Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”29 Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.”

IQ was the single largest predictor of how many arguments people listed, but it correlated only to how many supporting arguments they listed. “People invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly,” the researchers concluded.

“If you were ever tempted to think that right-wing judges weren’t activist—that they were only ‘enforcing the Constitution’ or ‘reading the statute’—this will persuade you to knock it off,” wrote law professor Nicholas Bagley.

The government predicts that in 2030, immigration will overtake new births as the dominant driver of population growth. About fifteen years after that, America will phase into majority-minority status—for the first time in the nation’s history, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the population.

Meanwhile, America’s foreign-born population is projected to rise from 14 percent of the population today to 17 percent in 2060, more than 2 percentage points above the record set in 1890. The rise has been staggering in its speed: as recently as the 1970s, America’s foreign-born population was under 5 percent.

In 2018, for the first time, Americans claiming “no religion” edged out Catholics and evangelicals to be the most popular response to the General Social Survey’s question on religion.

projects the religiously unaffiliated will edge out all Protestants in 2051—“a thought that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago,” he writes.9 These demographic

Power, no less than oppression, is intersectional. Viewed through that lens, however, the tipping point has already happened. When Obama took office, 54 percent of the country was white and Christian. By the 2016 election, that had fallen to 43 percent.

“An identity is questioned only when it is menaced,” wrote James Baldwin, “as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.”11

Among participants who lived in the western United States, those who read that whites had ceded majority status were more than 13 points likelier to subsequently say they favored the Republican Party.

What Tesler proves is that in the Obama era, attitudes on race began shaping attitudes on virtually all political questions.

“According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,” writes Tesler.15

Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the front of American politics through rhetoric or action. Rather, Obama himself was a symbol of a browning America,

In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote—a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. A few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t elect a president; by 2012, it could.

When a political tribe is so overwhelmingly dominant, it can persecute with impunity, but it can also be more generous. It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks, and other minorities—in part because it seemed like the right thing to do. Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups

political power runs a decade behind demographics, with older, whiter, more Christian voters turning out at higher rates. “The ballot box acts like a time machine,”

Robert Jones told me, “taking us back 10 years in race and religion. We reached the tipping point of white Christians being a minority of the population during Obama, but our calculations are it’ll be 2024 before we see that at the ballot box.”

But cultural power runs a decade or more ahead of demography, with brands and television networks chasing younger, more urban, more diverse consumers.

Brands want to be where the culture is going, not where it’s been. But most people live in the culture rather than profiting from it, and they experience the changing mores reflected in ads and movie casts as a shift in power that either excites or unnerves them. The result is that the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political power but feels increasingly dismissed and offended culturally.

“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,” Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”19

2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 57 percent of whites agreed that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”23 A 2017 GenForward poll of white millennials found 48 percent agreed with a similar statement, showing that the sentiment isn’t confined or even concentrated among older whites.

“When considering whether white Americans feel a sense of anxiety about the status of their racial group, or whether whites possess a sense of racial identity that has political consequences, for the past fifty years, the answer generally has been ‘no,’ ” she writes. “For the most part, scholars have argued that racial solidarity among whites has been invisible and politically inconsequential. Whites, by nature of their dominant status and numerical majority, have largely been able to take their race for granted.”25 Jardina shows that this was wrong. White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges—periods like this one. Demographic change, the election of the first black president, and the downstream cultural and political consequences of both have “led a sizeable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered. As a result, this racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world.” There is a nuance to Jardina’s research worth noting. A sense of racial identity can be based on in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. Both can be, and often are, present, but Jardina repeatedly finds that much of the strengthening of white political identity is a defense of white political privilege without an attendant rise in racist attitudes. To some, this will sound like a distinction without a difference, but it’s meani...

They found that priming white college students to think about the concept of white privilege led them to express more racial resentment in subsequent surveys.

The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it, to tell them they don’t deserve what they have, to make them consider that it might be taken away. The experience of losing status—and being told your loss of status is part of society’s march to justice—is itself radicalizing.

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. In her book Talking to Strangers, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen writes that “the hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up ...

American politics is often a chorus of contradictory voices persuasively claiming victimhood at the same time. Most of us are winners in some ways and losers in others, and we feel the losses more acutely than the victories.

racial resentment activated economic anxiety, rather than the other way around:

Before Obama’s presidency, how Americans felt about black people did not much affect their perceptions of the economy. After Obama, this changed. In December 2007, racial resentment—which captures whether Americans think deficiencies in black culture are the main reason for racial inequality—was not related to whites’ perceptions of whether the economy was getting better or worse, after accounting for partisanship and ideology. But when these exact same people were re-interviewed in July 2012, racial resentment was a powerful predictor of economic perceptions: the greater someone’s level of racial resentment, the worse they believed the economy was doing.27

“Far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp in a careful review of the literature. “The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim.”28

“Anyone who wants to explain what’s happening in the West needs to answer two simple questions,” writes the political scientist Eric Kaufmann in his book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. “First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment.”29

These are proxy wars for bigger, more fundamental concerns over the direction of the culture. The theory is that as go elite college campuses, so goes the nation. This is particularly true for those who make a portion of their income giving speeches on college campuses.

