In rural Texas, about 130 women were scared to come out — as progressive.
This woman in Toronto was among the enormous crowds that filled streets around the world on Jan. 21, 2017, following Donald Trump’s inauguration in the United States. Women like her, and their allies had a lot to say: about their opposition to misogyny, to authoritarianism, to patriarchal power. But how many millions more women felt they couldn’t enjoy that luxury, for fear of reprisal, marginalization, and worse in their local communities, even in their homes? Our guest today tells the story of one small group of women in America’s heartland who found each other and nurtured their politics in the dark.
Arindam Banerjee / Shutterstock
In January 2017, millions of women marched in solidarity to oppose Donald Trump’s inauguration. But in a small Texas county, a growing network of likeminded ladies found each other — and started meeting in secret. Communications scholar Emily Van Duyn followed these women as they became improbable, undercover champions of civic engagement while keeping their activism hidden, from their husbands, families and neighbors. We explore what their story says about the politics of silence and the silencing of politics.
After some debate, the women Van Duyn worked with kept men, including spouses, out of their meetings. The group worried that even men friendly to its cause would take over their conversation.
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For those living in communities where their convictions — not just their ethnic, racial or gender identities — are in the minority, Van Duyn says, “coming out” in favor of the absentee party can be a powerful assertion of self.
On the other hand, it can also be an invitation to social stigma, economic loss and threatening behavior, Van Duyn found. Her work looks at this universe in a grain of sand, exploring how people suppress their politics even as they try to express it. The women’s group she studied suggests that progress is possible from the shadows. Thanks to their efforts, phone banks took flight, voter lists got updated, and one of their ranks ran for office, then won.
Still, what does it say that even a predominantly white, middle-class group of relative privilege has to hide its motely, and fairly moderate, mix of views?
Emily Van Duyn
Emily Van Duyn is an assistant professor of communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Many of our shows deal with the ills and unintended consequences of social media, but her work focuses on how it can also be a force for good, making it easier for people to build community and participate in politics under challenging circumstances. Van Duyn’s first book, based on her doctoral field research, is Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret (Oxford, 2021). Follow her on Twitter @emilyvanduyn.
Democracy Lives in Darkness plays off of the Washington Post’s motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” adopted in February 2017 to emphasize the watchdog role of the press in a free society. Van Duyn says she feels her work tells the flipside of that story: how, in hard times and places, democratic principles may need darkness to incubate.
Watch Van Duyn discuss her research in greater depth in a video presentation she did earlier this year.
Together with Cynthia Peacock, Van Duyn has published other work looking at how civility dissolves in the comments sections of news sites, and why men are more likely than women to post such comments in the first place.
Local politics has become increasingly nationalized — reflecting the larger polarizing and partisan trends seen across the country. The Annual Review of Political Science summed up research on this phenomenon in May 2019.
Rural Texas is not especially friendly to Democrats anymore. This stop sign on a dirt road has been vandalized to proclaim “Obama, stop.”
J.B. Manning / Shutterstock
Two Texas scholars more recently looked at how this situation is playing out in their state and poisoning its political climate.
As the Democratic Party in the past few decades has withdrawn from vast swaths of the state, Texas has gotten a lot redder. At the same time, its cities are growing fast, and that may portend further unpredictable shifts: many Californians, for one, are moving to urban and suburban areas of the Lone Star State.
In April, NBC News’s Meet the Press Reports explored how the influence of the Democratic Party has receded in rural areas across the country, not just in Texas.
The Rural Democracy Initiative is a progressive movement trying to overcome some of those losses by supporting civic engagement in the heartland. A recent report from the initiative made the case for why investing in small-town voters matters.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz speaks in August at the CPAC Conference near Dallas. He’s not up for reelection this year, but Republican Gov. Greg Abbot is - against Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke.
Lev Radin / Shutterstock
How serious is the problem of secrecy and fear in American political discourse? The libertarian Cato Institute found in a 2020 survey that 62 percent of citizens are afraid to share their views for fear of offending people around them.
