14: Book Review - Why Were Polarized

"Any aggregation of individuals can be a group if the aggregation is seen and experienced in that way."

Hello, friends,

Recent polling shows that Americans are polarized about the coronavirus and, surprise surprise, we are polarized by party. A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted March 13-14 shows that 84% of Democrats are “very concerned/concerned” about the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 in their community; only 58% of self-labeled Republicans feel that way. Seventy-six percent of Democrats think the spread is a “real threat”; only 40% of Republicans think so.

This brings me to this week’s curiosity: a book review of Why Were Polarized (2020), by the co-founder of Vox.com Ezra Klein.

Book Review - Why Were Polarized

I dove into the political polarization literature for my master’s exams. I learned that it represents the state of the art of our field; it is absolutely fun to read, important, and scholars have used numerous qualitative and quantitative methods to try to conceptualize and measure it. I came to a realization that positive feedback loops explain much of our polarization. Here is what I wrote:

Hopkins’s (2017) subtle explanation and examination finds that small changes can produce aggregated results that are unrepresentative, which, in turn, take on “self-reinforcing” power. His work is the most convincing of all I have reviewed.

And I reviewed a ton of literature. Most competing explanations for polarization are actually complementary and supplementary. Elites are polarized which polarizes the public which incentivizes institutions to become more polarized. Media searching for audiences find the most polarized which turns away normal folks and incentivizes more polarizing content. Making all this worse is the psychological, and cognitive science research showing we are social and tribal animals making us all the more susceptible to group-based arguments; “us” vs “them” is hardwired (to some extent) if you believe the work of Kinder and Kam (2010), Tajfel (1981), Eagleman (2012), and Sapolsky (2017). And if you want to dispute that, good luck; you have your work cut out for you – anthropology, history, evolutionary biology, social psychology, and political science can offer you independent literatures with robust results confirming that we are social, group-based animals (Greene 2013) and that even minimal group connections are sometimes all it takes for us to favor “our group” and disfavor the “out-group.” This line of research is called “minimal group paradigm.” Think sports riots and hooliganism.

This brings me to a recent book published by Ezra Klein, co-founder and now editor-at-large of Vox.com. I have been a huge fan of Ezra for as long as I can remember; his early appearances on MSNBC, analyzing health care and politics with an eye and ear for political science, path dependency, and institutions hooked me. I knew I wanted to be a political scientist. This book, Why Were Polarized, is a brilliant synthesis of political science, cognitive science, sociology, and history coupled with his own political reporting and interviews with the likes of then-President Obama, and political science that paints a deeply informed narrative about why our politics is particularly polarized. This book is delicate and smart.

In the first part, Klein’s goal is to convince the reader that we are in fact living in a more polarized (not to be conflated with extremism) time when compared to the post-war (WWII) era. He explains how the Democratic Party became entirely constituted of liberals, and how the Republican Party came to contain nearly all self-identified conservatives. This was a slow yet seemingly inevitable process that has been told in many books, including a few I’ve read such as Red Fighting Blue (Hopkins 2017) and Racial Realignment (Schickler 2016). Klein does a great job of illuminating the path the party system took across the last half-century and more.

I agree with Francis Fukuyama’s review in which he said that Klein has “done his homework in reviewing the extensive academic literature on the subject.” I’ve read and listened to Klein over the years—his podcast The Ezra Klein Show is one of my favorites—interview the very political scientists who are polarization specialists. I anticipated this book would be great; it is. Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites (2012) best explained the current moment; I think Why Were Polarized explains the gloomy prospects of the next ten or so years better than many contemporary accounts that I’ve seen or read so far. As Klein (137) writes in the interlude section, “polarization isn’t something that happened to American politics. It’s something that’s happening to American politics. And it’s getting worse.”   

