Why We're Polarized

Don't waste your time reading this drivel.

If you have spent the last two to three years in seclusion, haven't read a good newspaper lately (e.g. Washington Post), or think Pew Research refers to a religious undertaking then this book will be interesting. Otherwise, for those out and about you already know what this book has to say. A rambling review of the obvious. I found it frustrating to read as I kept waiting for more out of my respect for Mr. Klein's prowess as a journalist.

Societies blow apart periodically. When they do long buried dreadfulness comes around again.

Why do societies blow apart? The principle reason is, what I call, loss of the generous spirit (what Levitsky and Ziblatt call mutual toleration)---when each side of the political divide think the worst of the other.

Ezra Klein's book lays out the whys and wherefores of political polarization in non-technical language. Lilliana Mason's academic but very readable book "Uncivil Agreement" laid the groundwork for Klein. Both books are well worth reading.

If I read Klein correctly, it is the citizens most engaged with politics who have traveled farthest down the dangerous slope of thinking the worst, of seeing the other side as the enemy. This leaves Klein somewhat sanguine about the majority of ordinary citizens.

A powerfully disturbing quote in Klein's book: "To hate like this is to be happy forever." Yes the quote is about the Duke/NC basketball rivalry, but it crosses far too easily into what our politics has become.

I will let readers answer for themselves how far the generous spirit has disappeared from the ordinary US citizen.

Lilliana Mason ends her book with the supposedly comforting thought that nothing in politics is forever. As someone who has been deeply affected by Michael Woods book on Yeats ("Yeats and Violence"), where everything comes around again, I take little comfort in Mason's closing thought.

Democrats are good. Republicans are bad. I was expecting a balanced presentation... which this is not.

from a trash writer

Another privileged 30 something coming off as wise and insightful.

Ezra Klein has written a timely book about our current political and cultural situation and how we got here. It’s not a political opinion book (although Klein is transparent about his own political preferences). Klein is trying to put our current situation into an historical and conceptual context, with the hope that, if we understand how we got where we are, we may be able to work our way out of it or at least manage our way within it better.

I don’t think the subject of Klein’s book needs any justification. The American people are polarized, and it’s reached a point of frustration such that seemingly no one can be persuaded to even consider rethinking their positions on anything from taxation to universal healthcare to climate change. Much less who should be president.

By “polarized,” Klein is not talking about extremism, although extremism may well be enabled by polarization. What he is talking about is the sorting of America into two “sides,” under the heading of political identity. Each side — Democrat and Republican — groups together almost exclusive demographics, political ideology, stands on national issues, and even seemingly non-political preferences such as what kind of neighborhoods we prefer to live in.

It wasn’t always this way, as Klein documents. Once upon a time, not so long ago (mid-twentieth century America), there were liberal Republicans (e.g., Nelson Rockefeller) and conservative Democrats (e.g., Strom Thurmond). Southern conservatives voted Democratic in presidential elections, and many northern liberals voted Republican. You couldn’t confidently predict someone’s position on a given issue from their party voting preference. Now such predictions are almost iron-clad.

So what happened?

There are really two complementary arguments that Klein makes — one straight-forwardly historical and the other a more philosophical and psychological claim about human reasoning.

The historical argument centers on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Until a southern Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the south had voted solidly Democratic — the “Dixiecrats.” Granted, as Klein says, the alliance between southern Dixiecrats and other, more northern, more liberal Democrats was a pragmatic one, not an ideological one. They disagreed on many issues — treatment of the African American population and respect for their voting rights being one or the primary one, but they agreed to look the other way and hold their noses when they had to in order to maintain the power of their coalition.

But the Civil Rights Act broke the back of the alliance. Johnson famously knew that it would, and that he had “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

But, by Klein’s argument, the decisive act was not decisive just for voting behavior, it was decisive for how Americans identified themselves and how they expressed their identities. Party identification became the primary sorting criterion for a person’s political and cultural identity. Civil Rights? Line up over there with the Democrats. Reduce government regulations? Over on the other side with the Republicans. Eventually, gay rights? Line up with the Democrats. And so on, through the list, including that if you prefer houses with large yards and a big distance between neighbors, you should line up with the Republicans. If you like urban life and diverse neighborhoods, you must be a Democrat.

Crucially, as Klein argues, alignment within the parties on all of these issues eliminated the need for compromises in the candidates and platforms of the parties. When there were Rockefellers among the Republicans, there was diversity of thought and a need to reach some consensus or compromise in order to act as a unity. Likewise, when there were Thurmonds among the Democrats (although, as Klein says later in the book, the Democrats do retain more diversity, with a bundle of demographics — white liberals, African Americans, Latinos, LGBT, and others representing a variety of interests to be reconciled).

