of hoping that people adopt a different behavior or a different attitude?
Beth Silvers (10:58):
I wish I had a really easy prescription for this. We would probably be able to bottle it and sell it if we could come up with that.
(11:05):
For me, it is constantly focusing on what is the goal here and electing people who have that goal in mind. You said it when you talked about your family that we disagreed and it was fun because through that disagreement, maybe we figure something out, but that implies that the goal is to figure something out together, and right now all of the incentives in politics are just to win or to lose in a way that helps you win something outside the political process, right? Sometimes I think in Congress we have legislators who are setting up failed votes just for messaging purposes because they're winning in some dimension that has nothing to do with passing laws or doing the business of the government. I don't know how much more obvious that's going to have to get for the general population. My sense is that it's becoming obvious that we might be reaching the limitation of the public's patience with legislators as publicists instead of lawmakers, but getting to some orientation of a shared goal where everyone occasionally has to accept things that they don't love in order for us to take steps forward together is the only way I know to get out of this persistent obnoxious cycle that everybody says they're exhausted by.
Ted Roosevelt (12:26):
One of the things you guys focus on is really trying to start with people's values and where the values connect with people. When I was in business school, this really blew my mind, but there was this guy, professor Keith Hennessy, who taught fiscal policy and he gave everyone in the class a line item of the national budget and said, cut the budget by 15% and just kind of cross out the things that you don't want to see. He then would set people up that were on different sides of what should get cut and what shouldn't get cut and have them argue it out and they'd be sort of going back and forth and you could see they were getting nowhere and he just started asking the students on each side sort of like, well, why do you think this is important? And followed up that question until he got to the core value that the person was why they were defending that particular policy or another, and then would do it on the other side and you'd have two values facing off against each other. And what happened is they very quickly would be like, oh, that value's not so different from my value. And the amount of agreement between the two of them and then their ability to find consensus was so much greater and happened so much more quickly. And I see you guys doing something very similar in your conversations, and so I'm wondering how you came to that realization and if you could just talk to it.
Sarah Stewart Holland (13:47):
Sometimes I articulate on our show, I feel like the only one we can get people to agree on is I want my kids' life to be better than mine. Can we just agree on that? Can we get there? Let's start there. We want the next generation of Americans' lives to be better than ours. It's hard. It's hard to really get to what is the universal value here? We don't do a lot in American life to articulate and think through just values. I always tell my friends, I want people to go to church not because I think they should go to church 'cause they're going to go to hell-- I don't believe in hell-- not 'cause I want them to go to church to even worship God just because I need a place where people go and think what's important to me? What does it mean to be a good person?
(14:31):
What does that look like in my life? I want a place you go where you think, what are my values? And we don't spend enough time in our lives thinking about what does character mean? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to live? Because if we don't have those spaces to think about it as individuals, when we get into conflict, that muscle is weak and we can't exercise it in the face of frustration or anger or disagreement because we haven't exercised it when we are calm and alone and with our own thoughts.
Beth Silvers (15:04):
Maybe another way to put that is that we say in the private sector a lot, you don't cut your way to prosperity. So if you're starting with the exercise of we want to cut 15% of the federal budget, you're setting yourselves up for a scarcity mindset and let me hold on and be really territorial. If you lead with the values, just like you saw in the exercise you discussed, what are the top three things that government can do in this space? Okay, what's been most effective toward those three goals? You might end up with 15% somewhere that can be redirected or that can come out or redeployed, but we have to get out of this space where we start by saying to people, Hey, you should get worried because something's going to be taken from you. And I think so much of our politics has become about subtraction, that we lose all the opportunities that we have when it's about addition.
Ted Roosevelt (16:03):
I want to keep going on that thread of the sort of space for people to establish their values and if I have a Sarah or a Beth in my life, depending on who I am in this analogy, it's a friend of mine whose father is an Episcopalian minister and he's been really kind of banging the drum on the decline of organized religion in the United States. It's not that he has one in particular that he wants to see happen, but he feels like that's exactly Sarah, what you're describing, that space for people to come together, the moment of calm, the sense to sort of establish a shared set of values or at least kind of hold them up. It's not about the rituals from his perspective or the particular religion.
Sarah Stewart Holland (16:45):
Theology.
Ted Roosevelt (16:45):
Yeah, theology. Thank you. And I wonder how you guys feel about that if you feel like part of this partisan divide that there is some correlation or connection between the declining participation in organized religion in this country.