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Klein’s synthesis of all the ways America is polarized is worth relaying to the reader who won’t get to the book. But, first, I feel it is appropriate for me to define what polarization is. Here is how I defined it in my work:

I define political polarization as a situation with increasingly divergent political views and outcomes which results in, more or less, bimodal distributions of outputs—incentivizing and rewarding extreme actors and results over median interests, policies, beliefs, and actors. This is nicely captured as “a movement from the center towards the extremes” (Levendusky and Pope 2011, 229).

Back to the review.

First, there is partisan polarization. We are polarized and sorted by party more than any time in the modern era (usually this accounting starts with FDR and the 1930s-1940s). This means that if you are a pro-life Protestant we can predict with near-perfect accuracy what party you are in. [Play for yourself, using this political science-informed algorithm from The New York Times.] This goes for many issues: gun rights, minimum wages, immigration, and so on. As Klein eloquently shows, this was not the case in the 1950s-1960s. He even reminds the reader that the Republican Party platform showcased mixed views on abortion as late as 1976 and “in Congress, Republicans and Democrats voted against abortion in similar numbers. In surveys, Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to say it should be legal in all circumstances as illegal in all cases (16)." I can attest using my own work: what we call “party ID,” or political party self-identification, out of hundreds of variables we use in quantitative studies looking at US domestic politics, is the most robust and predictive of political views than any other, including gender or income, for example. Its what we call “party ID” all the way down.

A subset but slightly different way of looking at polarization is ideological polarization. Political scientist Abramowitz found that “forty-eight percent of the 95th Congress (1977-79) fell within the moderate range of ideology, compared to just 16 percent of the 115th Congress (2017-19).” Political scientist Liliana Mason points to research that shows that only 2% of the electorate was ideological in 1964 compared to a majority now. It is not that the average American is that ideological; it’s that the most politically engaged (think: time involved + understanding) people are.

Second, there is geographical (think: regional) polarization. David A. Hopkins in his book Red Fighting Blue has an amazing section that illustrates this point: “By the 115th Congress of 2017-2018, Democrats held 69% of the House seats from the Northeast and Pacific Coast, while Republicans held 73% of the seats from the South and interior West” (2017, 59). A subset of this political geographical polarization is the urban-rural divide. Klein highlights work that shows that people-per-square mile density metric can be used to predict electoral outcomes. There isn’t one dense city that votes Republican; not very many rural cities vote Democrat. Klein reproduces numbers from an Atlantic article that showcases this well: In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton won nearly half of the country’s 3,100 counties. Since then Democrats have shed rural support. By 2016, Hillary Clinton, though still winning the popular vote, won less than 500 counties. (2020, 40).

Third, there is religious sorting: the most answered question to ‘what religion are you?” is Christian for Republicans and “non-religious” for Democrats. Parties were not split this way in the past. Religious polarization has been studied intensively by economists, political scientists, and sociologists. Klein does not get into this literature very much and neither have I. However, I did read Wilkins-Laflamme’s (2014) article that found there does seem to be a global trend. In her words: “the proportional decline of nominal affiliates coupled with no decline or an increase of unaffiliated and religiously committed individuals can be found in Great Britain and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia.” In other words: the middle is becoming a lonely place. We either are or we are not. The center isn’t holding.

Finally, and more controversial, we are psychologically sorted. Klein summarizes work by the political scientists Hetherington and Weiler who used a psychological scale/index placing people in two categories, one is “fluid”; the other “fixed.” When people are asked a set of questions, folks with “fixed” mindsets are overwhelmingly Republican; people with “fluid” are all but guaranteed to be Democrats. This distinction breaks down when looking at black Americans, however. Two political psychologists find that white Americans and Asian Americans are more likely, on average, to have in-group favoritism than Hispanic or black Americans on survey questions (see here). The pioneer social psychologist Henri Tafjel argues that dominant groups are consistently prejudiced (Kander and Kam 2010, 51). Thus, people aren’t merely sorted by psychology. This brings me to the next point.

