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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And today we’re talking about political polarization, where it comes from, and why it seems to be more now than it was in the past. I’m always someone who is a little bit skeptical when people point to the present day and some feature of it, whether it’s economic or political or whatever, and say it’s very different now than it ever used to be. That’s very difficult to say objectively, right? Because we all experience the world differently when we’re 20 years old, 50 years old, 80 years old. And we change, no doubt. So it seems to us that the world is changing in different ways, but it’s hard to be objective about it. Nevertheless, I do kind of buy the idea that political polarization has increased in the sense that there’s sort of been a sorting of people, at the very least in the US, but I think it’s a broader phenomenon than that, into a set of alignments on different issues that you might not think are necessarily connected. And nevertheless, people are sorting themselves into tribes.

0:01:07 SC: And this is not a correct or incorrect thing. I mean, maybe this is a good thing, I don’t know. But it seems to be there and we wanna ask, “Well why did that happen in a way that there seemed to be more of a continuum in the past?” So today, I’m talking to Ezra Klein, who’s a name that most of you, I’m sure, know. Ezra has a famous podcast of his own. Ezra and I sort of heard of each other, got to know each other a very tiny bit, way back in the early days of blogging. I started my blog in 2004, Preposterous Universe, Ezra was writing at Wonkblog and Pandagon back in the day. Now, of course, he’s the co-founder, and I don’t know exactly what his title is, Head Editor of Vox.com, which has become a little bit controversial, I guess, because people like controversy.

0:01:53 SC: I’m happy to say that I love Vox.com. I don’t always agree with what they’re doing, but I love the philosophy of explainers, right? Of giving you the background for why things are true. So anything dealing with politics is going to engender controversy, but that’s okay. We got to do it. I’m a believer that understanding the political world is very important. So this podcast is not about saying who’s right, who’s wrong, but trying to understand the forces that have increased polarization in the modern world. Is there something we can do about it? Should there be something we can do about it? Is it inevitable? Is technology causing it? Or is it something that is a little bit more contingent and perhaps reversible? Remember, you can support the podcast by becoming a Patreon supporter on patreon.com/seanmcarroll, and you don’t have to support on Patreon. I don’t mind, one way or the other, but it’s a nice thing to do, and also it gets you ad free versions of the podcast. Plus every month I try to answer a bunch of questions in an “Ask Me Anything” that can be a lot of fun. People ask really good questions and that’s become a great tradition. So patreon.com/seanmcarroll. And with that, let’s go.

[music]

0:03:19 SC: Ezra Klein, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:03:21 Ezra Klein: I’m thrilled to be here. The dumbest guest you’ve ever had. [laughter]

0:03:24 SC: Well, no… Well, you know, there’s no such thing as a dumb guest but…

0:03:28 EK: The most math illiterate.

0:03:29 SC: If I recall correctly, you’re a blogger at Pandagon, is that correct? Is that a…

0:03:33 EK: Yes, that is right. I am Jesse Taylor’s understudy.

0:03:37 SC: We all start somewhere. Did you ever have a vision of what blogging was going to become, like back in the days? Did you think that… Today it’s some sort of… It’s either been absorbed by the media, or it is the media. I’m not quite sure which way to say it.

0:03:48 EK: Yeah. And now… It’s funny now, because a lot of original bloggers run media organizations and user platforms to be nostalgic about how they can’t seem to bring blogging back and how it all got killed. But no, I will sometimes get… There’s an analysis we can put on my career that I’ve been making these very strategic moves from the very beginning, to get into media. And people forget how absurd the idea was originally, that blogging would ever get you any kind of job. It was not… Not just the word “blog”, which… There’s no other thing that has the “blah” sound that’s good…

0:04:24 SC: It’s disqualifying phonetically, really, yeah.

0:04:26 EK: It’s like “bleugh”, “blagh”… Right, yeah. It’s phonetically disqualifying, I like that. But also it initially was hated by journalists. It was… It rose up as part of a critique of how the media did its work. So the idea, when I was a freshman in college starting a blog, that that would somehow ever lead to journalism, I would have laughed at you. And so it’s actually one of these things where a lot of other people saw earlier than I did that I might end up in journalism, because even well into my blogging career those two worlds just seemed so different from each other that the idea of bridging them seemed a bit absurd.

0:04:58 SC: They were back in the day, but I do have nostalgia back for those days. My wife Jennifer and I met because we read each other’s blogs, so…

0:05:05 EK: No kidding!

0:05:06 SC: Good things can happen.

0:05:07 EK: Oh my God, the most beautiful blog story of them all.

0:05:10 SC: It’s pretty good. And our engagement was announced in Nature, the scientific journal, so…

[laughter]

0:05:19 SC: But now you’re all grown up and writing books. There’s some steps in between, but we’ll skip those. But you have a book out called Why We’re Polarized, is that… Did I get the title right?

0:05:27 EK: I do. Yes.

0:05:30 SC: The first question I have to ask, as a fellow book author, is how much discussion went in with you and your publisher about “Why We’re Polarized” versus “Why We Are Polarized”. [chuckle] Contraction in there.

0:05:41 EK: Zero. Zero.

0:05:42 SC: Zero? They just went for it. You just suggested that?

0:05:44 EK: Zero, they did not… They would not have dared to suggest “Why We Are Polarized” to me.

