Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and confuse our theories of repair. We try to fix the system by changing the people who run it, only to find that they become part of the system, too.

That the worst actors are so often draped in success doesn’t prove the system is broken; it proves that they understand the ways in which it truly works.

Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people—you and me—reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes.

One reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don’t have very strong views about policy. It’s the rare hobbyist who thinks often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve. But all of us are experts on our own identities.

the Democratic Party is a diverse collection of interest groups held together by policy goals, while the Republican Party is built atop a more united base that finds commonality in more abstract, ideological commitments.

But for most conservatives, whether they were prominent pundits or everyday voters, there proved to be no contradiction between conservatism and Trumpism. Quite the opposite, actually. According to a September 2019 Gallup poll, 75 percent of self-identified conservatives and 91 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing.7 This is because conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology. It’s a group identity.

The conservative movement has spent years battling liberal bias in the media and the academia. Some of their complaints had merit. But rather than reform those institutions or build similarly credible competitors, the right has untethered itself from them and built an informational ecosystem premised on purity rather than process.

In an age where bipartisanship is irrational, making it impossible for partisan majorities to govern well simply ensures we’ll be governed poorly.

It’s possible that a more democratic America would be a more Democratic America, but it’s also possible that a Republican Party that had to compete for more kinds of voters would reform itself to win that competition.

There is no less dysfunctional politics without a less dysfunctional GOP, and the path to a less dysfunctional GOP is forcing the party to reach beyond the ethnonationalist coalition Trump rode to victory.

Sometimes it’s worth being angry. Sometimes it’s not. If we don’t take the time to know which is which, we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others.

Trump’s most intemperate outbursts, his most offensive musings, pale before opinions that were mainstream in recent history.