Reclaiming Persuasion: Why Political Violence Threatens the Constitution—and How Civic Education Can Save Us

Political violence doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it grows in the shadows of dehumanizing talk, outrage incentives, and the belief that ordinary politics no longer works. We take that trend head‑on with Jeff Davis, program director for civic education at the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, to unpack why language matters, how persuasion gets crowded out, and what we can practically do to rebuild trust in elections and constitutional processes.

We start by mapping the pattern behind recent attacks and threats, then trace the subtle shift from criticizing ideas to labeling people as enemies. Jeff explains how the Constitution anticipates disagreement and channels it into institutions designed for debate, deliberation, and peaceful power transfer. From there, we explore the real boundaries of free speech—rights paired with norms—and how today’s attention economy rewards the exact behaviors that corrode civil dialogue.

The heart of the conversation is solutions. Jeff shares concrete classroom strategies for teaching respectful argument: modeling good‑faith listening, practicing reason‑giving, and separating people from positions to cultivate “civic friendship.” We also outline practical media habits to escape algorithmic outrage cycles—curating diverse homepages, comparing coverage across viewpoints, and blocking sources that attack people instead of ideas. The goal isn’t to avoid conflict; it’s to make conflict productive, so losing a vote isn’t an existential defeat and compromise isn’t a dirty word.

If you care about lowering the temperature without lowering your standards, this episode offers a toolkit for better conversations and stronger communities. Listen, share with a friend who argues in good faith, and tell us one media habit you’re changing this week. If this resonates with you, subscribe, leave a review, and help more people find the show.

Constitution Day Calls Us to Honor Peaceful Disagreement Article.

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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 1:35 Setting the Stakes: Violence and Democracy
• 2:35 Dehumanization’s Drift from Debate to Enmity
• 6:21 The Constitutional Case for Persuasion
• 8:44 Free Speech, Algorithms, and Outrage
• 11:41 Teaching Civic Friendship and Compromise
• 13:22 Practical Media Habits Beyond the Feed
• 15:11 Closing Reflections and Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

Welcome to Civics in a Year. I am super stoked about my guests today because my guest today is my colleague, Jeff Davis. Jeff is the program director for civic education at the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University. And he recently wrote a piece in Fair for All, which I will put in our show notes. But today we're talking about kind of the rise of political violence. So, Jeff, welcome to the show. And our opening question is: what does the rise of political violence in America reveal about the health of our democracy and the challenges of living up to our constitutional principles?

SPEAKER_00: 1:26

Well, thanks for that. Welcome, Liz. It's great to be with you too in this context. I'm so excited to be on the Civic to a Year podcast. And great question. We have something very timely to discuss because it does seem like there is this rising tide of political violence that our country has started to experience. Certainly, you know, the most recent episode with the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been on everybody's mind. Although, even more recently, there was an attempted attack on ICE agents that appears to have been politically motivated, with the little that we know so far. And looking back, just uh the last couple of years, we've got incidents where Democratic lawmakers were attacked in their homes, both in Congress and in state legislatures. We had a presidential candidate who there was an attempted assassination against. All of this seems to point to an idea that Americans are just not seeing the ordinary constitutional means of practicing politics as the ways to resolve differences. That there's something you know greater that needs to be done in which violence is justified because people who are not wanting the same thing as me in our policy making, they're they're enemies, right? And that's not a view that that you know overwhelming majorities of Americans are holding, certainly not, but but there are these signs of extreme minorities of of each of our sides in partisanship who who think that that that violence is the is the better means to the end. And that's not healthy. That's not what the Constitution was designed to provide for us.

SPEAKER_01: 3:03

And it feels like there's so much dehumanizing, right, of the other side. And I know that viewers can't see, but I just put that in air quotes. So why is it so dangerous to dehumanize or collectively blame political opponents? And how does that really undermine the principles of free speech and equal protection?

SPEAKER_00: 3:24

Yeah, you're totally right about that. In in it doesn't take a ton of time hanging out on social media or watching 24-hour news networks or other, you know, YouTube channels, podcasts, etc. You it's not hard to find people talking about political opponents or at least people that they disagree with in public policy as as enemies, as dangerous, as you know, they they label with terms like you know communist or fascist, suggesting some kind of like extremist ideology that's not committed to you know the democratic republic under the constitution. And and all of that is super dangerous. It it uh serves to justify that the ordinary political practices are no longer going to work, right? If if somebody else is an enemy who is seeking to undermine our way of life or the institutions that we've become accustomed to living with, then you know anything goes, right? That's that's what justifies things like you know the the extremely counter-majoritarian or or extra-constitutional mechanisms to stop them from having any policy-making power, is because if if they're out to get me and people like me, if they're out to get my way of life, if they're out to to undo the constitutional fabric themselves, well, then I am justified and my side is justified in undoing the constitutional fabric to stop them from doing it. Well, that's that's the whole point of the constitution, is that is that as we are going about our political differences, our founders knew that people are always going to have differences of opinion in politics, right? There's always going to be disagreements about what the tax rate should be, how properties get transferred, what the regulations on business should be, what you know, gun laws or et cetera, et cetera. You could you could go to any particular issue. And the whole point of the constitutional system is that we resolve those differences in various institutions at various levels, you know, local, state, and federal, through debate, through deliberation, through persuasion, right? And if your side's losing and it's not getting its way in policy right now, your job is to make the case and persuade others that that that your way of thinking is actually more valid. And here are the reasons why. What we lose when we start talking about people as enemies and and justifying violence or or extra constitutional mechanisms to to block the other side from from doing anything is we're we're giving up on that idea of persuasion, right? We're we're suggesting that uh that that other side, they're beyond hope, they cannot be persuaded. And that justifies all kinds of terrible things that that undo the fabric of our constitutional republic.

SPEAKER_01: 6:08

And I think that one of the things I have learned in my teaching career, you know, when we talk about free speech, free speech is never meant to be absolute. And so I think that the founders, when they thought of free speech, was this the freedom to disagree and the freedom to have these conversations and criticize your government. And it almost feels like, and again, I understand that social media is a business, right? We understand that rage fading is a business now because that's what people click on and it makes it feel more divisive. And this, you know, call for, well, I have the freedom of speech, I can say whatever I want is becoming this dehumanizing thing. Instead of, like you said, like you and I disagree about where we're gonna go to lunch one day, right? And instead of calling each other names and saying these new things and claiming freedom of speech, freedom of speech should be a back and forth. And I'm trying to persuade you why my side is better, and you're trying to persuade me. And I mean, if that's a very like low-hanging fruit example, but this freedom of speech is supposed to be a principle of you know, really good argument and disagreement. We think about like the Federalist papers and the anti-federalists, and I mean, they were not always nice to each other, but for the most part, it was this really thought-out back and forth. So as we look toward America 250, so we're getting ready to celebrate that. How can civic education help renew our commitment to persuasion, deliberation, and elections as the way to settle our political disputes?

SPEAKER_00: 7:50

Yeah, there's the real question, huh? And and for you and me and our center, and and for the work that so many other great civic educators are doing in our K-12 schools and various nonprofits out there, we we can do something about this. There, there really is hope here. And and personally, I think that the best approach is to teach students when they are in our classrooms some of the art of respectful civil dialogue and to show them that persuasion actually is possible. You know, it is okay for someone to change their minds. People do change their minds all the time. And we can demonstrate the practices of what it looks like to express an opinion with with sound argument, reason, evidence, personal experience, you know, laying out how it's going to affect me and and and the other people I know who are in my situation, but also to listen to what the others have to say and not to listen for like waiting for the moment where you can like you know poke the hole in the argument or like prove them to be hypocrites or something, but to but to listen to try to understand first, right? And to really know, like, okay, are they coming from a reasonable place and and can I understand why? And once you get to that point, once once we show students that persuasion is possible, I think that undoes a lot of the demonization and and characterization of other people's enemies. Because you know, civic friendship is about believing that if we currently disagree, that doesn't mean we have to always disagree. And it also doesn't mean that the other person isn't, you know, sharing in uh a rightful place as an equal partner in this constitutional experiment that we've been doing. So, so in your lunch example, which I think is is wonderful, uh we can, you know, we can attack each other about the lunch choice. The result of that is gonna be that neither one of us is that we we end up you know splitting up and going our separate ways and eating alone, right? That's not gonna be a fun experience. In a perfect world, you know, maybe I get my way, maybe you get your way, but more likely what we get is a compromise where we pick a lunch spot that we're both kind of gonna enjoy and we'll enjoy each other's company. Or alternately, maybe we work it out that this time we'll go to your place and next time we'll go to my place, and we strike a deal where both of us are gonna, you know, win in the long run. And that's that's what civic friendship is. It's a belief that that we're going to continue in this American constitutional experiment together, regardless of whether I'm getting my way right now. In the long run, we're all gonna be better off because we have these protections under the Constitution and because we're resolving these differences peacefully. And we always believe that there's hope for the future that next time around we can be a little more persuasive, we can come with a little more reason, and maybe that will persuade enough people that we win the next election and get our way next time around. And that's how we resolve our differences in this system.

