Be a Better You: How to Break Political Tribalism
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2018
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s our final episode for 2018. As we take stock of this seemingly never-ending year, big questions abound: How can we rise above the worst impulses of our political tribalism to find common cause? At a time when our very identities are under attack, how do we resist the temptation to retreat to clusters of likemindedness, and instead open up to the greater good? These concerns about the nature of our democracy and the definitions of belonging in an atomized world form the basis of this illuminating conversation between moral philosopher and author, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief, Clara Jeffery, recorded in October before a live audience at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. This episode contains edited highlights from that event.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the Mother Jones Podcast. I'm Jamila King in New York. |
| 0:07.0 | On today's show, our final episode for 2018. |
| 0:14.0 | Now, look, it's been an exhausting year |
| 0:17.0 | and you probably like me just want to tune it out, take a bath, |
| 0:21.0 | get a bath bomb, get a massage, and try to hope that 2019 is going to be a little bit better personally, but also politically. |
| 0:30.0 | So for our final show of the year, something different, something to prompt some bigger thinking, some brain food. |
| 0:38.0 | What about hearing from a moral philosopher? |
| 0:41.0 | Kwame Anthony Appia talks to Clara Jeffrey. a shifting identities at a time of enormous change and conflict here and around the world. |
| 0:57.2 | Is there any way we can escape from the tribalism that infects our public life by thinking differently about who we are as individuals. |
| 1:07.0 | Big questions. Some interesting answers, all coming up. Stay tuned. What's your New Year's resolution? |
| 1:17.0 | I'll tell you mine. I want to get out of the US as often as I can and I understand that's a privilege |
| 1:28.0 | And I don't know if I can make it happen financially, but I'm gonna try |
| 1:31.4 | This time of year always invites big questions, doesn't it? |
| 1:35.4 | Lots to reflect on, but also a moment in time, a juncture, an opportunity to ask, what's next? |
| 1:45.0 | To make some big decisions maybe, or maybe just say screw it |
| 1:49.5 | and finally go on vacation. |
| 1:51.4 | That's good too, obviously. With big questions on our mind we wanted to |
| 1:56.1 | bring you a big thinker who can tackle them. Kwame Anthony Appia is one of the |
| 2:01.0 | country's leading philosophers. He teaches at New York University, and you might |
| 2:06.3 | know him as the author of the Weekly Ethicist Column for the New York Times magazine, which |
| 2:11.7 | tackles the tricky daily choices we all make, big and small. |
| 2:17.5 | His latest book, The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity, pushes back on our current thinking about identity at a time |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mother Jones, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Mother Jones and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.