0:05:48 SC: Alright. They know you too much, or…

0:05:50 EK: We went through a bunch of… I’m a big believer that the only words that matter in anything are the headline. So at Vox I have a rule that if you write a piece, which is what we do, or a video or a podcast, any of it, you have to come up with 10 headline options. Because people will spend all this time on the underlying piece of journalism and then by the end of it you’re exhausted of whatever you’ve been writing about, podcasting about, making a video on. And so you just like throw on a headline. And so if the headline is bad it often doesn’t matter if the underlying piece is good. So for this book, I think we had… I think I tried to get us to 30 possible headlines, and this came in later and then it… I don’t think I expected that this one would stick. But it really was what the book was about. And the other, which you have not mentioned but is my true greatest accomplishment on the book, is there was no subtitle.

0:06:42 SC: There was no subtitle. I was gonna mention that. That’s very, very impressive. I’m gonna try that.

0:06:46 EK: Yes, people should buy this book. People should buy this book, if for no other reason, than to push the publishing industry away from subtitles.

0:06:54 SC: It’s radical. I just sent a new book proposal in without a subtitle. My agent was like, “Well, what’s the subtitle?” [chuckle] But I love that you don’t even call it a title. You call it a headline. [laughter]

0:07:02 EK: A headline. It’s a headline.

0:07:03 SC: You might be new at writing books, but at headlines, this is your thing, that they should just…

0:07:08 EK: I am very new at writing books. [chuckle]

0:07:09 SC: They should just listen to you.

0:07:10 EK: I’m a babe in the woods here.

0:07:11 SC: But did you enjoy it? I know we’re not getting on the substance yet, but we will get there. Did you have fun, are you a book writer?

0:07:16 EK: No, this is actually the conversation I wanna have. I’m exhausted the book substance.

0:07:19 SC: Yeah, alright.

[laughter]

0:07:21 EK: Did I enjoy it? So I signed on to do a book with Simon & Schuster six-ish years ago when I was still at the Washington Post. And then… It was a very different book that I had sold them. And it was much more about the policy-making process and institutions and forces in political life and politics that ended up shaping policy, even though they didn’t get a lot of attention. So things like the Congressional Budget Office, the filibuster, polarization was in there, but it was not the primary thing.

0:07:48 EK: And I had to put that down, ’cause myself and Melissa Bell, and Matt Yglesias decided to start Vox, and so I put that book down and didn’t think about it for years. And then about two years ago, when I stepped down as editor-in-chief of Vox, one thing that I had felt when I was editor-in-chief was that I did not… I wasn’t able to do the reporting that I’d been doing in the years prior. And so in some ways I was running off the fumes of an old understanding of politics. And I was looking around, and we are well into the Trump era now, and just realizing that I didn’t have a model that really explained how we got from Obama to Trump, why things looked and felt the way they did, why politics was working the way it was.

0:08:28 EK: My background is in policy reporting, and so I have a lot of models for what happens when Congress starts working on a bill, and why it always collapses into total omni-shambles, but I didn’t have a model about why politics had seemingly gone off the rails in the way it had. And so this book was an opportunity for me to try to rebuild my understanding of politics from the ground up in a way that created… That could help explain what was happening for me, and then hopefully for an audience. And so in that way, it was an incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding intellectual process, and a humbling one. You realize oftentimes, and you’ve done this more than I have on much harder topics than I’m taking on, but you realize that there are things that are operating in your implicit model of the world that when you force them down onto the page it turns out that they’re thin.

0:09:19 SC: Yeah.

0:09:20 EK: Or possibly not even there. One of the big examples of this, to me, was I have a chapter, it’s the penultimate chapter in the book, but it’s one of the ones I’m really proud of, on asymmetric polarization. This idea that the right has gone further right, and we should talk about what that means, and the left has gone left. I actually don’t think “left and right” are the quite right words there, but the right has become a more… It has responded to polarization by straying further from the norms of American politics than the left has, across a variety of different dimensions. And this is a well-known thing in political science. Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann have written a book about it that’s quite well known called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson have written on this, so have others.

0:10:00 EK: What was striking to me when I began really looking at that literature, ’cause I believed and could look around, you can see asymmetric polarization playing out all around us. I thought that there was a good causal story and there just wasn’t. That there were stories about Mitch McConnell and people doing things, but why those people were the ones who were being rewarded, why they were emerging on the right and not the left, why had Republicans forced out two speakers in a couple of years, whereas Democrats in the House are still led by the exact same leadership team they had in ’06. There was something different happening in the parties. And while there had been narrativizations of it there actually was not a good causal story for it. And so, having to actually force onto the page the model, do the reporting to fill in the gaps, and then realize where the stories that I had been told, or that I had seen had holes that I needed to fill, was really quite helpful.

0:10:51 SC: I mean, as you say in the book, that in some ways the election of Trump was a unique event, but in so many other ways it was just business as usual in some sense. So these underlying structural questions are really fascinating, like a future historian would not look at the numbers of who voted for whom and why and say that this was anything out of the ordinary.

0:11:10 EK: Absolutely. And this is something I’m really trying to do in the book, is to show that what is striking about Trump is not how different and aberrant the 2016 election was, but in fact how normal it was. How much he just simply put back together the Mitt Romney coalition with a couple of tweaks on the sidelines.

0:11:27 SC: Right.