With the homogenization of the political identities, there was very little room in the middle. In order to even have a political identity, you needed to sort. There was no room on either side for “undecided,” or perhaps even for “thoughtful.”

The philosophical or psychological point that Klein makes (actually he draws on the philosopher Joseph Heath’s book, Enlightenment 2.0, for this point) is that human reasoning is much less individual than we have traditionally thought it to be. Hence Heath’s “Enlightenment 2.0” as overcoming the traditional model of the individual decision-maker, reasoning his way to such things as policy preferences and choices of personal identity on their own (Enlightenment 1.0). Rationality, says Heath, “is inherently a collective project.”

Rather than a pejorative “herd reasoning”, Heath (and Klein following him) is getting at something more fundamental. Where does reasoning happen? It happens in conversations, in exchanges, in arguments, in debates (okay, sometimes). Moreover the very structures and practices of reasoning — the vocabulary and rules of reasoning itself — are social in nature. What counts as a good argument, what counts as a reason is something determined socially.

That’s not an uncontroversial argument, but in Klein’s account of polarization, it fits. Those on one “side” accept some arguments and not others. Often, and this is just as important a point, the reasons follow behind the positions, not in front of them. We construct the rationales for our political identities, and the choices under their headings after the fact more often than we would like to think. We don’t reason our way to them, we reason our way back to justifying them once we’ve chosen or fallen into them. And that’s not an “error” in our reasoning, it is just the way reasoning works (as Hume said, “reason is a slave to the passions”).

The historical argument explains what happened to push us into our polarized society, and the philosophical/psychological argument explains a good bit of the engine behind how that polarization happened.

Klein makes the complementary point, so apparent in social media, that, with this sorting into “sides,” our statements about our political (and cultural) preferences became expressions of our identities, not so much claims or theses to be debated as more intractable expressions of who we are.

Thus, the era of “identity politics.”

One interesting consequence of what Klein describes is that political identity can and does transcend the traditional political parties. Neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders would have been the choice of the traditional Republican or Democratic party apparatuses. But both were the choices of motivated members of their respective group identities, demonstrated by their success with individual, as opposed to more traditional institutional, donors.

The middle chapters of Klein’s book discuss some of the enabling factors and feedback systems, e.g., social media and the lining up of media in general along battle lines, that strengthen and perpetuate polarization. I won’t go into any depth on those — some of Klein’s points, especially regarding the interests and even the survival factors, for news organizations in the internet age, are interesting and worth thinking about — but the main argument of the book is, I think, the historical account of polarization buttressed by a philosophical/psychological account of political (and other) reasoning.

So far, the argument feels like Klein is hewing to a version of “moral equivalence.” Both “sides” are described in the same way. But Klein doesn’t buy moral equivalence wholesale. In his chapter on “The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans,” he cites the homogeneity of Republican demographics and ideology in contrast to diversity in both of those for Democrats. Democrats, like I mentioned above, must appeal to liberal white voters, Latinos, Blacks, LGBT voters, and others with differing priorities and interests. Doing so requires compromise and tends toward moderation. For Republicans, their core white voters may well display internal diversities but not on a comparable scale, enabling and encouraging more extreme party positions and actions. They also appear less vulnerable to division and disunity.

Actually, I’d quibble with Klein on this. Republicans may not be demographical diverse, but they include libertarians, evangelical Christians, nationalists, and other groups. It’s a whole different question why some of the members of those groups, e.g., the libertarian Rand Paul, fell in line behind Trump when his style of governing, as well as many of his expressed positions, were so opposed to their principles. The one answer that Klein provides is that Trump, and his supporters and advisers, succeeded in framing the choice as a war against an enemy that must be defeated at all costs. I’m not sure that’s a fully adequate answer — it may just push the question back to why they would buy that framing itself, given that they were falling in with something so seemingly diametrically opposed to their expressed principles. Cynically, I’m inclined toward thinking that, contrary to Klein’s claim that there is no room for compromise within the Republican political identity, those groups thoroughly compromised their principles.

I’d also toss in another point vs. moral equivalence. The fact that your position on a particular issue, e.g., climate change, is influenced by your political identity does not mean that you aren’t right (or wrong). It just means that, to take the issue seriously and to debate it seriously, we have go beyond merely identifying with a political group or party and repeating the rehearsed arguments of that identity. Unfortunately, in so many cases, we don’t do that, as I believe, with the “debate” over climate change. A common refrain is that “they have their facts and I have my facts.” We can do a lot better than that.

But back to Klein’s main storyline. He’s painted a pretty dire picture, if you think the polarization of America is a bad thing. It happened for big historical and philosophical/psychological reasons, it seems to have sunk our feet into our respective blocks of political concrete, and we can no longer move freely to act in any unified direction. We are doomed to conflict.

