Why We're Polarized Quotes

“they want to know?” Which is like the creation story of cable news.6”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“We talk a lot about the left-right polarization in the political news. We don’t talk enough about the divide that precedes it: the chasm separating the interested from the uninterested.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties. Obama’s presidency was an example of the younger, more diverse coalition taking power; Trump’s presidency represented the older, whiter coalition taking it back.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,” Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote—a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. A few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t elect a president; by 2012, it could.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Obama, being African American, discussed racial issues and put forward race-conscious policies more often than past presidents. You’d be wrong. “According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“became more divided by race: shown pictures of the Obamas’ dog Bo, more racially resentful Americans liked the dog better when told it was a picture of Ted Kennedy’s dog Splash.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“percent. To put it even more starkly, about seven out of every ten seniors are white and Christian, compared with fewer than three in ten young adults—a trend being driven not just by demographic change but by fewer young people identifying as Christian. “These changes are big enough to feel, they’re fast enough to feel,”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“This isn’t just a statement about the future; it’s a description of the present.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“3 This isn’t just a statement about the future; it’s a description of the present. The”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of one were nonwhite.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The catalytic ingredient in his Senate campaign was liberal loathing of Cruz, the thrill that he might be defeated. When O’Rourke was running against other Democrats, his personal charisma failed to recapture the magic of his Senate race.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“And with that essential clarity, the parties sorted around virtually everything else, too. This transformation has taken the two parties from being coalitions that looked alike, lived similar lives, and thought only somewhat differently to two warring camps that look different, live different lives in different places, and find themselves in ever-deeper disagreement.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The digital revolution offered access to unimaginably vast vistas of information, but just as important, it offered access to unimaginably more choice. And that explosion of choice widened that interested-uninterested divide. Greater choices lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp in a careful review of the literature. “The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“In 2016, Georgetown University political theorist Jason Brennan released a book entitled Against Democracy, in which he argued for an “epistocracy,” a system where the votes of the politically informed counted more than the votes of the politically naive.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Demythologizing our past is necessary if we are to clearly understand our present. But an honest survey of America’s past offends the story we tell ourselves—it offends our sense of America as a true democracy and the Democratic Party’s sense of its own honorable history.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The Civil War was only one hundred years in the past at the time the Civil Rights Act passed, and during that interregnum, the white South had been trying to balance its top domestic priority - the enforcement of white supremacy - with its forced membership in the broader United States. The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home.

The Dixiecrat-Democrat pact is a powerful reminder that there are worse things than polarization, that what's now remembered as a golden age in American politics was purchased at a terrible cost.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“What's surprising about the 2016 election results isn't what happened. It's what didn't happen. Trump didn't lose by 30 points or win by 20 points. Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they'd chosen in 2012. That isn't to say there was nothing at all distinct or worthy of study. Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election. But the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat. 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

“So here, then, is what we know: even gentle, incidental exposure to reminders that America is diversifying -- and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation -- pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican party.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Dick Cheney, then a member of the House of Representatives, put it sharply in 1985. “Confrontation fits our strategy,” he said. “Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?”[22]”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“subservient, timid mentality of the permanent minority”[21] makes it easier to work with the majority but harder to win back the majority”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“is as powerful a political motivator as love.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized