Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home.

Or, to go back to the main story of this chapter, in the era when Washington was least polarized, political consensus rested on a foundation of racial bigotry that most would find abhorrent today. The compromises Congress made to preserve the peace included voting down anti-lynching laws and agreeing to lock most African Americans out of Social Security. I would call that political system far more ideologically extreme than the one we have today, even as it was less polarized.

From this, Tajfel took a lesson. Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations.

Tajfel theorized that the instinct to view our own with favor and outsiders with hostility is so deeply learned that it operates independent of any reason to treat social relations as a competition. We do not need to hate or fear members of an out-group to turn on them. We do not need to have anything material to gain by turning on them. Once we have classified them as, well, “them,” that is enough—we will find ourselves inclined to treat them skeptically, even hostilely, because that is what we are used to doing with anyone we see as a “them.” It’s an automatic response, like the gooseflesh that rises on your arm in reaction to the cold.

Reflect on that for a second: they preferred to give their group less so long as it meant the gap between what they got and what the out-group got was bigger.

How we feel matters much more than what we think, and in elections, the feelings that matter most are often our feelings about the other side. Negative partisanship rears its head again.

This is what has changed. Our political identities have become political mega-identities. The merging of the identities means when you activate one you often activate all, and each time they’re activated, they strengthen.

You’re a ’90s kid and I’m a ’90s kid, so let’s talk about how the ’90s were the best decade for music.

80s and 90s yes

Over and again, Mason finds that identity is far more powerful than issue positions in driving polarization.

People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.

In general, economic anxiety did not predict which candidate people voted for, and what relationship did exist was no stronger in 2016 than in 2012.

The economy since Trump took office has mostly shown the same trends from the final years of Obama—job growth, in fact, has been slightly slower—but his coalition’s confidence continued to soar, even as they lived under much the same economy that so depressed them in 2016. Indeed, new data collected by Tesler shows that the most racially resentful are now the most economically optimistic.

The money really started rolling in if you could dominate a market, because then you could set the rates advertisers paid. But you couldn’t dominate a market if you were explicitly serving one political persuasion and offending the other. Thus, newspapers, and other forms of news media, began building an ethic of nonpartisanship, one that both protected their businesses and served important editorial goals.

What makes people interested in political news? It’s that they are rooting for a side, for a set of outcomes.

To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage. You can arouse that passion through inspiration, as Obama did, or through conflict, as Trump did. What you can’t do is be boring.

He also finds that when asked to name the politician they hate most, only 15 percent name someone in their own state.

I live in Louisiana so its easy. We have detestable politicians

have to like Clinton to vote for her; everything Trump did and said was evidence that the GOP had lost its mind and had to be kept from power at all costs. Much of Clinton’s campaign proceeded in that frame: it was less about why she should be president than why he shouldn’t be. But Clinton herself served that same purpose for conservatives. She is one of the most polarizing political figures of the modern era.

Bc of b.s. news coverage that never corrected the lies

America was lucky, if that’s the right word, that Trump proved himself, once in office, distractible, lazy, and uninterested in following through on his most authoritarian rhetoric. He’s done plenty of damage, but he’s not emerged as a dictator in control of American political institutions, as many liberals feared in the direct aftermath of the election.

And then....

That changed in 2011, when the newly elected Tea Party class of Republicans refused to increase the debt ceiling in order to increase their leverage to force spending cuts (a bit of anti-deficit dogmatism that tellingly evaporated the moment a Republican won the White House).

Ornstein saw him as the logical next step for a party that was transforming itself, its institutions, and its leadership into vessels of revanchist rage.

But for most conservatives, whether they were prominent pundits or everyday voters, there proved to be no contradiction between conservatism and Trumpism. Quite the opposite, actually. According to a September 2019 Gallup poll, 75 percent of self-identified conservatives and 91 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing.7 This is because conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology. It’s a group identity.