Why We're Polarized

Ezra Klein (2020).?Why we’re polarized.?Avid Reader Press: New York

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ix ?2016 … something strange happened.?Donald Trump won the election

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xi?Rather than asking how Trump won, we should be asking how Trump was close enough to win .. Larry Bartels … What if nothing unusual happened at all?

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xiv ?white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and that overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election … the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat … We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds … Aren’t we better than this?

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xv ?This is not a book about people.?This is a book about systems

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xvii?Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems, Sidney Dekker … Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken or no parts are seen as broken.”

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xvii ?The American political system … a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole

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xix?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

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xx?everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics

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xxi?in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens

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xxii?we have countless identities, some of them in active conflict with each other

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xxii?Health policy is positive-sum, but identity conflict is zero-sum

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1?The Democratic and Republican Parties have dominated elections since 1864 … the Democratic and Republican Parties of today are not like the Democratic and Republican Parties of yesteryear

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2?1950 … the American Political Science Association (APSA) … pleads for a more polarized political system.?It laments that the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily

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3?Political parties are shortcuts

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6?When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise … But when a division exists between parties, it gets addressed through conflict

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7?[1964] George Romney … “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress,”

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8?It used to be common for voters to split their tickets … Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties

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9?Corwin Smidt … between 2000 and 2004, self-proclaimed independents were more stable in which party they supported than self-proclaimed strong partisans were from 1972 to 1976

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9-10?“negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose

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10?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

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10?“Partisan” is a pejorative in American life

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12 ?[Samara] Klar and [Yanna] 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

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12?partisans aren’t bad people … They’re normal people – you and me

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16?Smidt … a voter who mostly ignores American politics today is clearer on the differences between the two parties than political junkies and partisan loyalists were in 1980

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17?why the parties have become so different … race

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22?1950 to 2018 … the white South had been trying to balance its top priority – the enforcement of white supremacy, held in place by the dual weapons of law and violence

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23?The Dixiecrat-Democrat pact is a powerful reminder that there are worse things than polarization … 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

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24?During much of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party’s rule in the South was hegemonic

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25?1874 … As the New Orleans coup suggests, the Democratic Party enforced one-party rule

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30-31?the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … the old Confederacy, which realized that the language of small government conservatism could be weaponized against the federal government’s efforts to right America’s racial wrongs … cleared the way for southern conservatives to join the Republican Party?

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32?Hans Noel says that sorting is just a subcategory of polarization

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33?Polarization begets polarization.?But it doesn’t beget extremism

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35?Extremism is a value judgment

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36?The passage of the Civil Rights Act heralded the death of the Dixiecrats … That let the parties sort themselves ideologically

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37?In 2012 … 43 percent of self-identified Democrats, but only 9 percent of self-identified Republicans, were non-white … diversity was concentrated in the Democratic Party

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38?In 2014 … the single largest religious group in the Republican coalition was evangelical Protestants.?And the Democrats??Their single largest religious group was the religiously unaffiliated, the “nones.”

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38?2017 … As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die, “the two parties are now divided over race and religion – two deeply polarizing issues …” … the parties are dividing over fundamental identities

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39?growing urban-rural divide … Marc Muro … the dividing line is at about nine hundred people per square mile: above that, areas trend Democratic; below it, they turn Republican

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41?Bill Bishop … Between 4 and 5 percent of the population moves each year from one county to another

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

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44?openness to experience … is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness … connects to conservatism

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45?Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel locations track deep partisan divisions

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48?When we participate in politics to solve a problem, we’re participating transactionally.?But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity

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49?In 1970, Henri Tajfel published a paper with the anodyne title “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination.” … Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations

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50?“The most important principle of the subjective social order we construct for ourselves is the classification of groups as ‘we’ and ‘they,’ … even if there is no reason for it in terms of [our] own interests.”

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55?“Discriminatory intergroup behavior cannot be fully understood if it is considered solely in terms of ‘objective’ conflict of interests … it is the winning that seems more important to them,”

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57?Human beings evolved to exist in groups

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57?loneliness is worse for you than obesity or smoking

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60?sports … for one side to win the other must lose

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60-61?2015, Patrick R. Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover … “The behavior of partisans resembles that of sports team members acting to preserve the status of their teams rather than thoughtful citizens participating in the political process for the broader good,”

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62?How we feel matters much more than what we think, and in elections, the feelings that matter most are often our feelings about the other side.?Negative partisanship rears its head again

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63?the least-engaged voters tend to look at politics through the lens of material self-interest … while the most-engaged look at politics through the lens of identity

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63?Politicians … Nothing brings a group together like a common enemy

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64?The most effective politicians thrill their supporters.?But they do so in the context of the threat their opponents pose … You need anger

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66?[Barack Obama] could speak to the best in America because he believed the best of America

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67?Obama’s point here is that our political identities are not our only identities

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68?In practice, our political identities are polarizing our other identities, too

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73?A 2012 study by Joshua Gubler and Joel Sawat Selway surveyed data from more than one hundred countries and found that civil war is “an average of nearly twelve times less probable in societies where ethnicity is cross-cut by socio-economic class, geographic region and religion.”