The women’s group Van Duyn worked with feared marginalization and even assault in response to their politics. Research from the Brookings Institution says the risk of being targeted for your views is real.
Social scientists say threatening rhetoric is on the rise in American political discourse. This man protests stay-at-home orders in Los Angeles, in May 2020.
Matt Gush / Shutterstock
In August, authorities shot and killed a gunman who attacked the FBI office in Cincinnati. The New York Times spoke with experts who said the “apocalyptic language” of prominent right-wing personalities is helping inspire such acts.
Qualitative research helps scholars like Van Duyn get behind the numbers to see how political dynamics work on the ground. For more on ethnographic methods in politics, check out this volume, edited by Edward Schatz of the University of Toronto.
In case you missed them, give some of our related episodes a listen. We’ve covered a lot on social media; visited the republic of Texas; and unpacked violent extremism.
Democracy in Danger S5 E2: “Closet Civics”
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[00:00:03] Will Hitchcock: Hello, I’m Will Hitchcock.
[00:00:05] Siva Vaidhyanathan: And I’m Siva Vaidhyanathan.
[00:00:06] WH: And from the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute, this is Democracy in Danger.
[00:00:11] SV: As our listeners know, we have spent a lot of time on the show talking about the disturbing rise of far-right extremism — how it thrives on the dark web and the many ways that xenophobic, ultranationalist militant groups form, find each other and then ultimately threaten an inclusive, multi-ethnic democracy.
[00:00:31] WH: Yeah, Siva. And of course, as you know, the explosion of social media in the last couple of decades has played a huge role in that. The same algorithms that are enriching Facebook, they’ve also ratcheted up extremist discourse. The web has made it possible to organize in secret, to hide your identity, to interact anonymously and, of course, to spread disinformation, to radicalize people and contribute to alienation in our politics.
[00:00:56] SV: Right, right. You know, as I’ve written, there’s nothing better than Facebook for motivation, but perhaps nothing worse for deliberation. And we live in a society so hyper-motivated in both good and bad ways.
[00:01:10] WH: Right. Well, today we have a guest with us whose recent work adds a kind of surprising twist into the story of political mobilization in the internet age.
[00:01:20] SV: Emily Van Duyn is a scholar of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a new book out called Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret.
[00:01:34] Emily, welcome to Democracy and Danger!
[00:01:38] Emily Van Duyn: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
[00:01:40] SV: Cool. So, Emily, this book offers a very granular analysis of a group of women in a rural county in Texas, right. So it’s ethnography. And I love this universe in a grain of sand approach. These women, as you wrote, organized initially in 2017 after Donald Trump’s inauguration. So, sort of like a post-election political therapy group, which, by the way, is kind of what our podcast is as well. But, you know, little by little, they began getting more involved in local politics. So, you describe a meeting ahead of the 2018 primaries in Texas. And at that meeting, some of the members of the group tried to organize a calling party, like a phone banking party or campaign. They wanted to call senior citizens and let them know how they can vote by mail. But this pretty simple action turned out to be really fraught. Can you tell us what happened?
[00:02:45] EVD: Yeah. So this was back in March of 2018. So this is kind of right in the middle of primary season for the midterms. I am attending this meeting, right, I’ve been attending many meetings to this point for close to about a year. So I am sitting around a table. They ask people to participate in this phone banking campaign and they ask some of the women, “Hey, you know, would you be willing to make some of these phone calls to people in the county who are over 65, could vote by mail?” And I hear two women turn to each other — they’re next to me — and they say, “Well, I can’t do that because, you know, my husband’s at home, and he could overhear what I’m saying on the phone.” And a bunch of the women around her kind of nod sympathetically and other ones, like, “Yeah, me too.” And this kind of raises this concern that’s really at the heart of the book and something that kind of paints a really nice picture, which is that, you know, the mode of communication really matters, right. Like, this is a phone call — should be super easy, they should feel comfortable doing it. But if you’re doing that at home with someone who disagrees with you and you’re trying to keep your politics a secret from that person or you’re trying to not step on their toes, then a phone call is actually not a great mode for you to participate.
