Why We're Polarized Quotes

“Psychologists speak of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Where we fall on these scales is measurable in childhood and shapes our lives thereafter. It affects where we live, what we like, who we love. And, increasingly, it shapes our politics.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.” I’d amend that slightly: the parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility, and the issue conflicts are just one expression of that division.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“And that is where Clinton focuses her efforts, proving, convincingly, that everything from James Comey’s letter to Russia’s interference to deep-seated sexism could have, and probably did, account for the thin margin by which she lost.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Conservatives were choosing, again and again, the path of maximum confrontation and disruption, rallying behind the voices that promised to go where their predecessors hadn't, to speak the words that had previously been whispered, to embrace the tactics that had once been shunned. Trump wasn't a break with this Republican Party. He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Freed from the need to appeal to the median voter, Republicans have hewed to a more conservative and confrontational path than the country would prefer. They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Absent an external unifying force like a war, the divisions—or worse—we see today will prove the norm, while the depolarized politics of mid-twentieth-century America will prove the exception. And if we can't reverse polarization, as I suspect, then the path forward is clear: we need to reform the political system so it can function amid polarization.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“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

“We become more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more - indeed, we've come to like the party we vote for less - but because we came to dislike the opposing party more.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“These findings led the researchers to an interesting conclusion: “In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“In an interview I did with David Brooks in 2019, the genially conservative New York Times columnist reflected on the social agony criticizing Trump had caused him. “I had been part of the conservative movement my whole life,” he told me. “The Weekly Standard. The Wall Street Journal National Review Washington Times. Suddenly, I wasn’t the kind of conservative all the other conservatives were, and so my social circles drifted away.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Too much of American politics is decided by efforts to restrict who votes or, as in gerrymandering, to manipulate the weight those votes hold. A more democratic system won’t end polarization, but it will create a healthier form of competition.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“If you’re a Democrat, the Republican Party of 2017 poses a much sharper threat to your vision of a good society than the Republican Party of 1994 did. It includes fewer people who agree with you, and it has united around an agenda much further away from yours. The same is true, of course, for Republicans peering at the modern Democratic Party.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their copartisan”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“To appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Every few years, a new crop of politicians emerges promising to put country over party, to govern on behalf of the people rather than the powerful, to listen to the better angels of our nature rather than the howling of our factions. And then the clock ticks forward, the insurgents become the establishment, public disillusionment sets in, the electorate swings a bit to the other side, and we start again. This cycle is a tributary feeding into the country’s political rage—it is maddening to keep trying to fix a problem that only seems to get worse.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“I think I’m an optimist, but that’s because I try to hold to realism about our past. For all our problems, we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“identities. We don’t talk about big states and small states but about red states and blue states.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“A central problem in any free political system is how to secure balanced competition.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“There is no less dysfunctional politics without a less dysfunctional GOP, and the path to a less dysfunctional GOP is forcing the party to reach beyond the ethnonationalist coalition Trump rode to victory.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“but more important than the details is the simple principle that voting should be easy, not hard. The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“If DC and Puerto Rico have representation, that would be another push for the Republican Party to veer away from deepening racial polarization as an electoral strategy.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“I have more confidence in my diagnosis than my prescription,”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“I’ve tried to show in this book, the polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions. It implicates capitalism and geography, politicians and political institutions, human psychology and America’s changing demography. And for now, at least, it’s here to stay.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters, they win power by winning the votes of most places.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Whatever Trump’s moral failings, he’s a ruthless street fighter suited for an era of political combat. 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.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Republicans have hewed to a more conservative and confrontational path than the country would prefer. They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds. Republicans know that their coalition is endangered, buffeted by demographic headwinds and an aging base. And that has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized