‘A Healthy Democracy Requires Social Trust’: A Conversation with Ilana Redstone

By Greg Berman

Ilana Redstone has launched a personal campaign against certainty. A professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, and a former co-director of The Mill Institute, Redstone believes that certainty is the accelerant that has helped to fuel the culture wars and political polarization in the United States. “The power of certainty is easy to underestimate,” she writes. “And when it comes to both aspiring and established democracies, that underestimation can be downright dangerous. Certainty makes it possible to kill in the name of righteousness, to tear down in the name of virtue, and to demonize and dismiss people who simply disagree.”

In recent years, Redstone has sought to advance the idea of nuanced thinking and principled disagreement by becoming a prominent public intellectual, publishing frequently in mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and in intellectual journals like Quilette and Persuasion. She is a vocal critic of the lack of viewpoint diversity in the media and higher education. 

Redstone spoke with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about the decline in social trust in the United States, the importance of trying to understand your political opponents, and the tension between advancing free speech and protecting vulnerable groups. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get here? Why have you chosen to spend so much of your time thinking about the challenges of communicating across ideological divides?

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late nineties in Togo. I think it’s probably safe to say, for most people, that being in the Peace Corps raises questions of moral and ethical complexity. It forced me to ask myself, “Am I propping up a corrupt government? Am I fostering a dependency mentality?” So I have always been interested in moral and ethical complexity and in political discourse.

I got a joint degree in demography and sociology from Penn. And for a long time, my work focused on immigration in a very dry, narrow, academic sense. I was a quantitative researcher. I analyzed data and wrote academic papers that nobody really read. I didn’t have a public-facing side to my work at all. 

But seven to eight years ago, I started noticing that there were a lot of conversations, both on my own campus and in other places, around issues of race, identity, ethnicity, gender, etc. To be honest, I felt like everybody had received a memo that I just didn’t get. It felt like all kinds of assumptions were being made that no one ever said out loud—assumptions about the causes of inequality or assumptions about how we think about identity or whatever. And so over time, I just started paying more and more attention to these assumptions and found they related back to my interest in moral and ethical complexity. 

Talk to me a little about your decision to become public-facing. Do you think of yourself as a culture warrior? What’s your relationship to the culture wars?

I really hope that nobody thinks of me as a culture warrior. I don’t feel that way at all. Most of the time, I don’t think I’m in the business of changing people’s minds about anything. I don’t care what your position on abortion or affirmative action or whatever is. I just don’t care. But I do care if you can have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you. 

There's an argument to be made that one of the biggest threats to democracy is calling the other side an existential threat to democracy.

I don’t like smugness or snarkiness. And I think those are the kinds of things that in the culture war space get you a lot of attention. I’ve never been interested in talking with people who want to scream about wokeness. I try to be very careful and precise and thoughtful in my work. I can’t control what people will do with my work. But I try to model a spirit of questioning and curiosity about the world. I take that pretty seriously.

You have a book coming out called The Certainty Trap. What is the certainty trap? 

Concerns about free speech, self-censorship, lack of viewpoint diversity, academic freedom, civil discourse … all of these things to me are downstream consequences of a fundamental problem in how we think. The problem is certainty and the contempt with which we view people who disagree with us. In order to be morally outraged, you have to be certain of something. There has to be some value, principle or belief that you’re holding onto. 

Avoiding the certainty trap means really making an intellectual commitment to the idea that there are no ideas, principles, beliefs, or claims that are exempt from questioning, criticism, or challenge. Nothing. Nothing gets a free pass. It also means that there are no ideas that are off the table. Nothing. There is nothing that is off the table. And so you want to talk about why you think the Holocaust didn’t happen? Okay, let’s do it. Let’s dig in.

After the violence in Christchurch, New Zealand, you wrote a piece saying that celebrating viewpoint diversity doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate extremist hate. 

I haven’t gone back and read that piece, so I don’t know whether I would word it a little bit differently today, but I still stand by it. I believe all lives have equal moral value. Period. That’s a bedrock principle for me. When that principle is violated, when someone shoots a bunch of people, it isn’t hard to call that out. 

But isn’t part of the problem that what constitutes extremist hate turns out to be in the eye of the beholder? Aren’t there trade-offs between promoting free speech and combatting hate?

We can’t have a world where there is a diversity of viewpoints, pluralism, and communication across differences, and also have a world where nobody gets offended or upset by what somebody says. At the end of the day, you have to pick one. Because there is always going to be a tension between the two. What I say to students is: If what you’re trying to do is to make sure that no member of any marginalized group ever feels offended, or that their existence is never challenged, that’s fine, but just know that you can’t also have a culture of free expression. You just can’t. 

As we move toward the culmination of the presidential election, are you worried about the potential for political violence?

Of course I worry about it. A lot of the way that the 2024 election is being framed, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that this election is about protecting democracy, that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters are an existential threat to democracy. I understand the thinking behind that. I get it. It’s trying to make people aware that the stakes are really high. At the same time, I do think there’s an argument to be made that one of the biggest threats to democracy is calling the other side an existential threat to democracy.

Human beings have two ways to resolve conflict: words and violence. 

I think that there’s a distinction to be made between Trump and the people who would vote for him. I don’t think we should assume that because they support Trump that they don’t care about democracy. Any time we make assumptions about our opponent’s intent, it’s bad news. At the end of the day, when all the dust settles, when the inauguration is done in 2025, we all have to live together. 