[00:03:59] And the second thing that was really important to this was that, you know, it was so important for this group to use other means to get people to participate. And one of those means was Facebook and email and digital communication that allowed them to have more control over what they’re saying and who they’re saying it around and who can see it.
[00:04:20] WH: Well, Emily, let me ask you to kind of zoom out a moment and paint a picture of the group that you wrote about in your book. It’s some 130 women. But tell us a little bit about the makeup of this group. And you’ve given it the name in your book, Community Women’s Group, CWG. But that’s a pseudonym, right. Because you didn’t want really to give too much detail about who they are because even now they still feel vulnerable for their political organizing. What is significant about the fact that they had to keep their politics a secret?
[00:04:53] EVD: Yeah. So it’s a group of, I would say, pretty average Democrats or progressives. It’s a mixture of some independents and some kind of more reticent or disaffected Republicans. As you said, it’s in a rural area in Texas, and if anyone has been to rural Texas, it’s a unique place. It’s very different than the, you know, like huge booming cities of Texas. There’re small towns. It’s farmland. It’s ranch land. It's a very different geographic community. It’s a mostly, you know, white women. There were a few people of color that would come to meetings, but by and large, it was middle class white women and most of them over the age of 60 — the median age was about 62. So it’s a very niche group of people. I mean, like, I always tell this story, but like I would come to some of these meetings and they felt like my grandparents. Like they would try and send me home with baked goods or be like, “Hey, why don’t you take this extra stuff back to your apartment? You’re probably not getting a ton of food as a graduate student.” I mean, it was just like I was being mothered by some of these women because that’s the age group that I was working with.
[00:06:03] SV: Well, hey, that’s the best kind of scholarly work, right, where can you get baked goods, right.
[00:06:05] EVD: Absolutely.
[00:06:06] SV: So that brings up another question. The group actually sounds pretty ideologically diverse, even if they weren’t ethnically diverse or diverse in terms of age range. So what were their arguments about their agenda?
[00:06:23] EVD: Yeah, I think that was one of the things that quickly became an issue for them. I mean, this is a two-party system in the United States. They kind of had to decide, right. Like if you’re going to move forward and take political action as you get closer to an election where you’re forced to choose, like, which party are you going to choose? And I think that they ultimately came to the decision “We’ve got to back the Democrats,” but that cost them some of their membership, right. Because some of those people didn’t want to do that. And I think that became kind of a broader issue. But that was a huge concern — was “Do we be nonpartisan, or do we have to take an affiliation?” And I think the ultimate impending election forced them to choose a side, and they had to go with the Democrats.
[00:07:05] And I think, you know, there’s some research to say that our national politics have started to increasingly align with our local politics, right. That, like, we have people who are now voting locally like they would nationally. And that has kind of changed how parties are distributed at the local level. But it also really creates systems in places, in particular like rural Texas, other rural areas of other states, where you have a very dominant party both locally and nationally in that area because people are aligning those two levels. And then you have one little sad party that’s just trying to hang on and desperately remain relevant or have a presence at all in the county. And so that has certainly been a challenge for this group in particular is that their Democratic Party locally — they had very few people left even willing to run as a Democrat in the area. It had totally flipped since the ’90s and now they are barely hanging on by a thread. It’s the same few people who run the party. Nobody wants to be public as a Democrat. Nobody wants to put a Democratic yard sign out. They can’t get people to run. It’s really kind of decaying in their community, even though the state level party, Democratic Party in Texas, is actually growing as the cities become bigger and as they’re engaging some of these previously non-voters in those areas.
[00:08:27] WH: Well, Emily, let me circle back to a question that’s really at the heart of your book, which is, you know, why does this political organizing have to be done in secret? You know, what is it that these women genuinely are afraid of? And it’s easy for me to say they shouldn’t be afraid of X, Y and Z. But in your book, you make it clear that they have really significant anxieties about being perceived as liberal, being perceived as progressive, being perceived as politically active and as having different views from their husbands and so forth. I mean, how important is fear to this story?
