Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein.

5/5 rating. 268 pages.

Book #6 of 2023. Read March 1, 2023.

I think this is the most thought-provoking book I’ve read in years. The rating is because so many ideas that have kind of been swirling around just below the surface in my head were brought to the forefront. If you are going to read one book about politics – maybe ever – this might be the one to choose.

This book has an incredibly interesting view backed by data that the weirdest thing about 2016 was its normalcy in the sense of outcomes as compared to previous elections. It appears that politicians don’t matter near as much as we like to think and the systems are what actually lead politics.

“Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities.” – this is one of Ezra’s biggest ideas that he has imparted on me: if you know one thing about someone today, you can pretty confidently predict about 10 other things about them, this just didn’t necessarily use to be the case.

The move to more sorted and ideologically-aligned parties across unrelated topics has meant that the two parties truly see themselves and their ways of life being threatened by the opposing party – whether this is actually true or not doesn’t even really matter.

“If we can’t make decisions because of structural issues in our political system, or because of a habit of mind that doesn’t allow us to believe other people deserve to be on the playing field, we cannot govern ourselves. That is an existential threat to the next generation of Americans.”

Ezra finishes by saying that for now, polarization is here to stay for the most part. We need to bombproof the government so it runs smoothly; democratize government so people feel heard, and more voices are available than the red-blue dichotomy; and actually make our representatives govern.

Lastly, we need to be aware ourselves of what identities we are choosing to feed. Ezra says that instead of Democrat or Republican, we could choose to identify with curiosity, or fair-mindedness, or to care about the poor, or humanity.

Quotes:

“[Trump] won the electoral college even though 61 percent of voters, in Election Day exit polls, said he was unqualified to hold the presidency; even though most voters had a higher opinion of Clinton and believed Trump lacked the temperament for the office he sought.”

“Rather than asking how Trump won, we should be asking how Trump was close enough to win. How did a candidate like Trump—a candidate who radiated contempt for the party he represented and unfitness for the job he sought—get within a few thousand votes of the presidency in the first place?”

“Let’s look at it a different way. This was the white nationalism election, when the alt-right came into its own, when Trump promised to sweep in after the first black president in American history and put America back the way it was, to build a wall and make America great again. And yet, in 2004, the GOP candidate won 58 percent of white voters. In 2008, he won 55 percent of white voters. In 2012, he won 59 percent of white voters. Fast-forward to 2016: 57 percent.”

“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.”

“Every few years, a new crop of politicians emerges promising to put country over party, to govern on behalf of the people rather than the powerful, to listen to the better angels of our nature rather than the howling of our factions. And then the clock ticks forward, the insurgents become the establishment, public disillusionment sets in, the electorate swings a bit to the other side, and we start again.”

“All politics is influenced by identity.”

“The journalist Godfrey Hodgson recounts a conversation where [Robert] Kennedy warned that ‘the country was already split vertically, between sections, races, and ethnic groups,’ so it would be ‘dangerous to split it horizontally, too, between liberals and conservatives.’ Politics, in this telling, was meant to calm our divisions, not represent them.”

“Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina notes that when Gerald Ford ran against Jimmy Carter, only 54 percent of the electorate believed the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party. Almost 30 percent said there was no ideological difference at all between the two parties”

“Looking at districts with contested House races, they found that between 1972 and 1980, the correlation between the Democratic share of the House vote and the Democratic share of the presidential vote was .54. Between 1982 and 1990, that rose to .65. By 2018, it had reached .97! In forty years, support for the Democratic presidential candidate went from being a helpful, but far from reliable, predictor of support for a party’s House candidate to being an almost perfect guide.”

“In 1980, voters gave the opposite party a 45 on the thermometer—not as high as the 72 they gave their own party, but a pretty decent number all the same. After 1980, though, the numbers began dropping. By 1992, the opposing party was down to 40; by 1998, it had fallen to 38; in 2016, it was down to 29. Meanwhile, partisans’ views toward their own parties fell from 72 in 1980 to 65 in 2016.”

“Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.”

“In 2014, Pew found that 37 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats viewed the other party as ‘a threat to the nation’s well-being.’ By 2016, that was up to 45 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats.”

“During much of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party’s rule in the South was hegemonic. At times, Democrats occupied a stunning 95 percent of all elected offices, and as is true with authoritarian rulers everywhere, they did so in part by suppressing free and fair elections. African American voters were legally barred from voting in many cases and, when that didn’t work, beaten or even killed for trying to exercise the franchise.”

