Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

“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.

by 2060 and the mixed-race population to triple.

Race is a construct, and we reconstruct its categories continuously. But that’s only to say that it’s often our perception of race and power that matters.

White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges—periods

the greater someone’s level of racial resentment, the worse they believed the economy was doing.

the democratization of discomfort,”

“There were whole swaths of people uncomfortable all of the time. Now we’re democratizing it. Now more people across different races and religions feel uncomfortable.”

campus conflict is a window into the larger conflicts cutting through our society.

In our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we’ve lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of politics and, indeed, much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear.

the digital information revolution offered wasn’t just more information but more choice of information.

The key factor now,

was not access to political information, but interest in political information.

The digital revolution offered access to unimaginably vast vistas of information, but just as important, it offered access to unimaginably more choice. And that explosion of choice widened that interested-uninterested divide. Greater choices lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less.

“In a high-choice environment, people’s content preferences become better predictors of political learning than even their level of education,”

What makes people interested in political news? It’s that they are rooting for a side, for a set of outcomes. This is not a new insight.

the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, the more mistaken they were about the other party

But much of what the media thought were interests were actually identities.

You feed an interest with information; you build an identity through socialization.

interests become identities as they socialize you into a community.

echo chamber theory of polarization: we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.

hearing contrary opinions drove partisans not just to a deeper certainty in the rightness of their cause, but more polarized policy positions—that

polarization was coming from forcing people who were persuadable to watch political news, which they didn’t want to do. Once you gave them the choice to opt out, it was just preaching to the choir.

Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power—and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive.

the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.

to decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news.

Trump understands what newsworthy really means, and he uses it to his advantage. In theory, newsworthiness means something roughly like “important.”

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

The point is to obscure the fact that the decisions being made are decisions at all.

Because of that, judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too.

Thus, a shortcut to newsworthiness has always been whether other news organizations are covering a story—if

social media’s preference for identitarian conflict focuses the media on identitarian conflicts, even when those collisions are almost comically obscure.

But a more polarized electorate changes the strategies candidates use to get elected. Those more polarized strategies further polarize the electorate. And then the cycle continues.

“The increase in polarization was nearly three times as large in the 28 chambers that limited party contributions as it was in the 8 chambers that allowed for unlimited contributions,”

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.

Politics,

is a war between pragmatists “concerned primarily with staying in power” and “policy-demanding” purists, who care above all about getting their agenda passed. Defunding parties empowers the purists over the pragmatists.

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.

But somehow or another, you need to stand out. You have to get noticed, retweeted, booked. And, in general, loud gets noticed.

But as we give more to national candidates and less to local candidates, that creates incentives for candidates to nationalize themselves, focusing on the polarizing issues that energize donors in every zip code rather than the local issues that specifically matter in their states and districts.

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.

So long as politics runs on private donations, you’re left with the inescapable problem that the people who donate want something different from the people who don’t.

the key to the weak parties/strong partisanship dichotomy: threat is as powerful a political motivator as love.

Trump’s win, in other words, depended heavily on voters who were actually just voting against Clinton—indeed,

Trump supporters said they were motivated more by fear of Clinton than admiration of Trump.

As party affiliation becomes more important, individual candidate traits lose their power.

we’re seeing less variation in voting patterns due to ideology and more stability due to partisanship.

originalism:2 the Constitution meant only what he understood it to have meant to the men who wrote it, at the time at which they wrote it. As such, while all sorts of protections might be read into the glittering language on the page, Scalia found them absent in the minds of the document’s authors and thus absent from the law.

sociologist named Juan Linz.

he showed that systems based around an independent president tended to dissolve, as conflicts between the executive and the legislature were often irresolvable, and irresolvable conflicts end in crisis and collapse.

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.