[00:09:02] EVD: Yeah, I mean, so fear is key here — like there was social fear. People did, in this group, worry about being isolated from their community, about having friendships. And one woman was legitimately kicked out of her knitting club for expressing dissenting beliefs to what they were saying around Trump. If you’re voting in a primary in Texas, you declare, as when you go to vote, what party you’re voting in. And you — if you’re in a rural area where it’s a small town, like, you know the people at the table who you’re declaring that to. So that kind of removes the anonymity and the sanctity of the anonymity we associate with voting in this country.
[00:09:40] But there were kind of some more surprising elements of this work that I didn’t expect and that kind of challenge what we previously think about when we think about people being afraid of expressing their beliefs. You know, economic fear. Some of these women were worried they would lose patronage or business. So they’re real estate agents and they were worried they would get in trouble with clients, or they would have clients not come to them, because they knew their politics. One owned a local business and was worried literally, she said, that people would take after her business if they knew what she believed. And that’s kind of a new thing, right. She’s not a wild extremist. She’s a pretty average Democrat in her local town with like long standing connections and friendships there. And for her to feel like her business was at stake was a kind of an interesting thing. And the last kind of fear that I talk about in the book is physical fear. So, some of these women were actually afraid of being like physically retaliated against for expressing their beliefs. So, you know, one woman I talk about, Linda, she was afraid of putting a yard sign in her front yard because she had done that in the past and had a couple of her animals shot at. So, you know, there was this legitimate concern of having physical retaliation or physical violence against them for making their politics public.
[00:11:00] SV: And they’re the fundamentally undemocratic or anti-democratic aspects of the current state of American politics, right. And this isn’t just happening in rural Texas. We’ve seen accounts of this happening all over the country. So I have spent a lot of time in rural Texas — I was a reporter for a few Texas newspapers back in the 20th century. So it’s a different state, at least in terms of political affiliation. And those days, top to bottom, all the local elected officials were Democrats, even in the most conservative counties that I remember. What’s it like now when they decide to back the Democrats? Like, what kind of difference did these women make when they went about their work? Did they improve the health of democracy over the long term? Is there a possibility for improving the health of democracy over the long term? And did they make a difference in who won elections?
[00:12:00] EVD: Yeah. I mean, I think this is kind of a broad question of, you know, political participation, political expression, political engagement, like what is the impact of this? There’s, of course, not a great way of answering this definitively, but I think I can kind of point to some of the ways that this group in particular — and in particular how secrecy — helped the women, kind of, what they would say, “come out” as Democrats. So, you know, they talk about — I mean, I constantly heard the people in the group refer to, “I’m coming out as a Democrat,” and it kind of parallels to how much this is an identity. I mean, we can think about coming out, coming from the gay liberation movement in the process of unveiling one’s, you know, sexual identity. That is very much, like, rooted in oppression. And I think, obviously, this isn’t to the same extent that many people have experienced, particularly in those communities. But, you know, the women in this group did have that process of having to unveil part of themselves to people that they knew.
[00:13:04] And what that looked like for some of these people was, you know, lots of these women actually joining and helping to run the party. And that looked like them updating the voter records, going door to door. I mean, the Democratic Party in Texas has historically really abandoned some of these areas. They had been like, “Oh, well, they’re unviable. They’re not going to win a bunch of votes in that area. So we’re not going to put even a bit of time into maintaining those records or even reaching out to people in those areas.” And so this group has really, like, put some energy into the local party and helping to kind of update those records and reach out to people who haven’t been reached out to in 20 years. So I think that is kind of one of the areas that I can definitely point to them making a difference.
