Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

That the South felt it needed something akin to a diplomatic strategy with the rest of America is little surprise. The Civil War was only one hundred years in the past at the time the Civil Rights Act passed, and during that interregnum, the white South had been trying to balance its top domestic priority—the enforcement of white supremacy, held in place by the dual weapons of law and violence—with its forced membership in the broader United States. The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home.

the common thread is that openness to experience—and the basic optimism that drives it—is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism. People high in openness are more likely to enjoy trying new foods, traveling to new places, living in diverse cities, keeping a messy desk.

The first was that we were so tuned to sort the world into “us” and “them” that we would do so based on the lightest of cues. The second was that once we had sorted the world into “us” and “them,” we would act with favor toward our group and discriminate against the out-group—even in the absence of any reason to do so. Atop this theory, Tajfel conducted a series of famous experiments that would be farcical were the results not so chilling.

Sports are such a powerful force in human society precisely because they harness primal instincts that pulse through our psyche. The fact that teams can command such deep, violent loyalty based on nothing but being in the same town as fans—even as professional sports teams are transparently cynical in their loyalties, even as they demand stadium subsidies to locate and tax breaks to remain in the towns they profess to love, even as the players leave the moment another team offers a better deal—shows that we are no different from Tajfel’s boys: a group does not have to be based on objectively important criteria for it to become an important part of our self-identity and for it to inspire loathing of those who stand outside its boundaries.

In the previous chapter I mentioned the book Open versus Closed, which finds that the least-engaged voters tend to look at politics through the lens of material self-interest (“what will this policy do for me?”) while the most-engaged look at politics through the lens of identity (“what does support for this policy position say about me?”). This helps illuminate a long-running debate, particularly on the left, about whether working class voters who pull the lever for Republicans are betraying their self-interest in voting for a party that will cut taxes on the rich and break the unions that protect the poor. What Johnston, Lavine, and Federico find is that as people become more involved and invested in politics, the “self-interest” they’re looking to satisfy changes. It’s a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action. As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity. “It is not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests,” they write, “rather, it is that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual’s goals when forming a policy opinion.”15

Football fandom used to be an identity that cut across politics. Democrats liked the sport. Republicans liked the sport. Even I, sports hater that I am, played nose tackle in high school. But when the NFL came into contact with politics, it became part of politics. Rather than a shared loved of football pulling our political identities toward compromise, our political identities polarized our love of football. Intense supporters are catnip for brands, so Nike jumped into the fray, purposefully polarizing one of the biggest clothing brands in the world. And football fandom became, at least for a while, one more magnet in the political identity stack, attracting those on the Left and repelling those on the Right.

being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right. The skin-cream experiment wasn’t the first time Kahan had shown that partisanship has a way of short-circuiting intelligence.

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.

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.

When I entered journalism, the term of art for pieces infused with perspective was “opinion journalism.” The point of the work was to convey an opinion. Nowadays, I think a lot of it is closer to “identity journalism”—the effect of the work, given the social channels through which it’s consumed, is to reinforce an identity. But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim—through sharing and liking and following and subscribing—that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

“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.

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. If we decide to give more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to her policy proposals—which is what we did—then we make her emails more important to the public’s understanding of her character and potential presidency than her policy proposals. In doing so, we shape not just the news but the election, and thus the country.

In practice, newsworthiness is some combination of important, new, outrageous, conflict-oriented, secret, or interesting.

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. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

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.

Both parties have since turned their presidential nomination processes over to party primaries, which means that 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.

Whatever the motivation, if you’re a candidate who wants to fund your campaign in a state where the party controls the money, your incentive is to convince your party that you can win, and that often means convincing it of your ideological and temperamental moderation. 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.

That’s another difference between party-centric fund-raising and candidate-centric fund-raising. Parties know who’s running for office where. They pay a phalanx of staffers to research which districts are vulnerable, which candidates are capable, which races deserve money. But voters don’t have a full-time staff picking through candidate résumés six days a week. So candidates who want to raise big money from individuals need to somehow get known by those individuals. You can do it by being a generational political talent, like Obama when he ran for Senate in 2004. You can do it by running against someone whom your party really hates, as O’Rourke did in taking on Cruz. You can do it by pulling a controversial stunt that makes you the center of a national firestorm, like Wilson did. You can do it by going viral on social media, as Ocasio-Cortez does, or getting yourself regularly interviewed constantly on the news, as Senator Chuck Schumer was famous for in New York. You can do it by renting lists of past party donors and trying to send them fund-raising emails or making fund-raising calls that get their attention. But somehow or another, you need to stand out.

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 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?”

When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s its only realistic shot at wielding influence. Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents.

Once a political party has decided the path to governing is retaking the majority, not working with the existing majority, the incentives transform. Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.

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 polarizing forces I have described throughout this book are acting on both coalitions. So why has the Democratic Party weathered them in a way the Republican Party hasn’t? Why are the two parties so different? The answer is twofold: Democrats have an immune system of diversity and democracy. The Republican Party doesn’t. This has not left the Democrats unaffected by the forces of polarization, to be sure. But if polarization has given the Democratic Party the flu, the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.

Republicans have become the party of white voters, Democrats the party of nonwhite voters. But those are two very different party structures. Sorting has made the Democrats into a coalition of difference and driven Republicans further into sameness. As a result, appealing to Democrats requires appealing to a lot of different kinds of people with different interests. It means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and the karmically curious in California. Democrats need to go broad to win over their party and, as we’ll see, they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power. Republicans can afford to go deep.

This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back.

America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones.

This is most glaringly true in the Senate, where Vermont wields the same power as New York. But it is also true in the House, due to the way districts are drawn, and in the White House, due to the electoral college, and thus it is also true in the Supreme Court, which reflects the outcomes of presidential

I’ll be blunt here in a way that cuts against my professional interests: we give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more.