Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

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.

We talk a lot about the left-right polarization in the political news. We don’t talk enough about the divide that precedes it: the chasm separating the interested from the uninterested.

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.

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.

“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.”

A party that keeps losing voters has two choices. It can change itself—its agenda, its standard-bearers, its temperament—to win over new voters. Or it can turn against democracy, using the power it still holds to disenfranchise or weaken the voters who threaten it. The Republican Party, for now, has chosen the second path and chosen it decisively.

I wonder why Dems dont take the power grab path