Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election.I

The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a

We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.

We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and confuse our theories of repair. We try to fix the system by changing the people who run it, only to find that they become part of the system, too.

Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.”6

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. On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making. Together, however, they shine bright light on how and why American politics works the way it does.

That logic, put simply, is this: 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. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on. Understanding that we exist in relationship with our political institutions, that they are changed by us and we are changed by them, is the key to this story. We don’t just use politics for our own ends. Politics uses us for its own ends.

But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. We are left searching in vain for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.II7

it. And while we often speak of identity as a singular, it is always a dizzying plural—we have countless identities, some of them in active conflict with each other, others lying dormant until activated by threat or fortune. Much that happens in political campaigns is best understood as a struggle over which identities voters will inhabit come Election Day:

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.

“It would be a great tragedy if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line,” he said. The strength of the American political system is “we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”5

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.

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

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. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.

Crespino argues, convincingly, that Thurmond should be seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. “In 1948, when Goldwater was still a year away from running for the Phoenix City council and Reagan was still an actor, Thurmond was a presidential candidate denouncing federal meddling in private business, the growing socialist impulse in American politics, and the dangers of statism,” he writes. But until a few months prior to that 1965 filibuster, Thurmond had been a Democrat. He was elected to the Senate as a Democrat in 1954, and he wouldn’t switch to the Republican Party until 1964.

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.

During his 1946 reelection campaign, Democratic senator Theodore Bilbo was chillingly blunt: “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election. I don’t have to tell you any more than that. Red-blooded men know what I mean.”5 He won the race.

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.

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.

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

“the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.”

Every dimension of our lives—ideology, religiosity, geography, and so on—carries a psychological signal. And those psychological signals strengthen as they align. What’s been happening to American life is we’re taking the magnets and stacking them all on top of one another,

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.”15

It’s why presidential candidates find it hard to keep their supporters engaged when they win the White House—the terror of losing an election is more viscerally motivating than the compromises of daily governance.

Polls looking at the difference between how Republicans viewed Democrats and how Democrats viewed Republicans now showed that partisans were less accepting of each other than white people were of black people or than black people were of white people.

That is a profound finding: 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. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.”26

“The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages,” Iyengar says. “But now party politics has taken on a life of its own—now it is the cleavage.”29

“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

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. We are their descendants. Once you understand that, the ease with which individuals, even informed individuals, flip their positions to fit the group’s needs makes a lot more sense.

None of this, of course, describes you, dear reader. You’re the kind of person who buys books like, well, this one. People who don’t pay much attention to politics or know much about policy might use parties as shortcuts and be vulnerable to their deceptions. But knowledge is power, and you have the knowledge. The question is simply how to get everyone else that knowledge, too. Right?

In 2016, Georgetown University political theorist Jason Brennan released a book entitled Against Democracy, in which he argued for an “epistocracy,” a system where the votes of the politically informed counted more than the votes of the politically naive.15 “I call this the ‘competence principle,’ ” he said in an interview with Vox. “The idea is that anyone or any deliberative body that exercises power over anyone else has an obligation to use that power in good faith, and has the obligation to use that power competently. If they’re not going to use it in good faith, and they’re not going to use it competently, that’s a claim against them having any kind of authority or any kind of legitimacy.”16

Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process. Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.

ideological reliability (more on that later). The Court isn’t meant to be political, but the cases it faces are often political, and the process by which a judge is nominated and confirmed is thoroughly politicized.

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.

So here, then, is what we know: even gentle, incidental exposure to reminders that America is diversifying—and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation—pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican Party.

The result is that the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political power but feels increasingly dismissed and offended culturally.

Otherwise, it warned, “our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

American politics is often a chorus of contradictory voices persuasively claiming victimhood at the same time.

Society often appears calm when fundamental injustices go unchallenged, but even if that were desirable—and it’s not—it will be impossible as historically marginalized groups gain the power to demand their share of the American dream.

But as Obama found after he was elected, leadership in this era requires delivering for diverse coalitions, taking sides in charged cultural battles, and thus becoming part of the very conflict you’re trying to calm.

Content preferences—which is to say, how much people wanted to consume political information versus how much they wanted to consume other forms of entertainment—had

But you couldn’t dominate a market if you were explicitly serving one political persuasion and offending the other. Thus, newspapers, and other forms of news media, began building an ethic of nonpartisanship, one that both protected their businesses and served important editorial goals.

You don’t need a big audience when you have the right audience.

Here’s the dilemma: to decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news. It makes journalists actors rather than observers. It annihilates our fundamental conception of ourselves. And yet it’s the most important decision we make.

In the modern era, a shortcut to newsworthiness is social media virality; if people are already talking about a story or a tweet, that makes it newsworthy almost by definition. In both cases, the presence of other outlets and other voices serves to build a fortress of tautology: whatever everyone is covering is newsworthy because everyone is covering it.

To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage. You can arouse that passion through inspiration, as Obama did, or through conflict, as Trump did. What you can’t do is be boring.

Today, though, the path to a nomination runs through primaries and caucuses, both of which favor candidates with intense supporters, even if they’re not the candidates with the broadest support.

In their book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner argue regulations don’t keep money out of politics so much as redirect the channels through which money gets into politics. Slap limits on donations to political parties, and people begin giving to candidates. Slap them on candidates, and they give to super PACs. That means you can use the different regulations of different states to learn quite a bit about how different fund-raising rules change politics.

Of course you’re likelier to donate to defeat the politician who serves as the villain in the political dramas you watch rather than some local legislator whose name you can’t remember. Of course the stakes of national politics, with their titanic clashes over good and evil, their story lines omnipresent on social media and late-night comedy, are more gripping than local bond ordinances. 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. The rewards here, as viral superstars of both parties routinely discover, are massive.

Individual donors are polarizing. Institutional donors are corrupting. American politics, thus, is responsive to two types of people: the polarized and the rich.