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McConnell’s obstructive innovations are a cause of our current divisions, but they are also a consequence of them.
a more polarized political system has led to a more polarized Supreme Court
As Linz argued, a presidential political system in which power is divided among different branches works when the parties that control those branches are ideologically mixed enough to cooperate with one another, and that was, for much of the twentieth century, the secret to the American political system’s success.
A nationalized media means nationalized political identities.
if local interests drove voting patterns, you could predict how a member of Congress would vote on the Affordable Care Act by knowing whether the uninsured rate among his or her constituents was above or below the national average.
a political system in which changes in congressional control are rarer, and are talked about more rarely, is going to be a political system that both is and feels far more stable in its hierarchies.
Republicans have been able to appeal to their party through ideology. Democrats haven’t. They’ve had to appease a coalition of whites and nonwhites, liberals and moderates, the fixed and the fluid. They’ve done that by promising different policies to different groups—offering a transactionalist, more than ideological, approach to party building.
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.6
conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology. It’s a group identity.
It was the direction of Trump, not the direction of the policy, that mattered.
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.
Political parties exist within informational ecosystems. Those ecosystems create the context in which voters make demands, in which politicians make strategic choices, in which presidential aspirants craft messages.
“tribal epistemology”—when “information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.”
Democrats rely on a diversity of information sources that discipline their flights of fancy, while Republicans rely on a narrower set of media institutions that propel their polarization.
Democracy,
should push against polarization. But America isn’t a democracy.
In the Senate,
the average state is six points more Republican than the average voter.18 So when Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole.
What national Republicans have learned to do is construct deep coalitions relying on more demographically and ideologically homogenous voters. Instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters, they win power by winning the votes of most places. That’s let them appeal to an electorate considerably to the right of the median voter, to get away with decisions and candidates that would’ve torched another party. But it’s also forced them into dependence on an electorate that feels its power slipping away, and that demands a response proportionate to its fears.
The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression.
We don’t argue over the problems we don’t discuss. But we don’t solve them, either.
the polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions. It implicates capitalism and geography, politicians and political institutions, human psychology and America’s changing demography.
