Beyond the Left-Right Divide
The Media and Public Trust series opened with a conversation with Peter Levine.
Earlier this week, Peter Levine – professor at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life – spoke at MISI’s first seminar on Media and Public Trust with a timely conversation titled “Beyond the Left-Right Divide.” This series convenes scholars and practitioners to explore how media systems shape public trust and how research, innovation, and community engagement can help address some of our most urgent civic challenges. As MISI Associate Director of Research Chris Wells noted, the goal is to “show the way forward” in strengthening democratic life.
Levine’s talk challenged the simplified idea that we exist along a single left-right spectrum. The existing polarized media environment forces people’s nuanced beliefs into rigid identities, disallowing meaningful and dynamic conversation. As an alternative, Levine proposes thinking in terms of “idea networks,” where each of us holds multiple, interconnected beliefs – networks of facts and values that are continually shaped and reshaped through interaction with others. Even within the same political ideology, belief systems are heterogenous and dynamic. If communities and cultures can be understood in this way, then disagreement does not signal democratic failure – it reflects complexity and allows for productive conversation.
The seminar invited attendees to reconsider how we foster civil conversation. If people are more capable of democratic reasoning than simplified models suggest, then “one of our best hopes is that we learn from each other,” said Levine.