The metadriver of much of this polarization, Klein convincingly shows, is race. We are polarized and sorted by race. Ninety percent of Republican voters are white. And a full 25% of President Trump’s base is white women, over 45, who didn’t go to college (The Atlantic). The most alarming chapter, in fact, is the chapter on demographic change; most research shows that demographic change produces reactionary political movements. Klein reviews this literature in a section called “Change makes us conservative,” that really is deeply troubling and portents ill on our future, at least in the short and mid-term (read: our lifespans!)

Klein’s most unique contribution which he explicitly says is one of his goals is to construct a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what “identity” is. He succeeds admirably. Ezra builds on what Liliana Mason calls “mega-identity,” defined as “identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more.” Mason’s book Uncivil Agreement is one of Erza’s biggest influences in his book. Mason (2018,22) shows we are socially polarized and have fewer friends with big disagreements than in the past. When this mapped onto party affiliation, this is a problem because “when we limit our exposure to outgroup individuals, the differences we perceive between parties grow increasingly exaggerated, and imaginary conflicts of interest rival genuine ones.”

Not a Book for Solutions

Klein has said over and over that the “solutions” chapter should be read as if he wrote it with a gun to his head. Klein’s goal was to accurately describe, as he sees it, how American politics works and how a polarized two-party system at this point in time is detrimental and making our politics fundamentally broken: we are stuck in perpetual conflict and no one can figure out who to blame. That said, Klein does posit some potential “corrections,” or ways to “manage” our current era.

Klein, pointing to research by social psychologist Jennifer Richeson that shows that how we frame demographic change matters; reassuring white people that a “majority-minority” future still includes a plurality of white folks and that there will only be a “majority-minority” country by 2050 if you count all different minority groups together. Her research does find survey responses that are less fearful and less conservative when you reassure folks and explain the situation more clearly. Groenendyk (2013) has found that priming people to think of themselves as citizens can help lessen partisanship, for example. However, crosscutting research that Klein points to rejects much of the “more information hypothesis” as a salve; in fact, smarter people with more information tend to produce simple, more efficient ways of constructing arguments and making confirmation bias simply feel less at work (2020, ch. 4). This is where meta-rationality, which I introduced two weeks ago, would come in handy.   

Klein is more inclined towards institutional and systemic change; he thinks more democracy and institutions that are more majoritarian, at the margins, are the way forward. Even after reading Democracy for Realists, I agree with most of Klein’s proposals. He believes in eliminating the electoral college, for example. Thirty-six states (plus. D.C.) have already signed on to the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact signaling support for such a fix. I think this is a no brainer. He ticks off other fixes: end the filibuster; give Puerto Rico and D.C. Congressional representation (this seems incomplete for not including the number of other territories who aren’t represented); automatic voter registration; finally, Klein entertains the idea of expanding the Supreme Court, allowing both parties to choose five justices, and then letting those ten choose five themselves, which was balance partisanism with expertise and authority (this idea comes from two center-right law professors, and it’s called the Balanced Bench idea).

Klein’s most compelling non-institutional call to action is for individuals to “rediscover a politics of place.” (264). Our politics have become increasingly nationalized and almost no one pays attention to local politics; local and state governments deeply impact our lives. I have a master’s in political science and I know almost nothing about the local politics of my neighborhood, school district, or county. No, not almost nothing; I know nothing about them. Klein is correct here and a challenge to all of us political hobbyists, educators, and activists alike.

This book is a great read and some of the best parts of it I didn’t even get to in this review. The chapter on the media (Ch. 6 The Media Divide beyond Left-Right) is where Klein shows his expertise; he is a media-figure, an explanatory journalist, and the editor at large of Vox.com. Go for Klein explaining how “audience-driven media is identitarian media” (150); stay for Klein’s argument that “the news media is arguably the most powerful actor in politics.” (164). The media is competing for “mindshare,” as Klein calls it, and Klein exhibits a nimble, specific understanding of how these dynamics play out.

Watch Klein Discuss His Book/Argument (And Nimbly Unwrap Shapiro)

I highly recommend this book.

Until next time,
Patrick M. Foran