Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

elections feel like they decide whether our country belongs to us and whether we belong in it.

the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

The rise of BuzzFeed made this subtext into text. Its cofounder and CEO, Jonah Peretti, helped launch the Huffington Post (now HuffPost), and he built BuzzFeed on the side as a skunk works for experimenting with how viral content spread online. The answer soon became clear: identity was the slingshot.

BuzzFeed was successful as a laboratory for discovering the principles and drivers of social sharing, and the kind of content it created reflected the discoveries it made. “A classic early BuzzFeed post, and later video, was ‘13 Struggles All Left Handers Know to Be True,’ ”

The stories that thrive when your business model is a local monopoly that needs a news product that’s appealing to every kind of person who might shop at a department store is different from the stories that thrive when your business model is people who strongly agree with your stories sharing them with their friends.

But the other perspective takes identities as living, malleable things. They can be activated or left dormant, strengthened or weakened, created or left in the void. In this telling, all this identity-oriented content will deepen the identities it repeatedly triggers, confirms, or threatens. It will turn interests or opinions into identities.

The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim. This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, 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 Few realized, early on, that the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity, and the simplest way to do that, particularly in politics, was

Facebook and Twitter serve us up the news they’ve learned we like, which means the angriest voices we already agree with;

“We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative posttreatment,” write the authors. “Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant.”

The difference between the Democratic and Republican responses is interesting and merits more study. But the key finding is that neither group responded to exposure to the other side by moderating its own views. In both cases, hearing contrary opinions drove partisans not just to a deeper certainty in the rightness of their cause, but more polarized policy positions—that is to say, Republicans became more conservative rather than more liberal, and Democrats, if anything happened at all, became more liberal rather than more conservative.

There is evidence that structuring positive, collaborative interactions can promote understanding. But very little in either political media or social media is designed for positive interactions with the other side. Most political media isn’t even designed for persuasion. Some is—Ross Douthat’s column at the New York Times is a conservative trying to persuade a liberal audience, for instance—but,

Many of us, myself included, have watched an older family member retire and swing sharply right as Fox News comes to fill their days. And a number of studies show that Fox News increased Republican vote share as it rolled out across the country, suggesting a genuine persuasive effect compared to the pre–Fox News equilibrium.13 But the reality is these networks command modest audiences. The key to their influence is that they have the right audiences.

Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power—and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive. The rest of the country then has to choose from more polarized options, and that in turn polarizes them—remember, the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.

Here’s the dilemma: to decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news. It makes journalists actors rather than observers. It annihilates our fundamental conception of ourselves. And yet it’s the most important decision we make.

In theory, newsworthiness means something roughly like “important.” The most newsworthy story is the most important story. But if that were true, front pages and cable news shows would look very different from how they do now: more malaria, fewer celebrities (including political celebrities). In practice, newsworthiness is some combination of important, new, outrageous, conflict-oriented, secret, or interesting.

The point is to obscure the fact that the decisions being made are decisions at all. It’s best if newsworthiness feels like a quality external to journalistic judgment, as if it were a weight attached to each story and measurable with proper instrumentation.

To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage.

For all the talk of Trump’s Twitter feed, the demographics of his voters are the precise inverse of the demographics of Twitter users. Twitter is used by the young; Trump won atop the votes of the old. His Twitter feed matters because it sets the agenda for every political news outlet in the country.

‘Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.’ ” Dowd realized, looking at his chart, that presidential campaigns were conceptualizing elections all wrong. They had imagined the bulk of the electorate as open to persuasion and had been “putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation.” In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for—indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you.

If Bush’s 2000 message was that he was a Republican Democrats could feel good about, his 2004 message was he was a Republican Republicans could feel great about. It worked.

“presidential campaign strategies have shifted in recent years reflecting a stronger emphasis on base mobilization compared to persuading independent, undecided or swing voters.”

