Mike Groll/AP Photo
A Tax Day Tea Party rally in Albany, New York, April 15, 2009. The Tea Party movement was launched in 2009 to oppose the policies of President Barack Obama.
Ezra Klein’s first book is an almanac of our modern politics, tracking the conflict, partisanship, and gridlock that anyone who follows the news today knows all too well. Why We’re Polarized reaches into history to outline today’s partisan landscape, featuring academic studies and Klein’s own analysis about polarization, identity, and our social culture. It can make you feel hyper-aware of your own identities while reading it.
The most provocative parts of the book are when Klein, who formerly held my position as a Prospect writing fellow as well other writing and editing roles here before creating The Washington Post’s Wonkblog and founding news site Vox, evaluates the stacking of different personal identities into what he calls “mega-identities.” Some of these identities, such as Californian or sports fan, are more flexible than others, like race, gender, or citizenship status. Yet they have come to define us socially and politically, which Klein doesn’t necessarily denounce. In the last chapter, he notes, “This is not to say we should become afraid of our identities becoming inflamed … sometimes it’s worth being angry.”
Klein leaves readers with the simple fact that polarization exists, obstructs the government’s efficiency, and changes how we view political campaigns. And, maybe, we go from there. Below, Klein talks with me about how this book fits into his larger journalistic objectives, why the party structures in the 1960s tamped down political tactics, and how polarization will play a role in 2020.
An edited transcript follows.
Brittany Gibson: How do you view this book fitting in with your work to create these bigger-picture explainers? I found some old videos of you talking about starting Vox and it seemed like that was one of your main goals. How does this book fit into that project?
Ezra Klein: It’s all part of the same project. I care about political journalism because I care about the power of politics to make things better for people. And I believe political journalism is worth doing because I believe that understanding the central questions of what policy would be best or how is a political system and structure actually functioning to make it hard to pass those best policies is really important. That you can’t make good decisions about how to act in policy without good information. So this book, like a lot of my work, represents me trying to understand the system I see around me and in many ways I’m part of, trying to understand how it works, trying to understand how it brings out what it does in people. I’m trying to understand why it can be so predictable even as it includes such a range of human beings with all their various motivations and sensibilities and temperaments and activities. And so to try to build the model or framework for seeing politics as a set of interlocking systems in shaping people’s incentives in reasonably predictable ways, such as if you want to get different outcomes from the political system, you need to actually change the system, not just change the people. And that work for me goes back a long time, you can look in the archives of The American Prospect and you’ll find a cover that I was sort of the lead editor on and wrote the lead piece for from the month of the 2008 election and it’s called, if I remember correctly, “The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think),” and it’s profiles of people like—recognizing to that point, that there’s about to be an election, and a new president, but recognizing that a lot more can come from the system, so you have profiles in there of people like Max Baucus, the Senate finance chair, the piece I wrote about the limits of the presidency. And just trying to—in general, I think we have a problem with personalizing American politics and inviting too much of our hope in this candidate or that candidate to win and then change everything. And this book in many ways is about why this has been bigger than any one person and why it seems so capable of absorbing people into it and making them its handmaidens.
BG: You talk a little bit [in the book] and like you just said your role in this as well as someone who does political journalism. When you were writing the book, what kind of reflections were you having on your own past work in political journalism, as you’re writing, you know, a whole chapter on critiques and problems and feedback for political journalism and news media?
