Why We’re Polarized

Metadata

• Author: [[Ezra Klein]]
• Full Title: Why We’re Polarized
• Category: #books

Highlights

• 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. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability. (Location 95)
• We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and confuse our theories of repair. We try to fix the system by changing the people who run it, only to find that they become part of the system, too. (Location 117)
• Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.” (Location 138)
  • Tags: [[systems]]
• That logic, put simply, is this: 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. Understanding that we exist in relationship with our political institutions, that they are changed by us and we are changed by them, is the key to this story. We don’t just use politics for our own ends. Politics uses us for its own ends. (Location 168)
• All of this points toward an important principle: the most-engaged experience politics differently than everyone else. In the previous chapter I mentioned the book Open versus Closed, which finds that the least-engaged voters tend to look at politics through the lens of material self-interest (“what will this policy do for me?”) while the most-engaged look at politics through the lens of identity (“what does support for this policy position say about me?”). (Location 1091)
  • Tags: [[politics]] [[polarization]]
• I’ve read a lot of studies in the course of researching this book, but this one still surprises me. When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their copartisan. This held true whether or not the copartisan had the higher GPA—when the Republican student was more qualified, Democrats chose him only 30 percent of the time, and when the Democrat was more qualified, Republicans chose him only 15 percent of the time. (Location 1284)
• I want to dwell on this for a minute, because it’s an insane finding: being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right. (Location 1509)
• Kahan calls this 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.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And 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. (Location 1570)
  • Tags: [[polarization]]
• There’s a quote I occasionally see ricochet around social media. “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”III26 There’s truth to this line, but it cuts both ways. To the extent that it’s true that a loss of privilege feels like oppression, that feeling needs to be taken seriously, both because it’s real, and because, left to fester, it can be weaponized by demagogues and reactionaries. (Location 1895)
  • Tags: [[polarization]]
• There’s a story Jennifer Richeson, the Yale psychologist responsible for some of the studies discussed above, told me about the building she works in. “My lab is an old engineering building and there’s exactly one women’s bathroom,” she said with a laugh. “No one noticed that, or at least no faculty members did.”30 And then, slowly, Yale began adding women to the department, and they noticed it. They complained. Now there was friction. What had gone unnoticed by those with power in one era was unacceptable to those gaining power in another. “When new people show up, they notice new things and start asking questions and begin making demands,” she says. (Location 1953)
  • Tags: [[favorite]]
• The demographics of elite, residential colleges has changed drastically in the last 50 years and, as a result, the definition of civility has begun to change. There are many, including myself, who see the act of whites dressing in blackface as a disrespectful act. Reminding students of the norms of civil, respectful behavior, including refraining from blackface, is in line with the actions of colleges historically. What has changed is not the expectation that colleges define norms for civility, but rather the definition of civility. There are behaviors on college campuses in general, and at Kenyon in particular, that may have passed a standard for civility 50 years ago—when the institution was all-male and almost all-white—that would not be considered civil today. (Location 1981)
• It’s become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now and you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces—the fear is not that the government is regulating speech but that protesters are chilling speech, that Twitter mobs rove the land looking for an errant word or misfired joke. In our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we’ve lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of politics and, indeed, much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear. (Location 2018)
• This is a dynamic Tesler describes well. “In the post–civil rights era, Democrats needed to maintain their nonwhite base without alienating white voters,” he told me. “So their incentive was silence. And Republicans needed to win over white voters without appearing racist. So their incentive was to speak about race in code. The shifts now have made it so Democrats’ incentive is to make explicitly pro–racial equality appeals and Republicans now have an incentive to make more explicit anti-minority appeals.” (Location 2049)
• The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim. This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.8 (Location 2415)
• There is evidence that structuring positive, collaborative interactions can promote understanding. But very little in either political media or social media is designed for positive interactions with the other side. (Location 2466)
  • Tags: [[favorite]]
• We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters. (Location 2724)
• This is why there are no long-standing presidential democracies save for the United States. And it’s why America doesn’t impose its specific form of government on others. “Think about Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria,” wrote Vox’s Matt Yglesias. These are countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders operating in close collaboration with occupation authorities. It’s striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America’s political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.11 (Location 3047)
• This is a problem that afflicts much in American governance. The rules, as set down in the Constitution and our institutions, push toward partisan dysfunction, conflict, and even collapse. The system works not through formal mechanisms that ensure the settlement of intractable disputes but through informal norms of compromise, forbearance, and moderation that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough. McConnell didn’t break any laws or devise any new powers to stop Garland; he just led his party to break with the historical practice of appointing Supreme Court justices they didn’t agree with ideologically—a historical practice that forces parties to regularly cross their ideologies and voters for the good of the system. In breaking with that precedent, he was doing precisely what his voters wanted, and they rewarded him for it in the next election. Why should any of his successors do anything different? (Location 3114)
  • Tags: [[polarization]] [[politics]]
• Imagine you work in an office where your boss, who you think is a jerk, needs your help to finish his projects. If you help him, he keeps his job and maybe even gets a promotion. If you refuse to help him, you become his boss, and he may get fired. Now add in a deep dose of disagreement—you hate his projects, believe them to be bad for the company and even the world—and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss and will be mad at you if you help him. Think you’ll help him under those conditions? That’s basically American politics right now. Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad. (Location 3257)
  • Tags: [[favorite]] [[incentives]] [[polarization]]
• Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance. (Location 3367)
• If conservatism was an ideology first and foremost, then a stronger attachment to that ideology should provide a stronger mooring against the winds of Trump. Instead, the precise opposite was true. The people who identified as most strongly conservative were the likeliest to move in response to Trump. And the effect was about the same size whether Trump was taking the conservative or liberal position. It was the direction of Trump, not the direction of the policy, that mattered. Interestingly, there wasn’t an equal and opposite reaction among strong liberals: they didn’t change position much to oppose Trump.I This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back. Amash, in an interview conducted with Vox’s Jane Coaston days before leaving the GOP, put it well. A lot of Trump Republicans have this mindset that they have to fight this all out war against the left. And if they have to use big government to do it, they’re perfectly fine with that. So when I go to Twitter and talk about overspending or the size of the government, I get a lot of reactions now from Trump supporters saying, “Who cares how big the government is”, or “Who cares how much we’re spending as long as we’re fighting against illegal (Location 3474)
• In an essay for Vox, Dave Roberts calls this “tribal epistemology”—when “information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.” (Location 3543)