Why We're Polarized Quotes

“technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view.”[iii][9] You can call this the echo chamber theory of polarization: we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Aren’t we better than this? I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Once a political party has decided the path to governing is retaking the majority, not working with the existing majority, the incentives transform. Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“There's a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence, and such experts are never very far away.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“For both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group
identity. “It is not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests,” they write, “rather, it is that material
concerns are often irrelevant to the individual’s goals when forming a policy opinion.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“As the parties become more racially, religiously, ideologically, and geographically different, 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. The more sorted we are in our differences, the more different we grow in our preferences.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“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. In the drift into failure, accidents can happen without anything breaking, without anybody erring, without anybody violating the rules they consider relevant.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Journalists are hardly immune to these forces. We become more polarized, and more polarizing, when we start spending our time in polarizing environments. I have seen it in myself, and I have watched it in others: when we’re going for retweets, or when our main form of audience feedback is coming from partisan junkies on social media, it subtly but importantly warps our news judgement. It changes who we cover and what stories we chase. And when we cover politics in a more polarized way, anticipating or absorbing the tastes of a more polarized audience, we create a more polarized political reality.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power — and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive. The rest of the country then has to choose from more polarized options, and that in turn polarizes them — remember, the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“We venerate centrists, moderates, independents. In a telling experiment, Samara Klara and Yanna Krupnikov cued subjects to think about political disagreements and then handed them photographs of strangers, some of whom were identified as independents and others of whom were said to be partisans. The independents were rated as more attractive, “even when, by objective standards, the partisans were actually more attractive.” In another test of the theory, Klar and Krupnikov found that Americans are nearly 60 percent more likely to call themselves “independents” when they’re told they need to make a good impression on a stranger. Being independent isn’t about whom you vote for. It’s about your personal brand.

Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people—you and me—reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes. What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“This is a profound enough point worth dwelling on for a moment. When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate. An example here is health care: Democrats and Republicans spend billions of dollars in election ads emphasizing their disagreements on health care, because the debate motivates their supporters and, they hope, turns the public against their opponents. The upside of this is that important issues get aired and sometimes even resolved. The downside is that the divisions around them become deeper and angrier.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Even Trump’s team didn’t believe he was going to win. Plans were afoot for him to start a television channel in the aftermath of his loss. And then came election”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“There was violence here, and even attempted coups, as when members of Louisiana’s White League stormed New Orleans in 1874, trying to eject Governor William Kellogg, a Republican, and install his unsuccessful Democratic challenger, John McEnery. The insurgents took control of the city, forcing President Ulysses S. Grant to send in federal troops to restore order. In a telling postscript, a monument was erected in New Orleans in 1891 memorializing the White League members who died trying to take over the city. It was finally pulled down in 2017.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Imagine you work in an office where your boss, who you think is a jerk, needs your help to finish his projects. If you help him, he keeps his job and maybe even gets a promotion. If you refuse to help him, you become his boss, and he may get fired. Now add in a deep dose of disagreement—you hate his projects, believe them to be bad for the company and even the world—and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss and will be mad at you if you help him. Think you’ll help him under those conditions? That’s basically American politics right now. Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Imagine you work in an office where your boss, who you think is a jerk, needs your help to finish his projects. If you help him, he keeps his job and maybe even gets a promotion. If you refuse to help him, you become his boss, and he may get fired. Now add in a deep dose of disagreement—you hate his projects, believe them to be bad for the company and even the world—and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss and will be mad at you if you help him. Think you’ll help him under those conditions?”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our group’s advantage over other groups.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Now imagine that everyone who wants to legalize cannabis moves into the Democratic Party, everyone who wants to outlaw it joins the Republican Party, and the undecided voters are split evenly between the two parties. Now the parties are perfectly sorted but—and this is the crucial point—no one’s opinion has actually changed. The country holds the same mix of beliefs about pot in both examples. It’s just that in the second example, those beliefs are sorted by party.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else. “Nothing any ordinary member of the public personally believes about the existence, causes, or likely consequences of global warming will affect the risk that climate change poses to her, or to anyone or anything she cares about,” Kahan writes. “However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one [held by] people with whom she has a close affinity—and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life—she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment.” The reality, he concludes, is that “the cost to her of making a mistake on the science is zero,” but “the cost of being out of synch with her peers potentially catastrophic,” making it “individually rational” to put group dynamics first when thinking about issues like climate change.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“We are not divided. We can only be divided.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges— periods like this one. Demographic change, the election of the first black president, and the downstream cultural and political consequences of both have “led a sizeable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered. As a result, this racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks, and other minorities—in part because it seemed like the right thing to do. Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition—pure political tribalism.[17]”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Kahan calls this theory “identity-protective cognition”: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are and our relationships with the people we trust and love.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“If we can do a bit better tomorrow, we will be doing much, much better than we have ever done before.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“I am motivated in part by the radicalising realisation that I am often carrying out the biddings of a system I dislike, by the frustration that overcomes me when I realise I am acting more like a policy than like myself.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized