Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Politics, they argue, is a war between pragmatists “concerned primarily with staying in power” and “policy-demanding” purists, who care above all about getting their agenda passed. Defunding parties empowers the purists over the pragmatists.

If it was just about winning, people would give to the closest races, based on expert opinion about flipping seats. But people often give to the races where they’re most ideologically invested, no matter the chances of success

But somehow or another, you need to stand out. You have to get noticed, retweeted, booked. And, in general, loud gets noticed. Extreme gets noticed.

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.

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.

Institutional donors want government to work, it’s true—but they want it to work in their favor. 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.

In my experience, transactional giving drives the bills no one has heard of, the provisions few people read, the regulatory processes the public and the media tend to ignore. But at the macro level—the level of presidential politics and legislative fights that lead front pages day after day—it’s partisan dollars that dominate outcomes.

Once an issue becomes a red-blue collision, corporate cash often loses out to the zero-sum logic of partisanship or the fury of the base.

This is the key to the weak parties/strong partisanship dichotomy: threat is as powerful a political motivator as love.

we’re seeing less variation in voting patterns due to ideology and more stability due to partisanship.

You’re voting for your side to beat the other side. You’re voting to express your identity.

You’re voting to say your group is right and worthy and the other group is wrong and unworthy.

It’s perfectly rational to care more about the party label than a candidate’s character. Politics is about parties, not individuals.

But he was operating in an era when the Supreme Court had become a more partisan institution rendering more partisan decisions on more partisan cases. The idea that nominees should be judged on professional merit rather than philosophical alignment had long since ceased to reflect the real workings of the system.

At the core of that nationalization is an inversion of the Founders’ most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state than with our country.

A nationalized media means nationalized political identities.

‘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.

A weird thing happened as we nationalized our politics. We became disgusted with the ways that local politics played out nationally. Take earmarks, the small addenda members of Congress would add on to bills to fund a road, a hospital, or a job-training bill back home. Earmarks were a way that bipartisan cooperation was, yes, bought.

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.

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.

Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer.

So what’s happening now is the norms and understandings that made the informal system work are collapsing, and the underlying, dysfunctional structure is coming clear, with disastrous consequences for day-to-day governance.

Back when American politics was less competitive and less polarized, filibusters were rare. They were rare in part because the parties were ideologically diverse, which prevented the internal agreement that leads to coordinated and strategic obstruction, and in part because the minority party saw little chance of regaining power, which left it cautious about antagonizing the majority. But now that the disagreements between the parties run deep and control of the Senate teeters on a knife’s edge, the filibuster is a constant.

The problem is that we have a political system where the rules create irresolvable conflict, gridlock, and even global financial crises.

What that means is Republicans have been able to appeal to their party through ideology. Democrats haven’t. They’ve had to appease a coalition of whites and nonwhites, liberals and moderates, the fixed and the fluid. They’ve done that by promising different policies to different groups—offering a transactionalist, more than ideological, approach to party building.

What they find is that the Democratic Party is a diverse collection of interest groups held together by policy goals, while the Republican Party is built atop a more united base that finds commonality in more abstract, ideological commitments.

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.

If conservatism was an ideology first and foremost, then a stronger attachment to that ideology should provide a stronger mooring against the winds of Trump. Instead, the precise opposite was true. The people who identified as most strongly conservative were the likeliest to move in response to Trump. And the effect was about the same size whether Trump was taking the conservative or liberal position. It was the direction of Trump, not the direction of the policy, that mattered. Interestingly, there wasn’t an equal and opposite reaction among strong liberals: they didn’t change position much to oppose Trump.

The audience that is sufficiently alienated by mainstream outlets to present a business opportunity is uniformly conservative, and creating a differentiated enough product to appeal to them means creating a product that chooses to cater to conservative identity, rather than a product that routinely confronts it. But the result is that Democrats rely on a diversity of information sources that discipline their flights of fancy, while Republicans rely on a narrower set of media institutions that propel their polarization.

The difference between the parties is that Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities, and more skeptical voters, than Republicans do. Successful national Democrats construct broad coalitions, and that’s a practice that cuts against the incentives of pure polarization.

polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions. It implicates capitalism and geography, politicians and political institutions, human psychology and America’s changing demography.

We know that politicians are becoming more responsive to a media that amplifies conflict and a base that loathes weakness. We know that confrontation and paralysis have become divided government’s natural state.

We should, to the extent possible and consistent with political accountability, bombproof the government’s operations against political disaster.

Revamping the budget process to make budgeting more automatic, with predictable spending changes that trigger in the absence of a new budget, would be a more sensible way to finance the government and would permit Congress to fight at less cost to the American people and the services they depend on.

An expansion of automatic economic stabilizers offers a possible answer: as the unemployment rate rises, the federal government can automatically absorb more state Medicaid costs, boost unemployment and food stamp spending, and begin lowering payroll taxes or expanding Social Security checks.

where congressional inaction can do great damage, we should ask ourselves whether the upside of congressional deliberation truly outweighs the risk of unnecessary disaster.

The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls.

Too much of American politics is decided by efforts to restrict who votes or, as in gerrymandering, to manipulate the weight those votes hold. A more democratic system won’t end polarization, but it will create a healthier form of competition.

The problem in our system is that what we balanced for is no longer what’s competing. Today, the strongest and most politically important identities are partisan identities.

The primary way the system gets its hooks into us is by threatening or otherwise activating our political identities and using the catalytic energy to get us to contribute, vote, read, share, or just generally be pissed off.

All politics is influenced by identity. That’s not because all politics is literally identity politics. It’s because all of human cognition is influenced by identity, and politics is part of human cognition. We cannot sever ourselves from our circumstances. We will never fully know how fully we’ve been shaped by our contexts. Who we are, where we grew up, whom we’ve learned to trust and fear, love and hate, respect and dismiss—it’s deeper than conscious thought.

In this case, the relevant factor I’m urging you to pay attention to is identity. What identity is that article invoking? What identity is making you defensive? What does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity? Can you notice when it happens?

Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, of what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is a necessary first step to gaining some control of the process.

But I’ll be blunt here in a way that cuts against my professional interests: we give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more.

Again, I’m not counseling you to abandon national politics. But audit your informational diet and ask what percentage of political stories you read are national versus state or local. Watch yourself for a week and reflect on how much of your political emotion and energy attach to the national stories. If that mix is overwhelmingly tilted toward the national scene, consider tilting it back.

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? There isn’t an end state to American politics. The search for a static answer will always be folly. There is no one best way for the system to work. There is only the best we can do right now.

And in an economy in which diplomas are increasingly demanded for middle-class jobs, and cultural power is increasingly aimed at more urban and educated consumers, voters without an education are going to be angrier at both economic and cultural institutions they feel locked out of and more receptive to populist candidates who promise to fight for them against elites.