“Within three years of the Civil War’s end, ‘black voter registration ranged from 85 to 94 percent in the Deep South, and almost one million freedmen were voting throughout the region,’ records Mickey. Less than a century later, that fundamental freedom had been demolished. ‘By 1944, in the states of the old Confederacy, only 5 percent of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote, which left millions of blacks politically voiceless,’ writes Anderson. The repression was fiercest where black political power was most feared. In 1953, in the so-called Black Belt—the region of Alabama where the black population exceeded the white population—’only 1.3 percent of eligible African Americans were registered. Two counties had no black voters whatsoever.’”

“In an analysis at FiveThirtyEight, Dave Wasserman looked at ‘landslide counties’—counties where the winning presidential candidate got at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1992, 39 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. By 2016, that had shot to 61 percent of voters.”

“In less than twenty-five years, the percentage of voters who lived in a district where almost everyone thought like them politically went from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5.”

“Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”

“Discrimination varies in its targets and intensity across cultures, but it is surprisingly similar in its rationalizations.”

“That’s how deep the experience of social anxiety runs: it literally wakes you up throughout the night, because your body knows it can’t rest as deeply when it can’t rely on others for protection.”

“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.”

“In 1960, Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party. Respondents reacted with a shrug. Only 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they would be upset by the cross-party union.”

“In 2010, YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats professed concern at interparty marriage.”

“Iyengar’s hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages. ‘Political identity is fair game for hatred,’ he says. ‘Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.’”

“It was not an isolated case. In 2007, both Newt Gingrich and John McCain wanted a cap-and-trade program in order to reduce carbon emissions. A few years later, the entire party—including them—turned against the idea. In 2008, the Bush administration proposed, pushed, and signed the Economic Stimulus Act, a deficit-financed tax cut designed to boost the flagging economy. Under Obama, Republicans became staunch opponents of the idea that deficit-financed stimulus could help an economy, before re-embracing the idea under Trump. When Romney ran for president in 2012, he was mocked by Democrats for saying that Russia was America’s foremost geopolitical threat; after Russia helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election, Democrats turned sharply against Russia, while Republicans came to view Vladimir Putin more favorably than they viewed Obama.”

“‘However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one [held by] people with whom she has a close affinity—and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life—she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment.’ 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 is potentially catastrophic,’ making it ‘individually rational’ to put group dynamics first when thinking about issues like climate change.”

“once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”

“Among participants who lived in the western United States, those who read that whites had ceded majority status were more than 13 points likelier to subsequently say they favored the Republican Party.”

“I sent Spanish speakers to randomly selected train stations in towns around Boston to simply catch the train and ride like any other passenger. I focused on stations in white suburbs. The intent was to create the impression, by subtle manipulation, that the Latino population in these segregated towns was increasing. Before and after sending these Spanish speakers to the train platforms, I surveyed passengers on the platforms about their attitudes about immigration. After being exposed to the Spanish speakers on their metro lines for just three days, attitudes on these questions moved sharply rightward: The mostly liberal Democratic passengers had come to endorse immigration policies—including deportation of children of undocumented immigrants—similar to those endorsed by Trump in his campaign.”

“‘According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,’ writes Tesler.”

“Strikingly, ‘white liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help.’”

“Making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our group’s advantage over other groups.”

“This is a damning result: the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.”

“Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons. It seems as if you are never ‘hard core’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes.”

“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.”

“In Identity Crisis, Sides, Vavreck, and Tesler find that ‘from May 1, 2015, to April 30, 2016, Trump’s median share of cable news mentions was 52 percent.’ There were seventeen Republican candidates running for president, so Trump was getting more than half of all the media coverage, with the other sixteen candidates splitting the remainder.”

“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.”

“If 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.”

“What has changed, Hall finds, is that moderates are increasingly disgusted by the political system, by the compromises and fund-raising necessary to be a candidate, so fewer moderates are running in the first place.”

“Unlike in Goldwater’s or McGovern’s day, when ticket-splitting was common, any candidate able to win his party’s presidential primary can now count on his party’s support and has a damn good chance of winning the presidency.”

