Interview with Dr. Farnsworth 

Pratiki: We have studied your work on political humour through your book Late-Night in Washington: Political Humour and the American Presidency. What function does political humour play in a democracy? And is criticism more acceptable to the recipients when it is presented through humour? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: The key thing to remember about political humour is that it scratches an itch that humans have, wherever they live. The idea that people with money and power need to be taken down a peg is a universal thing. And so, when you think about political humour, it's a way that a lot of people can respond to their frustrations in life. Rich people are still going to be rich; powerful people are still going to be powerful. But if you make fun of some of the things that are happening, that may make it a little easier to deal with the burdens of the day. So, it's not unique to us in America at all. And I think that even in the Soviet Union, during Stalin's time, people were making jokes about Stalin. Now, you didn't publicly make jokes about Stalin. But among your friends, there were jokes that were passed around. It's, I think, a real human need to make fun of people. 

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Pratiki: Yes, humour can make political criticism more acceptable to people because they tend to get defensive when it is presented directly. But does it make the topic seem less serious for the public, with them then treating it as just a joke? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: No, not necessarily. One of the key things that political humour does is convince people to pay more attention to politics. A joke about an individual, let's say a member of parliament, isn't funny if you don't know the background of this person. And so, we've seen in public opinion studies in the United States that consuming political humour encourages political consumption of news, encourages voting, and encourages more engagement in politics across a whole series of dimensions. And so, it's a joke that's being told, but it has very serious consequences. We're all better off if more people are participating in elections and understanding what the challenges are that the society is facing.

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Pratiki: Surveys show that Americans still think that freedom is their nation's greatest invention, but they disagree on what it actually means. In your research on public opinion, how has the American definition of freedom changed over the decades? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: Well, the original vision when the U.S. was first organised was that we didn't want a king. We weren't sure exactly what we did want, but we knew that we didn't want what we had with Britain. And so, the vision of freedom is sort of a leave-me-alone kind of thing. The government shouldn't be too big, too intrusive, and neither too powerful. But again, Americans don't want anarchy either. They want some measure of security that comes from having authorities to tell other people not to do something. In some ways, this is an old debate about the meaning of freedom. Basically, Hobbes in the Leviathan talked about freedom as only occurring if there's a government to keep other people in line. And then, an older vision of freedom from Aristotle is that you could pursue your excellence. That's the definition of freedom. Whatever it is you want to do, whatever opportunities might come your way, the more you can realise your potential, that's what freedom is. So, one is kind of individualised, and one is kind of group-oriented. And so, America goes back and forth between these different freedoms all the time. We have a big issue right now with what's called flock cameras. These cameras read license plates. And they can track where people are going in the cities that have these license plate readers. People are really upset about that. And a number of cities have said they're going to discontinue their usage because of the public health issue. 

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Pratiki: It's interesting because when we look at it practically, in America, the idea of freedom is not fixed. And it differs for different people depending on their social or political perspectives.

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Prof. Farnsworth: Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the big things that America is working with right now is a question of bodily autonomy. When you think about abortion laws in the United States, some states say that abortion should be legal for the first six months of pregnancy. And then some states say that there shouldn't be abortions. And so the individual states in the country have very different ideas about this. And, by the way, there is no law that restricts bodily autonomy in men. We are going through challenges about redefining this. So the U.S. continues to work through freedom. It's the evolving vision of freedom in America. 

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Malishka: What are your views on the political situation of the U.S.? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: Well, America's a very divided country right now, but it's often a divided country. We have pretty close to 50% that support the Democrats and pretty close to 50% that support the Republicans pretty much all the time. One side wins sometimes, another side wins sometimes. But there are no permanent majorities and no permanent minorities. And it would be nice if we could agree on the facts, I guess.  One of the things that really troubles me about the political world today is that when people post stuff online, it doesn't have to be true. They aren't necessarily responsible. They just say what they wish were true. Instead of saying vaccines work…we have all this scientific evidence that demonstrates that they do… we have people out there saying, for whatever reason, that vaccines don't work or they're dangerous. And there's no scientific evidence that they bring. It's just their opinion. As a result, people get sick, and they don't get vaccinated. We had eradicated measles in the United States, and now we're having people die of measles. And this is one of the problems that I see with social media- false information is on the same level as true information. You have doctors with medical degrees telling you something, and you have some random person telling you something, and somehow, the consequences are basically at the same level in terms of how the public views it. We have so-called practitioners online saying if you take this, it will be good for your health, or if you don't take that, it could be better or it could not harm you. But they do not have any scientific backing for that. They do not have any degree to be able to say that, for giving that advice to people. That's a problem.