0:11:27 EK: And I do this. I show it through exit polls going back a couple of elections, how you really wouldn’t be able to pick this one out of a line-up. But the thing that… This hits to a big story in American life, which is that the two parties have polarized. And, let me try to say this very clearly, ’cause polarization is a word that I think has been thrown on very incoherently, because it can mean a lot of different things. But what has happened is the two parties have sorted themselves by ideology, race, religiosity, geography, culture, and psychology over the past 50 or 60 years such that what Republican and Democrat means, how much information those labels encode is much, much larger than it was then.

0:12:11 SC: Right. So, we’re defining what is meant by polarization, right?

0:12:14 EK: Exactly.

0:12:14 SC: Because I think a lot of people would just sort of casually conflate it with disagreement, which has been around for a long time.

0:12:20 EK: Yes.

0:12:20 SC: But this is a very different phenomenon.

0:12:22 EK: That’s… I wanna note, a very important point you just made there. Because something that is misleading when you look back at American history is people will sometimes tell a story about disagreement as a way of disproving the idea of polarization. They will say, “Look, Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. They later made a musical about it.”

0:12:38 SC: Yeah.

0:12:38 EK: It’s a well-known fact in American life. But you can go even back to the ’60s, which importantly are a nadir of polarization in America. It’s one of the periods in which our political system is least polarized. But look around, you have political assassinations, you have student protesters being killed in the streets, you have the civil rights movement, the feminism movement, the indigenous rights movement. We are at a… The anti-war movement. We’re at a moment there where the ferocity of disagreement is such that you have actual violence in the streets; urban riots and so on, and yet the political system itself is not that polarized. So there’s a tendency to look back and say, “We’ve all… We’ve had Republican and Democratic parties going back to the Civil War, we’ve had disagreement that at other times was violent, much more so than it is now. So come on, this can’t be that bad.”

[laughter]

0:12:58 EK: And in many ways, by the way, that’s very true. This is not comparatively that bad. What is different is that the disagreements are so well sorted by party, and that is having very distinct effects, both on the nature of how our disagreements play out, what the political system is able to do in their midst, and where things are going. We can talk about this more later but I think a very scary thought experiment is to imagine the level of genuine civic division of the ’60s and paste it on to the political structure of the… What, now the 2020s. You run that one out for a little bit and you don’t end up in a happy place.

[chuckle]

0:14:05 SC: To me, I know this is just predictable, but it sounds like a physics problem to me. You have a bunch of…

0:14:10 EK: Well, when you’re a physicist I guess it all does.

0:14:12 SC: That’s what happens, right, and…

0:14:13 EK: But is it a classical or a quantum physics problem?

0:14:16 SC: It’s just purely classical, no, you don’t need quantum mechanics. There’s no spooky action at a distance or anything like that. But I think that the physics of politics, of political science, is fascinating to me. And basically, you have a collective phenomenon with many little constituents, and you might say, “Well, entropy increases and it’ll all just mix together.” But in fact, there’s sorting, as you say in the book, as you make the case very strongly. So that different characteristics of these little constituents begin to become correlated in interesting ways. So, clearly they’re not just random particles moving, they’re interacting, they’re being influenced by things, by external forces, and figuring out what those forces are is very important.

0:14:52 EK: Yeah, so something that you see in the book is that what I’m trying to do is offer a description and a framework of how a system is working. And something that I do explicitly and repeatedly is make the argument that individuals have much narrower ranges of action than we like to think. As you say, it’s very much a classical, not a quantum system. We very much can predict where people are gonna end up pretty well. And that’s important, because I think that one way in which my own industry, political journalism, I don’t wanna say misleads people, but ends up confusing the situation, is that we narrativize the story of American politics through the stories of individual politicians. Most saliently the president, but very much, particularly in elections years, the opposing candidate or candidates, to some degree the leaders of the House and Senate. And then there’s always a couple of other players operating with less formally huge bases of power, but an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Ted Cruz. These people become political superstars. And as we tell these stories… If you read a book of campaign narration like Game Change or one of these, you really see it, it’s…

[chuckle]

0:16:01 EK: “There was this meeting at the White House, and the person said the thing, and the other person walked out, and then they told us, and… ” And so, everything has, in the way of human interactions, this feeling of indeterminacy. Well what if they just said the other thing? What if they just hadn’t made that messaging mistake? What if they just elected the other person? And the argument I’m making in this is that the system is driving outcomes and shaping incentives such that, while obviously there is some range of free will operating within American politics, at least depending on your broader metaphysical view of humanity, there’s some range of what we think of as free will operating in American politics, it’s pretty narrow. And people are, much more to the point, the incentives and systems around them, and polarization is in some ways the master story and master incentive system of them all, are shaping the way they understand the information that helps them make decisions, shaping who they trust, who they listen to, who they fear, who they’re trying to attract. And so, you can really predict pretty well what people are gonna do, even when you have tremendously large variation in the individuals at play.

0:17:05 EK: And this is why the story of Trump’s presidency is very telling. What we basically did is we ran… [chuckle] It was not a simulation unfortunately, we’re living through it. But we ran a version of American politics where we tested the theory. We gave the Republican Party an incredibly aberrant individual, aberrant in his ideology, aberrant in his relationship with the Republican Party, his relationship to Republican Party elites, aberrant in how he acted personally, the kinds of things he said, the way he communicated, the way he attacked. Say what you will about Donald Trump, people who love him will say he’s a very unusual figure, people who hate him will say he’s a very unusual figure. And you put this very unusual figure in and what happens? You reconstruct most of Mitt Romney’s coalition, and then the Republican Party falls in line behind the party leader, and he ends up more or less governing as a traditional Republican with a very unusual Twitter account. So, if that is not a test of how much polarization in the broader political system incentives contain even the most disruptive figure, I don’t know what is.

0:18:02 SC: Yeah, no, I think that’s an excellent thing. I think that, as a scientist, looking for the underlying systematic things going on is much more educational. I don’t know if it’s much more important or significant, but it’s certainly much more illuminating to me than telling a story of Lyndon Johnson in the backroom twisting someone’s arm, even though…

0:18:20 EK: Well, let me ask this of you, ’cause you’ve read it and you’re… Did the book feel… Did the system feel convincing to you? Does the analysis of the book… Did the pieces fit together in a way that you looked at it and thought, “Yeah, that explains what I’m seeing.” Or, does it feel like the pieces don’t quite fit?

0:18:37 SC: Yeah, it’s always hard to tell. Roughly speaking, the answer is yes, I think it is a pretty convincing story overall. It’s this quasi-historical analysis, because the United States has a history that is very unique, with the Civil War and Slavery and Reconstruction in the South, and the whole bit. I do worry, if I’m being really, really rigorous, that we can tell ourselves a story that gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling about things without really knowing how to test it rigorously. But up to the difficulties…

0:19:08 EK: Did you find this one very warm and fuzzy, though? [chuckle]

0:19:10 SC: Well, okay, warm and fuzzy in the sense of, “Oh, I understand what’s going on,” not that I like it.

[chuckle]

0:19:17 SC: So, let’s share with the audience who has not read the book. We said, what… Actually, sorry, maybe this went by too quickly or was embedded in too many things. The thing about polarization is that everyone has characteristics. Where they live, how old they are, religious beliefs, political beliefs, economic beliefs. But in principle, those could be independently distributed. You could have economic right-wing people with socially left-wing people, etcetera. And the polarization is this kind of sorting where different attitudes become aligned in a very significant way. Is that a fair, short summary?

0:19:51 EK: Yeah, let me even back it up one more step. A problem with polarization is people do not tend to say the next word in the sentence or the description. Polarization of what? And so, if you begin to look into the… And this book, as you mentioned, it has some amount of historical work in it, but it’s very heavily inflected by political science and, to some degree, social psychology, and then political reporting, which is my bread and butter. But so, when you study polarization there are a couple things you could be describing, and they don’t have to be happening at the same time. And in fact, some could be getting worse and some getting better. But you can have polarization of policy. So, the two parties have clustered around almost perfectly opposite policies. One wants to tax people more, the other wants to end taxes entirely. I use the example, I think, at some point in the book, of cannabis policy. You can have a party where… One party is for full legalization of marijuana and the other party is for full criminalization of it, that would be perfectly polarized on the policy.

0:20:48 EK: Then you could have a situation where you’re polarized by what they call “affective”, A-F-F-E-C-T-I-V-E polarization, affective polarization. And what they mean by that is, it’s polarization in how you feel about your party and the other parties. So, even if your policies are not that divergent, you’re seeing an increase in how much people hate the other party. One thing worth noting is we’re seeing a lot more affective polarization than policy polarization. The two interact in important ways, but one thing… What has really, really risen up is how negatively people feel about the other party, more than how much they necessarily disagree with the other party. So I wanna note that. Then there’s a question of, “Are you looking at elite or mass polarization?” There’s a difference between, “The country is changing”, either in how it feels about the other side, or its own side, or what it thinks about policy, and it’s just elites doing it. And there’s a lot of disagreement about this, but I think it’s a little bit of a disagreement without a difference. But the evidence is extremely strong on elite polarization, and that seems to then be sorting the structure that the rest of the country has to respond to.

0:21:51 SC: So, the elites are leading the polarization charge?

0:21:53 EK: The elites seem to be leading the charge. One of the arguments that is central to the book is that the most important form of polarization, and one of the most important questions in American politics just in general, is identity polarization. Identity politics is a term people have heard a lot, people use it a lot right now. But I am trying to offer what I think of as a much more rigorous definition of that. And so “identity politics”, in the way we typically use it in American politics, refers to traditionally marginalized or weaker groups who are making a claim for something of importance to their group. African-Americans making a claim about police brutality, or Jewish people making a claim about anti-Semitism. These would traditionally be understood as identity politics, whereas rural gun owners who want the Second Amendment expansively interpreted, that’s just politics. Or CEOs who want their taxes cut, that’s just politics. But identity is an incredibly powerful way that people operate in the world.

0:22:52 EK: I am Californian, and a father, and I’m Jewish, and I’m a vegan, and so on and so forth. And one of the things that is happening is that our identities are stacking and connecting to our political identities. And this is what you were talking about in the set up to this question, which is, what we used to have were very cross-cutting identities that played across parties. If you go back to, say, the 50s and you look at a range of demographic characteristics, there wasn’t more than 10 percentage point difference in how prevalent those groups were in either party. Even ideology was not well-structured between the parties. You had a lot of liberal Republicans, you had a lot of conservative Democrats. When Strom Thurmond was a Democratic member of the Senate, he was the second most conservative senator, according to different rankings we had at that time. So, a lot of this was happening, as you alluded to, because of race. The Dixiecrats, which were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, they were quite conservative but importantly, very racially conservative. They functionally ran the South as a authoritarian system built on protecting a racial hierarchy system. But they were very powerful in the Democratic Party. And so what they created was almost a blockade around the two parties coalescing around ideologies.

