Why We’re Polarized By Ezra Klein — Summary and Book Review
This is the first essay in a series of book reviews (which are mostly summaries) I’m writing to help me better remember what I read. This one is a bit lengthy; my goal is to write summaries that are about half as long as this one.
Summary and Thoughts
In 2016, Trump’s presidential victory shocked the nation — or at least, Hillary Clinton, Democrats, pollsters, the establishment media, political moderates, and even Trump’s own campaign staff. But as Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox and opinion writer at the New York Times, explains in his book Why We’re Polarized, the real question is not how Trump won, but how a self-declared “p*ssy grabber” was close enough to win in the first place. To Klein, the election was not an anomaly: Trump won a similar proportion of male, female, white, Hispanic, and Christian voters as other Republican candidates, despite his irregularities. When looking solely at the numbers, the election was quite typical.
To explain the polarized system that elected Trump, Klein introduces two theses: first, the American political system is not “broken” insofar as it promotes polarization; it is doing exactly what its incentives suggest it would do. Second, American politics has become polarized around identity politics, and not in the way that Fox News likes to denounce “identity politics.” Rather, our party allegiances have become tied to all types of racial, gender, religious, geographical, and other identities, whether you’re a white wall-loving Christian or a gay Latino in California.
But it wasn’t always this way.
In the 1950s, America was so unpolarized that the country’s most prominent political scientists wrote a paper calling for a more polarized system featured on the New York Times front page. To them, differentiated political parties would be a useful proxy for voters to identify the policies they preferred, but since the parties were too similar, voters wouldn’t know which party would better represent them. The parties overlapped on abortion, healthcare, race, free trade, taxes, essentially anything.
One of the reasons for this is that prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the “two-party” American system was really a “four-party” system: liberal Republicans, conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats, and Dixiecrats. The southern Dixiecrats were Democratic because the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, and the South was poor, so Dixiecrats supported the Democrats’ pro-poor policies. This had a moderating effect, as each party had to collaborate — usually with the other half of their own party — to pass crucial parts of their agenda.
But the Democrats’ passage of the Civil Rights Act isolated the Dixiecrats. The Republicans, on the other hand, nominated Barry Goldwater for president, a candidate who had voted against the Civil Rights Act and was an advocate for states’ rights. This gradually led the Dixiecrats to join the Republicans and triggered the “sorting” that makes identity such a polarizing aspect of politics today: minorities gravitated towards Democrats and whites towards Republicans. Today, we are politically sorted by geography, psychology, and the supermarkets we shop at. Republicans and Democrats look at the world in radically different ways and — in terms of race, religion, and location — look radically different to the world.
Herein lies my first criticism of Why We’re Polarized, which is more-so a point of confusion. For one, Klein introduces the book by arguing that today’s system is a result of the incentives it holds, not specific individuals or events — but that’s contradicted by his argument that the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater are the roots of sorting and thus polarization.
There’s also a slight disconnect between the racial sorting that resulted from the Civil Rights Act’s passage and the broader sorting following the act. For instance, what happened to the liberal Republicans? What made racist Dixiecrats less “pro-poor” when they shifted towards Barry Goldwater? Klein’s argumentation is convincing insofar as it explains racial sorting amongst the parties, but I’d have liked him to explain why broader psychological and geographic sorting occurred and how that polarized our policy. (This shouldn’t be too hard, since race is associated with a lot of other demographics and factors).
As a result of sorting, identity became a key part of politics. Identity’s importance can be explained rather simply: people are drawn to those they identify with and are antagonistic to those they do not.
A key theme of Klein’s identity discussion is negative partisanship: people are less-so driven by support of their own group than by fear of the other. He cites many compelling statistics: studies about boys giving money to different groups of boys, how distaste of the opposing party is better correlated with campaign donations than support of one’s own, how hatred of Democrats increases Republicans’ chances of voting, and sports rivalries.
Even worse, when identities are engaged, persuasion is difficult. Klein argues identity politics drives motivated reasoning, so people rationalize ideas despite mountains of counterevidence. When acting under motivated reasoning, new information is not persuasive; instead, we pick and choose the evidence we want to hear, which ends up solidifying our positions. This is why persuading people from the other side is so difficult: our reasoning is driven by a raw, fundamental desire to affirm our identities, so we go to great lengths to protect ourselves and reject outside information.
America’s rapid demographic change has inflamed identity politics. Soon, the country will become “majority-minority”, leading Yale Law Professor (and Tiger Mother) Amy Chua to write:
“Today, no group in America feels comfortable 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 tribalis.”
