Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

That’s polarization: the opinions themselves changed to cluster around two poles, with no one left in the middle.

While it’s true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, research shows that the dominant considerations when people are choosing a place to move are housing prices, school quality, crime rates, and similar quality-of-life questions.

Depending on the type of person you are, you might read one of those descriptions as compliment and one as indictment.

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. And that’s when our relationship to politics, and to each other, changes.

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.

Sports are such a powerful force in human society precisely because they harness primal instincts that pulse through our psyche.

Nothing brings a group together like a common enemy.

You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.”27

“epistocracy,” a system where the votes of the politically informed counted more than the votes of the politically naive.

The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.II18

An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different from our past.

In 2018, for the first time, Americans claiming “no religion” edged out Catholics and evangelicals to be the most popular response to the General Social Survey’s question on religion.8

when the Russians wanted to sow division in the American election, they focused their social media trolling on America’s racial divisions.

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 hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others.”

It takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups.

the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

there was nothing as pleasurable as drawing the boundaries of your group, as sending out a signal that only other members would understand.

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.

technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view.”

You don’t need a big audience when you have the right audience.

If you announce your campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, you’ll dominate mindshare among both the people who hate you, whose identity and group you’re threatening, and the people who’ve been waiting eagerly for someone to descend a golden escalator and finally stand up for them and their beliefs.

You can arouse that passion through inspiration, as Obama did, or through conflict, as Trump did.

American politics, thus, is responsive to two types of people: the polarized and the rich.

polarization has given the Democratic Party the flu, the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.