0:24:07 EK: They’re part of why you had a lot of liberal Republicans, because liberal Republicans did not agree with what was happening in the Democratic Party on race. As the Civil Rights Act and other things that happened begin to end that blockage, and so you have conservatives move into the Republican Party, including in the South, which is now the most conservative region of the country, you have liberals move into the Democratic Party. And that, for a variety of reasons, kicks off this period of sorting. And so now you have… Back, if you go into the early 20th century, the density of a place does not predict its partisan politics. But now there is no place in America more dense than 900 people per square mile, if I’m remembering the stat right, that is Republican. So, if you get denser, you will always see a Democrat. Like all major cities in America are Democratic. Religiosity has become very different. The Republic Party’s overwhelmingly Christian. It used to be that they were both this way. Now, the single largest religious group in the Democratic Party is people who are religiously unaffiliated. The Democratic Party is a coalition of a lot of different religious groups, liberal Christians, Buddhists, atheists, etcetera.

0:25:10 EK: On race, the Democratic Party is, I believe it is 44% non-white, at least in its 2016 primary vote, or in its 2016 vote. The Republican Party is over 90% white. And I can keep going like this. Psychologically, we’ve sorted. There’s this whole openness to experience stuff, there are different ways people play this out, but…

0:25:29 SC: We had a great conversation with Will Wilkinson on the podcast about the urban-rural divide, but also the personality factors and how they come in. And I wanna get back to that, but keep going.

0:25:38 EK: Yeah. So anyway, the point is that on almost everything you can think of, the parties have, over the past 50 years, sorted so that the identities are stacking on top of each other, as opposed to crossing. So you don’t have a ton of union members who are Republicans, you don’t have a ton of rural Southerners who are Democrats. And so, as that happens, and there’s a lot of evidence on this from outside of politics too, when you begin to stack identities the nature of disagreement becomes much deeper, it becomes much more threatening. And more affective polarization, hatred and fear of the other side, loyalty or identification with your own side, is a quite rational response. If polarization was not as high in the ’60s, in part that’s because, well, if you were a kind of moderate Democrat looking at the Republican Party, you saw a lot of people like yourself in it. Richard Nixon, domestically at least, did a lot of quite moderate and, even now looking back, liberal things. And conversely, Bill Clinton did some quite conservative things.

0:26:34 EK: And now, you look at the other side and they’re much more different from you demographically, they’re much more different than you ideologically. And so, the threat they pose to you and to your view of the good life is much more severe. And so, that’s the kind of central form of polarization now, this stacked identity polarization that is feeding into the majoritarian political identities, not just marginalized groups.

0:26:46 SC: Yeah, so I think that the evidence, it’s pretty… I always worry when we compare our era to previous eras because we are at different ages and we live in different eras, right? And so we always tend to see things through different kinds of glasses. But it seems that there’s quantitative evidence that the polarization really has increased. You’ve mentioned a lot of it already, but one thing that I found fascinating that really drove it home, was the undecided voters disappearing. Why don’t you say something about that?

0:26:46 EK: So, we just used to have a lot of… Let me put it… I actually think that the simplest way to put this is looking at ticket splitting. And I don’t have all these numbers right in front of me right now, but basically ticket splitting was very, very, very common 30 or 40 years ago. So, you might vote for a Democrat for president and then a Republican for your member of Congress. The South was full of ticket splitting, particularly in the post Civil Rights Act era, so they begin voting routinely for Republicans for president, not every state in the South, but it happens a lot. But there’s nevertheless, until that generation dies out, the South had an enmity towards the Republican party due to the Republican party invading and occupying it during the Civil War. So the affiliation is to Democrats and to the Southern Dixiecrats. And so they continue to actually have a hammerlock on the South for quite some time, even as at the national level, the South begins to trend towards the Republican Party. So there was a lot of ticket splitting. I think the numbers I have in the book are that the correlation in your vote between House and presidential in terms of partisan lean is something like, during these periods, 0.5. In 2018, I believe, it was 0.98. So, the correlation goes from being real but not necessarily everything to basically everything.

0:28:40 SC: Yeah.

0:28:41 EK: Undecided voters, true undecided voters, and it’s worth saying an interesting facet of all this, is that this high rise in polarization is happening at a time when we have more and more independent, self-styled independents, but it turns out that most independents are just partisans in disguise for… I have a lot of evidence on this in the book, but “independent” is a good personal brand. If you give people pictures of folks and you ask them to rate how attractive they are, but you also say if they’re Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, people will rate objectively less attractive people more attractive if they’re told they’re Independents. Independent is a great political brand. But the number of people…

0:29:15 SC: I think we need more romantic advice here on the Mindscape podcast. So I like that. So, for your personal ads, audience, Independents, not Democrats or Republicans.

0:29:23 EK: My job is politics, my passion is offering people relationship advice, so any time you want to do that, I’m here for it.

0:29:28 SC: Excellent. [chuckle]

0:29:30 EK: That said, you used to have a pretty fair number of what they called “floating voters.” Voters who, one election to another, would change who they’re voting for. And a stat I love, and this comes from the political scientist Alan Abramowitz, and again I should have a book in front of me right now but I don’t, but in, I think it is the ’70s, the swing in how a state votes at the presidential level from election to election is, I believe it is, eight or nine percentage points. So if you know how the state voted for president one year, in the next election you can expect a pretty significant swing in where they’re going.

