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This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis. I'm a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where much of my written work begins with seeing a new working paper come out and following it down a research rabbit hole.
An exciting new finding is always great, but the most important work is figuring out how it sits in the context of the rest of our knowledge base. What is it adding? Where does it depart from the consensus? And particularly when we're talking about new findings in economics, those often come from early versions of papers, before all the levels of review have been completed. So there's an extra, added level of scrutiny you have to have.
There's one such paper that's been stuck in my brain since I first saw it come into my inbox more than two years ago, one that upended much of my thinking about the protests in 2020.
The paper is called Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why? And it focuses on the demographic and ideological characteristics of protesters in two major social movements, the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests that came in response to restrictive COVID rules.
The paper finds that nearly 30% of protesters attended both a BLM and a lockdown protest, indicating significant overlap in the types of people attracted to both movements. And the research shows that these people are protesters, not counter-protesters. This finding really surprised me, and it made me question my priors about what kinds of people were attracted to these movements. Now, it's not possible to talk about protests without thinking about those that rocked college campuses this year.
While this conversation doesn't touch on those protests because we taped it in the spring, the research still has some lessons in it for those drawing large conclusions about who's protesting and why, and whether contemporaneous media reports can give us an accurate picture of chaotic events.
The stakes of misunderstanding the composition of protesters are high. Who we think is protesting drives how we respond to them. Who we think make up social movements affects whether our leaders react to them and how. And most importantly for me as a journalist, my own misunderstandings of what the 2020 protests were shaped my thinking about public health restrictions and whether they had gone too far.
I asked the lead author of that paper to come help me think through all of this. Nick Papageorge is an economist at Johns Hopkins University, where he mostly focuses on the intersection of public health and economics. Let's dive in. All right, Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So I want to take us back to spring of 2020. It was a really scary time. COVID was in full swing. We were seeing caseloads rising. I remember just being terrified. I didn't really know like what happened.
what was the way to keep yourself or the people you cared about safe. I was lucky that I got to work from home the entire time. But at the same time, it was just like there was such different changing informational environments. It just felt very chaotic. And the advice we were all getting was just stay away from other people, stay masked and, you know, just limit contact as much as possible. And, you know, spring of 2020, it's
It's also when George Floyd is murdered. And in response, you know, a nationwide movement erupted. Protests were happening in, I mean, most American cities and even around the world. And all of a sudden, I just have a vivid memory of seeing this open letter that's signed by over 1,200 people, public health professionals, infectious disease professionals, and people
It's a weird document from the time, right? Because you have them criticizing the, quote, heavily armed and predominantly white protesters for protesting stay-at-home orders. But then they say that actually the anti-racism protests were completely justifiable under public health grounds. Reading, quoting directly from it now, they say, "...do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions."
And it just felt very weird to me. It felt very weird that you had public health professionals who ostensibly were giving us advice about how to stay healthy now telling us that, well, for certain things, it was okay to break some of these guidelines. So what was your reaction to that letter? I think if I could start at a high level, one of the...
critiques coming from economists and people have an idea of what economists do and it has to do with sort of banks and finance and interest rates and it turns out that what we do is a lot closer to what maybe comes into your mind when you're thinking about what a sociologist does. We study people and behavior and factors that affect behavior, sources of inequality,
And so one of the things that really frustrated economists was there seemed to be this implied hierarchy about what was important in these public health debates. And of course, we don't want people to die from a disease at the same time.
kids not going to school is really, really harmful. And I don't know where different people are going to land in that debate because I could certainly see somebody saying, look, preventing any death is just the most paramount thing. I could also hear somebody saying, we need kids to go to school. That's just the most important thing. I can't tell you which one of those two is the right one.
What I don't think we did was recognize this really nasty trade-off, this really brutal trade-off and have that conversation. And then there was this kind of like implied view about what's kind of a worthy thing to do. And I guess it wasn't. Like what's worth risking COVID?
