Political Polarization Feels Unstoppable. Will it Destroy Democracy?

Polarization Feels Unstoppable. Will it Destroy Democracy?
In this episode of At the Boundary, we explore how America’s deepening divides are shaking the very foundations of democracy. Dr. Josh Scacco—USF’s first-ever Carnegie Fellow and founding director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy—joins us to dissect the troubling link between political polarization, public trust, and national security. From social media echo chambers and disinformation to local political violence and eroding public health consensus, Scacco explains why polarization feels so relentless—and what it could ultimately cost us.

 He also reveals his new research on vaccine attitudes in Latino and Hispanic communities, showing how polarized messaging threatens long-term democratic resilience. Most importantly, we discuss practical ways to rebuild trust and civic engagement, starting close to home. If you’re concerned about America’s democratic future—or just curious about how communication shapes the security landscape—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Episode Links:

• Receive Updates on the first Florida Security Forum (Nov 4: Port and Maritime Security: Risks & Resilience)
• GNSI Decision Brief: Assessing BRICS Gold Holdings
• The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

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The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

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Transcript

Jim Cardoso: 0:00

Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for GNSI and your host for at the boundary. We're excited to have Dr Joshua skaco On the show today. He's Associate Professor of Communication here at USF, and he recently became the university's first ever Carnegie fellow. We'll tell you more about that achievement and have a great conversation with Joss in a moment. First couple quick notes, summer is a little quieter on a university campus, but that just gives GNSI the opportunity to find new ways to inform decision makers, prepare the next generation of national security professionals and enable practical solutions. To that end, we're beginning a new conference series called The Florida security forum, as the name suggests, we'll tackle the big national security issues that are of concern across the US, but particularly impact the state of Florida. It'll be held annually in November, with the first event scheduled for November 4 at Port Tampa Bay. We're excited to be partnered with port Tampa Bay to deep dive the theme port and maritime security risks and resilience, and the pun was definitely intended. Look for a link in the show notes to receive updates on the conference as we finalize the agenda and the speaker lineup. Also, we published a new decision brief last week on the topic of the BRICS intergovernmental partnership. The brief examines how those countries are using their gold holdings to build an alternative to the US dollar to compete on the global economic stage. You can find a link in the show notes, all right, time to welcome our guests into the studio. Dr Josh skaco, as we mentioned earlier, Josh is the first person in the history of the University of South Florida to be named a Carnegie fellow. We're going to talk to him a little bit about that, as well as his activities as the founding director of USF center for sustainable democracy. He specializes in political communication and polarization and their impacts on national security. So we're going to walk that fine line of discussing political polarization without becoming politically polarized. Josh, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Jim, so how did you get into this area of scholarship and research? I mean, my experience is that people are happy to talk politics and be politically polarizing, but not as many actually study

Josh Scacco: 2:48

it, or even happier not to talk about politics. If that's true. Yeah, I have been interested in politics, the political process, for as long as I can remember, probably since my early teens and when I was in college, I worked in the Pennsylvania legislature. And after I was done with college, I worked for a member of legislative leadership and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. When I went to get my masters at Georgetown, I was in Washington, DC, so I worked on Capitol Hill for US senator. And the great thing about the senator's office, the senator at the time was Pennsylvania's US senator, Arlen Specter was his office had a just fantastic mix of staffers from across the political spectrum that were offering ideas to him to senior staff, and so the conversations were really generative in a lot of ways, especially for a young guy who didn't know whether or not he wanted to go into politics or whether or not he wanted to do something else. But if nothing else, those experiences have kind of stuck with me now coming back into the university setting as a professor and now as a director of a center, to be able to think about what would it look like if we depolarized a lot of the very polarizing topics, issues and reactions that many people have to political events.

Jim Cardoso: 4:18

Yeah, what? So you started out in kind of in politics on the outskirts, and maybe even considering getting more deeply into it, but then you sort of made that turn into academia. What? Not a bad turn, but it's definitely a different turn. So what? What kind of a made that come about?

Josh Scacco: 4:34

One day, a young legislative staffer was answering his like 700 phone call from a constituent, and, you know, I began to realize just I was one of the staffers. Yes, we all had to do phone duty at particular points. So one of the things that I was realizing was, at particular times during the day, we would get a particular type of. Caller that would be echoing a particular type of message. So for instance, around like two, three o'clock in the afternoon, we will get callers who had, for instance, been listening to Rush Limbaugh or talk radio, and so had been who would then echo particular types of messages to us. So what I was interested in didn't realize this at the time was the patterns that I was hearing, yeah, and so I begin, I began then to look at the transcripts of the radio programs that were on at particular times of the day, begin to even listen in to get some ideas on maybe what some people would be talking about. Our communications team would obviously be giving us, you know, additional sort of notes and things in the

Jim Cardoso: 5:43

military, they called it intelligence preparation of the battlefield. That's right, you're doing right?