Klein cites several convincing studies about how outgroups threaten our fundamental desire for safety. In one experiment, researchers found sending Latinos into neighborhoods — even liberal Democratic ones — led people to support strongly anti-immigration policies.
This is also why Obama’s presidency did not bring on a post-racial society but rather a more racialized one. Obama won by motivating a diverse coalition of voters, which is precisely what made him so concerning to whites. He symbolized the “browning of America,” which deeply threatened America’s white, Christian identity.
As the threat of a browning America pushed white Christians to the right, it also pushed the Democratic party to the left. For instance, the Democrats’ immigration platform of the 1990s was Trump-like, but Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton shifted significantly leftward.
I’d like to expand upon an interesting point Klein brings up in his chapter about America’s changing demographics. He argues that most politics is identity politics, but since America has long been a white-dominated country, white-centric identity politics have always been considered normal politics.
“It wasn’t considered identity politics when every cabinet member of every administration was a white male. It’s only identity politics when there’s pressure to diversify appointments,” he writes.
In my opinion, this is an oversimplification, and I think most readers will feel a twinge of cognitive dissonance when reading this example.
To me, there are two reasons why Democrats will always be the more “identity-centric” party. First, Democrats must appeal to more identities than Republicans. When Biden ran for president, he needed to show genuine dedication to numerous identities: blacks, Hispanics, women, working class voters, middle class voters, and LGBTQs. To be clear: Biden can’t simply split his time between multiple identities; he needs to show real dedication to supporting multiple subgroups, which means he must spend more time on identity than a Republican who only needs to appeal to white dudes.
Klein actually admits that Democrats must appeal to more identities than Republicans, but he argues that this is a moderating effect because Democrats must appeal to more diverse perspectives. This is true, but I think it can also be a polarizing effect when it comes it to identity.
Second, because of white-cis-male privilege, Democrats who care about racial, gender, and LGBTQ equality must promote identity-centric policies. To Democrats, minorities need targeted policies such as investment in inner city schools or affirmative action and diversity quotas. By contrast, Republicans don’t need to promote identity as much because the white identity is already doing pretty well. This isn’t to discount that Republicans often run on protecting white Christian beliefs, but Democrats must protect various identities while also explicitly advocating for targeted policies that promote these identities. That’s why Klein’s political cabinet example is somewhat inaccurate: we don’t know that a white-dominant cabinet is a product of identity politics, especially since there is a disproportionate number of politically ambitious and well-connected white Harvard grads, but we do know that Biden has tried to promote minority perspectives in his cabinet.
Having established the historical and demographic trends that have driven polarization, Klein moves onto his “system” arguments, starting with the media. With the explosion of the internet and entertainment on TV, people now have more access to political information than ever, but unfortunately, that is overridden by the near-infinite number of distractions we have as well. As such, the gap between the politically interested and dis-interested has grown, and what’s more politically interesting than identity issues?
Today’s media, then, has a bias towards identity conflicts, which strengthen consumers’ group identity, which then makes them more hostile to other identities. Klein cites a study showing that people who consumed more political media were actually more mistaken about the other party, which suggests that the media — such as CNN or Fox News — is focused on the most confrontational, extreme aspects of identity conflict.
Klein sums up his view quite nicely at the end of the chapter:
“The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.”
Klein’s next system argument concerns polarizing elections, which can broken down into four driving factors: the death of the swing vote, weaker political parties, money, and negative partisanship.
First, starting in the 2000s, presidential campaign strategy entered the “post-persuasion” period because strategists realized there were few swing voters, and thus decided to focus more on base motivation. This set into motion the polarization flywheel; in running on mobilizing the base, parties became less appealing to the opposing sides, further polarizing each side.
Second, political parties have weakened. Fifty years ago, Trump and Bernie would never have had the success they had during the 2016 primaries, namely because parties were gatekeepers for candidates. Both parties have adopted primary systems, so the way of winning the nomination has become appealing to an intense minority, which has made partisans stronger and parties weaker.
Third, campaign finance is broken. Big donors like corporations push for policies that often go under the radar but are still influential, but small donors are polarizing because they tend to donate to attention-grabbing names and demagogues. And with the rise of email, small donations have risen, allowing more polarizing candidates to run.