It’s easy to be in the middle of a muddle; it’s harder to be in the middle of a chasm. But a more polarized electorate changes the strategies candidates use to get elected. Those more polarized strategies further polarize the electorate. And then the cycle continues.

But in offering policies, drawing contrasts, and choosing candidates meant to mobilize a polarized electorate, both parties are further polarizing that electorate. Clearer choices mean fewer undecided voters to persuade, which further reinforces the incentives to focus on base mobilization. Here, as elsewhere, polarization begets polarization; it’s a flywheel, not a switch.

“The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong,” wrote Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari.4 She’s right, and it’s one of the most important insights for understanding the rise of Trump, the success of more ideologically extreme candidates, and the American political system’s deepening vulnerability to charismatic demagogues. At the beginning of the book, I posed a question: 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.

the measure of a candidate isn’t whether he or she can win over party bosses but whether he or she can win over the intense minority of party supporters who turn out to vote in primaries (in 2016, for instance, less than 30 percent of eligible voters participated in primaries—and that was unusually high). This has made parties weaker, partisans stronger, and the American political system more vulnerable to demagogues.

We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters.

But the truth is that even if party officials had the power to act as a check on their base’s will, they no longer had the popular legitimacy to use it: the resulting backlash would split the party in two. Parties aren’t weak because the rules have changed. The rules have changed because parties are weak.

money, how the trend toward national networks of highly ideological small donors is changing the way campaigns are funded and the way candidates compete for those funds.

the more powerful the parties were, the less polarization the state legislatures showed.

“The increase in polarization was nearly three times as large in the 28 chambers that limited party contributions as it was in the 8 chambers that allowed for unlimited contributions,” they write.11

But if you have to raise the money yourself, your incentives change. Most people, and most groups, don’t give money to politicians. Those who do give are, predictably, more polarized, more partisan, or they want something. You motivate them through inspiration, outrage, or transaction. Put differently, you appeal to them through ideology, identity, or corruption. La Raja and Schaffner cut this divide into “pragmatists” and “purists.” Politics, they argue, is a war between pragmatists “concerned primarily with staying in power” and “policy-demanding” purists, who care above all about getting their agenda passed. Defunding parties empowers the purists over the pragmatists. I think this typology misses the powerful role of political identity and negative partisanship. Here, as elsewhere, political conflict isn’t just about policy, and it’s not just about power. It’s about group conflict. That is different, to be clear, from it being about winning.

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. There is real value here. But it’s a channel through which racist lies and xenophobic demagoguery can travel as easily as overdue truths.

“the total number of small contributions rose from 55,000 in 2000 to more than 566,000 in 2016,” a more than tenfold increase.14 As it’s become easier to fund campaigns through individual contributions, more candidates have done it. But that’s also changed the kinds of candidates who prosper in primaries.

the share of itemized political giving—that is to say, contributions over $200, which have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission—that goes to in-state political candidates has fallen from two-thirds in 1990 to one-third in 2012.

Hopkins finds, tellingly, that the share of Americans who can name their governor has been declining, even as the share that can name the vice president has held steady. He also finds that when asked to name the politician they hate most, only 15 percent name someone in their own state.

It is worth pausing on this point a moment, because it illuminates one of the fundamental debates in politics and a thread of this book. Under materialist theories of political engagement, where people participate because they’re trying to maximize their share of the resources politicians control, this engagement pattern doesn’t make sense. State and local political decisions matter more for most people’s daily lives than the debates that drive national politics. People have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the president. People should be most engaged in the tangible stakes of the politics nearest to their experience, not the more abstract collisions of the national scene. But under an identity model of political engagement, where people participate to express who they are, who they support, and who they loathe, it makes perfect sense.

But as we give more to national candidates and less to local candidates, that creates incentives for candidates to nationalize themselves, focusing on the polarizing issues that energize donors in every zip code rather than the local issues that specifically matter in their states and districts.

Where the rules push toward individual donations, he finds candidates are more polarized. Where the rules open the floodgates to PAC money, the candidates are more moderate. 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 are more pragmatic. They want candidates who will win, and they want candidates who, after they win, will get things done. This is less benign than it sounds. 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.

In my experience, transactional giving drives the bills no one has heard of, the provisions few people read, the regulatory processes the public and the media tend to ignore. But at the macro level—the level of presidential politics and legislative fights that lead front pages day after day—it’s partisan dollars that dominate outcomes.

The Supreme Court, in a series of rulings dating back to the ’70s, has decided that political spending is constitutionally protected speech, so you can’t regulate it out of politics. But that means that the workable reforms tend to toss us between plans that amplify the powers of small donors, which worsen the problems of polarization, or plans that permit institutional money to flood the system, with all the attendant corruption. So long as politics runs on private donations, you’re left with the inescapable problem that the people who donate want something different from the people who don’t.

moderates still enjoy an advantage over more ideologically polarized candidates when they run, albeit a declining one. But the reason that Hall found moderates more electable is interesting: nominating an extreme candidate drives up turnout among the other party—negative partisanship, once again. What has changed, Hall finds, is that moderates are increasingly disgusted by the political system, by the compromises and fund-raising necessary to be a candidate, so fewer moderates are running in the first place.

When you vote for a candidate, you’re not just voting for him or her. You are voting for, well, everything we have discussed up till now. You’re voting for your side to beat the other side. You’re voting to express your identity. You’re voting for your members of Congress to be able to pass bills. You’re voting for the judges your side would appoint. You’re voting so those smug jerks you fight with in comment sections don’t win, so that aunt or uncle you argue with at Thanksgiving can’t lord it over you. You’re voting to say your group is right and worthy and the other group is wrong and unworthy. That’s bigger than any one candidate for president.

When you vote, you’re voting to keep a candidate, a coalition, a movement, a media ecosystem, a set of donors, and a universe of people you don’t like and maybe even fear out of power. All of that gives you reason to learn to like your candidate and, if you can’t do that, to justify voting for him anyway. It’s perfectly rational to care more about the party label than a candidate’s character. Politics is about parties, not individuals.

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.

In 1990, in a paper entitled “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Linz explained why. The “vast majority of the stable democracies” in the world were parliamentary regimes, where whoever wins legislative power also wins executive power.9 America, however, was a presidential democracy: the president is elected separately from the Congress and can often be at odds with it. This system had been tried before. America, worryingly, was the only place where it had survived. The problem is straightforward. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister is the leader of the coalition that controls the legislature. If that coalition loses an election, it loses power. But at any given moment, only one party or coalition holds power. In presidential systems, by contrast, one party can control the legislature and another can control the presidency. Both parties, then, have a claim to democratic legitimacy. “Under such circumstances,” asked Linz, “who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?” It gets worse. What happens when the majorities that the president and the Congress represent are different majorities, who voted at different times and through different methods?

It may sound ridiculous, but both McConnell and Obama represented legitimate electoral majorities, and there was no obvious way to resolve their differences.

This is a problem that afflicts much in American governance. The rules, as set down in the Constitution and our institutions, push toward partisan dysfunction, conflict, and even collapse. The system works not through formal mechanisms that ensure the settlement of intractable disputes but through informal norms of compromise, forbearance, and moderation that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough.

But now imagine a world where Republicans, due to their advantages in small states, routinely hold the Senate while Democrats, who’ve won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, routinely hold the White House.

Nelson was doing what members of Congress have done since the dawn of the republic: winning support for a polarizing national policy by extracting a material concession for his state. The American political system is built on a deep sense of place. The House isn’t meant to host the meeting of two parties but of 435 districts;

the Senate is not meant to represent red and blue but to balance the interests of fifty states. This reflects the Founders’ belief—true in their time—that our political identities were rooted in our cities and states, not the more abstract bonds of nationhood.