EK: These are issues that I’ve been struggling with a long time. A lot of my personal career, in a lot of ways going back to my Prospect days, is built on believing the media, the political media, is a powerful actor in politics and an agent of change and not just a mirror of reality. The choices we make shape the political world that we then cover. Choices we make in what to cover and how to cover it, and who to give attention to and what to amplify. And I try to the best of my ability—and I recognize that I’m compromised by the system I’m part of, too. But I try to the best of my ability to think about what we’re doing right and wrong and build my own journalistic project to respond. And the Prospect when I was there had some of this, was built in some ways on this critique. We used to joke that it was counter-counterintuitive journalism. It was the age when people loved things like the mid-’90s New Republic, and there was this big fad of counterintuitive journalism, ‘This thing you thought was right? Well, actually it’s wrong.’ You know, there’d be things like ‘the minimum wage is bad.’ And often we found ourselves in the position of saying, ‘No, the thing you thought was right is actually right. And the thing you thought was wrong is actually wrong.’ And sometimes you just have to see the truth staring you in the face and not try to be so clever about it. When I went to The Washington Post and created Wonkblog, and this goes to my roots at the Prospect as a policy journalist, that was in part a critique of political media that was obsessed with horse-race campaign journalism and deeply under-covered policy. And I thought that things would be better if we covered more policy. And obviously many other people were involved in that project, too. Vox is about explanatory journalism, the need to give people the context so they can follow stories that maybe they haven’t been following since the beginning, the recognition that the news media’s recency bias actually makes it very hard for people to follow the stories that matter for them in the world because we basically say to them it’s your job to know everything that’s happened before today, and we’ll tell you what happened today. But most people don’t know everything that’s happened before today, and so the compromises we needed to make when we had the space limitations of print, so we could only tell people a limited amount, were over on the web. And so we tried at Vox, and continue to try and build more contextual-style journalism. And something that I’m thinking about now though, and this is a part of the experiences I’ve had at Vox, is how do you operate in political journalism, recognizing the problems high levels of polarization pose to the system without making them worse. Because the nature of polarization, which I argue in the book, is it makes choices much clearer. It makes the differences between parties and coalitions and policies often times much larger. Simply wiring honestly about Donald Trump requires you to write in more polarizing language than has been true for a lot of other presidents in my lifetime. It has been hard after Donald Trump gets up and gives a functionally nonsense speech or runs an attack comedy riff to treat that as, ‘Well, the president got up there and made some good points.’ You can’t pretend. And so when that’s happening you’re turning off many of the people who are attached to him, who are in some ways the people it’s most important for you to reach. And then as I argue in the media chapter in the book, you have this more foundational problem of political media is increasingly only speaking to people who’ve already sharply made up their minds. It’s that the left-right divide is a secondary divide to the interested-uninterested divide, and if what you care about is informing people, not just preaching to them, how do you think about that interested-uninterested divide. What does that mean for your work? And I don’t have the answer for that one yet, but first, you gotta build the theory.
BG: Yes, I see. I’m upset you don’t have the answer. But I am pleased that you’re citing your work at the Prospect as informing some of this high-level confusion.
EK: Always. The Prospect is my incubation and origin story. I will always be grateful.
BG: When I was reading the book, and reading the studies specifically that were chosen, highlighting this tribalism we have that [then] applies to politics, I started to find myself hyper-aware of my identities, my biases, and then second-guessing my reactions to this information. So I wanted to ask, did you feel that same kind of awareness when you were writing and researching the book? And how did that affect how you wrote the book? Choosing which studies to use and you even have a line in the book that ‘maybe this whole book is just confirming my biases’?
EK: I’m glad it had that effect for you. I think it should. It should have that effect for all of us, and it did for me. I think reading the book you’ll see I tried to reference some of those complexities quite a bit. I say early on in the book, ‘I am not standing outside this system looking in. I am standing inside this system looking out.’ That part of the inquiry is motivated by feeling sometimes that I act more like American Politics than I act like myself. And so I tried to be mindful in the way these things act on me and then try to understand how they get called up and where they come from. But that’s very different from saying I’ve escaped them. I don’t think in any way that I have. And not only that, I don’t think they are escapable. These aren’t just cognitive biases. They are in part. But these identities connect to real things, real differences, and what should happen to the country. A point I make over and over and over again in the book is polarization sharpens the choices in real ways. It changes the nature of American politics such that it’s stranger, it’s less logical, less rational to remain undecided. I say at one point in the book, a lot of these things I don’t think should make you overly, deeply question yourself and your whole world. But the place that I think it’s really tough is the chapter I have about motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognitions, the chapter about how we absorb and sort information based on our identities, based on our political leanings. The evidence on that stuff is overwhelming, it’s overwhelming. And what’s worse is the evidence is that these dynamics affect people even more sharply when they’re highly informed, when they’re really smart. That all that intellectual horsepower gets turned towards justifying what you already believe. And so this idea that you’ll cut down on various forms of self-deception just by being super-informed is actually not true. Nor is it [true] that you can cut down on it easily just by reading the other side, because oftentimes in doing that, when you’re reading them say things that are offensive to you will actually deepen your own biases. And so I say in that section that this research is in certain ways, for me as someone who has devoted much of my life to the work of trying to gather good information, produce good reporting and analysis, and use that to help people inform their political decisions and actions, it’s like staring into the abyss. And to be honest, I don’t try to resolve that tension. I just sit with it. I think it’s just something we need to know about ourselves. There’s no golden age to go back to, there’s no perfect rationality to hide in. There’s only the recognition and the mindfulness that we are fallen and fallible creatures. And we move through the world as best we can. Something that I just want to add to that, which I know is a bit of a long answer, I think there can be a mistaken tendency to believe all of these modes of human cognition are bad. So for instance, you’ll hear people talk about these studies where it’s very hard to get people to change their minds. And implicitly it should be easy to get you to change your mind when you’re presented with contrary evidence, but of course why would that actually be. Presumably the reason we believe things we already believe is that we have people we trust and the things we’ve seen over time have amassed quite a push in that direction. So the idea that one article or study would undo all of that is strange. We are social creatures. We do a lot of our cognition socially in ways that I don’t think we’re even fully cognizant of. And it isn’t crazy that we demand a lot to change that. So it’s hard because in a world where it is literally impossible for us to ever have firsthand knowledge of all the things we need to make decisions on, it’s never going to be the case that we’re not using shortcuts … And so the question really is how good or bad are the shortcuts and what are the incentives of the people we are functionally hiring to turn our values into fine-grained political judgments. The idea that we shouldn’t be making shortcuts or we’re ever going to be in a world where we’re not using shortcuts is unrealistic.