We sort of decided or it was decided that, well, OK, but going to a BLM protest is OK. And I think that undermines some credibility of some of these decisions that were made on our behalf. And I think that I maybe I agreed in a way with that tradeoff. I decided to leave the House and join a big group to go to a BLM protest. But I could see why people agreed.
might have thought, hey, wait, you're telling me I can't take my kid to school, but that I'm allowed to go to this protest? That doesn't seem right. Who decided that? And I was rocked back to this. I remember vividly a couple years ago, and I'm going to out myself as a kind of a weirdo for this, but the National Bureau of Economic Research puts out this kind of weekly rundown of studies, and I'll click through them, and I remember seeing your study in 2022 when it first came out, and
Seeing the findings that people who attended anti-public health protests and people who attended BLM protests, that there was a lot of overlap over those people. Can you tell us about that? How did you find that? What was the process of even doing that survey? It was a strange study for me. We were playing with data and we found a
a pattern that didn't make sense. And so it's like we had to come back and figure out what's the right, what's the question this is answering? Yeah. Why were you doing the survey in the first place? The survey started pretty soon after the emergence of COVID-19. And Washington University, you know, got some outside funding to run kind of a high quality survey.
I was asked to sort of contribute some thoughts on what we might want to look at. That is because I've looked at infectious disease before in the economic context, in particular like HIV, risky behavior, how it interacts with medication usage and employment and these kinds of things, these health economic interactions.
So we started asking questions and then the data set was going to go back for like several rounds. And so by the time of the second round of questions, when they're asking whether we wanted to add more questions, the BLM protests had started. And so we thought, well, you know, we should probably collect data on whether or not people are attending them. And then I don't know who in the group, it might have been me. I kind of don't think it was. Somebody said, well, there are kind of these other protests going on.
for reopening. I don't want to quite call them anti-public health. I think that they were maybe pro-reopening. No, it's fair. It's probably a biased way of me talking about it. So there were these protests and in my mind still that there was still this like caricature that these were like gun-toting vigilantes and that we, okay, sure, we should probably collect that data as well because I'm trying, you know, we're trying to be scientists here.
And I thought, well, you know, why don't we see what's predicting process attendance? Obviously, you know, going to a BLM protest probably predicts not going to a reopening protest, you know, just because that would make sense according to my bias, my priors. And we found the opposite. And then we checked it again and we found the opposite again. And then we really started to kick the tires.
But the result didn't go away. And so then we sort of enter this period of thinking, well, okay, maybe this is novel. And maybe we need to start to figure out why this might make sense. And economics as a field, I think, tries to be a little bit apolitical. I mean, I would say that like one out of every five of my findings, I'm like,
Didn't want to find that out. Didn't want to find that, but that's, I think, you shouldn't be able to tell my politics by reading my papers, I guess. Yeah. But one thing I did think to myself was, I am getting frustrated by some of the public health mandates that seem to me to be a little bit excessive. More than just the closing schools or other stuff? Just the sort of
decisions that didn't make, to me, a whole lot of sense. Like, okay, we're going to let some bars open, but we're going to keep the schools closed. And I just was like, okay, well, what are we waiting for here? Like, what's the evidence? And where's the cost-benefit analysis here? Like, at what point? And whose values are being used in that cost-benefit, right? And I was getting more and more concerned that throughout this entire process,
Period you could still get stuff off of Amazon. There's all these people that have to still work Yeah, and they're not they don't have the kind of job that I have, you know where I can telework and I started thinking about just like the mental health burden I started thinking about my own kid who you know, he has two parents who still have jobs But I mean, I know that he's missing out on socialization at this like critical period I mean, I think these costs are starting to build up and
And so I was getting frustrated and I remember my husband saying to me, "If it's shut down again in Baltimore City, I'm going to go to join a reopening protest." And he was kind of joking, I think, or maybe he wasn't. I think he was kind of serious. And we had gone to BLM protests and I thought that we were just really isolated and having that kind of mixture of views.