Josh Scacco: 5:47

Basically here, it's just basically communication research, you know, yeah, and I was interested in the patterns. So when I went, so when I decided to go get my PhD, I went to University of Texas at Austin, Hook 'em Horns, and it was, you know, really great experience. I was studying media effects and those types of things. It was precisely some of the things that I had been thinking about at when I was answering phones from constituents who genuinely had concerns, but were using people like talk radio, those types of things to verbalize their concerns right in a really concise, really concise type of way. Hmm,

Jim Cardoso: 6:27

and but of course, in everything that's spoken on talk radio is absolutely 100% always, always right, always right. Well, not sensationalized at all, either

Josh Scacco: 6:35

not at all, not extreme in any kind of way or anything. So yeah, I guess that also would have been my first real like it was the baptism to really understanding information, misinformation, information quality issues and those types of things, because I would be the staffer on the other end of the phone getting yelled

Jim Cardoso: 6:56

at. That's That is a good reason for to move on from there well, and I'm glad you did, too, because what you're doing, it's, it is so unique. And you know, we as a national security Institute, I mean, obviously sustainable democracy is important to national security. I mean, they do go, they do go hand in glove. So actually, I was thinking as I'm surprised, we're at 8087 88 episodes in. We've never had you on before, and I guarantee we're gonna have you on again after this, but, well, we'll see how the conversation goes, but I think it's gonna go great, and I look forward to having you on again in the future. Jeff rock, he's one of our genus i Senior Fellow and intelligent historian. He says that historians almost see it as a personal challenge when someone says something is, quote, unquote unprecedented. Many Americans today would say that current political polarization has never been this bad, and the country is more divided than ever. IE, it's unprecedented. How would you respond to that? In

Josh Scacco: 7:56

a lot of ways, we have moments of political, partisan, polarizing rupture in American history. We do. We fought a civil war for this particular reason where the breakdown in our political process could not, you know, our government couldn't leverage a particular solution to the question of slavery, to the question of the expansion of slavery, and so the breakdown on that process led to a Civil War. The Civil War decided that with you know 500,000 500,000 deaths, and you know millions of others, you know injured. And so we can look at that moment. We can also look at the moment of like the 1950s and 1960s as a significant sort of societal rupture over civil rights in the United States for persons of color. And I think one of the key components, if you look at the common threads over history of what leads to these particular moments of really extremity, it oftentimes goes back to this question of, what type of pluralistic democracy are we gonna be because if we look at world democracies, for instance, we are one of the most diverse, yeah, in the sense of our people, race, class, ethnicity, religion across the board. You can kind of think through what we talk about, migratory rates of people to the United States.

Jim Cardoso: 9:19

And there really is unique aspect of America across the world.

Josh Scacco: 9:22

It is absolutely and what makes it a strength is also, in a lot of ways, a key vulnerability that can be exploited in a democracy, because many other democracies are much more homogeneous in terms of their populations. You know, I was reading something, I was looking at statistics recently, that that we're showing that the the Nordic countries are much more are much higher on kind of the democracy index in terms of standard measures that experts across internationally use. You can also look at it and say, well, they're much more homogeneous in terms of their populations. Yes, they're also much smaller. Alert. And what we're talking about here is a country of 300 plus million people coming from many areas in the world, not just currently, but historically, many areas of the world. So you have culture, you have geography. You overlay that with personal difference, and what that looks like. And so what you have is you have moments where these ruptures occur oftentimes around difference, how society, government, civil society, private sector, are going to, are going to manage, cultivate, foster these differences. And you do my and you do sometimes get these sort of moments of really extreme polarization around these issues

Jim Cardoso: 10:40

to and to continue. I mean, like I said, I did a last week's episode on at the boundaries with Jeff rock talking about some, you know, intelligence history. He went on to say, and again, I'm not mean to go back, but it is very relevant that the only that was, the only time he actually almost leaned into using the word unprecedented, was the technological change that is happening right now, and supercharging and the intelligence side, it's more supercharging almost a level of a surveillance state that generates some concerns. And would you agree that, also that some of the technology and some of the media capabilities out there is supercharging, some of the polarization,

