Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

What’s surprising about the 2016 election results isn’t what happened. It’s what didn’t happen. Trump didn’t lose by 30 points or win by 20 points. Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they’d chosen in 2012. That isn’t to say there was nothing at all distinct or worthy of study. Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election.I5 But the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat.

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.

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.

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.

What we are often fighting over in American politics is group identity and status—fights that express themselves in debates over policy and power but cannot be truly reconciled by either. Health policy is positive-sum, but identity conflict is zero-sum.

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.

political scientist Corwin Smidt found that between 2000 and 2004, self-proclaimed independents were more stable in which party they supported than self-proclaimed strong partisans were from 1972 to 1976.13 I want to say that again: today’s independents vote more predictably for one party over the other than yesteryear’s partisans. That’s a remarkable fact.

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.

Why are some intelligent republicans ok with the idea of a return to power of Trump, a candidate they likely didn’t support initially and who continuously displayed a lack of conscience and disregard for the morality and leadership tone that should exist in a leader? Could it be a deeply rooted desire to continue to prove that the other party or media’s attacks on him were biased, misguided or hypocritical, and therefore having that figure that was presented as the greatest tragedy and danger of US history as a clear way to continue to prove them wrong, even though there would be a literal endless number of qualified republican candidates that would be better qualified for the role?

Demythologizing our past is necessary if we are to clearly understand our present. But an honest survey of America’s past offends the story we tell ourselves—it offends our sense of America as a true democracy and the Democratic Party’s sense of its own honorable history.

The South’s mixture of legal discrimination and racial terrorism worked. Within three years of the Civil War’s end, “black voter registration ranged from 85 to 94 percent in the Deep South, and almost one million freedmen were voting throughout the region,”7 records Mickey. Less than a century later, that fundamental freedom had been demolished. “By 1944, in the states of the old Confederacy, only 5 percent of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote, which left millions of blacks politically voiceless,”

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.

Political scientists agree that the mid-twentieth century was the low ebb of political polarization, particularly in Congress. But the mid-twentieth century was not an era in which the world outside Washington was either serene or moderate. This was the age of Joseph McCarthy, the Vietnam War, and the draft dodger. It was a time of political assassinations, of civil rights activists being beaten on bridges, of authoritarian rule in the South, of feminists marching in the streets and Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. The irony is that the American political system was most calm and least polarized when America itself seemed to be on the verge of cracking apart.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act heralded the death of the Dixiecrats. The death of the Dixiecrats cleared the way for southern conservatives to join the Republican Party and northern liberals to join the Democratic Party. That let the parties sort themselves ideologically, such that there are no longer any House Democrats more conservative than any House Republicans or any House Republicans more liberal than any House Democrats.

It will be interesting to see if we are in the midst of another shift away from race and “non-whiteness” and into a further divide based on value-based conservatism on traditional family values that catch a large portion of the Latin vote, which because of wealth status would have normally aligned with democrats, but if the wealth gap is narrowed or brought in line with white voters, the conservative value based ideology might shift those voters to the Republican Party

We like to think that we choose our politics by slowly, methodically developing a worldview, using that worldview to generate conclusions about ideal tax and health and foreign policy, and then selecting the political party that fits best. That’s not how the political psychologists see it. They argue that our politics, much like our interest in travel and spicy food and being in crowds, emerges from our psychological makeup. “Certain ideas are attractive to some people and repulsive to others, and that means, essentially, that ideologies and psychologies are magnetically drawn to each other,”

Society needs lots of different kinds of people, with lots of different kinds of psychologies, to thrive. There are times when a mistrust of outsiders is necessary for a culture to repel a threat. There are times when enthusiasm about change is the only thing standing between a society and stagnation. Open isn’t better than closed. Conscientious is a trait, not a compliment. Evolutionarily, the power is in the mix of outlooks, not in any one outlook—that’s why this psychological diversity has survived.

These findings led the researchers to an interesting conclusion: “In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”

Psychological sorting, in other words, is a powerful driver of identity politics. If you care enough about politics to connect it to your core psychological outlook, then politics becomes part of your psychological self-expression.

To feel abandoned by community, to fear the opprobrium of others, triggers a physical assault on the body. You may have heard statistics like loneliness is worse for you than obesity or smoking. Medical professionals, like Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general of the United States, say social isolation acts like a disease or an injury, crossing from psychological state to physical malady. The mechanism is evolutionary; our brains know we need our groups to survive. So when we feel cast out of our group, it triggers a massive stress response throughout the body:

Sports are such a powerful force in human society precisely because they harness primal instincts that pulse through our psyche. The fact that teams can command such deep, violent loyalty based on nothing but being in the same town as fans—even as professional sports teams are transparently cynical in their loyalties, even as they demand stadium subsidies to locate and tax breaks to remain in the towns they profess to love, even as the players leave the moment another team offers a better deal—shows that we are no different from Tajfel’s boys: a group does not have to be based on objectively important criteria for it to become an important part of our self-identity and for it to inspire loathing of those who stand outside its boundaries.

the most-engaged experience politics differently than everyone else.

