Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

when people are choosing a place to move are housing prices, school quality, crime rates, and similar quality-of-life questions.[29]

the signals that tell us if a place is our kind of place, if a community is our kind of community, heighten our political divisions.

Psychologists speak of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The kinds of people most attracted to liberalism are the kinds of people who are excited by change, by difference, by diversity.

“In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me?

The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”[37]

You may have heard statistics like loneliness is worse for you than obesity or smoking.

After all, isn’t changing our minds in response to new information and arguments what we’re supposed to do?

The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.[ii]

There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.

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

But people don’t share quiet voices. They share loud voices. They share work that moves them, that helps them express to their friends who they are and how they feel.

But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. 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.

we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.

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

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

The news media isn’t just an actor in politics. It’s arguably the most powerful actor in politics.[iv]

You don’t become a national figure by being boring.

Individual donors are polarizing. Institutional donors are corrupting.

You’re voting for your side to beat the other side. You’re voting to express your identity. You’re voting for your members of Congress to be able to pass bills. You’re voting for the judges your side would appoint. You’re voting so those smug jerks you fight with in comment sections don’t win, so that aunt or uncle you argue with at Thanksgiving can’t lord it over you. You’re voting to say your group is right and worthy and the other group is wrong and unworthy.

Politics is about parties, not individuals.

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

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.

Yeah, I know. Of course, the politics book by the liberal Californian vegan ends with a call to mindfulness.

we give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more.