Josh Scacco: 11:16

so we can look at it. I'm a communication researcher, so oftentimes I'm thinking of the technology, the communication technologies, the media that are coming to play here. And what you have is a moment where the means by which people assess and trust information is challenged in an unprecedented manner. You can look at, for instance, artificial intelligence. You can look at, you can look at these types of mechanisms that are really deep, deep fakes, for instance, and the ways in which it challenges how we as human beings assess information, and oftentimes out of means of survival. Biologically, we have developed fine senses to assess if something's good or bad, and the people who are using this technology in nefarious ways to produce disinformation, intentionally spreading false information, are essentially trying to use our sensibilities against us in this way, Whether it's deep fakes that are mimicking the voices and the persons of people that we trust, but we could think of this as if we were, if we were talking about foreign intelligence operations against, for instance, another country like the United States. And think 2016 Russia against the United States right in that election. And one of the key components is the academic research says that there wasn't actually a lot of effect on the final vote and in the 2016 presidential election from that particular instance. But the key component for me, that I look at there is essentially what it was doing. Was it was using our networks of trust, our own family members, our own friends who agree with us politically, which is we're more likely to be around people who agree with us politically, infiltrating those networks, having your grandmother or a friend share those particular things, and we're more likely to trust it because we trust the people around us. So there's almost something really insidious about coming into our personal houses and using our people and using the people we trust against us, and that I think makes this moment particularly interesting, some would say even unprecedented, is the ways in which it is using us against ourselves in these particular ways.

Jim Cardoso: 13:42

Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, it always seemed, and we've done some other podcasts and other discussions about some of the you know, misinformation, different disinformation campaigns have gone on the past. And as you said, it didn't really seem to the research should didn't really have much impact, but it does seem that more the intent is just to create chaos. It not so much for for or against a particular candidate, but almost just to undermine the entire Democratic democratic process, voting process itself, and and you still see people, to this day, questioning the voting process, and now it's even filtering down, and we talked about that before that some of the some of the things that are happening at the higher levels of government polarization start to filter down to the lower levels. In fact, let's talk about that for a second. So, I mean, I think, you know, you said that you're seeing some of the things we saw as polarization. Normally, it's less polarized at the local level, right? The example you use was, you know, filling in potholes. That's what's important at the local level. But even filling in potholes is becoming polarized. Potholes is becoming polarized now, because it's sort of it's a trickle down economics effect of polarization. Can you talk a little bit about

Josh Scacco: 14:49

that? Absolutely. So I'll say that there's actually a really great set of folks at Princeton University with the bridging device. Initiative, and one of the things that they're doing is they're tracking actually threats, harassment and political violence against local officials across the United States. And one of the things that they've been finding is to illustrate, kind of, some of what we're talking about here, that the instances of threats, harassment and violence against local elected officials. So these are your clerks, your supervisors of election, your school board members. It's gone up over the past, over the past several years that they've been tracking and things we can look, for instance, at the recent tragedy in Minnesota and Minnesota, and it wasn't even a sitting Speaker of the House. It was a former Speaker of the House, right, a state senator as well, that these are, ultimately what happens, is the type of kind of messaging environment that we've been seeing where oftentimes political leaders lean into the message that's gonna get them lots of attention. Yeah. Is also, in a lot of ways, feeding a permission structure for people as well. Some people, not everyone. This is not a majority of people, but it feeds a permission structure for people to engage in a type of behavior that maybe they might other they might not otherwise do. Yeah, and that is, in a lot of ways, the risk that we can think about here. It's going to be the things that, if we think about, like this notion of polarization, which, which I know you had referenced, and I've talked about some of my work it, what it ultimately does is these messages fall with on people who are already predisposed to believe them. And so all of it's potentially doing is moving people in a more extreme direction. And when you move people in a more extreme direction, you're giving them options to consider that have nothing to do with sort of like dialog and the traditional sort of democratic means that we might expect. You know, participatory democracy in terms of going out and maybe demonstrating or even voting and those types of things, they're pushed in another direction, and that other direction is anti democratic in some instances. Again, this isn't with everyone, but that permission structure is one of the things that weakens democracies. It's one of the things violence and polarization are kind of key components of democratic backsliding that we see internationally. And those are also some of the things that you know, the center here at USF is studying and looking at and also trying to mitigate in some ways. Like, how do we how do we make sure that we are depolarizing the political environments that we're in, or even, like, the public health environments that we're in, which are also highly polarized at the moment, how do we depolarize some of these particular topics, that we can at least bring people to the table? Because if they're, if they're at the table, I think they're probably less likely to go out and engage in some sort of, like dangerous, violent behavior,

Jim Cardoso: 17:55

yeah, you know, you know, kind of continuing on that line of the backsliding and the depolarization, you know, I, I get the sense too that many Americans feel that we as a nation, we can never, we can never return to a an environment where polarization isn't constantly being just ratcheted up and fed by social media technology. Now you run the Center for sustainable democracy. And so I very much in the title, I would sense that you would not agree with that, that we can't get back to a a more civil form of our democracy. What's your

Josh Scacco: 18:30

we have to see the way ahead. Yeah. We have to be thinking about this as, first off, how do we talk to younger people about this, in the sense of what messages are they getting in their classrooms?