Beth Silvers (17:00):
I think participation is the key word there because when you go physically to a space to not just think about, but to live out your values, then you have to start doing things with other people and seeing things accomplished. My church functions like an enormous nonprofit organization. Sunday is our slow day. The campus is alive with people coming to take a shower. We have a number of people who live in their cars who shower at my church. They receive medical care there. We have a huge daycare for working families. It is alive constantly, and so we have in our congregation a mind blowing spectrum of political belief. The way people vote does not all line up in one direction, but none of that friction comes to church because we're doing things instead of just arguing about things. And I think that the missing piece is our political leaders recognizing that their constituents want to do something. I don't think anybody feels the sense of satisfaction when they pick up the phone and yell at a staffer for a congressman that they would feel if they got plugged into something local. And so I would love it if those staffers were given lists of organizations, Hey, if you really care about this, thank you for telling me. I'm going to pass that along and if you really care about this, get connected with this group because there are so many places to channel this energy and this interest and expertise maybe that you have.
Sarah Stewart Holland (18:33):
We just had a conversation about teen mental health. We had a comment about third places and how teenagers are being kicked out of third places. A lot of businesses will say no teenagers allowed like at coffee shops or I think you can see it around the conversation about libraries which are an enormously active, engaged third place. Having a space where you are coming together cross-generationally in particular with people who do have different politics than you. I mean that's part of the problem with organized religion is that has sorted based on politics, which I think has been incredibly detrimental and that there are so much politics present in so many churches, but to come together and say, well, I know I disagree with this person and they still care for my child, they still root for me and my family. I'm tearing up. But I just think, I think it's so important to have that feedback to just remind ourselves that we are more than consumers and that we are more than individuals just pursuing our success sequence.
Ted Roosevelt (19:37):
I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the word "grace," because it comes up a lot in your conversations and in your book. I want to know what it means to you and why it's sort of a concept that you highlight so much.
Beth Silvers (19:48):
So we think of it as a civic grace, the sense that if you live here, I want to be in community with you because you are a person who has earned my respect and dignity just by virtue of being. And so it means we don't throw people away. We don't throw them away because their political beliefs, we don't throw them away in the criminal system because of one mistake that they made. We really try to center the idea that we all belong. Some ideas don't belong. People push on this like, well then why haven't you had this kind of person on your podcast? Well, because their ideas don't belong. There are some things that we just have to reject out of hand. We're not advocating for a limitless moral relativism. We're just saying we can treat each other as people even through our most vigorous debates and even as we confront ideas that don't belong.
Sarah Stewart Holland (20:45):
I can hate ideas and I can hate policy solutions, but I do not hate people. I'm fully Nancy Pelosi, "We don't say hate." I don't say the word hate. It's one of my favorite Nancy Pelosi moments when she fully pulled out her mom voice in that press conference, and it is why we advocate for civic grace, and I do not think that you have to have a religious belief system to believe in civic grace. It's definitely grounded in faith for me, and I named the idea that I believe every human being contains a spark of the divine because I do not want to leave that field ceded to the pro-life movement that says that that is the foundation of their belief system because I believe that too, and I believe something very differently about reproductive justice, and if we all believe that and can disagree about something as fundamental as that, then maybe there is something there to hold onto this belief that there is something fundamentally valuable in each human being. Even those who are dangerous, even those who are intolerant because really it's not about protecting them, it's about protecting me. It's about protecting my own humanity by refusing to dehumanize someone else because that is dangerous and most dangerous belief in not only human history, but around the globe right now. When I see you as less, what can I justify? When I see you as undeserving, what then is available to me? And that is not something I want to participate in.
Ted Roosevelt (22:26):
When I was growing up, I felt like I could tell you what America was, what America stood for, and maybe some of it was mythology, maybe some of it was not factual per se, but there was a sense of, I thought, very clear American values. I struggle today to identify what those are sometimes, and I'm curious if you guys in your conversations have come away with whether we're talking to people on the right, people on the left, whatever it is, there is consensus. You mentioned Sarah earlier the idea that everybody wants their children to have a better life than you have, so maybe that's one of them. Are there others in that vein that you've uncovered?
Beth Silvers (23:07):
I think we continuously circle around this beautiful audacious experiment in whether you can have a multicultural democracy that freedom is extremely rare and hard to sustain in the history of humanity, but freedom among people who don't share an ethnicity or a faith or a background is even more rare, and so the fact that we just keep trying to do that is the principal American value. To me, the underlying determination to keep going at something that is very aspirational and unusual across the globe and throughout time is what motivates me.
