Why Can’t Democrats and Republicans Agree on Almost Anything Anymore?

Early on in his newly released Why We’re Polarized, Vox cofounder Ezra Klein explains that his book is not meant to guide us out of the morass that is American politics. Instead, he hopes to deliver a helicopter view showing us how we got so deep in, to view from above the system driving us all batty.

“What I am trying to develop here isn’t so much an answer for the problems of American politics as a framework for understanding them,” Klein, a self-acknowledged liberal, writes in his introduction. “If I’ve done my job well, this book will offer a model that helps make sense of an era in American politics that can seem senseless.”

For Klein, that making sense can only begin if you accept that where we are today in terms of partisanship is fundamentally different from where we’ve been in the past. “The first thing I need to do is convince you something has changed,” he writes. What has changed, exactly, is that “the Democratic and Republican parties of today are not like the Democratic and Republican parties of yesteryear.” Namely, in the past, being a Republican or a Democrat was “not a rich signifier of principles and perspectives.”

For instance, Klein cites the example that, in 1954, Minnesota’s very liberal Hubert Humphrey and South Carolina’s extremely conservative segregationist were both Democrats. Once upon a time, it was more common for voters to split their tickets. Voting for a Democratic president and voting for a Republican senator were not mutually exclusive actions. To that end, Klein highlights an analysis by political scientists that examined contested House races throughout the past half-century. “Between 1972 and 1980, the correlation between the Democratic share of the House vote and the Democratic share of the presidential vote was .54… By 2018, it had reached .97!” Somewhere along the way, we switched from having a level of comfort with the opposing party to not trusting it at all, to thinking that voting for someone on the other ticket was, essentially, an act of treason.

Why this realignment happened is complicated—and much of it has to do with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the split it caused in the Democratic Party between Northern liberals and Southern conservative Dixiecrats.

“What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has become more partisan in response,” Klein writes of this realignment. “Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.” There have always been differing views on everything from immigration to healthcare in this country, but those views were not as trenchantly sorted across party lines as they are now. In years past, there were more elected Republicans who were pro-choice (former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson), or pro-immigration (former Florida governor Jeb Bush), or pro-environment (former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman), and Democrats who supported school segregation (former vice president Joe Biden in a previous era). When Maine senator Olympia Snowe, a pro-choice moderate, shocked colleagues with her retirement, citing “partisanship of recent years in the Senate,” one Republican aide opined: “I think she just doesn’t fit this place anymore.“ Or consider a rather jarring quote Klein pulls from a former President: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Who said that? Ronald Reagan. Today, that type of policy cross-pollination seems unthinkable.

“It’s worth being clear about what this means,” writes Klein. “If you’re a Democrat, the Republican Party of 2017 poses a much sharper threat to your vision of a good society than the Republican Party of 1994 did. It includes fewer people who agree with you, and it has united around an agenda much further away from yours. The same is true, of course, for Republicans peering at the modern Democratic Party.”

At the same time that policy positions are moving further apart, so, too, are demographic ones. Democrats and Republicans share fewer touch points across racial, religious, geographic, and psychological lines. More Democrats are people of color, live in cities, are agnostic, and, on the psychological spectrum, skew towards an openness to new experience. Republicans, by contrast, are overwhelmingly white, Christian, live in rural areas, and, in psychological studies, score higher on conscientiousness and traditionalism. In the past, party affiliation did not offer as clear a blueprint of voters’ everyday lives, or what core beliefs and values drive your everyday decisions. Increasingly, though, it does. And since those things get at identity, something far more deeply embedded in who we are than our policy positions, we become even more calcified and entrenched in our opposition to one another.

“What we are often fighting over in American politics is group identity and status—fights that express themselves in debates over policy and power but cannot be truly reconciled by either,” writes Klein.

In conversation here, Klein explains how this shift happened, why we need to better understand that psychology (and not just policy) plays a vital role in politics today, and why “identity mindfulness”—a better awareness and cognizance of the ways in which you’re being manipulated or parts of your identity are being activated—might be a way out.

GQ: I wonder if we might start with a point you make in the introduction. Which is this idea that the fact that the worst actors, what you refer to as "the cynics, fools, and villains," are so often draped in political success doesn’t prove the system is broken—but rather that these people just better understand how the system works.
Ezra Klein: So the first thing I'm trying to do is get people to simply look at this as a piece of system-wide analysis, to get out of the mindset of “American politics is broken” or “It's great,” “It's terrible,” or “It's utopian,” and just to ask the question, “How does it function?”

