This week on Thinking Is Cool 🗳️

Welcome back to Thinking Is Cool, the podcast and newsletter here to make your next conversation better than your last. I’m your host Kinsey Grant. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here.

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Stop what you’re doing right now and turn on one of these three songs: “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” by Taylor Swift, or “The Times They Are a-Changin" by Bob Dylan. Today, we’re talking about the future of partisan politics in the United States. The mood has to be right.

Good morning and welcome to a brand new week. If you’re feeling like it’s time to make a change in your life, now is the time to do it. Maybe that change is journaling more. Maybe working on eating more seasonal vegetables.

For me, it’s going off the grid. Putting my phone in the drawer and not looking at it for 24 hours. Real On The Road stuff, but for the modern age.

Here’s why: Today’s episode is about the future of political parties and hyperpartisanship in the United States—and the ways it’s tearing our democracy apart. I just know someone is going to misinterpret this honest account of today’s political theater as an attack on their party, and I don’t want to deal with that right now because I’m in a really good mood and no one can rain on this parade.

So keep that in mind as you listen—we can all disagree on political issues without being at each other’s throats! And sending journalists into hiding! And being really, really venomous from behind a computer screen! That’s the takeaway this week. That’s what matters. Extremity is bad unless it's the extremity of positive vibes. Yeah? Yeah.

As always, you have options (that’ll be a theme in this one for sure).

• Option 1: Read this newsletter for background and then go listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts. Recommended for fans of C-SPAN and NPR.

• Option 2: Go listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts and then come back to this newsletter for more context. Recommended for fans of The Daily and John Oliver.

Here we go.

This Week on Thinking Is Cool 🗳️

Here’s a photo of me taken on Tuesday, November 6, 2012—blurry and heavily filtered, fresh from dance practice, wearing tights and moccasins. I had turned 18 just three days prior to this photo being snapped as I walked into my polling station to cast my ballot for the very first time.

I know you’re never supposed to admit publicly how you vote, but rules are meant to be broken. I voted for Mitt Romney because that’s who I surmised my parents were voting for.

A lot of things have changed since that photo was taken: I no longer wear tights, moccasins, or shorts that short. And more importantly, I make my own voting decisions.

But there’s one element that has remained even a decade later—I recognize the power in participating in the greatest American tradition: free and fair elections. Even when it’s hard, I never miss one.

And believe me, it’s been hard. Hard to stomach the conniving, dimwitted options we’re given on ballots. Hard to defend American democracy when it’s become such a polluted, perverted, deeply unequal version of its former self. Hard to find optimism for the future in casting a vote.

But not impossible. The more we talk about polarization and its side effects and causes, the closer we can get to righting its wrongs.

That’s what this week’s episode of Thinking Is Cool is about at the very core. It’s about recognizing the horrors of our shared reality, but also finding ways to move forward toward something better. It’s about the means by which we’ve become so shockingly extreme in our political views on both sides of the aisle...but also what we might be able to pull off to again find commonality in legislating.

There’s no denying that we’re at a tipping point. Characters and caricatures have come to rule our democracy with a zero-tolerance policy toward cooperation. It’s resulted in a sharpening of edges on both the left and right and, even worse, an alienation of entire generations of voters and potential voters.

Common sense legislation doesn’t get passed.

Winning elections becomes less about representing the people and more about engineering a popularity contest.

Voting is a maybe, not a hell yes.

Democrats are the party of equality and diversity and progressiveness. Republicans are the party of homegrown values, Americana, and idealistic independence. There is no Venn diagram intersecting the two.

According to Pew, only 21% of Americans think relations between Republicans and Democrats will get better in 2021.

Talking about politics and political discourse is a surefire way to end a conversation.

And we’re all worse for it.

How did we get here? Didn’t we learn anything from the mistakes and misgivings of our predecessors? What do we do to make it better? That’s what I’m taking on this week. Because this—hyperpartisanship and the gridlock and vitriol it breeds—is a problem that urgently needs solving, and talking about it is how we start.

I hope you’ll listen to this episode of Thinking Is Cool and take the time to consider viewpoints beyond your own—I did, and it was illuminating to hear the experiences of people who view the world in a very different way than I do.

It’s inspired me to attempt to diversify my media diet, in fact. Because a huuuuge part of this whole dissolution of commonality and cooperation thing has to do with the ways we create echo chambers for ourselves.

So over the next week, I’m curating a list of really honest, really insightful follows—left, right, and center. If you’re interested in suggesting a person or publication, hit respond. I’ll share the anti-hyper-partisan list later this week on Twitter. No Tucker Carlson allowed.

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Now, to the details of this week’s episode →

Who: This week’s guests span the political and professional spectrums, and I loved how passionate each person was in explaining to me the nuance and context of today’s partisan hellhole.

• Saagar Enjeti, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar and The Realignment Podcast

• Jake Sherman, respected political reporter, founder of Punchbowl News, and author of “The Hill To Die On”

• Kate Glavan, TikTok star and promising young political activist

I would also like to give a shoutout to my parents, Bill and Janet Grant, for raising me to be the kind of person who disagrees with almost all of her parents' political beliefs and still knows they’re incredible, intelligent, compassionate people. This episode wouldn’t be possible without the family dinners you insisted on every single night for the first 18 years of my life.

What: An honest and earnest attempt to understand how we got to today’s fractured, extreme partisanship in the world’s most well-known democracy, plus a potential solution to the problems we’ve created for ourselves

Where: Anywhere you get your podcasts, like Apple, Spotify, or...anywhere else

Why: Because thinking is cool! And this episode will make you think. Anything that includes both James Madison and Marjorie Taylor Green is bound to, right?

And as my final gift to you today, I offer this piece from Politico that was published quite literally as I was writing this episode about political parties: How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party by Derek Robertson. Episode 2 of Thinking Is Cool 🤝 Episode 7 of Thinking Is Cool.

See you Friday for another edition of the Thinking Is Cool blog. Have the best week ever.

—Kinsey

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