“As Hopkins writes, ‘Rather than asking, “How will this particular bill affect my district?” legislators in a nationalized polity come to ask, “Is my party for or against this bill?” That makes coalition building more difficult, as legislators all evaluate proposed legislation through the same partisan lens.’ A more nationalized politics is a more polarized politics.”

“In 2011, Congress got rid of earmarks entirely. They were considered a corrupt, and a corrupting, form of politics. Much better to have Congress run on pure principle and partisanship than the grimy work of negotiating something tangible for your constituents. To ideologues, transactional politics always looks dirty. To the transactional, ideologues look self-destructive.”

“We are a democratic republic. If we can’t make decisions because of structural issues in our political system, or because of a habit of mind that doesn’t allow us to believe other people deserve to be on the playing field, we cannot govern ourselves. That is an existential threat to the next generation of Americans.”

“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.”

“As I write these words, Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. The only national branch under Democratic control is the House. And yet Democrats didn’t just win more votes in the House elections. They won more votes in the Senate elections, too. They won more votes in both the 2016 and 2000 presidential elections. 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.”

“In December 2018, well into the Trump era, Gallup asked Democrats and Republicans whether they wanted to see their party become more liberal, more conservative, or more moderate. By a margin of 57–37, Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative; by a margin of 54–41, Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate.”

“It is properly Congress’s responsibility to manage spending, but it is also, in theory, Congress’s responsibility to manage it well. Revamping the budget process to make budgeting more automatic, with predictable spending changes that trigger in the absence of a new budget, would be a more sensible way to finance the government and would permit Congress to fight at less cost to the American people and the services they depend on.”

“Representation is an honored value in our political system, but as I write these words in September 2019, Congress’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average of polls is 16.6 percent, and its disapproval rating is 71.4 percent, so it’s not clear to me that the American people feel all that well represented.”

“Epps and Sitaraman suggest rebuilding the Supreme Court so it has fifteen justices: each party gets to appoint five, and then the ten partisan justices must unanimously appoint the remaining five. Until all fifteen are agreed upon, the Court wouldn’t be able to hear cases.”

“The underlying principle in all this is that the two parties both represent huge swaths of Americans, and the fact that one has the majority does not mean the other should be deprived of a voice.”

“But if we can’t turn off the power identity holds over us, we can harness it. Remember, our identities are manifold. ‘Republican’ is an identity, as is ‘Democrat.’ But so is ‘fair-minded,’ or ‘Christian,’ or ‘curious,’ or ‘New Yorker.’ It can be as much an identity to see yourself as an advocate for the poor, for animals, or for children as to be a member of a political party. The thing about the organized identities promoted by political coalitions is that there is a massive apparatus for defining, policing, and activating them. If you want to get out of that superstructure, it takes work. But it is possible.”

“He had purchased forty-five acres of land that used to sit atop a strip mine. The land became ‘his life’s work.’ He is restoring it, protecting it, turning it into something his community can enjoy. Hagerman, it turns out, hadn’t disengaged from civic life. He had simply disengaged from national politics to focus on local change. And he had constructed an informational ecosystem to support that choice. Perhaps he went too far in that project—way, way too far—but most of us are not going far enough.”

“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.”

“On August 27, 2019, Trump’s approval was 41.3 percent, and his disapproval was 54.2 percent, according to the website FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. Exactly one year later—a year that carried not just the coronavirus pandemic but Trump’s first impeachment, unemployment rising from 3.7 percent to 10.2 percent, and the protests following George Floyd’s murder—as Trump prepared to give his speech at the Republican National Convention, FiveThirtyEight had Trump at 42.2 percent approval and 54.3 percent disapproval. Everything had happened, and politically nothing had mattered. Opinions about Trump had barely budged.”

“But that 50-50 split makes American politics look far more evenly divided than it actually is. As Vox’s Ian Milhiser calculated, the 50 Senate Democrats represent 41 million more Americans than the 50 Senate Republicans.”

“In another system, polarization might even be disciplining, because the more you fear the other side winning, the more you’re willing to make the strategic decisions and ideological compromises necessary to beat them. But Republicans have a sufficiently clear minoritarian path to power that they need not make the difficult choices necessary to rediscover a majoritarian path to power.”

“The Brennan Center for Justice, which focuses on voting rights issues, calculated in mid-February of 2021 that the number of bills introduced to restrict the right to vote so far that year was seven times the number that were introduced by the same point in 2020.”

#readthis #ezraklein #whywerepolarized #politics #bookrecommendations

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