Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

The US presidency is a sacred trust, its occupant the wielder of unimaginable destructive power, and here, we had handed it to a human hurricane. And we had done so knowingly, purposefully.

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.

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.

Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.”6

But as the process wears on, as the politicians focus their attention and the media focuses its coverage, agreement dissolves. What once struck participants as reasonable compromises become unreasonable demands. What was once a positive-sum negotiation becomes a zero-sum war. And everyone involved believes every decision they made along the way was reasonable.

That 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

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.

A core argument of this book is that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics.

The answer is that our political identities are changing—and strengthening. The most powerful identities in modern politics are our political identities, which have come, in recent decades, to encompass and amplify a range of other central identities as well.

The act of choosing a party is the act of choosing whom we trust to transform our values into precise policy judgments across the vast range of issues that confront the country.

Politics, in this telling, was meant to calm our divisions, not represent them.

today’s independents vote more predictably for one party over the other than yesteryear’s partisans.

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.

The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party.

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.

Faced with anti-lynching legislation in the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that if he supported it, southern committee chairs would “block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing.”13 Moreover, if you weren’t acceptable to southern Democrats, you weren’t going to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in the first place: the party required a two-thirds supermajority of delegates to the national convention to approve a presidential ticket, which meant the South held an effective veto over a hostile nominee.

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.

The Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights, and the Republican Party’s decision to unite behind a standard-bearer who opposed the bill, cleared the way for southern conservatives to join the Republican Party. And that set the stage for all that followed.

If the Democratic and Republican Parties find themselves with an equal number of members from each group, America is totally unsorted.

The country holds the same mix of beliefs about pot in both examples. It’s just that in the second example, those beliefs are sorted by party.

Now fifty Americans want to legalize cannabis and fifty want to outlaw it. That’s polarization: the opinions themselves changed to cluster around two poles, with no one left in the middle.

In practical terms, he writes, both of these “have the consequence of increasing the tension between the two ends of the spectrum,” which is what polarization is meant to describe.

Both cannabis examples show people clustering around poles. It’s just that in one example, the poles that they’re clustering around reflect their policy opinions, while in the other, the poles they’re clustering around reflect their political identities.

Polarization begets polarization. But it doesn’t beget extremism. We often assume that voters and political systems that split the difference are less extreme than those that don’t, but this idea proves incoherent upon a moment’s inspection.

more sorted and polarized than the 1965 system—opinions were better aligned by party, and fewer politicians found themselves in the middle.

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.

When I say the political coalitions are becoming more sorted and more polarized, I mean only that: there is less ideological overlap, fewer of us are caught in the middle, and there is more tension between the poles.

I’d amend that slightly: the parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility, and the issue conflicts are just one expression of that division.

Psychologists speak of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

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.

This is the whole point of racial and ethnic stereotypes: the greed, criminality, venality, or idiocy we ascribe to others justifies our hatred or fear of them.

The first was that we were so tuned to sort the world into “us” and “them” that we would do so based on the lightest of cues. The second was that once we had sorted the world into “us” and “them,” we would act with favor toward our group and discriminate against the out-group—even in the absence of any reason to do so.

Human beings evolved to exist in groups. To be part of a group, and to see that group thrive, meant survival. To be exiled from a group, or to see your group crushed by its enemies, could mean death.

The sensitivities that helped us thrive within the interplay of a few groups of a few hundred people can drive us mad when exposed to the scale, noise, and sophisticated manipulations of modern capitalism and politics.

The big picture that emerges from this paper is that the people actually driving elections—the people knocking on doors, working for campaigns, and turning out to vote—are driven more by group rivalry than by tax policy.

finds that the least-engaged voters tend to look at politics through the lens of material self-interest (“what will this policy do for me?”) while the most-engaged look at politics through the lens of identity (“what does support for this policy position say about me?”).

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 key point Mason is making, though, is that those traits also operate as identities, and in coming together, they fuse into a single sense of self.

merging of the identities means when you activate one you often activate all, and each time they’re activated, they strengthen.

But when the NFL came into contact with politics, it became part of politics. Rather than a shared loved of football pulling our political identities toward compromise, our political identities polarized our love of football.

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.

Thus, though it seems that lots of different divisions would tear apart a society, it turns out that creating one bigger, deeper division—a mega-division—is more dangerous.

As our identities diverge, our worldview and agendas diverge, so all this is just a proportional response to deepening differences in self-interest.

much of our hostility is a pure expression of how we instinctively treat out-groups—it doesn’t need policy differences to catalyze it.

Over and again, Mason finds that identity is far more powerful than issue positions in driving polarization.

Westwood is quick to note that the comparison to racism doesn’t mean that partisanship is somehow worse than racism, more pervasive, or more damaging. It’s easier to see—and thus discriminate—against people based on their skin color than their partisanship, for instance. Moreover, political beliefs are a choice with moral implications while race is not. Judging someone on whether they support gay marriage, universal health care, or gun laws is far different from judging someone on the color of their skin.

This is, I think, the best way to understand the relationship between policy differences and identity conflict: they’re mutually reinforcing, not opposed.

But identity doesn’t just shape how we treat each other. It shapes how we understand the world.