The Purple Principle

In this episode of The Purple Principle, we wonder, what’s behind those red and blue maps of American political and social geography and our deepening urban-rural divide?  To find out, we consult not one but two political scientists named Ryan who have extensively researched the social geography of polarization in the U.S. – Ryan Enos of Harvard University (author of The Space Between Us) and Ryan...

We’ve all seen and heard the sad decline of civil discussions at congressional town hall forums over the past decade or two. The anger, the shouting, the gotcha questions. Not to mention generous amounts of obfuscation from congressional representatives. The result being that even before COVID, many members of Congress and other elected officials began to abandon town halls all together.  But the...

Does history create vulnerabilities that any number of populist politicians could seize upon? Or do exceptional populists create those opportunities only he or she can exploit? There’s no simple answer to that question. But it does frame the informative discussion we have surrounding a major populist figure, Newt Gingrich, on our first Season Two episode with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. Ze...

To some degree, all Americans realize we’ve become more polarized in recent times. Those at one extreme obsess about the other, while those in between wonder if that incessant tug of war will fray our social fabric to the breaking point. Fortunately, there are committed individuals and groups working hard to combat polarization. In Part Two of our season finale (“We’re Polarized; Now What?”), we h...

A first presidential impeachment… the COVID pandemic with great dissension over shutdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing…Our hotly contested 2020 election followed by major efforts at election reversal culminating with insurrection and a second impeachment trial...  It’s been quite a year, much too full of subject matter since we started researching and producing Purple Principle episodes on...

Anyone casually following the 2020 election this year may have noticed a particular pattern in polling trends and election results. That pattern, in key presidential states as well as Senate races, went something like this:  Democrat ahead… Democrat still ahead... Democrat a bit ahead, days away from the election… But then: Republican wins by a fair amount.  How was so much polling inaccuracy poss...

A Major Pandemic… Election 2020 that lasted weeks… Election Denial 2020 is still going months later… Insurrection… Impeachment… And possibly more to come. There’s been a lot of polarized and polarizing events over the past few months. So it seems time to step back and take a longer range, wider-angle view of partisanship in our DisUnited States.  The Purple Principle does that in Episode 20 with f...

The Year 2020 has not exactly been brimming with good news. Certainly in terms of public health and the economy, you could say it was the worst of times and the worst of times.   But we did find a bright audio spot in Purple Principle Episode 13, which we repodcast today with important new information, most notably that Alaska’s ambitious Ballot Measure Two has officially passed.  Ballot Measure T...

Colleges have come to be known as havens for divisive politics, cancel culture, and trollism, all miserably co-existing with academic stress, social pressure and stale pizza. In Episode 18, “Civil society and Campus Politics,” The Purple Principle profiles two college students pushing back against the polarizing forces on college campuses and the nation writ large.  Avinash Bakshi, President of th...

Inaccurate polling… Split-ticket results… Denial of election results by large numbers of Republican voters and members of Congress... There have been plenty of head-scratching developments related to the 2020 election. In Episode 17, “Party Dynamics in Context,” we turn to noted historian and columnist, Geoffrey Kabaservice, for 2020 election analysis.  Given the demise of moderates in the Republi...

The 2020 election has revealed the partisan state of American politics and society like no other event in recent history. How did we get to this point? Our special guest today, Trevor Potter, Founder and President of the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), provides insight into that question and suggestions for rehabilitating our polarized polity. Gerrymandering, the partisan drawing of electoral distric...

Exactly one hundred years ago this month, at a time of political polarization and the Spanish Flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming,” a poem premised on the cycles of history that resonates today with striking immediacy.  Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, the worst are full of passionate intensity... These and other enduring lines from “The Second Coming” are now...

How does a century-old poem written in Ireland as European civil wars erupted in the aftermath of World War I still resonate in our own partisan era? That is the central question The Purple Principle asks in both Episode 14 and 15, as the classic poem, “The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats, turns one hundred years young.  In Episode 14, our special guest is another great Irish poet, Paul Mu...

The great state of Alaska is different in many ways – its vast size, low population, and great distance from “the lower 48” (states). Politics in Alaska is different as well: a remarkable 57% of Alaskans are registered as either non-partisan or unaffiliated voters.  The proponents of Alaska Ballot Measure 2 would like to preserve and enhance the state’s non-partisan political culture. This measure...

Independent candidate David Krucoff is running for the non-voting D.C. Congress position without much hope of unseating incumbent Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton for her 16th term. Instead, Krucoff seeks to call attention to his non-partisan “retrocession” solution to D.C. disenfranchisement – the creation of Douglass (as in Frederick Douglass) County, Maryland as the new and fully enfranchised hom...

What makes a stand-up comedian wake up one day and decide comedy needs more science? A road comic for 13 years, Shane Mauss made this enlightened decision 5 years ago in launching his science podcast, Here We Are, and then expanded it by creating Stand Up Science comedy shows, inviting local professors around the country on stage to discuss their research.  We asked Shane about the origin of his s...

How much trust can independent-minded voters place in polling this 2020 election season?  It seems not a day goes by without multiple new poll results blaring from cable networks and rebounding across the Web. But how accurate are these polls? What’s been learned from the 2016 polling fiasco where many polls predicted a large Clinton for President victory? And how much more difficult is election p...

Let’s say, for the sake of Episode 9: The Brain on Partisan Politics, that identical twins are separated at birth and raised in different families, politically speaking: one deep blue, the other deep red. They’re bound to have different political leanings as adults, correct? Actually, probably not, according to Dr. Jay Van Bavel, NYU Neural Scientist and our featured guest in Episode 9, The Brain...

Ok, Comedians, make America laugh with surprising, original jokes that offend absolutely no one and work equally well in our very blue, very red and very antagonized parts of the country...  To the Purple Principle team, that seemed a near-impossible challenge in today’s partisan environment.  With Episode 8, The Purple Principle begins a series of related discussions with comedians starting with...

Did you hear the one about bipartisanship? Two opposing congressmen walk into a town hall…and civil discussion breaks out.  Hard to believe in the current climate, but former three-term Congressman Jason Altmire recounts the origin and unfortunate demise of these bipartisan town halls in Episode 7, Congress and Partisanship. Author of Dead Center: How Political Polarization Divided America, Altmir...

How do social media algorithms feed us news, entertainment, advertisements, even suggesting friends and lovers? By grossly simplifying human nature, according to featured guest Dr. Robert Elliott Smith, Research Fellow in Computer Science at University College London and author of Rage Inside the Machine: How to Prevent the Internet from Making Bigots of Us All.  Dr. Smith details how the same Art...

What the heck happened to broadcast news in recent decades? That is the burning question we ask of Dr. Dominik Stecula, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University and expert on broadcast media trends in the US over the past fives decades. Dr. Stecula contrasts the more fact-based, consolidated and regulated broadcast news industry of the 1970’s and 80’s with the highly f...

In this interview-based episode, Dr. Marsh explains the centrality of fear in human behavior, which motivates any social species (whether musk ox or democrats or republicans) to cluster together against perceived threats. The unfortunate result is the formation of tribes, demonization of others, and the filtering of information leading to stark, unhealthy divisions.   In Part I of the interview, s...

By most measures, the US has over 40 million independent or unaffiliated voters representing a third or more of the electorate. Yet despite large and growing numbers, independents are often missing from the national conversation.   Independents have no cable channel or national newspaper. You rarely encounter independent viewpoints on major networks or opinion pages. And there’s a surprising lack...

Our Episode 2 guests include a former Republican speechwriter, a former centrist Democratic congressional candidate, a former Economist Magazine correspondent, a current Professor of Public Policy (Dartmouth College) and the founder of the non-partisan group, Unite America, working to bridge our partisan divide.  Lots of voices for one podcast? In fact, each of these perspectives come from a singl...