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Malishka: Politicians are now integral content generators for social media. They post on a regular basis both in India and the U.S. How strongly do you think social media presence can affect the careers of political leaders and their popularity among the people? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: Yeah, I think that President Trump is a great example of how effective social media can be in getting your name out there and making you more prominent. Remember, Donald Trump was just a TV star before he started to run for president. And the first poll showed him at one, two, or three percent. A lot of people thought he was running for president just to improve the ratings on his TV show. But what Trump can do, very effectively, is generate a connection with people who are really angry about the world, people who are angry about change, and make them his supporters. He's very good at channelling the anger of voters who feel left behind, and that's a vehicle for really intense loyalty to the man. And that's how he became president. Without social media, I don't know that he would have gotten that much of a jump start. It might have worked out well for him anyway, right? He was good on TV. He was a celebrity. But I tend to think Twitter really helped him. Some presidents are really good at the media of the moment, and others aren't. I don't think Joe Biden was all that good. Obama wasn't bad. But Biden is an example of somebody who was a confident guy. He'd get up in the morning and go to work and do his job. But he wasn't really good at selling himself with the job. And Trump is much better at self-promotion than Biden ever was. And so if you think about those two men, you can really see that facility and comfort with new media technologies can make a big difference. Then you can look at people who have come out of nowhere to become prominent, like Mamdani. You're looking at somebody who is, again, a master of the social media platforms. And that makes him prominent, and now he's mayor. 

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Malishka: What are your opinions on how the use of AI will affect future elections and democracy? 

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Prof. Farnsworth: Well, we don't really know what we're facing, so we don't really know what's going to come next. AI is still very new, and what shape it's going to take is not necessarily clear. What we have seen so far, though, is pretty troubling. It's easier than ever to create a fake newspaper. It's easier than ever to have false information out there and have it look believable. And this is really, really troubling. Because if there's a clip out there that's not true, how do you undo the damage if you're a politician? Let's say Americans love sports. Let's say there's a politician from Wisconsin who says he hates the Green Bay Packers. This is the professional football team in Wisconsin. And AI generates it, let's say. That's terrible. People are going to hate him for that. He didn't say it, but it looks like he said it. And so how do you undo it? We don't really have a system for that. And we need one. I would prefer a system that requires disclosure. That at the bottom of every AI-generated thing, it says AI-generated. So that people can know what they're dealing with. But, of course, that may not be what they want to do. Use AI. They want to maximise their impact and maximise people using it. And if there is an AI label on it, people might not use AI as much. Yeah, it's becoming very dangerous because we can't tell if it's real or if it's fake. One of the things that's kind of troubling about AI right now is that the people who are running it don't know where it's going.  And so there's a great deal of concern that this may get out of control.

 

Malishka: Are you in support of using AI in election campaigns? Do you think it would be helpful? 

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Prof. Farnsworth:  Well, it's already being used in campaigns. You're already seeing false information out there generated by AI. I think that, as I mentioned a moment ago, disclosure is essential. And that would certainly be true for a political campaign. If a campaign uses this information, that is terrible for all of us. Because if a candidate says something that people don't like and they lose the election, well, that's on them. They said it. And that's how voters evaluate the campaigns. What's troubling to me is that we may be going into an environment where people are losing elections not on what they said, but on what they didn't say- AI generates lies to say what they (apparently) said. That's no good at all. I'm tempted to think we should ban AI in political campaigns. But at a minimum, we absolutely need a disclosure that says AI-generated content.

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Abila: Considering the research being conducted on AI and its implications for the public image of politicians, what is your understanding of the kind of AI-related research currently being undertaken at universities in the United States? What are some of the key challenges?

 

Prof. Farnsworth:  Well, right now, the thing I'm most concerned about regarding AI is controlling it. It's really troubling that the people who are running AI aren't sure what's going on. I really do think that we need some kind of system of monitoring, of evaluation, maybe just an off-switch. I don't know. But I don't like where we are. I don't like how we got here. And I don't like where it looks like we're going, to the extent that we can't predict what might come next. It's not comforting.

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Abila: The US follows a presidential system, whereas India follows a parliamentary system. What challenges do you see in the presidential system, particularly in terms of political accountability? To what extent is a president accountable within this system, and how can we evaluate the mechanisms that ensure or limit presidential accountability?