What has changed is not the expectation that colleges define norms for civility, but rather the definition of civility.

There are behaviors on college campuses in general, and at Kenyon in particular, that may have passed a standard for civility 50 years ago—when the institution was all-male and almost all-white—that would not be considered civil today.32

It is easy to read that as pure progress, but for those who dominated the discourse befor...

“I call it the democratization of discomfort,” says Richeson. “There were whole swaths of people uncomfortable all of the time. Now we’re democratizing it. Now more people across different races and religions feel uncomfortable.”

But on all sides, the debate over PC culture is really about the core questions of not just politics but life: Whose grievances get heard? Who gets to be referred to by the names and labels and pronouns they choose? Who grants respectability, and who takes it away? Put more simply, in a changing America, who holds power?

In 1994, 39 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans said discrimination was the main reason “black people can’t get ahead these days.” By 2017, 64 percent of Democrats believed that, but only 14 percent of Republicans. Much of this trend has been driven by white Democrats. “In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter,”

The Democratic Party will not be able to win elections without an excited, diverse coalition. The Republican Party will not be able to win elections without an enthused white base.

visible. It wasn’t called identity politics when every cabinet member of every administration was a white male. It’s only identity politics when there’s pressure to diversify appointments. And yet that process doesn’t reflect a strengthening of a particular identity group’s hold on politics but a weakening of it.

Interlude What I’ve tried to do in the first half of this book is build a model of what’s driven American politics into its current place of bitter polarization. Let’s take a moment to put it all together. The human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference. It takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups. The deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we become to make sure our group wins. Making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our group’s advantage over other groups. The parties used to be scrambled, both ideologically and demographically, in ways that curbed their power as identities and lowered the partisan stakes of politics. But these ideologically mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America’s peculiar, and often abhorrent, racial politics. The success of the civil rights movement, and its alliance with the national Democratic Party, broke that equilibrium, destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, and triggered an era of party sorting. That sorting has been ideological. Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn’t true in, say, 1955. The rise in partisanship is, in part, a rational response to the rise in party difference—if the two sides hated and feared each ...

The rise of online news gave Americans access to more information—vastly more information, orders of magnitude more information—than they had ever had before. And yet surveys showed we weren’t, on average, any more politically informed. Nor were we any more involved: voter participation didn’t show a boost from the democratization of political information. Why?

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,” Prior wrote in his paper “News vs. Entertainment.” “Largely unexposed to entertainment competition, news had its place in the early evening and again before the late-night shows. Today, as both entertainment and news are available around the clock on numerous cable channels and web sites, people’s content preferences determine more of what those with cable or Internet access watch, read, and hear.”1

Politics had once been bundled alongside everything else, and even the uninterested were pushed to consume political news.

And that explosion of choice widened that interested-uninterested divide. Greater choices lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less.

schooling. “In a high-choice environment, people’s content preferences become better predictors of political learning than even their level of education,” Prior wrote.

“News emerges not from individuals seeking to improve the functioning of democracy but from readers seeking diversion, reporters forging careers, and owners searching for profits.”2

In an age of choice, political journalism is a business that serves people interested in political news and that tries to create more people interested in political news. That wasn’t the business model when political news was just one part of a monopolistic bundle; when we were attached to the one newspaper in the city or to the three networks given access to public airwaves, the business model was about appealing to as wide an audience as possible, but it wasn’t necessarily about serving an audience intensely interested in politics.

In 1870, 54 percent of metropolitan dailies were affiliated with the Republican Party, 33 percent were Democratic, and 13 percent claimed independence from party.3 Hamilton argues that the transition to a news industry that prized independence from party and ideology was driven by technological advances that changed the business model of newspapers. “The development of presses with runs of 25,000 sheets or more per hour meant a single newspaper could supply a significant portion of a city’s readers,” he writes. Alongside a drop in the price of paper, newspapers became cheaper, which meant their potential audience became larger, which meant the prices advertisers would pay to reach that audience multiplied. 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.

If the strategy of the monopolistic business model was to be enough things to all people, the strategy of the digital business model is to be the most appealing thing to some people. So the question becomes: What makes people interested in political news? It’s that they are rooting for a side, for a set of outcomes.