Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter,” writes Vox’s Matt Yglesias, in an analysis of what he calls the “Great Awokening.”

white liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help.”

Democrats will need to build a platform that’s even more explicit in its pursuit of racial and gender equality, while Republicans will need to design a politics even more responsive to a coalition that feels itself losing power.

A majority of Americans—though not of Republicans—believe the browning of America is a good thing for the country.

The human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference.

feedback loop of polarization:

most people who follow politics do so as a hobby; they follow it in the way they follow a sport or a band.

What the digital information revolution offered wasn’t just more information but more choice of information.

polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.

the media often looks to her like “a conspiracy to surface the loudest voices.”

She’s right, but it’s no conspiracy. It’s more like the reason the food and restaurant industries pack products with salt and fat and sugar: that’s what the market demands. And market demand in media has become a more powerful and more precise force.

Cable news is journalism, but it’s also a business, and the business runs on ratings.

identity was the slingshot.

feed an interest with information; you build an identity through socialization.

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.

the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity, and the simplest way to do that, particularly in politics, was to focus on enemies.

Reading the other side doesn’t change our minds, it deepens our certainty

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

The fundamental thing the media does all day, every day, is decide what to cover—decide, that is, what is newsworthy.

increasingly identity-focused politics.”

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational.

“presidential campaign strategies have shifted in recent years reflecting a stronger emphasis on base mobilization compared to persuading independent, undecided or swing voters.”

polarization begets polarization; it’s a flywheel, not a switch.

parties weaker, partisans stronger, and the American political system more vulnerable to demagogues.

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.

individual donors give money as a form of identity expression, institutional donors give money as a form of investment.

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

moderates and ideologically extreme candidates are equally likely to be elected.”

Politics is about parties, not individuals.

In an era of high polarization, weak parties, and strong partisanship, it’s easy to see how extremists and, more than that, demagogues penetrate the system.

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

In recent decades, the media and political environments have both nationalized.

coverage of state and local politics is declining.

A nationalized media means nationalized political identities.

“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?’

A more nationalized politics is a more polarized politics.

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.

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

The age of cooperation is over. The disagreements run too deep, the debates are too nationalized, the coalitions are too different, the political identities are too powerful.

Democrats have an immune system of diversity and democracy.

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

conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology. It’s a group identity.

informational ecosystem premised

on purity rather than process.

A party that narrows the sources it listens to is also narrowing the voters it can speak to.

America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones.

Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections.

there is nothing more dangerous than a group accustomed to wielding power that feels its control slipping.

Rightly or wrongly, many conservatives—and particularly Christian conservatives—believe that they’ve been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, and as a result, they are on the verge of being vanquished, and America forever lost. Trump is the enemy they believe the left deserves, and perhaps the only hope Christian conservatives have.

the polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions.