Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

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 term “identity politics,” in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of weaker groups by making them look like self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate.

All politics is influenced by identity. Those identities are most powerful when they are so pervasive as to be either invisible or uncontroversial.

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.

There is no dense city in America that routinely votes Republican. There are few rural areas that vote Democratic. 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.23

Their choices map onto our politics not because they are trying to serve one side of the political divide but because our politics map onto our deeper preferences, and those deeper preferences drive much more than just our politics.

They argue that our politics, much like our interest in travel and spicy food and being in crowds, emerges from our psychological makeup.

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?”37

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.

“For both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

This will resonate with anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in researching counterarguments end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. This is true for all kinds of things, of course. Ever argued with a 9/11 truther? I have, and they are quite informed about the various melting points of steel. 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.

For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”29 Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.” Just as a press secretary is motivated to defend his or her boss’s positions, so, too, is our mind motivated to defend our group’s positions or the conclusion we need to reach for other reasons.

Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the front of American politics through rhetoric or action. Rather, Obama himself was a symbol of a browning America, of white America’s loss of control, of the fact that the country was changing and new groups were gaining power.

This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. 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. “Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,” Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”19

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.

The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it, to tell them they don’t deserve what they have, to make them consider that it might be taken away. The experience of losing status—and being told your loss of status is part of society’s march to justice—is itself radicalizing.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

There’s a whole subgenre of punditry arguing that Trump’s rise is a regrettable, but predictable, backlash to political correctness, and thus the blame for his emergence properly belongs to campus activists and Black Lives Matter protesters.

New lines are being drawn, but no one is quite sure where they are or who is doing the drawing. The power to define the boundaries of acceptable behavior and polite discourse is profound, and right now, it is contested. “I call it the democratization of discomfort,” says Richeson. “There were whole swaths of people uncomfortable all of the time. Now we’re democratizing it. Now more people across different races and religions feel uncomfortable.”

The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist.

But what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, the more mistaken they were about the other party (the one exception was the income category: high levels of political knowledge led to more accurate answers about the percentage of Republicans earning more than $250,000). This is a damning result: the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

The old line on local reporting was: “If it bleeds, it leads.” For political reporting, the principle is: “If it outrages, it leads.” And outrage is deeply connected to identity—we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group and violate our values. As such, polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.

But we don’t just want people to read our work. We want people to spread our work—to be so moved by what we wrote or said that they log on to Facebook and share it with their friends or head over to Reddit and try to tell the world. That’s how you get those dots to multiply. But people don’t share quiet voices. They share loud voices. They share work that moves them, that helps them express to their friends who they are and how they feel. Social platforms are about curating and expressing a public-facing identity. They’re about saying I’m a person who cares about this, likes that, and loathes this other thing. They are about signaling the groups you belong to and, just as important, the groups you don’t belong to.

interests become identities as they socialize you into a community.

I remember the Bush and Obama administrations begging the press to pay attention to this or that policy announcement. But when Trump sends out a misspelled tweet slamming Elizabeth Warren, it dominates cable for the rest of the day. The answer, simply, is that Trump understands what newsworthy really means, and he uses it to his advantage.

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.

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.

When you vote for a candidate, you’re not just voting for him or her. You are voting for, well, everything we have discussed up till now. You’re voting for your side to beat the other side. You’re voting to express your identity. You’re voting for your members of Congress to be able to pass bills. You’re voting for the judges your side would appoint. You’re voting so those smug jerks you fight with in comment sections don’t win, so that aunt or uncle you argue with at Thanksgiving can’t lord it over you. You’re voting to say your group is right and worthy and the other group is wrong and unworthy. That’s bigger than any one candidate for president. It’s true even if the personal characteristics of the other party’s nominee leave your standard-bearer looking like a decadent sleazebag.

When you vote, you’re voting to keep a candidate, a coalition, a movement, a media ecosystem, a set of donors, and a universe of people you don’t like and maybe even fear out of power. All of that gives you reason to learn to like your candidate and, if you can’t do that, to justify voting for him anyway. It’s perfectly rational to care more about the party label than a candidate’s character. Politics is about parties, not individuals.

McConnell didn’t break any laws or devise any new powers to stop Garland; he just led his party to break with the historical practice of appointing Supreme Court justices they didn’t agree with ideologically—a historical practice that forces parties to regularly cross their ideologies and voters for the good of the system. In breaking with that precedent, he was doing precisely what his voters wanted, and they rewarded him for it in the next election. Why should any of his successors do anything different?

Egged on by talk radio, cable news, right-wing blogs, and social media, the activist voters who make up the primary and caucus electorates have become angrier and angrier, not just at the Kenyan Socialist president but also at their own leaders.2

Why are the two parties so different? The answer is twofold: Democrats have an immune system of diversity and democracy. The Republican Party doesn’t.

Sorting has made Democrats more diverse and Republicans more homogenous. This is often seen as a weakness for Democrats. They’re a collection of interest groups, a party of list makers, an endless roll call. But it’s played a crucial role in moderating the party’s response to polarization.

According to a September 2019 Gallup poll, 75 percent of self-identified conservatives and 91 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing.7 This is because conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology. It’s a group identity.

This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back.

Crucially, the Democratic Party isn’t just more diverse in terms of its members; it’s also more diverse in its trusted information sources. In 2014, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents thirty-six different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each. Respondents who counted as “consistent liberals” trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera America, the BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, Daily Kos, The Daily Show, the Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC, the New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Yahoo! Consistent conservatives did not. Of the thirty-six outlets named, only a handful of deeply ideological sources commanded more trust than distrust among respondents who counted as consistently conservative: Fox News, Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal, the Blaze, the Drudge Report, The Sean Hannity Show, The Glenn Beck Program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. Pew also asked consistent liberals and conservatives which outlet served as their “main” news source. Here, too, the difference was stark. For the liberals, there was no dominant news source. CNN was the top choice with 15 percent, followed by NPR with 13 percent, MSNBC with 12 percent, and the New York Times with 10 percent. Amo...

mainstream newsrooms are built around incentives that are different from, and often contrary to, liberalism as a political movement. The New York Times and ABC News fear a liberal reputation—they want to be understood as neutral arbiters of truth—and reporting oppositionally and inconveniently on the Democratic Party is both part of the self-identity and the business model.

“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.”

“Republicans should be expected to win 65% of Presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”20

there is nothing more dangerous than a group accustomed to wielding power that feels its control slipping.

Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys’. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!” 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 alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization: it’s a legitimacy crisis that could threaten the very foundation of our political system. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.