And so I guess when I looked at the data, I thought, oh, maybe we weren't. But it's really interesting to me that you were surprised by these findings, even though they represented your own views. That's totally true. But I mean, I think that's one of the things also, I think, and maybe I'm just conditioned to be like this with science is to really remove myself from my science. And so I don't necessarily assume that folks, I think that's one of the most biggest dangers in science is
especially in the social sciences, is thinking that your views are representative, think that your opinions are shared by others. I think a lot of good social science comes when you step back and listen to other people and make sure you're not sort of speaking for them, but maybe elevating their voices. Well, let's dig in a little bit into some of the findings here on the numbers. So 33% of BLM protesters identified as Republicans and 36% of reopening protesters as Democrats.
I mean, just generally stepping back, if I think about how these were characterized, we think about BLM protests as left-wing movement and the reopening protest as a right-wing movement. So when you actually look at who is involved in these protests, like, what are you actually seeing? Who are these people? And, like, where is the overlap? Right. So if you go to a BLM protest or if you report having gone to a BLM protest—
They tended to be a little more Democratic and then the reopening protests tended to be a little bit more Republican. But then there was this mixture, right? There were a lot of there were plenty of Republicans at BLM protests and there were plenty of Democrats, I guess, at these reopening protests, which, again, I thought was a little bit strange. But I do remember in the early days of the BLM protests, it wasn't.
the same movement that it is today, which I think it's become much more politicized. I think, you know, you remember Mitt Romney was joining in these protests. There was this outrage from a lot of different places that was collective. The other thing that we found interesting is that, you know, that people who protested tended to be working in person.
And have children, which you would think, okay, well, these are things that are going to make me not want to protest. Yeah. We also found that people and kind of different measures of well-being were sort of higher. Like higher well-being meant you were more likely to go to a protest? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Which, you know, again, you wonder...
Isn't it frustration and anger that drives you to protest but then there is precedent in earlier research saying that people Might go to protests and then feel good. Maybe they feel like they have some say they have some Agency here. Maybe it was cathartic to go to the protest and so Or we could just be thinking that people who are energetic and feeling good about themselves are those kinds of people who will go to a protest as well Yeah, I think that if one
reflects a little bit on it, it makes sense that folks who might have been really frustrated with the state of things were folks who were working, right? And who were worried about losing their job. These are also parents who have lost their childcare arrangements, which was incredibly frustrating. But I can also imagine those same parents saying, "I don't want my kid to grow up in a world where this kind of violence happens." And so, you know, that was another
One thing that we found strange was that people who kind of saw themselves at greater risk of COVID were more likely to go to protests. I found this super interesting. So first of all, how do you, is it like you're just asking the question, like how scared are you of dying, of getting sick, or how are you determining that? So you can do different things. One is kind of more objective where you can just look at like the county caseloads or county reports.
And there, if I remember correctly, we have a positive correlation with it. But a lot of that can just be, hey, there were more protests available in places where there were higher rates, right? Maybe bigger cities or whatever. You can also ask people about their beliefs. Now, doing that is always wacky. So we got sort of wacky answers there. - Not the high numbers, right? Like 30% chance of death. - Exactly. But in our defense, anybody who looks to get beliefs data, it's really tricky to do that.
And people answer in a very wacky way. But also if you ask me in like June 2020 what I thought the risk of death from COVID was, like I remember like my dad who always every year around June gets like really bad allergies. But like, you know, like my dad has like really bad ones. I remember him calling me like, hey, I feel kind of sick. And I just like,
freaked out. I like went to his like apartment and I just dropped off. Like I've just been like on Twitter looking up random virologists and being like, are they using Motrin? Are they using Tylenol? Are they using like, you know what I mean? Just, and so there's a level where I'm like, I think I would have said like, oh my gosh, I think I'm acting like I think my father's going to like die, like, you know? And so I don't know how I would have evaluated that. Yeah, I think that's right. There is a whole lot of research on how to collect these kinds of data and
If you want to do it well, you have to do it really carefully, kind of anchoring people. For example, people are really bad at kind of small probabilities. So maybe something that's like 0.1% chance, they'll think it's like 10. Yeah. And to them, it's the same number. It just means small. It just means small. Yeah. But I mean, those are massively different numbers. I think if I remember, like kind of an average, people thought there was like a 30% chance that they would get COVID, which maybe that's not so bad. But then they think...
