Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a

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.

But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other.

We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives,

This

interregnum,

hegemonic.

revanchist

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Polarization begets polarization.

Marc Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, calculates that the dividing line is at about nine hundred people per square mile: above that, areas trend Democratic; below it, they turn Republican.

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.

To feel abandoned by community, to fear the opprobrium of others, triggers a physical assault on the body.

That’s how deep the experience of social anxiety runs: it literally wakes you up throughout the night, because your body knows it can’t rest as deeply when it can’t rely on others for protection.

They found that while high-minded factors like policy ideas and ideology played some role in how partisans felt, the overwhelming driver was the strength of partisan identity.

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.

This is what has changed. Our political identities have become political mega-identities.

Turns out the answer is: not much. We understand reasoning to be an individual act. This is, in many cases, wrong. “The central flaw in the concept of reason that animated the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that it is entirely individualistic,” writes philosopher Joseph Heath.12 But decades of research has proven that “reason is both decentralized and dispersed across multiple individuals. It is not possible to be rational all by yourself; rationality is inherently a collective project.”

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.

Kahan calls this theory “identity-protective cognition”: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.”

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.” Just as a press secretary is motivated to defend his or her boss’s positions, so, too, is our mind motivated to defend our group’s positions or the conclusion we need to reach for other reasons.

revanchist

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.

here, then, is what we know: even gentle, incidental exposure to reminders that America is diversifying—and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation—pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican Party.

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.