Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.”

we are political actors, and the decisions we make are both cause and consequences of the broader forces that surround us.

As such, I have found that American politics is best understood by braiding two forms of knowledge that are often left separate: the direct, on-the-ground insights shared by politicians, activists, government officials, and other subjects of my reporting, and the more systemic analyses conducted by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others with the time, methods, and expertise to study American politics at scale.

to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public.

the term “identity politics” has been weaponized. It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of historically marginalized groups.

in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of weaker groups by making them look like self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate.

The most powerful identities in modern politics are our political identities,

The act of choosing a party is the act of choosing whom we trust to transform our values into precise policy judgments across the vast range of issues that confront the country.

When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise.

But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict.

today’s independents vote more predictably for one party over the other than yesteryear’s partisans.

“negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose.

we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed,

but because we came to dislike the opposing party more.

Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship.

Voters—even inattentive ones—are seeing differences between the parties more clearly because those differences are bigger.

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. So southern Democrats had ideological reasons to compromise with Republicans but political reasons to compromise with national Democrats.

That’s polarization: the opinions themselves changed to cluster around two poles, with no one left in the middle.

Issue-based polarization leads to political identity polarization:

When polarization is driven by allegiance to political parties, it can be moderating.

the density of the place we live has become a powerful predictor of partisanship.

What is changing is how closely our psychologies map onto our politics and onto a host of other life choices.

As the differences between the parties clarify, the magnetic pull of their ideas and demographics becomes stronger to the psychologically aligned—as does their magnetic repulsion to the psychologically opposed.

different levels of openness to experience can account for as much as 35 percentage point swings in party identification,

But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity. And that’s when our relationship to politics, and to each other, changes.

Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations.

“The most important principle of the subjective social order we construct for ourselves is the classification of groups as ‘we’ and ‘they,’ ”

once someone has become a “they,” we are used to dismissing them, competing against them, discriminating against them—and,

the greed, criminality, venality, or idiocy we ascribe to others justifies our hatred or fear of them.

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

the instinct to view our own with favor and outsiders with hostility is so deeply learned that it operates independent of any reason to treat social relations as a competition.

‘micro-awakenings.’ These are small moments you won’t recall when you wake up, but in which you rise a little from your slumber.

you don’t feel safe going to sleep when you’re lonely, because early humans literally weren’t safe if they were sleeping apart from the tribe.”

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.

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?”).

as people become more involved and invested in politics, the “self-interest” they’re looking to satisfy changes.

The most effective politicians thrill their supporters. But they do so in the context of the threat their opponents pose.

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

the more your identities converge on a single point, the more your identities can be threatened simultaneously, and that makes conflict much more threatening.

feeling closer to the other side in identity does more to calm dislike than feeling closer to the other side on policy.

when awarding a college scholarship—a task that should be completely nonpolitical—Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student’s GPA.

identity doesn’t just shape how we treat each other. It shapes how we understand the world.

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.

“science comprehension thesis,” which says the problem is that the public doesn’t know enough about science to judge the debate.

happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern—just in reverse.

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.

on highly politicized issues, people’s actual definition of “expert” is “a credentialed person who agrees with me.”

our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our group—or at least our social standing in our group.

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