In his final chapter, “Managing Polarization — And Ourselves,” Klein gives his thoughts on where we go from here. He says that polarization in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad — after all, the period prior to the Civil Rights Act was one in which a large part of the American population was openly oppressed. The very act that set the polarization engine in motion was a (partial) remedy.

Klein is reluctant to propose solutions, and I don’t blame him. The problem he has posed, if we regard it as a problem (and I do), is bigger than any practical solutions he offers, or that I’ve heard.

Many of Klein’s recommendations seem difficult to imagine. In order to be enacted, they seem to assume a power structure different than the one he spent the previous chapters of the book describing. For example, among his ideas for how to “bombproof the government’s actions against political disaster,” he recommends eliminating the debt ceiling. Doing so would reunite the budget process with the process of empowering the government to pay its bills. The threat of default, by not raising the debt ceiling, has been employed by Republicans in recent years. Obviously, they believe the leverage it gives them is substantial, even if their goals so far in using it haven’t been met. They wouldn’t give it up willingly. It would require that Democrats regain power and enact the change.

One proposal that I had thought of myself as I was reading the chapters leading up to his recommendations, was adoption of some form of proportional representation, along with viable third (and maybe even fourth) parties. Such a system would reduce winner-take-all government, splitting power more finely, with a greater need for coalitions among disagreeing parties. But the structural changes required seem contrary to the power interests of both parties, particularly the Republican Party given its over-representation in power compared to its share of popular votes. Again, this would require a Democratic takeover of some sort (or a very unlikely come-to-Jesus moment on behalf of Republicans).

Maybe it’s just true that needed reforms will only happen if the Democratic Party gains the power to enact them. After all, I’m not sure that the “problem” of polarization is truly seen as so much of a problem to the Republican Party — it has, at least so far, served to magnify their power. Why would they go along with such changes, rather than oppose them with the very same vehement rhetoric that Klein gives so many examples of?

And why would Democrats, once in power, agree to changes that only evened out the field rather than turned it in their favor?

If the problem is as bad as it appears, or maybe even if not, the more do-able path seems to be to bite off victories where they can be gained. For example, Klein’s recommendation of support for the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact (a state by state pledge to support, in the Electoral College, the winner of the popular electoral vote in presidential elections) seems, at least on the surface, relatively practical in the foreseeable term. What is needed is for enough states to join the pledge to commit 270 electoral votes to the popular vote winner, and we currently stand at 196. That’s a change that would not require a constitutional amendment and that could be enacted state by state rather than at the more intractable national level.


Klein has given us a good problem to think about. I haven’t seen any big ideas that I like (much less thought of anything myself!). But if there is a big idea to propose, I would think it would be something along the lines of a systemic solution, just as the development of the problem has systemic roots. Changes that would kick into action a process of (this time, intended) change. I’m just not sure what that might be.

Who should read this book? Like I said at the beginning, this is not a political opinion book, although there are political opinions in it. That’s not the thrust, and if you’re looking for something to reinforce your opinions, whatever they are, there’s lot of books out there to help you — they spin off the presses daily. If you want to understand polarization, and contribute to thinking about what to do about it, great. Read the book and join the conversation.

Brilliantly written, researched and persuasively argued. Full of great insights from one of the best reporters in the business. A must read by every American!

Ezra Klein uses social science and polls to Tory and understand the political divide ripping this country apart. He starts by giving a history of the democrat and republican parties, notes that in an early 60’s paper by political scientists that they recommended that the parties NEEDED to be polarized to help voters choose as both parties had too many similarities (be careful what you wish for) and then proceeds to detail the history that drove each party to its conservative and progressive ideologies.

He also provides context of how the Republican Party, once the more progressive party, became a party where conservatives and even racists would align themselves 9he details how Southern Democrats, who were, essentially more conservative joined the Republican Party helping to reshape it to what it is today) and how the opposite happened to the Democratic Party with more progressive northern, western members drove a wedge between elements of their own party to embrace a much more liberal message).

Klein doesn’t provide any solutions that are solid to help bridge the gap between the extreme factions of both parties. Nor does he provide any solution to the Trump Republicans who have taken over the party from more traditional conservatives and the mainstream/more extreme elements of the Democratic Party working together. His insight into the chasm between the two is interesting and welcome.

Klein provides a fair balanced unbiased account of the wedge that has widened the gap between our two largest political parties in the U.S. with studies done by political and social scientists (for example, if you are a current GOP or progressive, you are more likely to object if your son or daughter marries someone with a different political belief rather than race). He notes that politics is one of the few areas where we can HATE or demonize someone and not appear to be out of step with social norms.

Recommended.

Haven’t finished yet. But the author is a little biased toward right