[00:13:48] And they’ve also, you know, kind of encouraged some of these women to run for office. So one of them ran for city council. She told me that she was like, “I could not deal with this guy talking about these two other women on city council.” And she said he would like criticize them and belittle them. And she was, like, had enough of it. After joining the group, she like absolutely was like, “I am running,” and ran and won a spot on city council and replaced him. So that’s small, right. But, like, that is a person who wasn’t willing to even express their beliefs to anybody who is now running for office. And I think that kind of points to some of the incubatory things happening from this group.
[00:14:25] WH: Hmm. That’s a great story of moving from the darkness into the light. You can’t run for city council without being a public figure. But I want to ask you just a pointed question, because I can imagine our listeners throwing their earphones down on the ground and saying, “I don’t care about these ladies. To me, they are hiding from reality. Look, grow up, take a risk. The essence of democracy is to have the courage of your convictions and to speak publicly and at least acknowledge that you have differences. Because if we can’t acknowledge we have differences, our democracy is gone, our politics is gone.” Is one interpretation of your research and of your book that basically, if elderly white ladies in Texas can’t express their political views even within their family or in public, that basically our democracy has already so corroded and so polarized that there really is no room for people to disagree anymore? And if that’s the case, it’s too late.
[00:15:21] EVD: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is kind of the prognosis here, right. Like this is a group of women who are very privileged in many, many ways, who face very little persecution for any other part of their identity. I mean, I talk a little bit about it in the book that, you know, they’re women and they feel of, you know, a particular age. They kind of feel like men take over a lot. And they — I mean, it’s part of the reason why they are an all-female group. But, you know, in reality, they really — they don’t have a ton of opposition against them, minus this being outnumbered in their community. So yeah, there is this kind of like horrible moment where we’re like, “If this is the group that’s feeling like they need to hide, what about people who have so many other marginal identities stacked up?” Right. Like, this is not a group who’s experiencing an extreme amount of persecution in any other way. So I think, yes, there is kind of this takeaway here, which is that this is where we are. This is a dark place if this is the group that feels like they need to hide.
[00:16:24] EVD: And I think that’s kind of the harsh reality that this points to. And I kind of wanted to flip it a little bit on its head, which is that, you know, yes, this is sad. The fact that these are the people who feel like they need to hide tells us how far we’ve gone with how turned against each other we are. But it’s also kind of optimistic, and at least maybe that’s my pitch here, is that this tells us that people can keep going, that like even when they do face these conditions, these women could have given up, right. Like they could have just been like, “Well, that sucks. I’m not really going to participate in my community. I have all these reasons to not do it.” But instead they’re like, “I think I will continue. I think I’m going to try. I think I’m going to keep doing something because that’s what my country calls me to do.”
[00:17:15] And I talk about this in the book as this kind of like beautiful picture, but they start their meetings every time with the Pledge of Allegiance, and they have this, like, true patriotism, which is really, really compelling, that kind of points to this is not an antidemocratic thing. Like we like to think about secrecy as this horrible, like, people shrouded in disinformation and spreading rumors and getting together and causing antidemocratic outcomes. I mean, think insurrection, think all the alt-right material you can find on the Internet. This is a group of people who come together, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and really try and put their values to work and they could have given up. So I feel like the kind of take away of this is that democracy does live in darkness. It also lives through it. Like we’re going to make it through if we can just keep investing in people willing to do the work.
[00:18:09] SV: Well, Emily Van Duyn, thank you so much for joining us on Democracy in Danger.
[00:18:14] EVD: Thank you so much for having me.
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[00:18:26] WH: Emily Van Duyn is an assistant professor of communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s the author of the new book Democracy Lives in Darkness.
[00:18:36] SV: Democracy in Danger is part of the Democracy Group Podcast Network. Visit democracygroup.org to find all our sister shows. We’ll be right back after this message from our friends.
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[00:19:37] WH: Siva. At the end of last year, I had a casual conversation with my graduate seminar of about seven or eight students. They were heading home for, you know, family reunions. And we were talking about politics and other topics. And every single one of them said they can’t talk about politics at home. So this is a group of University of Virginia students. They’re well-educated. They come from families that are quite diverse, but clearly share the idea that education is a good thing. They still felt they couldn’t really speak openly and publicly with their closest family members about politics. So I guess what I’m wondering is has Emily Van Duyn put her thumb on really what is the central crisis of our time, which is that democracy requires people to talk and to argue. And if we can’t do that, we really don’t have a democracy.