If you get COVID, there's like a 30% chance of dying. And that's like if they go to the protest? No, no. Just in general. This is just in general, yeah. So you're thinking, okay, this is like really high. But we did find that people who saw themselves at greater risk of COVID died.
were more likely to go to the protests, which that in itself doesn't surprise me because that could just be like a recognition that, you know, I do risky things. Yeah. And so that actually checks out. So you find that like 28% of protesters attended both a reopening protest and a BLM protest.
You know, one hypothesis sort of raised when I first read this paper was maybe there are just certain kinds of people who like to protest, right? Or not like it is like it's an activity, but just have a high propensity to just protest if it's kind of something that's available in their area. And I was looking...
into the literature on this. And there's a study by a sociologist at the University of South Carolina Aiken. Her name is Michelle Petrie, and she looks at the determinants of protest participation. And one thing she brings up is this concept called biographical availability, which is basically like
whether someone has the time, particularly like unstructured time, or they feel like they're less at risk of being surveilled or facing consequences for engaging in protest. And she cites Doug McAdam, who has this paper about the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. And
He finds that then the people who participated largely came from affluent families where they were in their early 20s. It's summer, so they didn't have jobs. They were unemployed, unlikely to be married. I mean, in your sense, is it what's going on here that it feels like there's
two potential hypotheses, and maybe they're both true. One is that there's a large overlap on these ideologies between people who were concerned about anti-police brutality and people who were worried about reopening and public health restrictions. But it's also possible that a lot of people are just like, maybe I'll just protest. You know what I mean? And so how do you kind of tease that out? I think it's hard to tease out is the first thing. And I think that there is this notion of biographical availability and
certain people are just going to be more likely to protest. And that's something that we spend a lot of time doing. That's why we look at these predictors. What are the factors that seem to predict protest attendance? And I think there, the story's a bit nuanced because, okay, sure, younger, that makes sense. That checks out, but having kids and also working in person, that does not. And then I think there is also, or was also, or it has been this notion of, you know, maybe it's just fun.
protesting as the new brunch was i think one of the things that came out and i think that was one part of the caricaturization right that you know there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting
And then there were these like, you know, privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasn't in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist. The median protester was not somebody who had plenty of time on their hands or plenty of affluence. And so they don't even need to worry about working. People seem to be overcoming obstacles to get there. And so that's got to be at least part of the story. And, yeah.
We also were able to look at kind of police shootings in the kind of area where these folks were. And it seemed to be also predictive, which means, okay, this issue— So like if there were more police shootings, you were more likely? If there were more police shootings, you were more likely to go to BLM, exactly. And that seems to suggest that, you know, this isn't just a leisure activity, but something that people are taking seriously. Okay, well, we're going to take a quick break, but more with Nick when we get back. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot—
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This is something I find with economists a lot when I'm talking to them, that there's a lot of frustration that, you know, in many ways, our official apparatuses don't take into account costs like fun, things that you like to do that make your life happy. You know, it's like, you know, the tradeoff, of course, we wanted people to stop dying. And especially the very beginning, we had like no information, like, it makes a lot of sense to shut down a lot of things. But
It's interesting to think back again to that letter we talked about at the beginning, because in many ways, that letter was actually the way you would want public health officials to engage with tradeoffs, because they go into it and they say, yes, of course, there are concerns with catching COVID-19 in public spaces. But also people have a legitimate concern about protesting and about anti-racism. Our goal as public health professionals is to provide them to tools to do mitigation of that kind of damage.
And it was like, where is that trade-off thinking in any other space? No, that's what I think was so... And to be fair to people in public health, and I work now with some epidemiologists, because there is now this kind of call in general for, okay, we need to figure out a way to think about these trade-offs more carefully.