The fact that some of the worst people are most draped in success in our system means that we need to learn from them. They are proof that the system has an internal logic. If it is rewarding a certain kind of activity that we don't want, then we need to work backwards to understand what the incentives are and how to change them. People are going to do, ultimately, what the system tells them to do.

One of the analogies I use sometimes is this: We know that football causes brain injury. You can turn on the NFL and you can see people who are friends, who like each other, who respect each other, strapping on armor and helmets and potentially causing each other grievous damage. They're not doing that because they're bad people; they're not doing it because they hate each other; they're doing it because the rules of the game of football are that you put on the helmet and you crash into the guy in front of you.

It's really important when you're trying to understand why people act in a system the way they do, to understand the system and not focus so much on the people. And in political journalism in particular, we narrativize politics through the decisions, actions, activities of individuals in ways that obscure the systemic incentives.

Of all the psychological studies you read, what most sticks with you?
A series of studies done by a guy named Henri Tajfel. He was a Polish Jew who moved to France because he couldn't go to university in Poland due to being Jewish. He enlisted in World War II. He was captured by the Germans. He was held in a POW camp, and understood as a French POW. If he'd been understood as Polish Jew, he would have been killed. When the war ends and he's released, his whole family's been killed in the Holocaust.

So he becomes fixated on this question of group identity. What creates group identity? Why do we react with hostility to people we think of as outside of our group? And what are the conditions under which group identity activates or deactivates? How could it be that though he was the same guy, in one context he was understood as a French POW and in another as a Polish Jew?

So he starts a series of experiments that are now called the “minimal group paradigm” experiments. He brings 64 kids from a nearby high school in. They look at a screen with dots and guess how many dots there are. Then the researchers say, "While you're here, we want to do one more study with you. It’s not in any way related to that dots thing, but for ease of sorting you, we're going to put you in two groups: people who overestimated the number of dots and people who underestimated them." In reality, these groups were totally random.

But they're put into these two false groups built on a dumb characteristic: how many dots you estimated. And they're put into another study about allocating money and they began giving more money to people in their dot group. Immediately, this outgroup hostility begins to form.

Then, he replicates the study with paintings: has kids come in, gets them to look at paintings, sorts them into two actually random groups based on which paintings they liked. Now the way you can allocate money includes options where you can maximize the difference between what your group gets and what the other group gets. But if you maximize the difference, it means your group gets less overall money, than in a condition where your group gets more but there isn't as much difference between your group and the other. And they prefer the version where they screw over the other group to give to people who like the same painting they did!

So then how does this play out on a political level?
So what this shows is that Tajfel was not able to find a test of group identities so subtle that group identity doesn't take hold. If group identity takes hold so fast and so ferociously, what happens when the identities are not based on bullshit? What happens when they're very real, when the stakes are very high—life and death even—when there are a lot of identities at play and linked together? Well, what then? And that's where you get into politics.

I think it is important to appreciate our sensitivity to group identity, the swiftness with which we begin to manifest outgroup hostility, and to think about what that means when you begin to understand groups is something we do in politics, too. Part of the book is trying to rescue the term “identity politics” from its current cul-de-sac where people only use it to describe the politics of smaller marginalized groups. Identity politics is most powerful when it is practiced by majoritarian, very powerful groups. Recognizing that identity is a force that acts on us all, in context far outside of politics helps us add a layer on which we can evaluate and better understand why people are making the political decisions they do, which often are very hard to explain by simply attributing them to resource competition or policy preferences.

How has knowing that changed the way you think about the identities or groups that you belong to?
One is something that I believed for a long time, but that all of this research has helped me understand better: cynicism is an overrated explanation for why political actors and people involved in politics do what they do. It understates how easily we convince ourselves of what our group needs us to believe, and how quickly we can feel sincerely committed to something we weren't committed to five minutes ago. A lot of political interviewing operates off of the implicit premise that if you've changed your position, it was cynical. Even when people change in somewhat ridiculous ways and circumstances, it often feels very authentic to them.

I guess I'm just wondering how that actually helps you in the moment. Does it make you more compassionate towards them?
It makes me more intentional about my own reactions to things. It’s important to know how people are trying to manipulate you. They may not even realize they're doing it, but it's also important to know why you might be getting a little hot under the collar. So, for example, I don't think much about being the son of an immigrant until somebody starts throwing around anti-immigrant rhetoric and then it comes out real strong. I don't think moment to moment about being Jewish until somebody trying to bracket my name on Twitter, and I'm getting anti-Semitic hate mail—then it comes on real strong. It’s knowing that I have these and many more identities that can be threatened, and noting when they are. Sometimes you want to react from that place of threat. If somebody is saying anti-Semitic things to me, I don't want to ignore it.

