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.I5

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.

But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

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.

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.

Identity is present in politics in the way gravity, evolution, or cognition is present in politics; that is to say, it is omnipresent in politics, because it is omnipresent in us. There is no way to read the literature on how humans form and protect their personal and group identities—literature I will survey in this book—and believe any of us is immune. It runs so deep in our psyches, is activated so easily by even weak cues and distant threats, that it is impossible to speak seriously about how we engage with one another without discussing how our identities shape that engagement.

With a quick sleight of hand, identity becomes something that only marginalized groups have.

Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities.

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,” writes Anderson.

The restoration of what was, in effect, the Confederate political hierarchy in the South set the country on a path that paired the power of white supremacy with the power of political transactionalism. 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.

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. “Around the turn of the twentieth century the southern Democrats represented the left wing of the Democratic Party,” says Princeton University professor Howard Rosenthal. “They were basically populist. The questions of redistribution at that time were from a relatively well-off North to a poor South. Race was not on the table as an area of disagreement in Congress.”

But then race became an area of disagreement. Democrats didn’t just want to redistribute from rich northern whites to poor southern whites. They also wanted to redistribute from richer whites to poorer blacks. Furthermore, beginning in 1948, with President Harry Truman’s military desegregation orders, the Democratic Party became a vehicle for civil rights, betraying its fundamental compact with the South. It’s in this era that a Republican—Barry Goldwater, running on a platform of “states’ rights”—carried much of the old Confederacy in a presidential election for the first time.

It is remarkable, from our current vantage point where everything cuts red from blue, to see a debate that polarizes the country without splitting the parties. But that was the case with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Geoffrey Kabaservice shows in Rule and Ruin, his history of Republican moderation, “eighty percent of House Republicans supported the bill, as opposed to sixty percent of House Democrats.”

In the end, “as with the House vote, a greater proportion of Senate Republicans than Democrats voted for cloture and passage of the [Civil Rights Act]: more than four-fifths of the Republicans but only some two-thirds of the Democrats,” wrote Kabaservice.

“The credit—even the glory—that the Republican Party should have enjoyed for its support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was effectively negated when its presumptive presidential nominee voted against the measure.” And sure enough, Goldwater’s stance against civil rights paid dividends. His disastrous presidential campaign succeeded in only one region of the country: the old Confederacy, which realized that the language of small government conservatism could be weaponized against the federal government’s efforts to right America’s racial wrongs.

Today, vegans are dismissed as extremists. I hope that in the future, the suffering that we impose on animals through industrial-scale factory farming is considered the shocking position.

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?”

When we participate in politics to solve a problem, we’re participating transactionally. But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity.

Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations. Perhaps, he thought, the way we treat people we decide aren’t like us isn’t a product of our specific culture or experience but something deeper, something that reflects how humans think, organize, and bound their social worlds.

Reflect on that for a second: they preferred to give their group less so long as it meant the gap between what they got and what the out-group got was bigger.

His life story was, itself, a rebuttal of polarization’s coarse logic. This was the secret to his political success. He could speak to the best in America because he believed the best of America. He was like the friend who looked at you and saw the version of yourself you wanted to be.

Put more simply: 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.

Given the choice between what their eyes were telling them and what the group was telling them, they went with the group. “I felt conspicuous, going out on a limb, and subjecting myself to criticism that my perceptions, faculties were not as acute as they might be,” said one of the subjects in a post-experiment interview.

But parties, though based on a set of principles, aren’t disinterested teachers in search of truth. They’re organized groups looking to increase their power. Or, as the psychologists would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy.