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.”6

The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face. We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole. That the worst actors are so often draped in success doesn’t prove the system is broken; it proves that they understand the ways in which it truly works.

Much that happens in political campaigns is best understood as a struggle over which identities voters will inhabit come Election Day: Will they feel like workers exploited by their bosses, or heartlanders dismissed by coastal elites? Will they vote as patriotic traditionalists offended by NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, or as parents worried about the climate their children will inhabit?

Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic,

ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Political parties are shortcuts. The APSA report called them “indispensable instruments of government,” because they “provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternatives of action.”

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. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate.

So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more.

In national politics, however, the South’s Democratic Party was a united front, “the instrument for the conduct of the ‘foreign relations’ of the South with the rest of the nation.”

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.

Even when national Democrats weren’t led by revanchist racists, the South was left to the warlords for the same reason territories are often left to warlords: it served the interests of those in power. National Democrats cared about passing the New Deal, about winning presidential elections, about building infrastructure projects. Given the choice between working with a southern Democratic Party that could provide them crucial votes or challenging a southern Democratic Party that could defect and doom the Democratic Party’s national agenda, they chose accommodation.

In the US Congress of that era, seniority meant power. And because of the authoritarian structure southern Democrats operated at home, they were rarely exposed to anything even approaching electoral pressure, which let them amass more seniority, in greater numbers, than elected officials of any other region.

At the same time, the South’s alliance with the Democratic Party was by no means purely cynical. They really were Democrats, their party loyalty locked in place by regional identity and interest. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president; the South’s enmity toward the Republican Party was thus signed in blood. The Democratic Party supported redistribution from the rich to the poor—and the North was rich and the South was poor.

When polarization is driven by allegiance to political parties, it can be moderating. Political parties want to win elections, so they try to champion ideas that won’t get their candidates crushed at the ballot box. People who aren’t attached to one party or the other are free to hold much more unpopular opinions.

In an analysis at FiveThirtyEight, Dave Wasserman looked at “landslide counties”—counties where the winning presidential candidate got at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1992, 39 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. By 2016, that had shot to 61 percent of voters. The numbers were even starker when Wasserman looked at counties where the winning candidate won by more than 50 points: the share of voters living in those “extreme landslide” counties more than quintupled, from 4 percent in 1992 to 21 percent in 2016. In less than twenty-five years, the percentage of voters who lived in a district where almost everyone thought like them politically went from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5.

Marc Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, calculates that the dividing line is at about nine hundred people per square mile: above that, areas trend Democratic; below it, they turn Republican.

Different studies categorize people in different ways, but 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.

When Obama paired the words “hope” and “change,” he was expressing something fundamental to the liberal psychology: change makes some fearful, but within the liberal temperament, it carries the hope of something better. The kinds of people most attracted to liberalism are the kinds of people who are excited by change, by difference, by diversity.

What is changing is not our psychologies. 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.

As Johann Hari describes in his book Lost Connections, “anywhere in the world where people describe being lonely, they will also—throughout their sleep—experience more of something called ‘micro-awakenings.’ These are small moments you won’t recall when you wake up, but in which you rise a little from your slumber. All other social animals do the same thing when they’re isolated too. The best theory is that 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.”11 That’s how deep the experience of social anxiety runs: it literally wakes you up throughout the night, because your body knows it can’t rest as deeply when it can’t rely on others for protection.

“When partisans endure meetings, plant yard signs, write checks, and spend endless hours volunteering, what is likely foremost in their minds is that they are furious with the opposing party and want intensely to avoid losing to it—not a specific issue agenda. They are fired up team members on a mission to defeat the other team.”

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.”

Obama was offering the right explanation for polarization from the wrong angle. He’s right that it’s all about which identities get activated, and he’s right that our political identities are more polarized than our other identities. But he was too optimistic in believing that our nonpolitical identities could become our political identities, that they were somehow a truer reflection of our essential selves, and thus strong enough to overwhelm our partisan divisions. In practice, our political identities are polarizing our other identities, too.

Our political identities have become political mega-identities. The merging of the identities means when you activate one you often activate all, and each time they’re activated, they strengthen.

2012 study by Joshua Gubler and Joel Sawat Selway surveyed data from more than one hundred countries and found that civil war is “an average of nearly twelve times less probable in societies where ethnicity is cross-cut by socio-economic class, geographic region and religion.”24

“Political identity is fair game for hatred,” he says. “Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can

“reason is both decentralized and dispersed across multiple individuals. It is not possible to be rational all by yourself; rationality is inherently a collective project.”I

Put more simply: reasoning is something we often do in groups, in order to serve group ends.

More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us—or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence, and such experts, are never very far away.

“In fact, the more information the voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”23

Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process.

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

There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified.

If the strategy of the monopolistic business model was to be enough things to all people, the strategy of the digital business model is to be the most appealing thing to some people. So the question becomes: What makes people interested in political news? It’s that they are rooting for a side, for a set of outcomes.

The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim. This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.8

the bulk of opinionated political media is written for the side that already agrees with the author, and most partisan elected officials are tweeting to their supporters, who follow them and fund-raise for them, rather than to their critics, who don’t.

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 rest of the country then has to choose from more polarized options, and that in turn polarizes them—remember, the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.

We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters.

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.

La Raja and Schaffner cut this divide into “pragmatists” and “purists.” Politics, they argue, 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.

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.

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 general, we assume a system like this encourages compromise, and that’s true, when the competing political coalitions are open to compromise. But a system like this can also encourage crisis—crises where, in other countries, “the armed forces were often tempted to intervene as a mediating power.”

The question that Supreme Court vacancies pose in the modern era is different from the question they posed in previous eras. That’s because a more polarized political system has led to a more polarized Supreme Court

The centrality of state and local political concerns in national politics has been one of the American political system’s brakes on polarization. The zero-sum forces of two-party competition were moderated by the regional interests of politicians rooted, first and foremost, in a particular place. Sure, you may be a Republican, and that bill might be pushed by Democrats, but you’re a Republican from Oklahoma, dammit, and that bill is good for Oklahoma. Catering to a member of Congress’s particularistic interests, either through the direct design of the legislation or through earmarks offering unrelated benefits, gave congressional leaders ways to build coalitions that the logic of partisanship denied.

The durability of party control in America’s past is easy to miss because our political histories tend to be presidential histories, and the presidency has tended to be more competitive than control of Congress. But when you view political power through a broader lens, our era is an aberration. In this 150-year time frame, there’s no period where political control has been as tenuous as in the last four decades. And that’s true whether you’re looking at how often control of the government switches or how much power the majority party wields when it’s on top.

When winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of cooperation dissolves. If you’re signing on to the majority’s bills and boasting about the provisions you added to their legislation, then you’re part of their reelection strategy. If you’re keeping the majority from passing anything and making sure people are fed up with the state of politics, then the voters are likelier to make a change.