Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Scalia thought this preposterous. The Constitution, he said, is “not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.”1 He believed, or said he believed, in 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.

“One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy,’ ” McConnell said.6

McConnell, for his part, gave up the game in 2019. Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Kentucky, he was asked what he’d do if a Supreme Court vacancy opened in 2020, the year of the next presidential election. CNN’s Ted Barrett reported what happened next: “The leader took a long sip of what appeared to be iced tea before announcing with a smile, ‘Oh, we’d fill it,’ triggering loud laughter from the audience.”8 There was no mystery to McConnell’s reasoning, but he laid it bare anyway. The simplest way for politicians to have a “long-lasting positive impact” was to appoint judges. “Everything else changes,” McConnell said, but judges serve for life.

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. “Under such circumstances,” asked Linz, “who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?”

It gets worse. What happens when the majorities that the president and the Congress represent are different majorities, who voted at different times and through different methods? Linz noted that presidents tend to be elected by voters but legislatures tend to reflect geography, with small towns and rural areas given outsized power. It’s hard enough resolving a democratic disagreement that plays out among a single electorate. What do you do when you’re facing a disagreement that reflects different kinds of electorates?

This is a problem that afflicts much in American governance. The rules, as set down in the Constitution and our institutions, push toward partisan dysfunction, conflict, and even collapse. The system works not through formal mechanisms that ensure the settlement of intractable disputes but through informal norms of compromise, forbearance, and moderation that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough.

A more nationalized politics is a more polarized politics.

In 2011, Congress got rid of earmarks entirely. They were considered a corrupt, and a corrupting, form of politics. Much better to have Congress run on pure principle and partisanship than the grimy work of negotiating something tangible for your constituents. To ideologues, transactional politics always looks dirty. To the transactional, ideologues look self-destructive.

You can think of a politician’s political priorities as running roughly in this order: Win reelection Win the majority Shape governance as much as possible Governing comes third not because politicians are cynical, though they often are, but because you can’t govern at all if you don’t win reelection, and you can’t govern effectively from the minority. Even so, if winning the majority becomes impossible, then the priorities look like this: Win reelection Shape governance as much as possible

“Confrontation fits our strategy,” he said. “Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?”22

The filibuster then was not like the filibuster now. Today, the filibuster can be shut down with sixty votes, a process known as cloture. Then, the filibuster was unstoppable so long as a senator or group of senators was willing to hold the floor. You could have every member of the body but one desperate to take a vote and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. As such, past filibusters were a war of physical endurance and tactical gamesmanship.

Filibusters were rare in past Senates (with one gruesome exception: they were used routinely to block anti-lynching and civil rights legislation).

This is all rational and maybe even inevitable: Why shouldn’t both sides use and, when possible, change the rules to maximize their advantage? The problem is that we have a political system where the rules create irresolvable conflict, gridlock, and even global financial crises.

Ornstein saw him as the logical next step for a party that was transforming itself, its institutions, and its leadership into vessels of revanchist rage. Conservatives were choosing, again and again, the path of maximum confrontation and disruption, rallying behind the voices that promised to go where their predecessors hadn’t, to speak the words that had previously been whispered, to embrace the tactics that had once been shunned.

If conservatism was an ideology first and foremost, then a stronger attachment to that ideology should provide a stronger mooring against the winds of Trump. Instead, the precise opposite was true. The people who identified as most strongly conservative were the likeliest to move in response to Trump. And the effect was about the same size whether Trump was taking the conservative or liberal position. It was the direction of Trump, not the direction of the policy, that mattered.

The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.11

In an essay for Vox, Dave Roberts calls this “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.”

But the result is that 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.

America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones.

They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds.

This is the context for much of the Republican establishment’s ultimate embrace of Trump. Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a ruthless street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Rightly or wrongly, many conservatives—and particularly Christian conservatives—believe that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, and as a result, they are on the verge of being vanquished, and America forever lost. Trump is the enemy they believe the left deserves, and perhaps the only hope Christian conservatives have.

The difference between the parties is that Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities, and more skeptical voters, than Republicans do. Successful national Democrats construct broad coalitions, and that’s a practice that cuts against the incentives of pure polarization. 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.

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.

Absent an external unifying force like a war, the divisions—or worse—we see today will prove the norm, while the depolarized politics of mid-twentieth-century America will prove the exception. And if we can’t reverse polarization, as I suspect, then the path forward is clear: we need to reform the political system so it can function amid polarization.

Reinvigorating American democracy would take different forms at different levels. At the presidential level, it would simply mean doing away with the archaic electoral college. This is difficult to do through constitutional amendment but easy to do through legislative action: the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact is an agreement by states to throw their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote. It would take legal force the moment states representing a 270-vote majority in the electoral college sign it—and so far, the states that have joined represent 196 electoral votes, which is more than 70 percent of the way there.

This has a few advantages. One is that voters can choose the candidate they like most, knowing their vote can still matter even if their favorite politician loses. Another is that voters would no longer have to live in the small fraction of swing districts for their votes to matter. Parties would have to compete for all voters, everywhere. But the third and most important advantage of a system like this is that it makes third parties viable, as unlike under our winner-take-all election rules, a party that gets 22 percent of the vote can get 22 percent of the seats, rather than nothing at all.

The fact that we particularly deny it to places with large African American and Hispanic populations compounds historical injustice and tilts the system toward white voters. If DC and Puerto Rico have representation, that would be another push for the Republican Party to veer away from deepening racial polarization as an electoral strategy.