Jim Cardoso: 18:40

Talk more about that. I'm not gonna let you know,

Josh Scacco: 18:44

but it lies with younger people. It also is with us in a lot of ways too, of what can we do? And I think one of the key components is so much of what is coming at people right now, technologically, politically, economically, even culturally, is balkanizing us. It's pushing us into our respective corners. It's pushing us away from community and creating community, or it's pushing us, in a lot of ways, towards makeshift communities online, which can be really helpful. For instance, you know, there's a lot of research about cancer support communities and how those can be really beneficial for cancer patients. Not all those communities are like that online, though, and some of those communities can breed polarization, extremism, those particular types of things. So how are we creating the conditions each one of us to encourage people to come together, of creating community in those particular types of things? Because democracy is based on community. It's based on if it's not people agreeing, because we're not all gonna agree, it's at least people looking at their neighbor and essentially saying, You know what, you have a right to exist. You are a human being, and you might have a particular set of beliefs. That's okay, yeah. And I think we have to. Really think about those particular things in terms of what is, what is the roots of our humanity and those and those types of things. So oftentimes, a lot of the Center's work is trying to understand, well, here are some of the ills that we're experiencing. So information quality issues, for instance, or political leaders trying to drive the attention economy in order to get as many eyeballs on them. And those types of things, regardless of what they say and really what we really we should be taking those types of like, the types of lessons that we have from that, which is what we try to do at the center, and bring them back to say, okay, how can we mitigate some of these things create the types of communities that are going to be really important for long term democracy? And that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about. We're talking about 21st Century democracy here. It's gonna look different than in the 20th century. It's gonna look different than when we signed the Declaration of Independence. It just is. Part of that's technology, and some of that's going to be, how do we coexist with the technology that we have and with the media system that we have? Or if we can't coexist with it. How do we rework it in a way to make it safe for democracy?

Jim Cardoso: 21:05

Yeah, technology lends a certain facelessness to polarization and to political discussion, which then breeds more, it seems more of an ability to take an extreme view or consider an extreme action, whereas you're sitting across from the table and like I'm sitting across the table from you, it's you can still disagree with somebody, but it's hard to really just viscerally hate somebody that you've never met before. When you're sitting across the table from them, you know you can have a disagreement, and hopefully a respectful professional disagreement, but the technologies is made it so easy to disagree in a disrespectful, confrontational way, right? So that's the thing, I guess we get, which you didn't have when the, you know, they had disagreements when the Declaration of Independence was signed, but they had to sit, you know, sit across the table and talk it out, yeah, and figure it out

Josh Scacco: 21:56

in a really hot room in Philadelphia, right? It's kind of like a papal conclave. It's like, you know, you put people together for long enough and you basically give them basic necessities, they're going to come to some decisions fairly quickly figure it out. Yeah, exactly when you're sitting in front of your laptop, it's, there's, there's no, there's no potential end to what you're talking about here. And that, I think, is something that getting people to see first, our humanity is really, really, really important. And if you hear from political leaders, sometimes what they're doing is they're using language that dehumanizes their opposition. And we know from again, history tells us that whether it's the Balkans or other places with sectarian conflict and those types of things that when you start to dehumanize your your neighbors, when you start to dehumanize communities, it opens the door potentially for other extreme actions that people can take and governments can

Jim Cardoso: 22:53

take. Yeah, you talked about the attention economy, and you know, if you use it, you wrote a book. When did you publish your book? The ubiquitous presidency, 2021, 2021, okay,

Josh Scacco: 23:01

so it was a pandemic book. So if I forget some things about it, it's, you know, it was, it was a pandemic. There was lots going on.

