Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

on behalf of the people rather than the powerful,

Because "the powerful" (the wealthy?) aren't people?

a problem that only seems to get worse.

That problem is simply Gov't growth.

I am a voter, a news junkie, and a liberal.

stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress,”

Define "progress."

discrimination was the main reason many black people couldn’t “get ahead” in society.

Nonsense.

As the New Orleans coup suggests, the Democratic Party enforced one-party rule by crushing white Republicans, too. “Democrats controlled all election laws and election administration, and they took care to keep barriers to entry of potential opponents prohibitively high,” writes Mickey. “Several states, by party rule or statute, barred previously disloyal candidates, or those who failed to pledge themselves to the values of the Democratic party, from running for office—even as independents.”9 And thus the southern Democratic Party succeeded in consolidating authoritarian control over the Deep South.

So they've done it before.

“as with the House vote, a greater proportion of Senate Republicans than Democrats voted for cloture and passage of the [Civil Rights Act]: more than four-fifths of the Republicans but only some two-thirds of the Democrats,”

Well intentioned, I'll grant, but the wrong way to go about protecting the rights of all individuals.

That, then, is the story of the long period of depolarization in American politics. The South was in the Democratic Party, but it didn’t agree with the Democratic Party—particularly once liberalism’s vision of redistribution and uplift expanded to include African Americans.

In 1965, most Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic Party to create Medicare, a single-payer health-care system for the elderly.

All fools.

Medicare was a liberal government takeover of health care for the elderly that created an open-ended entitlement with no dedicated way to pay its full costs.

He said it.

What makes a national, government-run health-care system more “extreme” than a mixed system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured? The former is treated as more radical within the confines of American politics, but it’s the latter that’s radical (and cruel) when judged by the standards of other developed nations.

The use of gov't force, dummy. That's the measure of "extremism."

so it’s only logical

Ironic for a Leftist fool to mention logic.

The kinds of people most attracted to liberalism are the kinds of people who are excited by change, by difference, by diversity.

. . . by vague, undefined generalities.

They are more inclined to believe that a society’s well-being requires giving people greater latitude to question, to explore, and to discover their authentic selves.

Yes, to the point where they can simply declare themselves to be of the opposite sex. lol

What if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and merely rationalized as calculation?

They're not.

Once we have classified them as, well, “them,” that is enough—we will find ourselves inclined to treat them skeptically, even hostilely, because that is what we are used to doing with anyone we see as a “them.” It’s an automatic response, like the gooseflesh that rises on your arm in reaction to the cold.

Nonsense.

I believe Obama had sincerely tried to pursue a politics that he thought would foster compromise or at least understanding. But he had failed.

Seriously? Willfully ignorant. Or stupid.

And our other identities—Little League coach, PTA member, parent—are a lot less polarized than our political identities.

No sh*t. Because those other things aren't political, dumbass. They don't affect other people. (Or shouldn't.)

Rather than a shared loved of football pulling our political identities toward compromise, our political identities polarized our love of football.

That's because football had become politicized like never before, you moron.

much of our hostility is a pure expression of how we instinctively treat out-groups—it doesn’t need policy differences to catalyze it.

Ah, again we are just helpless before some force that controls us. Idiot.

In 1991, Milton Friedman, the legendary conservative economist, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing “a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”

That's not to his credit.

Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, had signed a universal health-care bill with an individual mandate, said that Wyden-Bennett was a plan “that a number of Republicans think is a very good health-care plan—one that we support.”

Fools.

We understand reasoning to be an individual act. This is, in many cases, wrong.

Speak for yourself, half-wit.

It is not possible to be rational all by yourself; rationality is inherently a collective project.”

Ridiculous.

For instance, why doesn’t the overwhelming evidence that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?

Ha!

individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.”

Slaves to our subconscious this time.

Suddenly, I wasn’t the kind of conservative all the other conservatives were, and so my social circles drifted away.”

Yeah, ideas have consequences.

On March 23, 2010, the day that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, fourteen state attorneys general filed suit against the law’s requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance, on the ground that it was unconstitutional.

As it totally was/is.

he decided the penalty was a tax,

A tax *on* what? My liberty? My life?

And while I obviously find one of those arguments more persuasive than the other, I can’t tell you that’s not just my motivated reasoning in action.

Such sheer idiocy.

How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this book isn’t a form of identity protection?

He's made it clear that he doesn't think we can.

the mere existence of Obama’s presidency further racialized American politics,

Obama racialized his presidency.

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

Obama did that!

Ted Kennedy’s

He was a piece of garbage, too.

“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.”

Yes, that's how you got elected . . . racism.

Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the front of American politics through rhetoric or action.

Laughable.

the election of an African American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.

Will this guy ever discuss anything besides group identity politics?

Bill O’Reilly,

Half-wit.

Jardina shows that this was wrong. White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges—periods like this one.

Or could it possibly be that . . . we aren't racists?

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

Because YOU made them start thinking in racist terms.

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 for others.”

Huh?

the question of who counts as a “winner” at any given moment is hard to answer,

Thanks for admitting you have no idea what you're talking about. lol

are often cloaked in more socially acceptable, and politically defensible, language.

Still not one word on differing values. Haven't seen the word Socialism yet, right? Liberty? Property rights?

economic anxiety activated racial resentment,

No, Obama did that.

those making less than $20,000 per year.”

Do they "make" that much, or are they *given* that much?

direct solutions to the economic problems offered by the Left.

The WHAT? lol

There’s a whole subgenre of punditry arguing that Trump’s rise is a regrettable, but predictable, backlash to political correctness, and thus the blame for his emergence properly belongs to campus activists and Black Lives Matter protesters.

Hey, some apparent recognition of truth!

but pulled out when GWU insisted on making the debate open to the public.

Probably for fear of Leftist violence. Where's the violence from the Right?

Strikingly, “white liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help.”

There it is.

I made them, for the first time, over 50 percent women. I think it was 53 or 54 percent women. And then we could get back to business.”

Great. And were they by any chance qualified for the jobs, in addition to being female?