Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

He’s tweeted that “the right to offend is the most precious right. Without it, free speech is meaningless.”33 He’s lamented the way millennials exact “professional destruction” as the price for “emotional upset.”34 But then the New York Times got a bedbug infestation, and George Washington University professor Dave Karpf sent a little-noticed tweet joking that “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”35 Furious, the columnist sent an angry email to Karpf, cc’ing his provost, and sent a separate email to the director of GWU’s School of Media and Public Affairs.36 It was the definition of trying to exact professional destruction as vengeance for emotional upset.

The right to offend may be precious, but the endless experience of offense is crushing.

But when he tried to act on his experience of being bullied, he proved the bully. Thus are the disorientations of the age.

Polarization isn’t something that happened to American politics. It’s something that’s happening to American politics. And it’s getting worse.

The key factor now, Prior argued, was not access to political information, but interest in political information.

“For decades the networks’ scheduling ruled out situations in which viewers had to choose between entertainment and news,”

The digital revolution offered access to unimaginably vast vistas of information, but just as important, it offered access to unimaginably more choice.

But what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, the more mistaken they were about the other party

This is a damning result: the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences;

don’t say this to dismiss my younger self or criticize the process of identity formation. I think my high school self was right about pot legalization. I think developing an activist identity was healthy. The point is simply that this process is far easier in the age of the internet than it was before.

As Peretti observed, interests become identities as they socialize you into a community.

Many of us who wrote about politics on the internet before the rise of social media lament the feeling that something has been lost, that a space that once felt fresh and generative now feels toxic and narrow.

it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.8

Nowadays, I think a lot of it is closer to “identity journalism”—the effect of the work, given the social channels through which it’s consumed, is to reinforce an identity. But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion.

Reading the other side doesn’t change our minds, it deepens our certainty

guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types. But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view.”

You can call this the echo chamber theory of polarization: we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.

being told you’re wrong by someone you already don’t like triggers annoyance, not reflection.

In both cases, exposure to the other side’s attacks is likely to trigger rebuttal, not reflection—identity-protective cognition, remember?

You don’t need a big audience when you have the right audience.

In practice, newsworthiness is some combination of important, new, outrageous, conflict-oriented, secret, or interesting.

What was striking, walking into this debate without the (dis)advantage of being present for its initial escalation, was how angry everyone was over something that objectively didn’t matter at all.

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.

How did a candidate as abnormal as Trump win the Republican primary and end up with such a normal share of the general election vote? Weak parties and strong partisanship is the answer.

Subsequent candidates would, like Dean, find that you could raise tremendous amounts of money and excite huge crowds of people by saying the things that millions of Americans wanted said, even if the parties didn’t want their leading figures saying them.

Individual donors want to fall in love or express their hate. They’re comfortable supporting candidates who offer less chance of victory but more affirmation of identity.

Institutional donors want government to work, it’s true—but they want it to work in their favor. If individual donors give money as a form of identity expression, institutional donors give money as a form of investment. Individual donors are polarizing. Institutional donors are corrupting. American politics, thus, is responsive to two types of people: the polarized and the rich.

These predictions were based on an old understanding of politics,

This is the key to the weak parties/strong partisanship dichotomy: threat is as powerful a political motivator as love.

But America’s political system posed a puzzle for Linz. As an outside observer, he was free from the quasi-religious reverence we afford our founding documents. He knew that the American political system had failed wherever else it had been tried.

That’s basically American politics right now. Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad.

The age of cooperation is over. The disagreements run too deep, the debates are too nationalized, the coalitions are too different, the political identities are too powerful.

If the US government failed to pass a debt ceiling increase and thus stopped paying its debts, the markets would have to reevaluate the most core piece of financial information of them all. The result would be a global financial crisis, sparked by congressional infighting.

“This is dangerous,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat known for his bipartisan bent, told me. “We are a democratic republic. If we can’t make decisions because of structural issues in our political system, or because of a habit of mind that doesn’t allow us to believe other people deserve to be on the playing field, we cannot govern ourselves. That is an existential threat to the next generation of Americans.”

The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression. We don’t argue over the problems we don’t discuss. But we don’t solve them, either.

And if we can’t reverse polarization, as I suspect, then the path forward is clear: we need to reform the political system so it can function amid polarization.

There are three categories of reform I think particularly worth exploring: bombproofing, democratizing, and balancing.

A system where it’s this hard to figure out why something didn’t happen isn’t a system where voters can act as an effective check on legislators. In an age where bipartisanship is irrational, making it impossible for partisan majorities to govern well simply ensures we’ll be governed poorly.

The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls.

the relevant factor I’m urging you to pay attention to is identity. What identity is that article invoking? What identity is making you defensive?

There is, in any age, a place for leadership, and danger beckons when leaders fail.