[00:20:24] SV: So, look, it doesn’t break my heart that students who are exploring their political identities at different stages of life are reticent to engage in uncomfortable conversations with people around them or in their lives. You know, politics can be fraught and nasty, especially at the personal level. But let’s remember what Emily Van Duyn is describing that is not part of the Thanksgiving table problem. She’s describing the potential of violence, the exercise of power. She’s describing a situation where women in rural Texas are concerned for the peace and safety of their home, right. They are, in some cases, afraid of the men in their house. In many cases, they’re afraid of people in their community exacting threats, exacting actual violence. So let’s keep power in mind as we discuss who gets chilled and why. Chilling effects are a fascinating subject. I’ve been thinking a lot about them. We, you know, we hear about this alleged cancel culture problem in the world. And it’s one that I am pretty convinced is a moral panic. But it often invokes the notion of a chilling effect. And a chilling effect, unfortunately, is not something one can document because it’s the absence of something or it’s the assumed absence of something, an expression. And let’s also remember, not all expression in all contexts is helpful or beneficial or healthy.
[00:22:08] WH: One of the things that we’ve talked about on this show a lot is the organization of the alt-right, done underground and in secrecy — at least it had been really up until 2016. We’ve seen all kinds of evidence from scholars, like Kathleen Belew and others, who’ve come on our program talking about the way over the past 30 years, militia groups and white power groups and nationalist groups and Christian ethno-radicals have been quietly and, in many cases, secretly organizing. But the reason that they’ve kept a lot of that organization secret is not necessarily out of fear of retribution, but it’s because they have a sense that their views are either so sharply out of the mainstream or are in fact illegal, that they’ve had to keep their organizing secret. So while I do think there is an equivalence here about this sense on both the left and the right that somehow their politics are going to make them vulnerable, we have to recognize that there’s something really quite different about the group that Emily Van Duyn’s writing about and a group of, you know, white nationalists in upstate New York that are secretly stockpiling weapons. These are not the same thing.
[00:23:14] SV: So I wish the alt-right would be more secret, more quiet, more demure. Instead, they rampaged through our town in 2017. They invaded our capital in 2021. They have opened fire on synagogues and on Walmarts and continue to make themselves quite publicly known, and their opinions quite well articulated. And we clearly are living in a situation where if you have a gun, you do not fear speaking. If you don’t have a gun, it’s a little bit different.
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[00:23:56] WH: That’s all we have this week. We’ll be back soon with legal scholar Christopher Sprigman. He’ll walk us through all the ways that the federal court system threatens the very democracy it was intended to protect.
[00:24:08] Christopher Sprigman: Brutus, one of the greatest anti-federalists, basically said, you know, “The Court’s not responsible to anyone. And men in that position soon feel that they’re not responsible to heaven itself.” You know, he said, “They will mold the government into any shape they please.”
[00:24:20] SV: In the meantime, stay in touch. Share your thoughts with us on Twitter. Our handle is @DinDpodcast. That’s D-I-N-D podcast. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. And please drop us some stars — five if you can afford it.
[00:24:39] WH: And if you can’t get enough of the show, visit our webpage, dindanger.org. Learn more about our guests and find more background material on every episode.
[00:24:48] SV: Democracy in Danger is produced by Robert Armengol with help from Rebecca Barry. Elie Bashkow is our engineer. Our interns are Eva Kretsinger-Walters, Ellis Nolan and Bea Webster.
[00:25:01] WH: Support comes from the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences. The show is a project of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. We’re distributed by the Virginia Audio Collective of WTJU Radio in Charlottesville.
[00:25:15] I’m Will Hitchcock.
[00:25:15] SV: And I’m Siva Vaidhyanathan. Until next time!