Sarah Stewart Holland (23:57):
I think that the freedom of association, the idea, that idea, for whatever reason, you want to come together and advocate for something you can, we take that for granted that there are so many places in the world that you cannot just merely gather among like-minded people. I had a friend tell me her 20-year-old son was just railing on America, we should leave. We shouldn't live here. There's so much corruption, so much elitism, and the corruption is just rampant. And she's like, where do you want to go? And he was like, Mexico. And I was like, what?
Ted Roosevelt (24:36):
I got bad news for you.
Sarah Stewart Holland (24:38):
Those freedoms that our founding fathers put first that have become a part of the water to the point where we don't see them, I think are so fundamental American values that if pressed, most Americans can identify and do depend on, but privilege can act as a camouflage for most of that.
Ted Roosevelt (25:04):
As I look forward, maybe not five years, but through '24, we have a presidential election coming up and--
Sarah Stewart Holland (25:12):
We've heard.
Ted Roosevelt (25:13):
Apparently this is what the word on the street is-- breaking news. I feel a dread of the sort of temperature in the country rising this year, an anticipation of the temperature in the country rising because of that. Is there anything that you talk to your listeners about or you could tell our listeners about to sort of keep their temperature down in 2024 to keep themselves from being agitated or stirred up by the events that are going to happen over the next six months?
Sarah Stewart Holland (25:41):
I mean, I think that it's almost the opposite problem that's going to catch us off guard, which is there's so much malaise. I'm not sure the temperature is going to rise. I think the temperature might drop. To me, we almost want to focus on staying plugged in ways that matter that do give you energy, local elections, statewide elections, they matter. And being able to see that politics isn't all just one thing, even though it seems to be the same candidates over and over again, I think is really, really important. And I hope people will get dialed into that.
Beth Silvers (26:15):
What I worry about are all the parties who are invested in the temperature rising, and I really want people to be aware when they see in person in their lives people going, Ugh, this election, and then they go online and it's all fired up. I want them to have a moment with that dissonance to realize that a lot of what is happening online comes from not people or not people in America. There are so many outside forces that like to use American elections to turn us against each other, and they can do that at unprecedented scale in this election. Don't allow yourself to be weaponized by all of these technological innovations that are manipulated by people who do not have America's interest at heart.
Ted Roosevelt (27:07):
There are two final questions we ask all our guests. The first one is, what is an action that you might encourage our listeners to take
Sarah Stewart Holland (27:16):
Last year, Beth invented ballot clubs where you invite your neighbors over to just review the ballot, just talk through what is this office, what does it do? Do you know the person running? Do you know the other person running? Is there no other person running? How do we feel about that? And I did it in my own hometown and it was an incredibly positive exercise. So, highly encourage a ballot club.
Beth Silvers (27:38):
And if that feels overwhelming to you, the precursor to my ballot club was an annual Facebook post where I would just go on and say, Hey, I'm not telling anybody who to vote for. I just want to show you the sample ballot for our area. And then in the comments, I'm going to put some links about all of the candidates, and I think it became something people relied on because those local elections are so important, but a lot of people skip them because they don't know anything about them. We have a constable office in Kentucky, very difficult to figure out what the constable does, so I grabbed the best link I could find for that and put it just there in the Facebook comments. There are so many ways to say to people, I'm just like you. We're all figuring this out together. Here's what I found. Without it leading to an argument about who anybody should vote for, where it's just we're kind of all being the League of women voters out there spreading the idea that your participation matters in whatever direction you're going to participate.
Ted Roosevelt (28:35):
Is there an organization that you would encourage our visitors to check out?
Beth Silvers (28:39):
Well, I do think the League of Women Voters does good work.
Ted Roosevelt (28:41):
They're great.
Beth Silvers (28:42):
Yeah.
Ted Roosevelt (28:43):
Beth, Sarah, I'm rooting for world domination for you guys because I think it would really help.
Beth Silvers (28:48):
Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt (28:48):
Really. I mean, I'm not saying that for the podcast. This was an absolute joy. I love talking to you guys.
Beth Silvers (28:54):
We really enjoyed it too. Thank you for having us.
Ted Roosevelt (28:59):
Thank you so much to Sarah and Beth. I could have talked to them for another hour at least. They are really thoughtful and informed, but it's their conversational style, focused on curiosity and empathy, that makes them special to talk with. You can of course hear more of them on their own podcast, Pantsuit Politics. I always appreciate being able to have conversations like these and hope you enjoy listening to them. If you do, please tell a friend or colleague about Good Citizen and leave us a review too. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts and Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.