I don’t really see much evidence we’re going to decrease polarization, or at least not in the near-term, so I think another question that it’s worth asking is how do we make the country more governable amidst polarization.
BG: Do you think in retrospect, the call from the APSA (American Political Science Association, in the 1950s and ’60s) to increase the polarization of these parties, that it makes sense that increased polarization would couple so well with these identity-of-belief shortcuts that we see today? You call them mega-identities in the book.
EK: I do. Two things on that. One is that yes, it makes sense that you would want to have parties offering distinct agendas. What they were saying was reasonable and rational at the time and it still is now. The idea that you might be a Democrat voting for Strom Thurmond, so you’re voting for somebody who is going to push in a conservative direction but also have a Democrat in Minnesota voting for Hubert Humphrey, so voting to push in a liberal direction. So in a funny way, in terms of what matters most in the Senate, who controls, you’re actually muddling your votes. What the APSA researchers were saying, in doing that the political parties are weakening the power voters actually hold over the system because the national political parties are not honoring the wishes of voters in different states, I think is correct. The problem is not necessarily polarization itself but it interacts with our political system and I would argue at this point our media systems. But specifically, we have an unusual political system that makes it very hard to govern amidst polarization. In other countries, more parliamentary countries, you win the election you win the power to govern in the majority. That’s how it works and then if people don’t like what you’ve done, they can vote you out and vote in the other party. In our system with the filibuster and competition between branches and the frequency of divided government and veto points and the way congressional rules work and judicial review and a hundred other things, you need a very high level of compromise and beneath that consensus to do things. You need that both in terms of numbers of members of Congress literally crossing over to give something the votes to pass, but also other members of Congress simply allowing that process to take place, not using various holds and filibusters and so on to simply stop the whole operation form happening. And that is what is the problem for governing amidst polarization. So sometimes I think people hear the discussion of polarization and the only thing they can imagine is how can they make the country less polarized. I don’t really see much evidence we’re going to decrease polarization, or at least not in the near-term, so I think another question that it’s worth asking is how do we make the country more governable amidst polarization. What if we take polarization as at least for now the constant, the thing that we don’t really know how to change, and recognize, well you know what we do know how to change, we actually can change the rules of the political system.
BG: Do you see parallels today, for example between the Dixiecrats and the moderate Democrats—you talk about this in one of the earlier chapters about how that coalition in 1965 won two-thirds of the Senate—do you see any parallels between that group of Democrats in the ’60s and the Democrats today, which you could probably split between the moderates, the mainstream Democratic party, and a new growing faction under the DSA groups? In terms of not being unified under one agenda?