Fourth, negative partisanship means that extreme candidates on one side are still more appealing than the other side’s candidate. In Klein’s words: “You might prefer a moderate Republican to a fire-breathing conservative, but given what the Left looks like to you these days, you’ll take either over a Democrat.”
The result of polarization has been a dysfunctional, unrepresentative government. American democracy is quite unique in that the president can be from a different party than the Senate; most European democracies are set up so the party that wins legislative power also wins executive power. The American system is thus vulnerable to gridlock and dysfunction. Case in point: when Antonin Scalia died, Obama nominated Merrick Garland as his replacement but failed to get the senate to debate Garland’s nomination.
Concurrently, American elections have become a lot closer; there are no more long stretches where a single party controls the presidency and/or strong majorities in Congress like we saw fifty to a hundred years ago. When there was no chance in beating the majority, it was more important to influence policies the majority supported. When races are close, minority parties who want to win back the majority know dysfunction is bad for the majority and good for the minority.
How have minority parties become so effective at making government dysfunctional? For one, in 2011, Congress abolished earmarks (though they have since returned), making bargaining more difficult. More importantly, the filibuster makes passing significant legislation difficult without a super majority, which is rare in today’s environment. As races have become more competitive and negative polarization has increased, the filibuster has become incredibly popular.
Finally, Klein explores the incentives that have driven the Republican party rightward but kept the Democratic party somewhat in line. As I mentioned before, Klein believes that the Democrats’ diversity is a moderating force, which I mostly agree with. Republicans appeal to white conservatives, Democrats must appeal to traditionalist blacks and liberal whites; Republicans appeal to Christians, Democrats appeal to Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and so on. As such, Democrats cannot go too extreme towards one direction.
Fox News is a big factor, too. Democrats rely on a diversity of sources, from leftist publications like Vox and HuffPost to the the center-left New York Times and the center-right Wall Street Journal. Republicans rely on far fewer news sources with a much lesser dedication to truth, with the most prominent example being Fox News.
Even Tucker Carlson admitted at CPAC 2009: “The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it is also… a paper that actually cares about accuracy… Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions” (unfortunately, they did not).
Thus, because Republicans rely disproportionately on a few conservative publications with less dedication to accuracy, they have become more susceptible to ideological extremism.
The last incentive concerns the way democracy is structured. The electoral college, senate, and house are biased towards Republicans (for instance, the Dakota Territory has four senators but California only has two), which means that Democrats need to reach more voters than expected to win Congress and the presidency (and the opposite for the Republicans). The result is a rightward pull, which moderates the Democrats and drives Republicans towards extremes.
“That’s let them appeal to an electorate considerable to the right of the median voter, to get away with decisions that would’ve torched another party. But it’s also forced them into dependence on an electorate that feels its power slipping away, and that demands a response proportionate to its fears,” Klein writes.
So yes, while the system is designed to polarize, its effect has been most pronounced on Republicans, which is why the party has become so extreme today.
Klein concludes with several solutions that he admits are far from perfect and require far more examination. The solutions include “bombproofing,” which reduces party’s abilities to screw over the country by abolishing the debt ceiling, democratization, which includes a national popular vote and making D.C. and Puerto Rico states, and “balancing,” which includes making the Supreme Court balanced between Republican and Democrat-nominated justices.
On an individual level, Klein recommends that we depolarize ourselves: we should be mindful of the identities triggered by the articles we read; we should pay more attention to local politics, which we have more potential to influence and is less polarized.
While our system sucks, Klein says that a lot has improved from the unpolarized America of 70 years ago. Sure, America was less polarized, but that was based on a compromise between liberal Democrats and the racist Dixiecrats of the south, where lynchings and racial epithets were common. Today’s America is still much more of a democracy than that of the past.
Conclusion
Ezra Klein is a fantastic writer who brilliantly weaves together studies and anecdotes to explain Why We’re Polarized. Still, 270 pages is not a lot to explain the complex history and systems that led to today. Klein’s work is incredibly “Vox-like”: clearly explained, but it leaves me with unanswered questions on a topic that doesn’t seem like it can be so clearly explained in any number of pages, let alone 270. I’m not sure if the book mentions Reagan a single time, or the influences of inequality and 2008 recession on polarization. Perhaps Klein is correct in his explanation that systems, not individuals and events, are what have driven polarization, but the least he could do is address competing hypotheses.
Still, the book is very readable and well-argued, with persuasive quotations and statistics. Even if you don’t agree with the broader argument, the book’s details are informative. I would give it a “definitely worth spending less time on Instagram to read” out of 10.