Obviously, there are some folks who still think, you know, any one death is worth just infinity and therefore anything else is just secondary. Fine. That's what they think. I just don't. One reason, we know poverty is deadly. So you're actually, you are talking about, you're not comparing apples to oranges. And so what it really comes down to is kind of whose life matters more. And I think that's really hard when you're comparing, you know, say my age.
somewhere in her 70s mom and you know a low-income kid in the city and you know whose life matters and we'll both but you're gonna put a policy together that's gonna probably harm one person less than the other and I think it's really hard to think about that yeah and I mean I think to me this
There were so many times during the pandemic where I felt like the way that public health professionals, kind of the value system in place was sort of this, and I later learned this is kind of called the precautionary principle, which is sort of this idea that, you know, do no harm is the very simple way of doing it. Of just saying like, okay, whatever you actually are going to do, make sure,
at the, you know, to the 99.999% sure, even 100% sure that anything you do is not going to cause harm. And that means let's not approve tests if we're not 100% sure that they're going to be like perfectly accurate or at a really high level of accuracy, even though the status quo is that we have no tests, that people have no way of figuring out whether or not they might be infected. And I wonder, I mean, do you think that this sort of the finding that you're having in this paper and also the research you've done in other spaces, like
Is that pushing the public health field to think differently? Or are you seeing any kind of changes at all in the public health field in response to how many people felt that trade-offs weren't really adequately considered during 2020? So I absolutely think that this paper and other work I've done pushes against this idea that in public health context, that health is the only thing to think about. I've made kind of a whole career off of thinking about, you know, the way that health interacts with other factors that are important to us. Like we're not...
We're not health maximizers. We might have, I mean, you know, you can imagine some creatures living in some other planet that, you know, the only thing they care about is their health. They're living on Soylent. They're just, you know. Longevity is the only thing you care about. I mean, just any decision we make on any given day shows that that's not true. We get, we leave our house, we eat, you know, fried foods, we drink, we...
get into cars, we get on planes. I mean, we do all sorts of things that show that we are not health maximizers. We're sort of lots of things maximizers. Health is one of them. We would rather be healthy than not healthy if it were sort of for free. The thing is, it's not for free. And so I think that there has been some movement towards how can we do this better?
And, you know, just recognize that there are these tradeoffs. And I think the subtle point is to say that I don't really care where you come down on the tradeoff or where I come down on the tradeoff. It's just I want to present that tradeoff. And then, you know, politics can kind of decide where we go from there.
So returning to politics then, because I think another part of your paper that really would be great to delve into is there's a finding that the protesters on some axes were more representative of the public than even the 2020 voting electorate.
And it's not on all of them. So you find on age and income, right, the protesters were younger, like much younger, and then like slightly more low income than the voting population and the general public. But then on gender and race, the protesting population is more representative of public than voters. So, I mean, when you see this, I mean, why do you think those distinctions are happening? Like why on gender and race is that happening versus age and income? Right.
That, I don't know why one versus the other, though. I know that, you know, younger people might not be as trustful about traditional modes of expressing themselves voting. I think there's some disillusionment. I think that, you know, there's, we know that voting is on a certain day and there are lots of requirements that are maybe easier to navigate if you have more income or more work flexibility, which usually like,
or oftentimes is going to correlate to higher income. I mean, if I leave for three hours from my job, no one's going to really even ask me where I've gone. Whereas that's just absolutely not the case with people who are like working hourly. And so, you know, if you then have like these protests sprouting up and the only thing you need to do, you don't have to bring your ID. You don't have to like make sure you registered a few weeks ago or whatever. You just go. But I mean, yeah.
I mean, you outlined for us earlier, like, that these were people who thought it was costly to protest. And I mean, for them, you said it's more likely that they're working in person and they're going. So I guess to me, I was surprised, right? Because it would to me would indicate, like, these are people who clearly feel like there is some value to protesting, whether it's just expressive, whether it's communal, whether it's actually trying to enact change, like or some combination of those three, you know.
