Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a weight so heavy that it can take an election as bizarre as 2016 and jam the result into the same grooves as Romney’s contest with Obama or Bush’s race against Kerry. 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.

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.

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.

when Gerald Ford ran against Jimmy Carter, only 54 percent of the electorate believed the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party. Almost 30 percent said there was no ideological difference at all between the two parties.

Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort.

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.

Different studies categorize people in different ways, but the common thread is that openness to experience—and the basic optimism that drives it—is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness, a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward disruptive change, connects to conservatism.

This is not to take away from the political power of inspiration. The most effective politicians thrill their supporters. But they do so in the context of the threat their opponents pose. And as politicians become less well-known and capable on the stump, they rely more and more heavily on activating fear of the other side. The lesson is known by politicians the world over. You don’t just need support. You need anger.

our political identities are not our only identities. And our other identities—Little League coach, PTA member, parent—are a lot less polarized than our political identities.

In 2002, psychologists Marilynn Brewer and Sonia Roccas showed that people with a lot of crosscutting identities tended to be more tolerant of outsiders than people with highly aligned identities.22 The insight here makes sense: the more your identities converge on a single point, the more your identities can be threatened simultaneously, and that makes conflict much more threatening.

A society, therefore, which is riven by a dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction, may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or falling to pieces than one split along just one line.

I want to dwell on this for a minute, because it’s an insane finding: being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.

among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.19

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.

on highly politicized issues, people’s actual definition of “expert” is “a credentialed person who agrees with me.”

There’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether the H1N1 flu is a problem, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive. Rather, our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our group—or at least our social standing in our group.

“As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.”

What’s worse is that it never feels cynical, it never reads as rationalization. It always, always feels like our honest search for the truth has led us to the answer that confirms our priors.

There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified.

The result is that the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political power but feels increasingly dismissed and offended culturally.

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 a single group dominates the political agenda, its grievances and demands are just coded as politics, and the vast majority of policy is designed in response to its concerns. But that changes when no one group can control the agenda but many groups can push items onto it; then the competition among identity-based groups becomes visible. It wasn’t called identity politics when every cabinet member of every administration was a white male. It’s only identity politics when there’s pressure to diversify appointments. And yet that process doesn’t reflect a strengthening of a particular identity group’s hold on politics but a weakening of it.

A world in which 50 percent of government appointees are female is a world in which fewer are male. Those losses will be felt and fought. Powerful social movements will arise to protect what is being taken, to justify the way things were before. Society often appears calm when fundamental injustices go unchallenged, but even if that were desirable—and it’s not—it will be impossible as historically marginalized groups gain the power to demand their share of the American dream.

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.

The digital revolution offered access to unimaginably vast vistas of information, but just as important, it offered access to unimaginably more choice. And that explosion of choice widened that interested-uninterested divide. Greater choices lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less.

The stories that thrive when your business model is a local monopoly that needs a news product that’s appealing to every kind of person who might shop at a department store is different from the stories that thrive when your business model is people who strongly agree with your stories sharing them with their friends.

an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim—through sharing and liking and following and subscribing—that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.

hearing contrary opinions drove partisans not just to a deeper certainty in the rightness of their cause, but more polarized policy positions—that

exposure to the other side’s attacks is likely to trigger rebuttal, not reflection—identity-protective

in offering policies, drawing contrasts, and choosing candidates meant to mobilize a polarized electorate, both parties are further polarizing that electorate. Clearer choices mean fewer undecided voters to persuade, which further reinforces the incentives to focus on base mobilization. Here, as elsewhere, polarization begets polarization;

We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters.

Subsequent candidates would, like Dean, find that you could raise tremendous amounts of money and excite huge crowds of people by saying the things that millions of Americans wanted said, even if the parties didn’t want their leading figures saying them. There is real value here. But it’s a channel through which racist lies and xenophobic demagoguery can travel as easily as overdue truths.

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.

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.

None of this happened to Trump. And it’s not because there weren’t Republicans repulsed by his behavior or interest groups unnerved by his heterodoxies. It’s because the parties are more polarized, so the alternative—Hillary Clinton—was unimaginable. This is the key to the weak parties/strong partisanship dichotomy: threat is as powerful a political motivator as love.

Trump’s win, in other words, depended heavily on voters who were actually just voting against Clinton—indeed, some preelection polls showed a majority of Trump supporters said they were motivated more by fear of Clinton than admiration of Trump.

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.

America was lucky, if that’s the right word, that Trump proved himself, once in office, distractible, lazy, and uninterested in following through on his most authoritarian rhetoric. He’s done plenty of damage, but he’s not emerged as a dictator in control of American political institutions, as many liberals feared in the direct aftermath of the election. But the world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues. They are the ones who truly threaten republics, and they are watching.

The Supreme Court is a powerful institution in American life, and it has often been a controversial institution in American life, but it has not always been a politically polarized institution in American life. As the parties have become more ideological, however, their expectations for Supreme Court justices followed suit.

Partisan disagreement and paralysis in Congress are making the Court’s judgments more consequential, as when the Court throws out a bill or invalidates a program; legislators rarely have the bipartisan consensus or partisan power to revisit the legislation and answer the Court through modifications.

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.

States used to have different political cultures from that of the nation as a whole. That gave members of Congress crosscutting incentives from what the national parties wanted. Now those incentives are, like so many others, stacked. As Hopkins writes, “Rather than asking, ‘How will this particular bill affect my district?’ legislators in a nationalized polity come to ask, ‘Is my party for or against this bill?’ That makes coalition building more difficult, as legislators all evaluate proposed legislation through the same partisan lens.” A more nationalized politics is a more polarized politics.

American politics, for most of its history, simply wasn’t very competitive. And contrary to what the conventional wisdom holds, perhaps that was a good thing, or at least, given the idiosyncrasies of our system, a necessary one. This is not what I learned in civics class. Close competition means voters have real choices, that politicians have accountability, that both sides need to keep public opinion and the common good in mind. Absent real competition, even a well-structured democracy rots into a corrupt autocracy.

a political system in which changes in congressional control are rarer, and are talked about more rarely, is going to be a political system that both is and feels far more stable in its hierarchies. This is key to Lee’s point. When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s its only realistic shot at wielding influence. Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents.

close competition, where “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” breeds all-out partisan combat. When winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of cooperation dissolves. If you’re signing on to the majority’s bills and boasting about the provisions you added to their legislation, then you’re part of their reelection strategy. If you’re keeping the majority from passing anything and making sure people are fed up with the state of politics, then the voters are likelier to make a change.

Once a political party has decided the path to governing is retaking the majority, not working with the existing majority, the incentives transform. Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.

America’s political system is unusual in that it permits divided government and is full of tools minorities can use to obstruct governance.

That’s basically American politics right now. Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad. This bizarre structure worked during much of American history because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority.