Mostly it’s because we’re humans and humans are dumb, tribal apes. Also, America is in deep trouble because our constitution contains some serious mistakes that we need to get fixed. That’s the short version of what Ezra Klein has to say about Why We’re Polarized.
But there’s a lot more to it than that. Klein, one of the biggest names in modern journalism, co-founded Vox and along with Nate Silver, helped pioneer a new school of journalism that’s heavily influenced by empirical social science. Vox is also — much moreso than Silver’s FiveThirtyEight — unambiguously a publication of the progressive left, deeply confident that empirical social science supports left-leaning policy goals. Conservatives have criticized the publication of being hopelessly biased and called its “explanatory journalism” schtick patronizing.
Why We’re Polarized gives a pretty good idea of how Ezra Klein thinks about the current state of American politics and American political journalism. I’ll note that Klein thinks in terms of systems, not stories; rather than identify heroes or villains, or ask where things might have gone differently, he describes our polarized political system as if it were the engine of a car; each part supporting the totality of how the machine operates. Of course, the difference is that no one designed this engine intentionally and most of us don’t like where it seems to be heading. This reminds me of how David Simon treats the War on Drugs in The Wire, but that’s neither here nor there.
Negative partisanship and gridlock
Klein draws upon the findings both of psychology and of political science to understand how the homo sapiens brain affects the modern American political system and also how the modern American political system affects the brain of homo sapiens. Most of the research he cites isn’t new to me, but it’s useful to have it all gathered in one place and analyzed as a whole.
The psychological research Klein cites shows that humans have a very strong tendency to polarize into groups, and to perceive reality in ways distorted by group membership. Some examples:
- The famous Robber’s Cave Experiment demostrated how group-based hostility can form around even the thinnest of distinctions.
- This paper (if anyone finds a non-paywalled version, let me know) is a favorite of mine: Bartels found that most Democrats believed inflation rose during Reagan’s presidency and most Republicans believed the deficit rose during Clinton’s presidency; the more politically informed and polarized subjects were, the more likely they were to believe these things. In fact, of course, reducing inflation was one of Reagan’s signature achievements, and reducing the deficit one of Clinton’s.
- Another favorite of mine: Democrats and Republicans hold exaggerated views about how extreme the views of the other party’s voters are, and the more educated and informed the Democrats and Republicans in question are, the less accurate their views are about the other party.
Given these tendencies, one might wonder not why we have become more polarized in recent decades, but why we haven’t always been so polarized? Klein’s answer here draws on political history: During the early and middle parts of the twentieth century, a series of unusual partisan coalitions played out in ways that kept a lid on polarization. The Democratic Party generally tended to be liberal, but for historical reasons (i.e. the Civil War) it also contained a large number of southerners who ranged from moderate to very conservative; the Republican Party was on the whole more conservative but it also contained quite a few northeasterners who were relatively liberal, especially on social issues.
For decades, these cross-cutting pressures countered the natural human tendency toward polarization, The passage of the Civil Rights Act began a process that ultimately led almost all conservative southerners to leave the Democratic Party and become Republicans, and conversely most liberal northeasterners to leave the Republican Party and become Democrats. With cross-party ideological alliances removed, nothing stood in the way of increasing polarization.
While Klein recognizes that polarization makes people stupid, he ultimately doesn’t seem to think it’s that big of a problem in itself; he shares the belief, common among liberals, that American conservatism is little more than veiled racism so there’s little to regret about liberals polarizing themselves against it. The problem, he believes, is that American democratic institutions happened to be structured (the Senate filibuster, Supreme Court nominations) such that they function well in only two conditions:
- When one of the two major parties has overwhelming dominance of the government.
- When the two parties share power and are willing to cooperate.
Through most of early American history, the first of these two conditions held; first the Federalists, then the Democrats, then the Republicans were consistently in control of most branches of government most of the time. After the New Deal, the parties shared power more competitively, but a we discussed above, the presence of cross-partisan ideological alliances made it easy for them to cooperate. It’s only now, after collapse of the New Deal coalition, that we see neither condition hold; the two parties are engaged in nonstop competitive struggle for control of the three branches of government, with no incentive to cooperate and every incentive to sabotage each other’s attempts to govern.
The repeated debt ceiling standoffs during the Obama administration are an example of the dangers of this situation — even though a failure to raise the debt ceiling could cause a global financial crisis that put 2008 to shame, Republicans nevertheless had strong political incentives to play a game of chicken in order to extract whatever concessions they could from the Democratic president.
Klein’s sixth chapter, on polarization in the media, deserves special mention, as this is one area where Klein speaks from personal experience rather than social science research. He notes that the current media environment, in which consumers have nearly unlimited choice in what news to consume, rewards publications that publish hyper-partisan content and use splashy, exaggerated headlines. He’s clearly ambivalent about Vox’s role in this environment; for more on this topic I recommend this podcast episode, in which historian Jill Lepore grills him on why he hasn’t quit Twitter yet.
Solutions, political and personal
It’s probably best to start with what Klein does not think is a potential solution: We can’t go back to a less partisan political system. Throughout American history, extreme partisan polarization has been the norm, because the structure of the United States government supports partisan polarization. It was only an exceptional set of historical accidents that made the depolarized era of the mid-twentieth century possible; there is no way someone could design such a system intentionally, nor would anyone want to.
(After the book had already gone to the presses, Klein found some interesting work on polarization in other countries; he confirmed that the situation in the mid-century United States was indeed extremely unusual not just in American history but worldwide.)
Klein’s solutions instead focus on containing the negative consequences of partisanship by reforming political institutions. Some, like getting rid of the debt ceiling, eliminating the filibuster, and introducing systems for proportional representation in congress and partisan balancing on the Supreme Court, would not clearly advantage either party in the long term and would likely reduce the problems polarization causes. Others, such as granting statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, would clearly make the United States more democratic…but they would also obviously make it more Democratic, and it’s not clear how that addresses the problem of polarization per se.
What’s less satisfying are Klein’s answers on the personal and cultural level — when he switches from asking “how do we prevent a second Civil War?” to “how do we keep politics from making us stupid?” He offers two: “Identity mindfulness” and “rediscover a politics of place.” Rediscovering a politics of place basically means paying a little bit less attention to national political issues — which tend to be sharply polarized along partisan lines — and more to local political issues, which tend to be less partisan and more concrete.
To be honest I’m a little unclear on what problem Klein is trying to solve with this one. Surely local politics would benefit from more people paying attention to it. And perhaps some peoples’ mental health would benefit if they paid more attention to local rather than national politics. But that seems like dodging the epistemological problems posed by polarization rather than solving or reducing them.
By “identity mindfulness”, Klein more or less just means “taking a step back”; to be self-conscious of the power that psychological power polarization has to make us stupid. This is surely a good idea, and it’s something that’s on my mind a lot; I find Klein’s thoughts on the matter underdeveloped but I’ll address that in a separate, follow-up post.
Not Peer Reviewed 
Another great book review.