They they were willing to overcome things that were to themselves costly, but then with voting you don't see that happening And I think a lot of that is just because you have yet like one day I mean, you know suppose I work, you know four or five days a week at a restaurant and the hours are a little bit wacky and Tuesdays day you gotta work and that's that's that whereas
The protests were kind of going on. The protests were kind of going on. And so there's going to be a day when you can make it. And I think that this is probably a lesson that we should be thinking a little bit about, which is, you know, why do people like to mail-in vote? Well, because, like, it means you don't have to do it on a certain day at a certain time. Yeah. I think in general what we were trying to show is these weren't, like, weirdos who just are entirely unrepresentative. These were really typical Americans. And...
I think that, you know, what we wanted to take away from that was that we don't get to ignore them by caricaturizing them. Yeah. And I think that that was something that, you know, some corners of the media did. And I think that was very unfortunate because it like cheapened the message. It cheapened the sort of will, the agency that people have. I think this is actually the place where the stakes of this misunderstanding and caricature are like really, really high. Because it's...
The BLM protests, I thought they were cross-racial. I saw a lot of white people participating in them, a lot of black people, a lot of people from different backgrounds. I saw, you know, I thought they were mostly young, but I saw a lot of men, a lot of women. And I thought that was, you know, large representative. But I still had like, you know, the image in my head of the Minneapolis police precinct on fire or people talking about like Seattle, where there was that kind of like, you know, really radical zone of people. And then, you know, with the public health protests, I thought it was even more biased. Like I was just like I saw, you know, militia members in buildings.
state houses and assume like that's that what's going on there. And the stakes of that are really bad because if you realize that these groups of people are actually representative and not just not your average person, then that changes how the
We talk about it as the media. It changes how politicians respond to it. And it's interesting. I mean, I haven't really worked through this myself, so maybe we can do it here. But in some ways, I mean, there's now a new paper by Emery Gethin and Vincent Pons, um,
you know, their paper, it's at NBR as well. So it's a working paper that indicates that BLM protests in 2020 did actually really affect public opinion and made people more likely to oppose police brutality, become more, quote unquote, liberal on racial justice issues. But they're finding that also BLM is one of the only protests in their sample that actually has these sustained effects. And I imagine it's because the other ones were not as widespread. And so in that
case, like, you know, people sort of did affect change despite these caricatures. And with reopening, I feel like it's kind of harder to tell because obviously we reopened, but was it because of the protesters? I mean, how do you think about it? Because in some cases you can be pessimistic and say these characters that exist really prevented these groups from getting what they wanted done. But there's some evidence that shows that despite the way that they were covered and maybe popularly understood, there's
People still really were able to get certain policy things enacted. Yeah, I think that that I think both things can be true at the same time. I think BLM certainly did have an effect. It did morph a little bit into a different movement. And I think the idea of like defunding the police became much more prevalent. And I don't think that's where the original protests might have been. But I think that the original coalition of people is like the very ideologically diverse set of people.
would maybe say, "Yeah, well, some things have happened." It's much more on the radar. You know, the idea of police reform, I think, is much more reasonable to hear about in different corners, when before maybe that had been a little bit more of an extreme view. And in terms of, you know, public health, I think it's really hard, like you said, to
understand what were the effects of those protests but I because you know vaccines were coming around and and that was probably what was going to happen this technology was going to just sort of change but at the same time when I started getting into this idea of behavior and it being like a really important part of
epidemiological models, you know, when you're trying to follow a pathogen, you need to understand its interaction with human beings. Like that was controversial to people in those spaces. It was controversial to certain experts to say, look,
You don't necessarily need to shut down everything because people are going to just kind of protect themselves. And I think these... Yeah, wasn't there some data that people before orders actually were in place were already kind of staying at home a bit? Absolutely. Absolutely. And so the idea is like, okay, well, then, you know, how do you take account of that when you're deciding what you're going to close? So I think in a way that some of these, I don't know if it was a protest per se, but I would say that we've absolutely seen a change in...