0:30:08 EK: Now it’s under two percentage points. So states have become much more fixed in political place. There’s no question about “Is California gonna vote for the Democrat in 2020?” Just as there’s no question about whether or not West Virginia will vote for the Republican. So across basically every form of data we can look at, people are becoming much more stable in their political preferences. And something that I cannot emphasize enough is, this makes sense, this is a rational response to what has happened, which is that the two parties have become much more different. Another piece of evidence I love, this comes from Corman Schmidt who’s a political scientist, is that today people who are self-styled independent voters or low-information voters, they are as certain when polled about the differences between the two parties or the two candidates, as people who are strong partisans or high-information voters were in the ’70s.

0:30:57 SC: So if you told a pollster in the ’70s, you’re like, “Yes, I am a die-hard Democrat.” And they said to you, “Well how sure, how confident are you that you can name the differences between how Richard Nixon and I don’t know, McGovern would govern?” You’d say, “Meh, you know… ” At this point, being somebody who doesn’t really like politics or feel attached to either parties, you are stronger on that question. That’s not because the people back then were lying, it’s because now the differences are much, much, much bigger. And so rationally, it is easier to be… I make the… The way I put it in the book is that it is harder to tell a donkey apart from a mule, than to tell a donkey apart from an elephant.

0:31:38 SC: Absolutely, and I think that there’s also a positive feedback loop, which is a point you make in the book, because it used to be that 20% of the voters were really persuadable, “Should I vote for the Republican or the Democrat?” And now I think the number was less than 7%, which means that if you wanna win an election, don’t spend all your time trying to convince those people, try to spend the time… Have your rabid partisans get out the vote, actually show up, and therefore you go, you preach to your converted.

0:32:05 EK: Yeah, so the second half of the book is about the feedback loops that have been set off in American politics by polarization. And I talk particularly about the media, about how elections are run, about the presidency, and about governance in the presidency and Congress, and then about the two political parties as institutions. And what you’re saying there is 100% true. So, it used to be that what you’re trying to do in elections was vie for these persuadable people in the middle, and these are usually people with a lot of cross-cutting identities, reasonably weak policy opinions, and what they wanted was somebody who they could see themselves in. And so you have the two political parties running candidates pretty often who fuzz the difference a bit.

0:32:48 EK: Think of Bill Clinton as a New Democrat who… He makes a big show of the ways in which he’s conservative, his identities are Southern, he’s a white man, he says he’s gonna end welfare as we know it. He’s a Democrat, but he’s a Democratic a conservative might look at and think… Or certainly an independent might look at and think, “I can kinda get behind that guy.” George W. Bush runs as a compassionate conservative, he makes a point of saying he’s gonna really focus on the racial education gap and he makes a point of saying that we shouldn’t balance our budgets on the backs of the poor. And so there’s a very long period in American politics when the strategy used to win an election is to try to choose a candidate and then choose a set of issues that are gonna be good for a voter who is persuadable to you but doesn’t quite agree. And that naturally pulls you towards the middle.

0:33:38 EK: Now, as the number of persuadable voters has gone down, what you have are candidates who are running base mobilization strategies. Donald Trump’s a pure base mobilization candidate, Barack Obama, rhetorically, would make his feints towards the middle, but as a symbolic candidate, an African-American who… From an urban area who is a constitutional law professor at the U of Chicago, he’s very much a candidate for Democratic mobilization and it looks like where Democrats may go, we’ll see… You know, could… Certainly, it looks like the Democratic party is moving in a base-mobilization direction as Republicans have.

0:34:09 EK: The big inflection point here seems to be the 2004 election under George W. Bush. But what’s very important about this is that it’s not a one-way system. So as the candidacies, as the political parties begin running more base mobilization strategies, what they do is they further polarize the electorate. So, if you are dealing with a choice between, say, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, it’s much easier for you as a member of the electorate to decide which side of that you’re on than when you were looking at a choice between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. But as you… The Democratic Party moves to the left and moves sort of in a democratic socialist direction and moves quite a bit to the left on immigration and race, which are very powerful political issues, and the Republican Party moves right on them, that polarizes the public too. People follow their parties, they take cues, they develop their opinions from their parties. And then when people look around, there’s this huge gap between them. And so, in deciding between the two of them, you sort of move in one direction or another. It’s harder to be locked in that kind of mushy middle.

0:35:11 SC: And if you’re gonna give… If you’re gonna boil down the explanation to a sentence, so, why we’re polarized. Is it the Dixiecrat explanation? Is that the single most important thing? That it’s a compelling historical story, but it seems unique to the United States. It seems like something that would not explain things elsewhere. But maybe I should be asking as a question, are other countries polarized in the same line?

0:35:34 EK: Other countries are very highly polarized.

0:35:37 SC: Yeah.

0:35:38 EK: What… The Dixiecrat thing is not, I would say, the explanation for polarization at all.

0:35:43 SC: Okay.

0:35:43 EK: What the Dixiecrat thing is is the explanation for why… It is the primary explanation for why did America have a period of depolarized parties in the middle of the 20th century.

0:35:52 SC: Okay.