Jim Cardoso: 23:09

Probably be other stuff, maybe other stuff coming out in the future, but, but it was interesting because you, you devote particular attention to the presidential communications of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Yeah. Now most people listening go, okay, these two guys are as different as two human beings can be, but you saw a lot of similarities in the communications and how they presented the presidency to the nation, to the audience. Can you speak more about

Josh Scacco: 23:35

that? So I don't want to give like the spoilers for like the you know, the people who are watching, because I'd love for them to go out and buy, yes,

Jim Cardoso: 23:41

it's true, and you should buy the book. It'll give you a few teasers here. No,

Josh Scacco: 23:45

but I'll say that there is a to understand where Donald Trump comes from. You have to understand Barack Obama. You have to understand the way Barack which

Jim Cardoso: 23:56

some people listening this would just go, they're just they're quivering right now, and they hear that, yeah, like, I don't

Josh Scacco: 24:01

think people like turn the channel anymore, but you know, like the car radio or whatever, hang with me, everyone there is, there's a big difference in style. There's a big difference in how they deliver the tools that they've used and the areas that they went into in terms of communication and those types of things. You know, one of my experiences as a young Hill staffer, and then also getting my masters at Georgetown. At the same time, it was 2009 or 2010 Yeah, but it was winter, 2009 2010 I was in DC. And the big and the one of the big stories in DC was Barack Obama was showing up at courtside at a Georgetown basketball game. And not only that, but he showed up at the game and was giving commentary from the from the court about the game, and was also talking about like legislative. Compromise and working with Republicans in those particular types of things, a setting you would never really see the President going to right? Yeah, fast forward, you know, you have eight years of those particular types of presidential communication, those types of things, and along comes Donald Trump. And Donald Trump a different tone, different sort of message, but is also venturing into some of these spaces that were potentially off limits to political leaders to go into, uses Twitter in ways that people say is like, coarse and I'm presidential and those types of things, and yet, when I talk to my students, I'm like, are Donald Trump's tweets more or less like the tweets that you generally see on Twitter. And most of the time, my students are like, well, they're they're a lot like the tweets you see. It's like, so he's adapting to the communication medium, yeah. And so do we not expect that, you know, those particular types of things? So there's not an easy answer to these things, and I think so, what you see is Barack Obama opens the door and really becomes the communicative air that gives us Donald Trump, and the ways in which he communicates, the volume by which both of them communicate, the ways in which they use the Attention Economy to get to gain people's, you know, visibility for themselves, for others and those types of things. It also helps us explain why Joe Biden struggled so much as president because he could not keep up with the content beast, yeah, that modern presidents have to engage in. They are all content creators. From here on out, they are going to be content creators competing with the influencers on Instagram that are baking the cakes or like showing you how to punt a football. So that's really where the President is now, and once we start to see the President as another content creator that just has a lot of power in their office, maybe we begin to start approaching presidential communication in ways where we can critically assess what is being said, as opposed to, you know, journalists being wowed by the fact that that Donald Trump has gone into this space to communicate, or Barack Obama, you know, went on Between Two Ferns, or, like some other, like late night comedy show, yeah.

Jim Cardoso: 27:15

And you wonder what, what is, is that, by the, whatever the powers that be, as we get into, you know, the you know, Donald Trump is term limited, so the next from both parties is going to be, you know, new, I won't say new faces. They're people that are known. But are they going to look at who they promote and who they try to nominate based on their ability to have that, that ubiquity of communications, that ability to hold an audience, basically all, everyone, everywhere, constantly, all the time, right? Because it wasn't a skill set really needed previously, although, I mean, presidents were several presidents were master communication, no question about that. But how they communicate has changed, and they've got to be able to hold that audience basically 20, 474, years.

Josh Scacco: 27:56

And the way you can kind of think about it is, if the President isn't filling that kind of space someone else's someone or other people are gonna do it, if you think about it in terms of kind of like, if you just reduce it to sheer politics and those types of things, it's the opposition might fill that space. They might frame the debate that would put that would put the president at a disadvantage, which is partly the reason why now modern presidents communicate so much is they're constantly having to first tell us, then remind us, then continue to remind us, over and over and over again of something that we need to remember between making dinner, cleaning the house, maybe watching Property Brothers or something that's like marketing. That's marketing 101, it's marketing 101, it very much is, I mean, in the 1960s and 1970s and I teach this for my I teach this for my students. You know, we oftentimes don't think of like Richard Nixon as like a master communicator. But between when he lost the presidency in 1960 someone else who was much better looking on television,