SPEAKER_01: 10:46

And it's interesting that you say, like, you know, sometimes I'll get my way, you'll get your way, or we'll compromise. But also in that whole thing, we're talking about the idea of lunch. You're not attacking me as a person. I'm not attacking you, right? We're looking at where the lunch idea. And this is, I think, especially in politics, and you bring up teaching it in classrooms, which I do know is your doctoral research, and I'm stoked to read that. But it is attacking the idea and not the person.

SPEAKER_00: 11:16

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 11:17

Right. And that becomes, you know, because we're all neighbors, we're all human beings, you know, I actually don't think you and I have ever disagreed about where to go to lunch because we also work on a very large campus. So there is a plethora of things. But, you know, in that lunch example, if if we, you know, attack each other and end up eating by ourselves, it's not like we come back and everything's fine, right? It creates a divide that unfortunately can get bigger and bigger. Instead of just, I'm gonna give up a little bit of what I want, you're gonna give up a little bit of what you want. And it helps, you know, progress things along. I'm gonna ask one more question. So if I am a consumer of social media, right? So whether I'm a student or a teacher or a member of the community, how can I be a better consumer of social media with kind of all of this dehumanization and finger pointing going on?

SPEAKER_00: 12:16

That's a tough question for sure to navigate in the world right now, because the the tough part is that we don't have a ton of control over what gets fed to us on a social media feed. And so you really have to make some deliberate decisions about how you want to go about that consumption. You certainly could take the approach that that you just kind of watch yourself and and police like what you see coming across your feed. And if you see stuff that's that's that an algorithm is feeding to you that's particularly, you know, negative about like actual people, uh, not about their ideas, but just like attacking them as though they are they're not worthy of protection or worthy of participation in freedom of speech in some way. Maybe it is the right thing to do to just kind of block those voices and and and try to remove them and stick to those that are that are talking about ideas. That's one approach. Personally, I like to avoid going to algorithmic sources altogether. I like to have, you know, if I'm gonna consume news digitally, a variety of sources that I go to where I go to the homepage of the source. Maybe it's, you know, sometimes the New York Times, sometimes the Fox News had the main space, sometimes it's the Wall Street Journal, sometimes the Arizona Republic for us locally, maybe it's CNN. You know, pick a variety of them and go to the home pages because you're you're not at that point being fed, you know, the algorithm of what's been decided you're most likely to be interested in, but you're getting their best effort at trying to appeal to a wider audience. Now, of course, each of these sites, you know, we we know that that there are audiences that gravitate toward toward certain sites. But but if you go to the opinion section or if you go to the front news pages of these sections, you'll tend to find a variety of news stories contained in the in the news headlines, and you'll tend to find a variety of types of perspectives in the opinion section, uh, especially if you're going to multiple sources. So that's something I would encourage, like rather than just passively accepting what an algorithm feeds you on social media when it comes to your news consumption.

SPEAKER_01: 14:22

I love that because my algorithm right now is Taylor Swift, it is the videos of dogs, and it is the WNBA finals and college football.

SPEAKER_00: 14:31

Like that's they know you, they know what you love, Liz.

SPEAKER_01: 14:35

That is what so I love that you say, like, maybe you just not get our news from there. And if you start to feel like if you start to get caught in that blame, like stopping. And I appreciate that you talk about going straight to the source and going straight to these home pages, all sides again, friend of the center is a really good place to go. Jeff, thank you so much for being our guest. And I know this won't be the last time. And listeners, I really again, I'm gonna put the piece of writing that Jeff did for Fair for All in the show notes. Highly suggest it. It is just, you know, Jeff and I are working really hard on civic education and trying to give teachers and students in our community as much as possible. So, Jeff, thank you so much for being my guest and thank you for your expertise.

SPEAKER_00: 15:22

You're very welcome. It was my pleasure.