But the primary benefit of this research is not how it helps me do introspection. It’s that it helps me understand the broader things that are happening in politics and the ways in which identities are becoming linked—what I call stacked identities as opposed to cross cutting identities—helps explain what is happening in polarization.

Because what's happening is not necessarily that we're becoming more polarized on policy. What's happened is that people have a lot of different identities that are converging into these political mega-identities and that when those political mega-identities come into conflict, it's very hard to get over that chasm. And so recognizing identity and group status as its own separate zone of conflict is really important to understanding the reasons and ways in which people respond to politics.

It takes a lot of work to think about all politics as policy: “These guys think we should do cap-and-trade on climate, but over here it's R&D investment.” And I'm not saying people can't get very invested. They can, should and do. But a lot more politics is people instinctively, and often correctly, saying, "They don't like me," or, "I don't like them. Those aren't my people. That's not my group." And if you miss that dimension of politics because you're pretending everything is policy debate, you miss a lot of politics.

How does “identity protective cognition” play into this?
It's a term from a Yale Law professor who studies cognitive psychology named Dan Kahan. There are some things that we think about to find the right answer. When I go to the doctor and the doctor says, "You've got strep throat. You should take antibiotics," I really do want to know the right answer to that. And so if he tells me that, I'm pretty likely to believe him. Then there are things where our identity, which is important to us, and our standing in a group, which is important to us, are wrapped up in that the question at hand. And then, our cognition operates oftentimes to align us with our group.

So the study I quote from Kahan, among others, is this study where they gave people this pretty tricky brain teaser where you’d get it wrong if you weren't quite good at math. It's built to fool you. But they gave it to people in two variations. One, where the brain teaser's about skincare and, if you're good at math, you’d get it right. And another where it was about gun control—same numbers, same trick. And then, whether you got it right, particularly if you are good at math, depended on whether or not you agreed with the way the questions were phrased. So your opinions on gun control began to override your capability with math.

What's happening in a place like that, is that the cognition is being driven by a desire to align the world with your identity, with your group, with the things you already believe. And that's pretty powerful.

What seems especially difficult to me about that is that we live in a world where if I ask someone, "What time is it?" I expect them to give me the right time. And because of what you're saying, and how our cognition is affected by our identity, it seems that Democrats and Republicans increasingly can't depend on each other to provide the right time.
Not only that, but a lot of political conversations do not have a right answer. Some do. Climate change is real. But “Should the government be responsible for providing healthcare to every American?” is not a factual question. I can't give you a study that settles it. There's no watch. One problem we have is people not believing things that are true. Another problem is people believing things that are false. But another is that mediating a lot of these beliefs are the facts that people want their side to win and that there are genuine conflicts over values in politics. You can't settle a values conflict with factual rebuttals. There's no Pinocchios I can attach to somebody's view that taxation is theft. It's not true or false. It's a belief.

How did you come to the idea of “identity mindfulness”?
I think a lot about mindfulness in general and I know people are going to laugh at the California vegan telling people to be more mindful about politics. But in general, I think we are very bad at understanding what our mental state is at any given moment. And just as that is a good practice and process in other parts of our life, it's kind of obviously a good one in politics. There's so much effort to manipulate us at any given moment—the way headlines are constructed, what we're seeing on Twitter, what stories are being chosen for promotion on cable news—it changes things. So being careful and cautious about it is good practice.

And why mindfulness practice, specifically? I think it will ultimately be understood as a bad thing that it got a quasi religious and quasi spiritual spin on it, to just be aware of what is happening in your own head. On some level, all we really have is what is happening in our own head. I'm not somebody who doesn't believe the world outside of our sensory perception is real. But it is nevertheless the case that we are really trapped in the world that our senses perceive. And so giving so little attention to what is actually happening to our mind state is just weird.

Way beyond politics, I think mindfulness should be something we're teaching in schools. I remember, as a kid, a lot of time going into trying to get me to be able to run a mile. Which is fine. But I have to run a mile a lot less often than I have to know how I'm feeling and why I'm feeling that way. And pushing people in that direction is valuable.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

They were an all-star crew. They cooked up the perfect plan. And when they pulled off the caper of the century, it made them more than a fortune—it made them folk heroes.

Originally Appeared on GQ