and some of the views that people hold not everybody but i think that you know folks have said wow we really didn't think about that trade-off we didn't do behavior well we didn't we didn't figure that out well
Well, I guess like how generalizable do you think your findings that you have about the BLM protests or the reopening protests are to protest writ large, right? Like, is it the case that like, you know, you're in June 2020, COVID-19 health precautions have sort of ensured that in many ways people, um,
There's a large number of people who are doing self-limiting behaviors such that they're able to participate in protests or that like maybe the costs were just like so high at the time to not engaging in protests that people were willing to do it. But, you know, I mean, I feel like there's a lot of protests out there that are not like this. I feel like they are like a really small group and maybe it's no one's just done your analysis yet to figure out that they're very representative people. But like, I don't know, sometimes I just see things and I'm like, that just seems like 20 people who are...
on this issue. Like, that does not feel like a regular thing. So, like, how do you think about why these ones felt this way versus what most protests? I think that if I'm a good scientist, I'm going to say I don't know how generalizable this is because that was a very unique moment in our history where we had these movements occurring and data collected at just the right time. And so, you know, in one sense, I would say it's not generalizable at all. But then you start to look. And I started to question, like,
this kind of received wisdom that we're just hopelessly at odds with one another, that there are these like extremists and that we've, there's this polarization happening and it's just relentlessly kind of, you know, growing and there's this. And I started to think maybe that's not true, right? I mean, it sounds like it if you turn on the TV, but it,
I started to question it and I started to wonder how much of this is like manufactured polarization. How much of this is just not really necessarily there? And I think abortion is like one of these issues, right? Where like the median American kind of wants abortion rights with some restrictions. And I am very pro-choice in my views.
And I, for a long time, thought if anybody's not kind of 100% pro-choice, then they're kind of the enemy. And I, after all of this, started to think, was that the right stance? Like if somebody said to me, like, you know, abortion's complicated for me. I think I'm a little pro-life. I understand that there should be different, whatever, whatever. Like maybe I shouldn't have seen that as the enemy, but maybe I should have been thinking it was a common ground thing.
I think that there are certain areas in my life where I don't have a lot of room to budge. Like if somebody says to me, two gay men shouldn't have a kid, I'm like, there's nothing for me to say here because it's my kid. And there's no room for me to be like, oh, I guess, you know, it's okay if you take him away just a little bit. I mean, that's just, we're done. But I think that on a lot of other issues, there's a lot more room to just recognize that we can do something together and
I wasn't ready for that before. And now I think I am. Well, that feels like a great place to close out. Our last question is always the same. What is an idea that you thought was good on paper, but when it came to real life, maybe it didn't pan out the way you thought? Okay. I was trying to think of one that would be appropriate to say. We've got...
I don't want to like lose my job or something. No, I'm just kidding. I okay. So I was just thinking about Parenting and how I like I think I'm gonna okay parent but I'm like I lack the instincts that my husband has like he is very Nurturing and like sweet and like just gets it with kids And so the kid was having trouble sleeping and even though he's like a champion sleeper so I
and taking the kid home and singing the monkey who bumps his head song. And I thought it would be just brilliant to change the animals around. So we did bears and like cats and dogs. And then I got to snakes and my kid like sang along with me until he got to like two snakes. And then he just turns and starts crying and saying, "I don't want snakes in my bed."
And I just remember having to call my husband and tell him, he's like, what did you do? Because he's used to me being stupid. And his boss was like there and the phone was on speaker and she's like, now I'm afraid to go to sleep. I mean, I was just like, wow, I...
I'm really bad at this. Well, does your kid sleep now? Yeah, he's fine. Well then, you know. It's all fine. It's all fine. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Nick. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for having me and for all these interesting questions. Good on Paper is produced by Janae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Anna Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is by Rob Smirciak.
Claudia Nabeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And hey, if you like what you're hearing, please follow the show and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or share it with a couple of friends who you think might like it. I'm Jerusalem Dempsis, and we'll see you next week. All right, guys, do we need any retakes or are we good? Okay, so you didn't mess up. I messed up. Congratulations.
There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government. But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time. We've reported on it and lived through it. And when we look at America today, right now, we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun. It's not some distant future, it's the present.
I'm Anne Appelbaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I'm Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. We're the hosts of a new podcast from The Atlantic, Autocracy in America. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.