Jim Cardoso: 28:58

much better communicator in that media, yes, and then GFK

Josh Scacco: 29:02

to when he makes a comeback in 1968 he brings on marketers, he brings on PR folks onto his 1968 campaign to market him in like, a softer, gentler Nixon, you know, those types of things. And there's actually a really famous book that talks about, how do we market Nixon like we do bars of soap? And that really is what we're talking about here. And so now candidates and now presidents have to market themselves in ways that are everywhere, very much like our product placements that we see today, our advertisements. And so when you put it in that particular mode, you don't you don't notice something until it's gone. And that was Joe Biden's issue. Yeah, we thought everything was, you know, coming along and those particular types of things in general, until he wasn't doing one of the very basic but modern tasks of the President, which was communicating on a regular, frequent basis those types of things. And it's just like pulling the advertisers. Advertisement, you know, if you pull the coke advertisement, it's going to take a bit, but people are going to notice when someone's going to take over that market share, right? And that is what political leaders have to contend with in this environment where there's so much competition for attention. Okay, let's turn

Jim Cardoso: 30:15

to the grant. Now, I want to talk a little bit about that. That's, that's great news, you know? What are some of the audience that you know, what is the what is the Andrew Carnegie fellowship? And what are you gonna be focusing on with this grant? I'm

Josh Scacco: 30:25

really excited about this, as you noted, Jim, this is the first time that a faculty member at the University of South Florida has received this fellowship. So really humbled and grateful for that. So the Carnegie Corporation of New York every year for really, the past 10 years, 1011, years or so, has run a fellowship program that is essentially what they bill it to be, kind of like a big ideas in some type of way to confront societal issues and broadly defined, whatever that would be. For the past couple of years, the focus of the program has been on political polarization. So this is the class that the class of fellows that I'm going to be in, I believe, is the second class of fellows looking at political polarization in some type of way. And so this year, they funded 27 individuals across the United States. They got over 300 applications. Each major university in the United States and academic institution can nominate one person and as part of the fellowship program, each each fellow is granted $200,000 to essentially conduct research on something related to political polarization. So I'm going to be focusing on the intersection of political polarization and public health around vaccination in the United States, particularly looking at, there's no controversy there, none, none at all, none at all. Particularly looking at childhood vaccination among Latino and Hispanic communities in the United States. And so, really important topic, really contemporary topic, it's also one of those things, if I if you think through kind of it's like one of those things that people don't realize right away when you talk about democracy, it's like democracy is central for national security purposes. Democracy and public health are also related to in the sense of, like, if you don't have a healthy populace, if you have huge issues with disease and those and you know, individuals are not going to be able to engage in the types of activities, the participatory activities to engage in public life. What that looks like in terms of voting, in terms of other forms of participation, you know. And so public health is integral to understanding healthy democracies, particularly in 21st century, particularly in a world where people travel a lot, they come into contact with many other people. And so that's what the focus of this is going to be

Jim Cardoso: 33:04

about, yeah, and we, and obviously, on the on the heels of COVID, you know, it's still in recent memory, you can see how that really can shut down a society and and can, I don't say, threaten democracy, but it can make some things challenging that we sort of take for granted, conducting a vote. It's changed some things in how we vote, and some say for the better. Some would argue not for the better, right? It's another point of point of polarization discussion as well. Right?

Josh Scacco: 33:24

Absolutely. And you can look at there was not there. There was not any merit to, you know, some of the claims made about the 2020, presidential election. But what I will tell you is, if you look at the root cause of those concerns, it's comes out of a pandemic, and states and localities trying to adapt to a very serious public health threat, right? And we oftentimes forget that, which was the ways in which voting was temporarily and or permanently altered, in some cases, to provide more flexibility to people. You know, those types of things opening up more polling sites to reduce, sort of like people crowding into places and that kind of stuff, all that comes out of a big public health threat. Yeah, so public health and democracy are very much intertwined with one another, and that's really what some of this work is going to be focusing on. It's how did we become so polarized around the sorts of topics that like vaccination and like childhood vaccination, but also, more importantly, if you look at the statistics on parents who are opting their children out of vaccination in schools, they're going up. And if you also look at vaccination rates in general for long managed diseases, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, those, you know they're going down. Yeah. And so we have to be thinking about what is the messaging that people are being exposed to in some of these environments. So we're we're going to have a team of researchers working on this, both here at USF, but also across the United States, and we're going to have individuals who. Uh, work on the civil society industry side as part of this, helping us kind of understand what's going on. And hopefully the goal is to figure out what might be some approaches that we can mitigate this, that we can use trusted, uh, sources, trusted local sources. Um, in some ways, influencers, even public health influencers, um, who people oftentimes look to as primary sources of information, using modern communications, correct? That, right? We have to be using the infrastructure that's in place and what people listen to. So we're going to be looking at social media messaging or but we're also going to be looking at Spanish language radio, um, to understand what's going on with with the sort of messaging and things. And then we're going to be figuring out what types of messages can we use and create, potentially mitigate some of these things.

