BROOKE GLADSTONE: If Mike Cernovich’s trolling tactics, name calling and ruthless attention seeking make him seem like a schoolyard bully, well, that's because he is, it’s just a bigger schoolyard, which seems to be what our politics and much of our media have become. So we end the hour with a conversation about what we know about bullies, with Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. She says that, speaking broadly, there are two kinds of bullies.
EMILY BAZELON: One type of bully is someone who’s in a position of having more clout than the person who they’re attacking. The second type is actually called a bully-victim, like as if there was a hyphen in between.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm.
EMILY BAZELON: These are people who are really struggling socially, and so their social struggle can take the form of lashing out at other people or they can end up bearing the brunt of other kids’ attacks because they are just not thriving in the environment that they’re in. One bully victim is Snape in the Harry Potter series, very domineering and abuses his power, but we also know that his back story is that Harry's father bullied him.
[CLIP]:
SNAPE: …it may have escaped your notice, but life isn't fair. Your blessed father knew that, in fact, he frequently saw to it!
HARRY: My father was a great man!
SNAPE: Your father was a swine.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So if Snape is an example of the second kind, the first kind, the schoolyard bully, we have myriad examples of that. This is ultimately where many of us take our idea of bullies. I’m thinking of the first Back to the Future film. George McFly, the nerdy kid, sees the bully, called Biff, forcing himself onto the girl he loves in a car.
[CLIP]:
LORRAINE: George, help me, please! [CRYING]
BIFF: Just turn around, McFly, and walk away.
GEORGE: No Biff, you leave her alone!
EMILY BAZELON: And he punches Biff.
[SOUND OF FIGHT/END CLIP]
And Biff topples. And that’s our beloved image of how you stop a bully. The problem is that in real life it almost never works that way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what happens in real life? What works, instead, if anything?
EMILY BAZELON: In real life, what works is the community coming together, in some way making it clear that his or her behavior is not okay and needs to change. You know, we spend a lot of time talking about what victims should do about bullies but that suggests that victims are responsible for stopping the bullying behavior, and it takes the rest of us off the hook. But when the rest of us try to act, we are much more successful usually when we do that collectively.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nowadays, America has a bullying problem. You would agree, right?
EMILY BAZELON: I would agree. I think, in particular from President Trump, that is not a model for kids growing up, and that is sending a message that being overly aggressive, mocking other people, that that’s all a route to power. And I should say this is not just Trump. I mean, you can also see it as a product of reality television, where people's cruelty toward each other is celebrated and it's how you make money.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And would you say the culture of an organization is set in the president's office?
EMILY BAZELON: Yes, I think it’s true about the leadership of any organization, that when you see the people in charge participating in or condoning in any form of bad behavior, it makes it seem more accessible.
When I was doing a lot of research in schools, if adults were snapping at each other or yelling at kids, I found that it was much more likely that I would hear the kids being mean to each other.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So back to the White House, you say that part of the reason we haven't been able to properly contain or understand this particular bully is that we aren’t really looking to [LAUGHING] reality for guidance. We’re still looking to the movies for that single hero moment, Republicans to stand up to him.
EMILY BAZELON: The Republicans in Congress have a lot of power, if they want to use it. What we’ve seen, however, is they’ve come forward one by one to challenge Trump, people like John McCain or Jeff Flake or Bob Corker. One by one, President Trump is able to dispatch them. If they got together and actually made him pay a price in terms of legislation or hearings or some other real consequence and they soberly held a press conference where they all stood in an array, that is the most effective and sort of fair way to try and stop a bully because then it's on everyone.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We, the American people, have made him powerful, so what's that say about our culture, that it was so ripe for Trump’s rise?
EMILY BAZELON: We didn’t appreciate how many [LAUGHS] of our crucial democratic traditions are based on social norms, instead of laws. And I think one of Trump’s fail safes is to say, well, what I did wasn’t against the law, and that makes it seem as if unless something is illegal we shouldn't be troubled by it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how is it being reflected? If we are starting to see the effect of having a bully in the White House, you know, is there enough data or any kind of anecdotal suggestion that it's having an impact in schools?
EMILY BAZELON: It’s going to be hard to isolate Trump’s bullying behavior as a cause of a kind of broader social phenomenon.
Another piece of research from schools that I always find heartening is that when you poll kids about bullying. they will tell you that they don't like it. And when you tell kids that, the polling results, that can help reduce bullying in a school.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm!
EMILY BAZELON: In the moment, it's hard to challenge the kid who’s acting like a bully. They seem powerful. And it's only upon reflection, when we realize that the group isn't necessarily onboard, that kids feel a sense of, wait a second, maybe next time I'll do something to try to help another kid out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There’s no way that grownups could do that in the Capital, is there?
EMILY BAZELON: Well, I don’t know, why not?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They’re not immature enough to do that.
EMILY BAZELON: They’re not immature enough? [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They are completely calcified. [LAUGHING]
EMILY BAZELON: Right. And there are political calculations they’re making about their own base that are making them reluctant. But that’s not a matter of being capable, it’s a matter of deciding that you don't choose.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
Emily, thank you so much.
EMILY BAZELON: Thanks so much for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.
BOB GARFIELD: That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova—Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Monique Laborde, Jon Hanrahan and Sarah Chadwick Gibson. And our show was edited -- by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Sam Bair and Terence Bernardo.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I’m Bob Garfield.
* [FUNDING CREDITS] *