Human beings have two ways to resolve conflict: words and violence. Part of what a healthy democracy requires is social trust. Because you’re not going to get what you want all of the time. In a democracy, sometimes the other side wins. We can disagree vehemently about abortion, gun control, immigration policy, whatever, but we need to be able to live with that disagreement.

It’s not just the job of the people who disagree with me to prove to me that they’re trustworthy. It’s also partly my job to come up with, as best I can, a version of their argument that makes sense to me and that is not rooted in hate, resentment, stupidity, ignorance. 

I try to teach this to my students. I’m in the sociology department. Most of my students, not all, but most, tend to be very progressive. In class a couple of weeks ago, we spent a lot of time talking about J.K. Rowling’s tweets that some people thought were transphobic. I asked my students to come up with a story about J.K. Rowling’s tweets where they were not rooted in hate, resentment, or ignorance. I didn’t ask them to believe it. I just asked them to come up with a plausible story. Once you do that, you have to acknowledge that there is a version of the world where somebody can hold that view and not be coming from a place of hate. We can’t be certain about our adversary’s motives. That’s something that we can all learn to do. If we care about reducing political polarization, strengthening democracy, etc., it is a skill we can all learn to develop.

What do you mean when you use the expression “political polarization”? I find that the phrase means different things to different people.

I do think it is important to try to be precise. What I mean by it specifically is how we view one another. Do I believe that the people who disagree with me are hateful, stupid, immoral, etc.? That’s what I mean by political polarization.

Thankfully, at this point, the actual incidence of political violence in this country is still pretty minimal. But it does feel to me like we have an increase in threats of violence, which I think can warp our public discourse. I’m wondering how you would characterize the state of the intellectual climate at the moment.

I think it’s a mess. I think one of the things that we’ve seen since October 7th, particularly within higher education, is a complete inability to navigate the conflict in the Middle East. I think it has been a spectacular own goal. Everybody was totally unprepared for this conflict, which is the mother lode of controversial topics. In my view, we did this to ourselves, which is really frustrating. Because nobody wants to touch this problem. 

The fallacy of equal knowledge ... is the idea that if only you knew what I knew, then we would agree.

What do you mean when you say “this problem”? What’s the problem?

The problem of how we communicate with one another. The problem of certainty. To go back to something that I said earlier, there’s going to always be a tension between wanting to not offend people and wanting to make space for a diversity of viewpoints. 

It seems like October 7th, or more accurately, the reaction to October 7th, revealed a schism on the left in this country. A lot of my Jewish friends in particular were really surprised by the unwillingness to condemn Hamas in some quarters. I’m wondering whether October 7th has had any impact on your thinking?

For me, with October 7th, I was horrified, in the same way that I think most serious people were. But I wouldn’t say that the reaction surprised me. In some ways, maybe, it surprised me that it surprised people. These are the rules of the game. This is how we set it up. It’s all about identity. Since October 7th, I’ve done workshops with Palestinian and Israeli students who will both say that they feel like they’re being silenced. How did we get here? How is that a good place to be?

In Tablet a few years ago, you wrote that many DEI training programs are based on a dangerous combination of “coercive measures and misplaced confidence in our knowledge.” Has anything changed in the way you think about DEI programs since you wrote that piece?

It’s not that I think diversity is bad. I like diversity. But what I would say about DEI programming is that there are certain assumptions underneath it. One is about identity—that we can, and should, think about who we are primarily along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc., and that we can lean into these identities basically as much as we want and there’s no downside. I think that’s a debatable assumption, but we never even bother having that conversation.

In The Certainty Trap book, I write about the fallacy of equal knowledge. This is the idea that if only you knew what I knew, we would agree. And so I’m just going to give you information, and then we’ll be on the same page. It doesn’t work that way because people vary along all of these other dimensions, including moral values and the way that they interpret their experiences and find meaning in their lives.

DEI training and anti-racism training often fall into this trap. I actually think there are ways to take the best of what DEI training is trying to do and leave the ideological stuff behind. 

Not long ago, you wrote a piece for The Hill that expressed some skepticism about the idea of bringing partisans together for conversation across their differences. So if that’s not the answer, what is? How do we get out of the certainty trap? 

The whole idea of we’re going to take a red person and a blue person and put them in the same room … I don’t mean to throw shade on that. I think it’s important work. I think it has value. My concerns with it are twofold, really. One is scalability. In a country of 330 million people, I don’t know how many dyads and focus groups you can convene. There’s a scalability question. 

The goal is not agreement. The goal is to figure out how to live with disagreement.

If I’m blue and you’re red, and we sit together and we have a conversation, and, at the end of that conversation, you’re like, “Oh, she’s not such a snowflake.” And I’m like, “Oh, he’s not such a racist.” That’s obviously a good thing, but it’s not totally clear to me whether that then generalizes to the next red person that I meet. Maybe it does, but it’s not immediately obvious to me that it does.

So the question of what to do … first of all, I would just say there’s no easy solution. We got ourselves into this mess. There’s no magic wand to solve it. But I think we need to change the way we think about education. We have to get people to understand that if you care about the health of our political discourse, you can’t then say the conversation is over when someone feels offended. You can’t hang an argument on an assumption about someone else’s intent. You have to be precise in your thinking. 

How successful do you think you’ve been with imparting these ideas to your Gen Z students? 

My experience in general is that they are very open. Whatever degree of success I have had is because I’m not trying to convince them of anything. I’m not making political arguments. The goal is not agreement. The goal is to figure out how to live with disagreement.

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This is part of a series of interviews  by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,  entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview also appears in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.