Jim Cardoso: 35:47

Yeah, it's absolutely, you know, fascinating conversation. In fact, that we're, we're already over 30 minutes, so we're going to start to kind of close things out. But one, one, you know, last I definitely want to boot, you know, tee this up for you when you won the Carnegie fellowship, I saw a quote that you said, and it was that each of us has an obligation to put in the work every day to preserve and promote the possibilities of democracy. I have 27 year old twins, and they're trying to put in that work. They're trying to be those, those responsible citizens, responsible active citizens, but you know, they're getting bombarded by wildly conflicting messages from sources hard to tell who to trust. You have students, obviously you're working with that you're, you know, you're trying to educate them so that they can go forward and be responsible of responsible citizenry in a democracy. How do you advise them to try to to to attain that level of civic mindedness that's so important to an active democracy.

Josh Scacco: 36:45

So I think we have to start with in a lot of ways, what is some of the most basic ways that people can engage with their democracy around them? And it starts oftentimes with the space between our ears. It's our attention and where we allocate our attention. And so we want to be thinking about if so much of what we deal with on a day to day basis is the attention economy. You know, we hope that people, lots of people, are listening to this podcast right now. We also know that they have other options. They should be here. They should be they should be here listening. We know, as we know that, you know, there's lots of other attention kind of directors out there, right,

Jim Cardoso: 37:26

less worthy attention detractors. But yeah, correct that question

Josh Scacco: 37:30

exactly. So we want to be thinking about it as, where can people allocate their attention? And one of the things that I think is really important is that political leaders, regardless of the stripes of their political party, regardless of their ideology. One of the things they're always looking at is the metrics of the people that are sharing or liking their posts on social media, or are the eyeballs that are watching them on some network. They're always looking at those things, just as they're always looking at public opinion polling and those things, we want to be thinking about our attention as just another metric that are that political leaders are working with and they're trying to gain our eyes and ears all the time. So how do we strategically allocate our attention to to political leaders and away from political leaders at particular points. And more importantly, how do we begin the process of, you know, I know a lot of people say, Well, you know, someone like Donald Trump, you know, he takes up a lot of attention space. He does, which is how he became Donald Trump. And before he was Donald Trump, the President, you know, he was Donald Trump, the cultural figure, also taking up a lot of attention. He's been doing this for decades, so he's very good at it. But what we want to be asking of people is, if they're like, Well, how do we reallocate attention around someone like Donald Trump? It's like, well, you can start in the places where Donald Trump is not really as much of a presence, or the President is not really as much of a presence, your local civic life in your own community and in your own backyard, and those types of things that can be really helpful. I talked to students about it's not the most exciting thing at all times, but they want to understand where the policies that they learned that affected them, their school board is a good place to start. You know, their local councils and commissioners meetings and those and those types of things, if you know, they're worried about growth and urban sprawl, or even, like development in their communities, you know, like, for instance, the community redevelopment, you know, boards here in the Bay Area,

Jim Cardoso: 39:35

that is an issue. Here in the Bay Area, it is. It's a huge, it's a huge issue.

Josh Scacco: 39:39

Those are also meetings, you know, going to those meetings and listening in and figuring out what's going on and which

Jim Cardoso: 39:44

have a reduced level of polarization, not absent, but definitely a reduced line of polarization, to really get involved in democratic process without maybe getting sucked into the polarization of it at the

Josh Scacco: 39:54

same time. Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty safe to assume that if you did public opinion polling on potholes like none. 98% of people would be like, Sure, yes, Phil, you know, you would get that like, point, those, I love potholes, exactly, exactly, and so political reason? Yeah, probably I want, you know, flatten tires and, you know, I want cracked windshields and all that other stuff. You know that we also oftentimes get here, but it's much less. It's much less. And I want to quote I'm political, because most everything's political, but it's not going to be polarized. You're not going to get the extremity of opinions. And that's also where it's more about

Jim Cardoso: 40:30

policy than polity, basically. So the policy is really what becomes more important than the polity. The political aspect it

