Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

election: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

This was the white nationalism election, when the alt-right came into its own, when Trump promised to sweep in after the first black president in American history and put America back the way it was, to build a wall and make America great again.

What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

We 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.

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.

National Democrats cared about passing the New Deal, about winning presidential elections, about building infrastructure projects. Given the choice between working with a southern Democratic Party that could provide them crucial votes or challenging a southern Democratic Party that could defect and doom the Democratic Party’s national agenda, they chose accommodation.

“The ballot box acts like a time machine,” Robert Jones told me, “taking us back 10 years in race and religion. We reached the tipping point of white Christians being a minority of the population during Obama, but our calculations are it’ll be 2024 before we see that at the ballot box.”

The result is that the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political power but feels increasingly dismissed and offended culturally.

“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,” Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”19

Whose grievances get heard? Who gets to be referred to by the names and labels and pronouns they choose? Who grants respectability, and who takes it away? Put more simply, in a changing America, who holds power?

Parties aren’t weak because the rules have changed. The rules have changed because parties are weak.

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.

He’s done plenty of damage, but he’s not emerged as a dictator in control of American political institutions, as many liberals feared in the direct aftermath of the election. But the world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues. They are the ones who truly threaten republics, and they are watching.

This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back.

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? If you log on to Twitter nine times a day, can you take a couple breaths at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on?