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73?[Lilliana] Mason … 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

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74?Over and again, Mason finds that identity is far more powerful than issue positions in driving polarization … Crisis emerges when partisan identities fall into alignment with other social identities

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75?If he [Shanto Iyengar] was right, then party affiliation wasn’t simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them

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77?As Iyengar and [Sean] Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.” … partisanship even trumped race … partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages

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79?identity doesn’t just shape how we treat each other.?It shapes how we understand the world

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85?Joseph Heath … “reason is both decentralized and dispersed across multiple individuals.?It is not possible to be rational all by yourself; rationality is inherently a collective project.”

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86?1951, Solomon Asch … Given the choice between what their eyes were telling them and what the group was telling them, they went with the group … what is a political party, after all, but a group

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88-89?parties … aren’t disinterested teachers in search of truth.?They’re organized groups looking to increase their power … their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy

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89?dear reader.?You’re the kind of person who buys books like, well, this one

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90?partisans devote enormous amounts of energy persuading each other that there is a right answer to the difficult questions … The only problem is it’s wrong

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90?2013 … Dan Kahan … Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic … Why isn’t good data more effective in resolving political debates?

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92?The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them

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92?People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right

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

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95?most of the time, people are perfectly capable of being convinced by the best evidence … our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our group – or at least our social standing in our group.?And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly rational when we fool ourselves

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96?Changing your identity is a psychologically and socially brutal process … 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 sync with her peers potentially catastrophic,” making it “individually rational” to put group dynamics first when thinking about issues like climate change.” … 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.” … 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

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100?“motivated reasoning.”

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102?Kahan’s work suggests that cognition exists on a spectrum, ranging from issues where the truth matters and our identities don’t to issues where our identities dominate and the truth fades in importance

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103-104?2013 marked the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of one were non-white

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104?in 2030, immigration will overtake new births as the dominant driver of population growth.?About fifteen years after that, America will phase into majority-minority status – for the first time in the nation’s history, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the population

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105 ?Women now make up 56 percent of college students and are 8 percentage points more likely than men to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine

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105?In 2018, for the first time, Americans claiming “no religion” edged out Catholics and evangelicals to be the most popular response to the General Social Survey’s question on religion

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106-107?Demographic change, and the fears and hopes it evokes, is one of the tectonic forces shaping this era in American life

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107?“ethnic/racial minorities will comprise a majority of the U.S. populace by 2042.”

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108-109?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

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110?“… Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,” writes [Michael] Tesler

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110?There’s a reason why, when the Russians wanted to sow division in the American election, they focused their social media trolling on America’s racial divisions

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111-112?political power runs a decade behind demographics … But cultural power runs a decade or more ahead of demography

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113?“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,”

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115?A 2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 57 percent of whites agreed that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

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119?Most of us are winners in some ways and losers in others, and we feel the losses more acutely than the victories

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120?In their book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck analyze reams of data and show that racial resentment activated economic anxiety, rather than the other way around

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122?Eric Kaufmann … Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment

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126?in a changing America, who holds power?

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131?Eric Garcetti … Talk less, act more

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133?the five central types of violence waged against black, brown and indigenous Americans: physical, political, legal, economic and environmental

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134?A majority of Americans – though not of Republicans – believe the browning of America is a good thing for the country

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140?almost no one is forced to follow politics … most people who follow politics do so as a hobby

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142?The internet made information abundant … And yet surveys showed we weren’t, on average, any more politically informed.?Nor were we any more involved

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142?The key factor now, [Markus] Prior argued, was not access to political information, but interest in political information

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143?Greater choice lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less

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144?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

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144?James Hamilton writes, “News emerges not from individuals seeking to improve the functioning of democracy but from readers seeking diversion, reporters forging careers, and owners searching for profits.”

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146?To be interested in politics is to choose a side

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147?political journalism is weird

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149?the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes

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149?For political reporting, the principle is: “If it outrages, it leads.”?And outrage is deeply connected to identity – we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group and violate our values … polarized media … weaponizes differences

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155?[Jonah Peretti] The forces BuzzFeed found and followed are shaping political news and conversations

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156?Zeynep Tufekci … “… YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.?It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes.”