Josh Scacco: 40:36

is. And the other key component is, particularly for, you know, your kids, you know, but also for younger people in general, it seems really daunting to be like, how do I go out there and, like, do these things and that kind of stuff, you know, oftentimes starting in a setting like that, where there might be five people in the room and you're one of those five people, guess what? If you have something to say, you've shown up, yes, you're gonna you're more likely to be her in those particular settings. So if, like, if Oscar Wilde is right, and 90% of life is showing up in a democracy, especially in like, local democracy, like you can have, you can double, triple, quadruple your impact. I mean, now I sound like a multi level marketer, but it's like, you can quadruple your impact in local democracy if you're one of five people in a commission meeting, and you're one of those people talking, and it's also great practice as well for, you know, not not necessarily not running for office or those types of things, but being a voice in your community. What does that look like? And those are, I think, some of the things that we oftentimes forget is where can we allocate our attention? And oftentimes, we can allocate our attention in the places where people aren't lucky, and that's and that's our local communities. And at the same time, it goes back to that democratic community that we were talking about. It's if you want to be able to build and bolster community, that is one of the biggest things you can do to prevent the sort of retrenchment and democratic rights, the sort of democratic backsliding and things that's going into your local communities, and actually being able to hear and see and also voice What's going on

Jim Cardoso: 42:08

that's now, that's a great final thought, actually. I mean, you know, I think we always think politics when we when somebody says politics, you immediately think of federal level, you know, presidential, Congress, now, even the Supreme Court, you know, is kind of dragged into the political aspects of it. But as you say, I mean, the vast majority of political activity that happens across this nation, it's going to be at the local level, as communities, counties, state, you know, level, there's just so much going on and people, there's, there is opportunity to be involved. And that's, that's, that's, that's a that's it, that's, I'm probably going to go home and talk to my my kids tonight say, Hey, here's, here's some ideas for you. I mean, they're not always talking politics, but every once in a while it is. It's good that they think about it at least. I'm heartened by that. But it's kind of hard to tell what to do, and sometimes the answers are fairly just, Hey, do something local. You know, clean up. Clean. See what you can. Clean up your own backyard, right, you know, and then maybe, then your neighbor clean up their backyard, and it goes out

Josh Scacco: 43:05

from there. And I'll just say on like, a final point here that I think for those of us in Florida, the local importance becomes all the more kind of heightened after we have, for instance, a hurricane, right? Clean up, rebuilding all of the things that the closures of government offices and those types of things, and then how do you rebuild and get a community back on its feet? Well, oftentimes, what's happening is, even before FEMA or state government is in, it's our local communities. It's our neighbors that are helping neighbors until power gets back on, until water gets back on. And those particular types of things, we want to be thinking about our democracy in that way, as the type of effort that each of us can put in for our neighbors and for our communities and those types of things. Because it doesn't matter if a tree has fallen on a house. I mean, it doesn't matter whether or not you know the people in that house are Republican or Democrat. You know, they're human beings. We're human beings. And so they're my neighbors. And so how do we get to a kind of like a society and community like that, when so much else is being pushed aside? But I think we have that unique if you're in an area that's disaster prone, I think you uniquely understand what that looks like and what community looks like in that particular way.

Jim Cardoso: 44:24

Any that was, I mean, that was a great final thought right by there. But I want to give you a Mr. Mr. Carnegie fellowship awardee for USF. I want to give you any final thoughts before we

Josh Scacco: 44:35

well podcast. You know, I'm, I'm grateful to be here talking with you, and I'm, I will do a final thought in terms of putting in a fantastic plug for the work that GNSI is doing here on the USF campus. And, you know, I look at, really, the work that this, that the Center for sustainable democracy is doing in GNSI, is, you know, really complementary to each other in the sense that democracy. See is national security and having stable societies where people have a say in kind of like the policy and direction of that society is really important for thinking about, how do we make sure people are safe and secure? How do we prevent wars? How do we promote kind of common ideals, not only here, but also abroad and those types of things. And so democracy and national security go hand in

Jim Cardoso: 45:34

hand. We hope you enjoyed our conversation today with Dr Joshua skaco, associate professor of communications here at USF and the founding director of the Center for sustainable democracy, his work in political communication and polarization, as well as politically polarized public health issues is one of the primary reasons he's the first person in the history of USF to earn a spot on the Andrew Carnegie fellows list. His insights into overcoming polarization have been powerful and will continue to be so next week on at the boundary, our guest will be Dr Jonathan schroeden, who recently became the Chief Research Officer for the Center for naval analysis, or CNA. He recently authored a decision brief on Afghanistan for us, and he'll be joining us to discuss some of the recommendations he offered for securing US interest in that nation. He's one of the country's leading experts on that country, and we're really looking forward to having him on the show. Thanks for listening today. If you like the podcast, please subscribe and let your friends and colleagues know. You can follow genus I on our LinkedIn and X accounts at USF underscore, GNSI, and check out our website as well, at usf.edu/gnsi, while you're there, don't forget to subscribe to our monthly newsletter that's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we've found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary.

Unknown: 47:19

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