EK: What’s interesting is that in this mid-century period, in part because there is no unification under a singular agenda, in part because the parties are genuinely mixed. Not that they have some disagreement internally the way they do today, but that you have Democrats who are much more conservative than Republicans serving in Congress. That you have Republicans much more liberal than many Democrats serving in Congress. And you have this generalized approach to governance that the parties do not operate as highly unified organizations in combat with each other, but instead furnish these ever-shifting coalitions. There’s long periods of Congress where the functional government majority, even though it looks like it’s Democratic, is actually a coalition between conservative Democrats and Republicans. So one of the things happening in that period is that because there is so much mixing and the parties are so internally incoherent they don’t use every rule they can to sabotage the other. So in a funny way our divisions are less dramatic today than they were for much of that period. I mean think about the divisions in America in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the indigenous movements, you have political assassinations, urban riots, student protestors getting killed in Kent State. And yet, members of political parties are not using every tool they have to stop the other one from governing and destroy the other party. When in 1964, after that election, when the Lyndon Johnson administration is thinking about how Medicare will pass, they don’t think it will be filibustered. They actively do not believe the filibuster will be a problem. Think about that! Health care without a filibuster, it’s ridiculous now. The Civil Rights Act, similarly, is a very bipartisan bill with a higher proportion of congressional Republicans voting for it than Democrats. Things were just working very differently. We have deeper divisions, but those divisions are not leading to the same level of tactical extremism that they are today. So I think that’s a thing that I think people often miss. It’s not just about agreeing on an agenda. It’s also about the level of permissiveness you have in letting any agenda go forward. Polarization isn’t simply about policy disagreements but how you feel about the other party. The legitimacy you attach to their governance, the way you approach compromise and coalition building, and as our parties have become more united internally—and they’re much more united today than they used to be—a by-product is they’re become much more tactically confrontational with the other. So I’d say mid-20th-century America you have bigger divisions but because they’re unsorted there’s a lot more pressure for compromise, and a lot more space for compromise, and a lot less of a sense of unified tactical action. Whereas today, on a lot of these issues we’re closer together than we used to be but our hatred of the other party is much higher.
As our parties have become more united internally—and they’re much more united today than they used to be—a by-product is they’re become much more tactically confrontational with the other.
BG: I love the phrase ‘tactical extremism’ and there was part of the book were you mention a great example of this: Mitch McConnell not letting Obama fill the Supreme Court seat … when you think about these faults in the system that prevent governance today but you have someone like Mitch McConnell, who is accomplishing his agenda, who is getting things done, the system is working for him. Maybe not what do you say to him, but what do you say to the kind of disparity?
EK: I think we need to look at Mitch McConnell and recognize that he understands the realities of American politics much better than most other politicians. He operates in a logical way from those premises. And the complaining and the crying and the lamenting about what he does is a little bit misplaced. In the sense that if you replaced him with another Republican leader they’d probably do the exact same things. It’s not like Mitch McConnell is fighting to the death with Jon Kyl over whether or not to operate in this way, there’s unanimity. That’s why what he’s doing is effective and the argument I make in that section—which I hope people will consider, it’s going to be a little bit of a tougher one for liberals to swallow—I think it’s pretty clear in the book I think the Republican Party has become a dysfunctional and in many ways dangerous institution in these conditions of polarization for a bunch of distinct reasons to it. But within that framework, votes on Supreme Court justices are among the most important and ideologically weighty votes any member of Congress will ever take. The question of whether or not Democrats would attain a majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in years or the Court would retain conservative control, it was much more important than any other vote members of the Senate were going to take in that period, and so the view we have in American politics that what Mitch McConnell and Republicans should have done is hold their beliefs about the world and about party control in abeyance and clear and treat the Supreme Court as a question of qualifications and not of ideology, it’s very strange when you think about it. And the reason it worked for so long—and I have, I think, a really interesting chart showing it in the book—is you have Supreme Court nominees in this era of mixed parties were very ideologically unpredictable. You had very liberal nominees who came from Republicans, like Earl Warren and David Souter, you have very conservative nominees like Byron White. The reason that there’s this idea that you should treat the Supreme Court differently is that it operated somewhat differently. But those Supreme Court justices that ended up becoming something their parties didn’t expect were understood, particularly as American politics became more ideologically polarized, as terrible failures, as never-again mistakes. As the parties became much better at vetting Supreme Court nominees. And now you don’t have nominees surprising their parties, now you don’t have Republicans getting on the Court and showing themselves to be secret Liberals or vice versa. So as that happened of course how the Senate treats these nominees became more ideological. If it’s an ideological vote, it’s an ideological vote. But Mitch McConnell didn’t invent any new powers. He broke a norm but he didn’t invent any new powers. He had the votes. And so the question here, which goes back to some of my points about the system, is that under conditions of polarization of course they’re going to do that. But the problem is that, arguably, it’s going to destroy the Supreme Court because if the new thing is that—forget his bullshit rationalization, which he has at this point admitted was bullshit. That it was about a principled belief that you shouldn’t fill a seat in an election year, he said now that if there was an open seat this year he would fill it. So let’s not pretend about what’s going on here. But if the reality is that these are deeply ideological votes and that no Senate controlled by the opposite party’s president would ever permit the president to fill a seat, well [then] you can imagine long periods of time in this country where, say, a Democrat has the presidency and Republicans, given their geographical advantage in the states, hold the Senate and so their control of the Supreme Court vacancies, that might really be the end of the Supreme Court for a while. So the problem is we have rules that don’t interact well with the realities of our ideologically polarized system.
BG: You have a line in the book where you say, “This is not to say we should become afraid of our identities becoming inflamed … sometimes it’s worth being angry.” I want to ask what are some issues that you find it worth being angry about? While you’re recognizing that these stacked identities make it harder to de-escalate conflict. What are some examples of issues that you think are worth it?
EK: Almost all of them. If you’re not angry, I don’t think you’re paying attention. Like right now, the Trump administration is in court trying to get the entirety of the Affordable Care Act invalidated, throwing millions of people off of health insurance. Right now, there’s this very deep effort going on not just to pull America out of international climate change agreements but permit polluters to just destroy streams and air quality. And this is the tricky thing and this is why I’m so careful to say it is not the message of my book that we should somehow not be polarized on these issues. It’s not the message of my book that polarization is an illusion or a mistake, or that the right approach to everything is compromise. What is happening in part as a effect of polarization, some of the governing agendas being pursued in this country are grotesque and they should be fought. And some of the problem with polarization is it makes it hard to solve these disputes even if you can win them in the court of public opinion. I mean look at gun control, as an example, that’s one where the people who want universal background checks and stronger safety laws have really, they’ve won that argument if you look at polling. What they can’t do is move one of the political parties, because it’s captured gun owner identity as one of the sub-identities of being a Republican. And so Republicans won’t move on it. The fact that Democrats win elections in part on that issue does not mean they get the governing power to do anything about that issue.
BG: You mention in a couple of points in the book about how motivating it can be to have a unified enemy or to vote against something, not just for someone else—how do you think that will affect Democrats, or any opposition, to Trump in 2020?
EK: I think that’s an important question. So negative partisanship is very powerful. The idea that you don’t even have to love the person that you’re voting for. You might just want to vote against the person you’re voting out or the party you’re voting out. That’s clearly part of how Donald Trump won the Electoral College in 2016, he won—there’s good evidence that a majority of his votes came from people who said they were more voting against Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. So this is an argument you’ll hear made on behalf of candidates who seem less mobilizing or inspiring, say a Joe Biden, because on the one hand the argument for them is that Donald Trump will provide the base mobilization. And Biden will, at the same time, not mobilize Trump’s base as powerfully. Whether or not that’s true is an interesting question, but that’s sort of the theory. I think you want to think about American politics and American elections as always having a push and a pull factor, any candidate has a push and a pull factor, to the degree in which they pull their supporters out, but also a degree in which they push the other side’s supporters out. And so some candidates have very strong pull factors, but some with weaker push factors, which is like the exact kind of candidate you want. So in 2008, Obama was very inspiring to Democrats, he got huge, wild Democratic turnout. But he was not that terrifying yet to a lot of Republicans, so he didn’t mobilize the Republican base in a way that other candidates potentially could have. You have people like Colin Powell and others endorsing Obama and that was part of why he found such a huge victory in 2008, not the only reason but a reason. There’s evidence that the way the quote-unquote “extreme candidates” have an electoral penalty against them is that they mobilize the other side more. I have research suggesting that in the book. And so the question with any candidate is trying to understand what will mobilize their own side but also what kinds of candidate qualities will mobilize the other side. And I think a lot of the debate in the Democratic primary right now comes down to this. A lot of the debate about Bernie Sanders, for instance, is one side’s saying that having this democratic socialist is a clear, direct agenda will mobilize a lot of people and by putting the focus of policy more squarely on economics it will blunt some of the Republican mobilization because it will make it impossible for them to blur the distinctions. Then other people say a candidate like Bernie Sanders might be mobilizing to the Democratic left, but having a socialist run for office in this country on a platform that is going to require gigantic tax hikes and the nationalization of industries will be unbelievably mobilizing to the right. I don’t have an answer for who’s right in that. I think it’s actually very hard to know. But that’s the question. Any candidate wants to maximize the benefits of their own partisanship but cut the benefits of negative partisanship, but it’s tough because a lot of what inspires your support is exactly what turns off the other side.
BG: I guess we’ll find out one way or the other.
EK: Yeah, I guess we will.
