Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election.I5

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.

to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways.

We don’t just use politics for our own ends. Politics uses us for its own ends.

Much that happens in political campaigns is best understood as a struggle over which identities voters will inhabit come Election Day:

Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities.

Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our political system toward crisis.

Political parties are shortcuts.

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.

George Romney,

“Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress,”

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

Polarization begets polarization. But it doesn’t beget extremism.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act heralded the death of the Dixiecrats. The death of the Dixiecrats cleared the way for southern conservatives to join the Republican Party and northern liberals to join the Democratic Party.

“the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.”

In 1992, 39 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. By 2016, that had shot to 61 percent of voters.

growing urban-rural divide.

nine hundred people per square mile:

Between 4 and 5 percent of the population moves each year from one county to another—100

Big Five personality traits:

Prius or Pickup?,

“fluid” and “fixed.”

Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations.

they preferred to give their group less so long as it meant the gap between what they got and what the out-group got was bigger.

Sports remain ubiquitous, and they are ubiquitous because they respond to human beings’ deep desire to sort “us” from “them,” to see our group triumph over outsiders in combat and competition.

Politics is a team sport

what will this policy do for me?”)

most-engaged

what does support for this policy position s...

Nothing brings a group together like a common enemy.

You don’t just need support. You need anger.

Obama’s point here is that our political identities are not our only identities.

spend some time watching television commercials and ask yourself whether they’re advertising products or identities.

Obama argued that polarized media, gerrymandering, and the flood of political money tended to balkanize us into our political identities.

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

son or daughter married a member of the other political party.

“Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.”

“The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.”

“rational” and “irrational” forms of group conflict.

Collectively, a group can know more and reason better than an individual, and thus human beings with the social and intellectual skills to pool knowledge had a survival advantage over those who didn’t.

Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument.

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

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.

we’re being perfectly rational when we fool ourselves.

“People invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly,”

Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,”

You can think of politics as a market and powerful, primal forces like white identity as representing a market opportunity.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

democratization of discomfort,”