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Prof. Farnsworth:  The key thing to remember about the American political system is that it's very open to new ideas. Someone like Trump can come out of nowhere and become president. His first day in government service was the day he became president. Now, compare that to a parliamentary democracy. If you think about how you make it to the top of parliament… you get elected, and then maybe you get a lower-level job in an opposition party or in government. And then your fellow members of parliament look at you and say, is this person a leader or not? And then you make your way up. So, there's this huge process of peer review in a Westminster-style democracy. But that also means that the people who get to the top tend to be long-time party loyalists who have been part of a consensus about what the party stands for for some time. You don't necessarily see all that many disruptors coming out of the parliamentary system. The current PM of Canada was head of the Bank of England and head of the Bank of Canada. He's had many, many years of public life. And people look at him, and they evaluate him in that context. The members of the Liberal Party of Canada-the party that nominated him to be the leader- saw a winner. In terms of an American president, you get this nomination for your party. Basically, you get a few thousand more votes in your early primary state than somebody else, and all of a sudden, you're the Democratic or the Republican nominee. And so, on the bright side, we have more openness to new ideas and new people. But on the negative side, we don't have that much privilege. And in some ways, the public gets what it wants in our system. But maybe in, say, the British parliamentary system or Westminster-style democracies more generally, the parties give you a choice, but it's a choice among people who've been kind of vetted along the way by people who should know the other members of the party. I'm not sure one system is inherently better or worse than the other, but it does give us very good outcomes. And our system continually throws up new people. Like Barack Obama, when he was elected president, he'd only been a senator for four years. Now, that's pretty small in Washington. George Bush had been governor for six years  in Texas before he became president. Again, not that long. I think a case could be made that either one of them might have been better as president if they had a few more years. Rather than four years and six years, what if it had been 10 and 12? 

 

Abila: In your work ‘Spinner in Chief’, you discuss how politicians sell not just their policies and strategies, but also themselves in the mass media. Do you think voters react more strongly to the curated image, rather than assessing the politicians’ proposed policies? 

 

Prof. Farnsworth: Character really matters in politics. When I say character, I mean the personal qualities of the individual. But in the case of Donald Trump, he sold himself as somebody who understands the troubles of white working-class Americans. His message was, “The jobs go to Mexico; I'm mad about that just like you are. The immigrants are coming; I'm mad about that just like you are.” This made people think, ‘okay, I like him because he's like me. He cares about what people care about’. And that's why Trump voters will vote for him. At the core of all of this is this idea that people will evaluate candidates on who they are as people rather than their policies. And there's a certain logic to it. You want a president who is up to the job, but you don't necessarily know what the job is going to be. When a president is elected, the world looks one way, and even before they take office, it may look very different. When George W. Bush was elected, the Cold War was over and a lot of people thought America didn't have to worry about the world as much. The 2000 campaign had almost no discussion of foreign policy matters. People were worried about domestic concerns in the elections. Yet before his presidency was a year old, 9/11 happened. And then it became an international presidency. So I think voters who choose candidates based on character are making a sound choice. You really don't know what the policy issues are going to be over the next four years. And if you can feel that this person is better able to handle the job, maybe that's the key metric that you should use to figure out who should be president. This is particularly true for voters who are not partisan, or are less partisan. The people who are neither Democrats nor Republicans are likely to be impacted by character as they evaluate the candidates, because they don't care as much about issues. 

 

Abila: Yet a politician’s character can also be curated and be presented to the public. 

 

Prof. Farnsworth:  Well, I think it's important to note that one can't really create the character of a candidate. People are who they are. A good example of this is President Trump's toughness. He comes across as a tough, combative figure, and all are indications of who he is. And that seems quite genuine. Now and then there's a national tragedy, flooding, a big fire or an earthquake, and this requires a president to be empathetic. I don't think Trump is ever at his best if the job of a moment requires him to be empathetic. It doesn't seem like he's wired that way. Someone like Barack Obama was much better at that. He could understand the troubles that people were having and the challenges that they were facing, and he could connect with them, in part because he might have known some hardship himself as a kid,. His father disappeared from the scene when he was young, and he was raised by his mother, who was sick. So, if you have a world of challenges, maybe you're a little more sympathetic to somebody else's challenges.  When I was a reporter for a while with the Kansas City Star, one of the politicians I covered sometimes was Senator Bob Dole. He lost one of his arms in World War II. One of the things that I saw in Bob Dole was his focus on accessibility. Obama worked as a community organiser, and so he was working with people having a rough time, and that's why it seemed very genuine when Obama was empathetic. Some voters like the more empathetic approach. Some would like the tougher approach. And what we usually do in American elections is we bounce around. We have one kind of president for a while, and then we want somebody else. When the president was Bill Clinton, there was the sex scandal; then the next president was George W. Bush, who was a devoted father and family man. And then after George W. Bush, the thought was that the economy was falling apart, and the war in Iraq wasn't going so well. Then it seemed like maybe we wanted somebody really smart to do the job. And then we chose Obama. But Obama is accused sometimes of lacking the common touch. And then we got Trump, who channelled that anger of the white working class in America, to which people thought, maybe we want somebody professional; then we got Biden, then back to Trump. It's human nature to want what you don't have, and we see that in the presidential selection going back decades. We want old, and we want young, we want liberal, and we want conservative, and so it goes.

 

Pratiki: Does the speed at which misinformation is posted online influence how people perceive politicians?

 

Prof. Farnsworth: Well, you have to remember too, when you're thinking about something like that, that not everybody is approaching it with the critical eye of a college student. You may be able to see something as false, but that is not necessarily the case for many voters. And this is why a number of countries are thinking about ways to build critical media consumption skills into something like an elementary school curriculum, so that more people are going to be getting it sooner. Your generation had some of that along the way for you, and the generation behind you even more so. And all indications are that it's a valuable perspective, and it does seem to work to make people more resilient to false information. Finland was really good at committing to critical media consumption. And they did like, tests on students, on the women's units, and they were very good at finding the falsehoods. 

 

Abila: How do we get everyone to think more critically about political tactics and manipulation? Is there any role in this context for psychologists? 

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Prof. Farnsworth:  I think we're talking about an all-hands-on-deck moment. Everybody should do what they can. If you can debunk something online, do it. At a minimum, don't share it if you think it's false. We are in a crucial moment dealing with this avalanche of falsehood in our current media environment. It's deeply, deeply troubling. If you can't agree on basic facts, there's no path forward to solving the problems. Every country has problems. America has tens of millions of people who don't have health insurance. To be able to fix that, you require an intellectual assessment. In this case, one of the things to remember is that if you have a lot of people who are uninsured, you may end up paying more in the end because then they avoid medical treatment and then a lot of people who don't have insurance will come in to the doctor and say they probably should have been there a year ago. An example of an effective policy outcome is education. Think about all that you and your friends are going to be able to do in life because you're going to walk out of here with a college degree. And think about what your life would be like if you were in the workplace now and you were never going to get a college degree. Which version of you does more for society? Which version of you is happier? Which version of you even provides more tax revenue for the state? Even at a class level, we're talking about significant differences. And so economists will tell you that one of the most effective public policies of all is education funding because of this multiplier effect. But again, these require studies of what works and what doesn't. 

 

Pratiki: In my hometown, we say that we need young, indigenous people as leaders in politics. But when native young people stand for elections, the public still chooses the previous candidate. What are your thoughts on this pattern? 

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Prof. Farnsworth:  I was talking about how President Trump really connects with white working-class voters because he shares their fears and their anger. And those are the kinds of things that are important. So any politician who's coming up now, wherever they are, they have to figure out what kind of electorate they have. And they have to figure out how best to connect with them. As a candidate from an indigenous community, you will have to figure out how you connect beyond the people who are totally like you or part of your racial, ethnic, religious group, and win over those voters. A good example of how this can work is actually Barack Obama. He ran for president in a country that is in the range of 14% African-American, about 14% Latino, and about 70% white. How does Barack Obama win? Well, you could say, probably a lot of African-Americans will vote for him. Maybe some Latinos will vote for him. But, whites looking at him may not be inclined to say, ‘this is who I want’. Remember, we've only had one African-American president. He was the first major party nominee who was African-American. And he won. But the point is that going into that campaign, he had to figure out a way to connect with white people who aren't used to voting for an African-American. And what Obama knew from the start was what he couldn't do. He knew he couldn't be an angry black man. If he was really militant and really combative, that would not work.  And so, if you look at the early Obama campaign, which is a case study of what you're thinking about, look at how he uses his family, saying, ‘I'm like you because I have two daughters. Aren't they adorable?’ You know, ‘I have a wife. Isn't she accomplished?’ And of course, people say, okay, we have families too. When you share jokes about, like, curfews for little girls and stuff like that, it all comes across as a way to connect. I encourage you to look at that 2019 campaign with Obama because I think it's a great example of how you can basically build rapport with people who are not naturally looking at you or claiming that you are one of them. 

 

Abila: In the political context in the US, how active are persons with disabilities in politics? How may they be empowered to take the lead in the political scenario?

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Prof. Farnsworth:  Well, we do regularly elect people with disabilities to office. In particular, we have elected a lot of war veterans. Maybe they're missing a limb or may have some other disability. These are people who demand a great deal of respect. I mentioned Bob Dole. He was an example of that. But there are members of the House and Senate who have artificial limbs, and they get around in a wheelchair. I think increasingly people are more willing to accept candidates with disabilities. In the past, decades ago, people with disabilities were not out in public life much, as the world wasn't accessible to them. Now we've got ramps and vans for getting in and out. That's what people are getting used to, and so that's a good issue. The same is happening for African-American, Latino, women candidates. The more you see them out there running, the less it's a matter of concern because of the difference.