Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds.

We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.

I have listened to rational people give me thoughtful reasons for doing ridiculous things,

In stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well—on

On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making.

But I’ve come to believe the master story—the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants—is the logic of polarization.

But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. We are left searching in vain for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.II7

we have countless identities, some of them in active conflict with each other, others lying dormant until activated by threat or fortune.

“It would be a great tragedy if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line,” he said. The strength of the American political system is “we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”5

Politics, in this telling, was meant to calm our divisions, not represent them.

“our national unity would be weakened if the theoretical differences were sharpened.”

It used to be common for voters to split their tickets: perhaps you preferred Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president but Republican George Romney for governor. And if you were a ticket-splitter, and most of the people you knew were ticket-splitters, it was hard to identify too deeply with either party; after all, you occasionally voted for both.

you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan.

That’s a story, as so many are in American life, that revolves around race.

Demythologizing our past is necessary if we are to clearly understand our present.

Today, vegans are dismissed as extremists. I hope that in the future, the suffering that we impose on animals through industrial-scale factory farming is considered the shocking position.

In less than twenty-five years, the percentage of voters who lived in a district where almost everyone thought like them politically went from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5.

While it’s true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, research shows that the dominant considerations when people are choosing a place to move are housing prices, school quality, crime rates, and similar quality-of-life questions.

The more sorted we are in our differences, the more different we grow in our preferences.

There’s a reason these divides are all stacking on top of one another. They don’t merely track differences in our politics. They track differences in our psychologies.

Psychologists speak of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

A similar argument, using slightly different data, can be found in political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide: Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is. Fear is perhaps our most primal instinct, after all, so it’s only logical that people’s level of fearfulness informs their outlook on life.32

In Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences,

Society needs lots of different kinds of people, with lots of different kinds of psychologies, to thrive.

Evolutionarily, the power is in the mix of outlooks, not in any one outlook—that’s why this psychological diversity has survived. What is changing is not our psychologies. What is changing is how closely our psychologies map onto our politics and onto a host of other life choices.

These findings led the researchers to an interesting conclusion: “In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”37

“Elections accentuate the team mentality of party identifiers, pushing them repeatedly to make ‘us-them’ comparisons between Democrats and Republicans that draw attention to what will be lost—status—if the election is not won,” write Miller and Conover. “This results in both rivalry and anger.”

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. The big picture that emerges from this paper is that the people actually driving elections—the people knocking on doors, working for campaigns, and turning out to vote—are driven more by group rivalry than by tax policy.

Nothing brings a group together like a common enemy.

Obama’s point here is that our political identities are not our only identities. And our other identities—Little League coach, PTA member, parent—are a lot less polarized than our political identities.

Rather than a shared loved of football pulling our political identities toward compromise, our political identities polarized our love of football.

In 2002, psychologists Marilynn Brewer and Sonia Roccas showed that people with a lot of crosscutting identities tended to be more tolerant of outsiders than people with highly aligned identities.

feeling closer to the other side in identity does more to calm dislike than feeling closer to the other side on policy.

If he was right, then party affiliation wasn’t simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them.

Iyengar’s hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages.

“The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.”28

After all, isn’t changing our minds in response to new information and arguments what we’re supposed to do?

Put more simply: reasoning is something we often do in groups, in order to serve group ends. This is not a wrinkle of human irrationality, but rather a rational response to the complexity and danger of the world around us. Collectively, a group can know more and reason better than an individual, and thus human beings with the social and intellectual skills to pool knowledge had a survival advantage over those who didn’t. We are their descendants. Once you understand that, the ease with which individuals, even informed individuals, flip their positions to fit the group’s needs makes a lot more sense.

Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth—purposes

the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.II18

More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us—or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.

It turned out that on highly politicized issues, people’s actual definition of “expert” is “a credentialed person who agrees with me.”

“In fact, the more information the voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”

Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process.

The reality, he concludes, is that “the cost to her of making a mistake on the science is zero,” but “the cost of being out of synch with her peers potentially catastrophic,” making it “individually rational” to put group dynamics first when thinking about issues like climate change.

arbitration. But the Supreme Court itself is just nine robed judges—and, increasingly, nine robed judges who are chosen not just for their brilliance but for their ideological reliability

There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified.

The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it,

There’s a quote I occasionally see ricochet around social media. “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”III26 There’s truth to this line, but it cuts both ways. To the extent that it’s true that a loss of privilege feels like oppression, that feeling needs to be taken seriously, both because it’s real, and because, left to fester, it can be weaponized by demagogues and reactionaries.

and American politics is often a chorus of contradictory voices persuasively claiming victimhood at the same time.