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158?an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion

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164?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

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169?Twitter feed matters because it sets the agenda for every political news outlet in the country

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172?swing voters … conceptualizing elections all wrong … almost all voters now had their minds made up … you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for.?What you needed to do was excite the group … to vote for you

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173?You still needed to win over swing voters, but the top priority was mobilizing the base

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174?[Costas] Panagopoulos … “presidential campaign strategies have shifted in recent years reflecting a stronger emphasis on base mobilization compared to persuading independent, undecided or swing voters

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176?“The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong,” … Julia Azari

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183?Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner … the more powerful the parties were, the less polarization the state legislatures showed

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186?you need to stand out … loud gets noticed.?Extreme gets noticed.?Confrontational gets noticed.?Moderate, conciliatory, judicious – not so much

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190?individual donors give money as a form of identity expression, institutional donors give money as a form of investment.?Individual donors are polarizing.?Institutional donors are corrupting.?American politics, thus, is responsive to two types of people: the polarized and the rich

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193?Trump’s win … depended heavily on voters who were actually just voting against Clinton

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193 ?Clinton … She is one of the most polarizing political figures of the modern era

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195?It’s perfectly rational to care more about the party label than a candidate’s character.?Politics is about parties, not individuals

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201?[Juan Linz] knew that the American political system had failed wherever else it had been tried … But he also knew that in America, the American political system had worked

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207?the Supreme Court … the idea that nominees should be judged on professional merit rather than philosophical alignment had long since ceased to reflect the real workings of the system

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210?In his book The Increasingly United States, Daniel Hopkins tracks the troubling nationalization of American politics.?At the core of that nationalization is an inversion of the Founder’s most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state than with our country

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216?[Frances Lee] When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s its only realistic shot at wielding influence.?Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents

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217?Lee’s argument is that close competition, where “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” breeds all-out partisan combat.?When winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of cooperation dissolves

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218?Theodore Lowi’s 1963 analysis … says that the party system that best fits America’s weird structure “is not a competitive two-party system but a system in which the second party is very weak: that is, a ‘modified one-party system.’”

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222?Filibusters were rare in past Senates (with one gruesome exception: they were used routinely to block anti-lynching and civil rights legislation)

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223?US Treasury bonds are considered the safest asset on the planet

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228?Trump wasn’t a break with this Republican Party.?He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology … [Norm] Ornstein

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229?Democrats have an immune system of diversity and democracy.?The Republican Party doesn’t

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230?Sorting has made Democrats more diverse and Republicans more homogeneous

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231?Republicans have become the party of white voters, Democrats the party of non-white voters … Sorting has made the Democrats into a coalition of difference and driven Republicans further into sameness

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232?Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins … Democrats say they prefer politicians who compromise to get things done, while Republicans say they prefer politicians who stick to their positions

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233?91 percent of self-identified conservative Republicans approved the job Trump was doing.?This is because conservatism isn’t, for most people, an ideology.?It’s a group identity

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234?the Democratic Party isn’t just more diverse in terms of its members; it’s also more diverse in its trusted information sources

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236?The Democratic Party’s informational ecosystem combines mainstream sources that seek objectivity, liberal sources that push partiality, and even some center-right sources with excellent reputations … There is no similar diversity in the GOP’s [Republican Party, also referred to as the "Grand Old Party"] trusted informational ecosystem, which is entirely built around conservative news sources, many of them propagandistic

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240?Democracy … should push against polarization.?But America isn’t a democracy … If America was a democracy, Democrats would control the House, the Senate, the White House, and, through those victories, a commanding majority on the Supreme Court.?Their weakness is the result of geography, not popularity

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241?this system restrains polarization among Democrats and unleashes it among Republicans

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241-242?a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears, and Ishaana Talesara calculates that “Republicans should be expected to win 65% of Presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

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242?The voters who hold the balance of power in American politics are whiter, older, and more Christian than the country as a whole

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247?Democrats simply can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans

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249?America’s modern run of polarization has its roots in the civil rights era, in the Democratic Party choosing to embrace racial equality and the Republican Party providing a home to white backlash.?Surely the polarization that followed that progress was preferable to the oppression that preceded it … The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression

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253?as I write these words in September 2019

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256?it’s long past time for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico to have congressional representation

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257?the most popular governors in the country are moderate Republicans leading blue [Democratic Party] states

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259?the Founders did not think about how to balance parties, because they didn’t think parties would exist

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261?all of human cognition is influenced by identity, and politics is part of human cognition

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262?the path of wisdom on identity politics is to be mindful of which of our identities are being activated, so that we can become intentional about which identities we work to activate

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263?become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us … Sometimes it’s worth being angry.?Sometimes it’s not.?If we don’t take the time to know which is which, we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others

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265?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 … “There are over five hundred thousand elected officials in the United States, only 537 of whom serve at the federal level,” writes Daniel Hopkins

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267?For all our problems, we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history

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267?the country’s early years – when new arrivals from Europe drove out and murdered indigenous peoples, brought over millions of enslaved Africans, and wrote laws making women second-class citizens

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267?Just a few decades ago, political assassinations were routine

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268?The Varieties of Democracy Project … gave the US political system a 48 on a 1 to 100 scale in 1945 and a 59 in 1965.?It was only after the civil rights movement that America began scoring in the ‘70s and ‘80s, marking it as a largely successful democracy … If we can do a bit better tomorrow, we will be doing much, much better than we have ever done before?