The American political parties are growing socially polarized. Religion and race, as well as class, geography, and culture, are dividing the parties in such a way that the effect of party identity is magnified. The competition is no longer between only Democrats and Republicans. A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store. This is no longer a single social identity. Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.

partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages. “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.

reasoning is something we often do in groups, in order to serve group ends. This is not a wrinkle of human irrationality, but rather a rational response to the complexity and danger of the world around us. 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.

If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this book isn’t a form of identity protection? Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

But the Supreme Court itself is just nine robed judges—and, increasingly, nine robed judges who are chosen not just for their brilliance but for their 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.

Kahan’s work suggests that cognition exists on a spectrum, ranging from issues where the truth matters and our identities don’t to issues where our identities dominate and the truth fades in importance. One implication of an era where our political identities are becoming more sorted and more powerful is that it will bring with it a rise in identity-protective cognition, and that’s particularly true if the relevant identity groups are able to construct sophisticated architectures of information that we can use to power our reasoning.

Next step- political alignment in areas where you would think there ought to not be, such as a legitimately deadly pandemic vs personal freedoms, and what the appropriate response is to a global issue such as global warming

In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were.

One way of looking at Trump is as a disruptive force that crashed, like a once-in-a-generation comet, into American politics. But the other way of looking at Trump—the correct way—is as a master marketer who astutely read the market. Conservative politics was becoming more racialized in response to Obama and the changes he represented. During this period, Trump was testing the waters by championing birther conspiracy theories. The water was warm.II20

In 1994, 39 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans said discrimination was the main reason “black people can’t get ahead these days.” By 2017, 64 percent of Democrats believed that, but only 14 percent of Republicans. Much of this trend has been driven by white Democrats. “In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter,” writes Vox’s Matt Yglesias, in an analysis of what he calls the “Great Awokening.”40 Strikingly, “white liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help.” Part of being a Democrat today—and particularly a white Democrat—is a commitment to racial equality, built on an understanding of systemic racism as a central scourge. As political demography changes, so do political identities.

The central truth I’ve learned about the audience in each and every one of those places is almost no one is forced to follow politics. There are some lobbyists and government affairs professionals who need to stay on the cutting edge of legislative and regulatory developments to do their jobs. But most people who follow politics do so as a hobby; they follow it in the way they follow a sport or a band.

This is the context in which modern political journalism is produced and absorbed: an all-out war for the time of an audience that has more choices than at any point in history.

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. If we decide to give more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to her policy proposals—which is what we did—then we make her emails more important to the public’s understanding of her character and potential presidency than her policy proposals. In doing so, we shape not just the news but the election, and thus the country.

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for—indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

Under materialist theories of political engagement, where people participate because they’re trying to maximize their share of the resources politicians control, this engagement pattern doesn’t make sense. State and local political decisions matter more for most people’s daily lives than the debates that drive national politics. People have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the president. People should be most engaged in the tangible stakes of the politics nearest to their experience, not the more abstract collisions of the national scene.

But under an identity model of political engagement, where people participate to express who they are, who they support, and who they loathe, it makes perfect sense.

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.

If the business community could purchase its preferences in all things, immigration reform and infrastructure investment would’ve passed long ago and Jeb Bush would be president.

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.

Extrapolating this leads us to the dangers of democrats becoming the party of liberal views further left than Obama on immigration, social aid and abortion. It allowed republicans to be able to begin breaking into conservative Latin and potentially rural low educated black or Asian voters

In this case, the relevant factor I’m urging you to pay attention to is identity. What identity is that article invoking? What identity is making you defensive? What does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity? Can you notice when it happens? If you log on to Twitter nine times a day, can you take a couple breaths at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on?

The 537 federal officials are the ones we have the least power to influence, if only because they have, on average, the most constituents. But we often don’t know the names of the officials nearest to us, even though they’d be glad to meet for coffee. This isn’t because we’re lazy, bad people. It’s because media has nationalized, and there’s been a particular reaping at the state and local level. I don’t have an answer for that—revitalizing state and local journalism is a book unto itself—save to counsel effort. It’s possible to make local and in-state news sources a bigger part of your media diet and thus make your local political identity more powerful. It’s just a lift, particularly when those stories aren’t being pushed at you by friends on social media or covered by the national publications you love.

A fair take back from this is to reign gage with local politics, education in particular, as I began to do my last year in dfw. Reapply to reading partners, a group I really enjoyed, and leadership ISD