Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

This bizarre structure worked during much of American history because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority. Lee quotes Theodore Lowi’s 1963 analysis, “Towards Functionalism in Political Science,” where he says that the party system that best fits America’s weird political structure “is not a competitive two-party system but a system in which the second party is very weak: that is, a ‘modified one-party system.’ ” But we’ve not had that system for almost forty years now, and there’s no obvious way to return to it even if we wanted to. 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. So what’s happening now is the norms and understandings that made the informal system work are collapsing, and the underlying, dysfunctional structure is coming clear, with disastrous consequences for day-to-day governance.