Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face.

In stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well—on a narrow range of performance criteria, that is—the ones that they get rewarded on in their current political or economic or commercial configuration.

So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more.

So why are the Democrats seen as the party that passed the Civil Rights Act? There, the answer is simple. Because they were the party that passed the Civil Rights Act. They held the majority in both chambers and the presidency. They chose to snap their alliance with the Dixiecrats to pursue justice. Bill Moyers, who served as special assistant to Johnson, recalls finding the president brooding in his bedroom the night he signed the Civil Rights Act. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Moyers remembers Johnson saying.

it turns out that there’s only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal their views actually are—to be exact, in both cases it’s about a .25 correlation.

The government predicts that in 2030, immigration will overtake new births as the dominant driver of population growth.

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.

Long before BuzzFeed, the internet was enabling people with niche interests to find one another and build communities around shared passions. IRC message boards were fractal worlds spinning off into ever smaller subgroups; history nerds would subdivide into medieval history nerds would subdivide into medieval history reenactors all the way until it was, inevitably, just three dudes looking at esoteric porn.

To ideologues, transactional politics always looks dirty. To the transactional, ideologues look self-destructive.

Given the way today’s weakened filibuster paralyzes the US Senate, how did the body survive, and even thrive, in this long era of unbreakable filibusters? The answer is that though the rules made the filibuster far more powerful for most of American history, the norms made it weaker. The filibuster was barely used.

Trump wasn’t a break with this Republican Party. He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology.

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

This is the way in which the parties are not structurally symmetrical and thus why they have not responded to a polarizing era in the same ways: Democrats simply can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left—and they are—but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power. And they know it.

the Republican Party has been warped by its ability to win elections without fashioning a majoritarian agenda. If we want politicians to adopt a broader and less polarizing approach to both politics and policy, we need to make them responsible for putting together broader, less polarized coalitions. A Republican Party that needed to put together popular vote majorities would be a healthier party, and that would make for a healthier politics.

the filibuster’s worst sin is that it drains the system of accountability. In theory, the way American politics works is that a party gets put in charge, that party governs, and then voters decide whether they like the results. In practice, the filibuster allows the Senate minority to hamstring the majority.

the path to honoring their insight lies in correcting their oversight.

And so the defining question of this next period in American politics is not whether we will be polarized. We already are. It is whether we will be democratized.