0:35:53 EK: So number one, for most of American history, or at least much of it, America was quite polarized. If you go back to, say, before the Civil War, that was a very polarized country that ended up having political parties where one wanted to invade part of the other. So we have had polarization here before and we have it very sharply in other countries. I mean, look at the UK. There’s a very big difference between the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn and the Tory party of Boris Johnson. I recognize Johnson has moderated a bit on things like the National Health Service, but there’s still quite a bit of polarization there. In general, political parties tended towards polarization, for all kinds of obvious reasons. If you are trying to be a product on a political market, so to speak, you need to differentiate from the other products.

0:36:34 EK: Race is a reason. And basically, in the 20th century, America was a four-party system. It was Democrats, Dixiecrats, Liberal Republicans and Conservative Republicans. And then, it collapsed down into a two-party system, as the Dixiecrat blockage undid itself. But that is not… Why we’re polarized, it’s actually the incentives of political systems of… And I would also say, at this point, social media systems and others, I mean we can talk about other things in the polarization stack. But I think it’s a very, very important point to say that mid-20th century America is both for us and globally, that is the aberration.

0:37:11 SC: Yeah, okay. No, I think that…

0:37:12 EK: When you have high salience political… High information, high salience political systems with multiple political parties, polarization is usually the result. What is distinct about America, and we can talk about this, is that most political systems function just fine amid polarization. Whoever has a majority is able to govern. America’s political system, which was designed to resist political parties, is distinct in that it does not function well amidst polarization. You need pretty high levels of consensus in the American political system to do anything at all. And so, one particular threat polarization plays to us compared to… Poses to us, compared to other countries, is basically making ambitious governance in this country impossible over the long term.

0:37:51 SC: Yeah, that is gonna be a problem. But I like that way of putting it. That became clear, even though I read your book, when you just said it, that the Dixiecrat phenomenon is more about explaining why we weren’t polarized.

0:38:04 EK: Yes.

0:38:06 SC: And maybe arguably, polarization is a more natural thing. But okay, if that’s the case, let me bring up the counter expectation maybe. If polarization is a way of characterizing the fact that along multiple different dimensions people’s beliefs or preferences are correlated… Why? Why should they be? Why should my religion or race be correlated with my feelings about the estate tax? Do you think that really is a natural thing or is this, again, something because we’re in a society that sort of sorts us by identity in different ways?

0:38:39 EK: I don’t think it is a logical thing, but I think it is a natural thing, and it is in this way. We have a often quite naive view of how people form their politics. Which is to say, there is this classical view that what people are doing is, they’re getting up, blinking their eyes, wiping the sleep out of them and looking around and saying, “How I do I feel about the estate tax? How do I feel about capital gains taxes? Do I think China is a currency manipulator? Is it a good idea to assassinate Soleimani? Will that do more to stabilize or destabilize the Middle East? Should we have a single-payer healthcare system, or would it be better to have a multi-payer system, or just a universal catastrophic… ” As soon as you begin running through the number of decisions that American politics asks us in theory to make, or maybe the clear way to put that is the number of questions American politics asks us to have preferences on, it becomes quickly ridiculous. “Should we have a carbon tax, or should we just fund R&D into new energy research?”

0:39:40 EK: Nobody, including people who do this professionally, can have an informed opinion, a truly informed opinion, on that many things. Political parties are these crucial mediators of American politics. And so, what functionally happens, the way most people operationalize our politics is they attach to a party, whether or not they admit they’re doing this or not, to say a word to the independents, and then they let that… They trust that party more or less to either make decisions for them or, and this is very important too, is sometimes, they don’t really trust the party they vote for, but they really, really fear the other party. There are a lot of people who are Republicans, not loving Donald Trump, but they hate the Democrats. A lot of Democrats who don’t love the Democrats, but they really do not wanna see Donald Trump re-elected.

0:40:01 EK: And so, then the question is, why do we attach to political parties in this way? And that’s where identity becomes really important. And so, what you’re basically seeing, the way the causal chain actually goes is that the political parties are connected to certain identities for a bunch of different reasons. You brought up the example of race here. The parties traditional cleavages on race going to the post-Civil Rights Act era where in the subsequent election, Barry Goldwater runs against the Civil Rights Act… I’m sorry, not the subsequent election, the election, Barry Goldwater runs against the Civil Rights Act and then Lyndon Johnson is for it. That is a key moment in American politics. So what is happening there, and I wanna note this for a minute, because it shows you how different the de-polarized and the polarized periods are.

0:41:14 EK: Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act in Congress in very large numbers. So actually as a proportion of members of Congress of their own party, Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act both in the House and Senate at a higher proportion than Democrats did. But then, in the election, Barry Goldwater runs against the Civil Rights Act and Lyndon Johnson is for it. And so, as opposed to this being a bipartisan accomplishment, it quickly becomes a cleavage between the parties. When it could have been the reverse, you very much could imagine a Republican party that had become the party of civil rights, as it had been traditionally. It was Abraham Lincoln’s Party, and the Democratic Party with the Dixiecrats who went the other way. But this does begin to kick off this period where the Republican party’s a home for the white identity politics backlash to the Civil Rights movement.

0:41:58 EK: And so the Democratic Party becomes the party of non-white Americans, a party that has a investment in and a policy agenda built for a more diverse and diversifying country. And so people who are not white tend to grow up in houses that are Democratic and they are attached Democratic Party through that identity. A lot of people who are white are having the opposite experience, particularly in the South, with the Republican Party. And then having done that, they take their views on the estate tax from the party, or more often than not, they don’t think about the estate tax at all, because it’s very rarely a central issue in American politics. So identity attaches you to party and then party helps filter for you what you believe and who you believe about what will be better for the country. But the idea that what is happening is that people are, maybe listeners of Mindscape are, but most people do not sit down, look at the 50 policy items they think are gonna come before Congress this year and reason backwards from them. They reason forward from who they already trust.

0:42:54 SC: Yeah, I think that nobody does. I don’t think that Ed Witten or Stephen Hawking does that. We have these finite cognitive capacities. If you read Thinking Fast and Slow, we reason by heuristics. And the psychology of it is fascinating to me. And you tell the story in the book, which is, I’d heard it before but I can never hear it enough times, about how politics makes you stupider, even when it just comes to doing math problems. Why don’t you share that one with the audience?

0:43:22 EK: Yeah, so and I would twist on it one way, which is even more than that, it’s it makes smart people very stupid.

0:43:27 SC: Right, it’s a bigger effect for the smart…

0:43:29 EK: It makes you dumber the smarter you are.

[laughter]

0:43:31 EK: So the math problem story is there are a group of researchers led by Dan Kahan at Yale Law School, who’ve done this great work on political psychology and partisan motivated reasoning, or as he puts it, which I like even better, what he calls identity protective cognition. So there are times when we’re just reasoning to the truth, but times when what we’re doing is reasoning to protect our identity and our standing in the group. And so one of the experiments he did, which is very clever, was they gave people this basically a brain teaser. It’s a math problem built so that if you look at it quickly, you’re gonna get it wrong. And in one version of the math problem it’s about how well a skin care cream worked. And when you give people that math problem, you get exactly what you would expect, which is people who are better at math, Sean Carroll, get the math problem right. My dad is a mathematician, I’m sure he’d get the math problem right. And people who are not as good at math get it wrong. But then they had a variant in the study, which is they gave you the exact same problem, same proportions, the same tendency towards fooling people, but now it’s about how well a gun control policy worked from one party or the other.

0:44:35 EK: And all of a sudden, when you do that, particularly for people who are better at math, math stops being helpful in giving you the right answer. Whether or not you get the right answer is whether or not you believe in gun control. And so even people, the… I love this finding for math. The disparity is biggest among the people who are best at math.

0:44:57 SC: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:44:58 EK: And this ladders out, and I have a lot of evidence around this in the book, but it ladders out to all kinds of different things. The smarter you are, and even a more direct way of putting it, the more high information you are as a voter, what it tends to do is give you a lot of cognitive resources to convince yourself of why what your group believes, or what you wanna believe is already correct.

0:45:17 SC: Whatever that thing is.

0:45:19 EK: Whatever that is. If you’ve ever tried to argue with a climate change denier, something you will find is that they are often quite informed about some aspects of science. It is a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And by the way, they would listen to me right now, and say, [chuckle] “The climate change believers are doing this performance of scientific inquiry”, or if you’ve talked to somebody who’s a 9/11 truther, they know a lot about melting points of steel. The issue here is not that people have the wrong views because they’re dumb. Oftentimes the reason they have very wrong views is because they’re quite smart and that has given them an incentive to go out and search for the wrong views, or answers, or information that will back them up in the wrong views. There’s some good work from Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. In the book, they have this wonderful paper that’s called “It Feels Like We’re Thinking”.

[chuckle]

0:46:11 EK: And the point of it is that when they ask people, “Did the budget deficit get bigger or smaller under Bill Clinton?” There’s an actual answer to that question. But the more informed Republicans are likelier to answer it wrong than less informed Republicans. And going backwards, more partisan Democrats were less likely to know that inflation had fallen under Ronald Reagan. And that’s because if you have ever read the National Review, or The New Republic, or whatever it might be, if you are going around in the Bill Clinton era and you’re like a not very informed Republican, you probably know you don’t like Bill Clinton. But you don’t know that much about the economy, and you’ve probably heard the deficit came down, and so, fine, I don’t like Bill Clinton, deficit has come down.

0:46:51 EK: If you’re a reader of the National Review and in that period, you’re hearing a lot about the size of the trade deficit with China, and there’s a credit bubble, and so on. And there’s a lot of ways to arrange the facts that you think, “Oh, no, the economy’s in general getting worse, the deficit is fake, there are these huge unfunded liabilities in social security,” and so you answer that a different way. So, we mediate not just the information we believe and not just whom we trust, which is crucial, but the information we’re actually looking for, by what our side is. And so, the people who are very smart and very committed in politics, they are better than other people are at finding the information to tell them that what they already believe is right.

0:47:31 SC: Yeah, no, I think this is… I think in the very first little solo thing I did to announce the existence of this podcast, I talked about how I wanted a common theme to be what we pay attention to when it comes to deciding what’s right and wrong. There’s reasoning capacities, which math is standing in for here, but there’s also the evidence that we look for. But if… Am I recalling correctly, it was a couple weeks ago, but in your book you mentioned that the probability or the fact that if you do try to listen to alternate viewpoints, to people who you don’t believe, that can often backfire.

0:48:08 EK: It can backfire.

0:48:08 SC: That can often push you away from it. I think what was called “the backfire effect” maybe wasn’t reproducible, but there is this sort of defensiveness that we get when we hear opinions different than ours that can cause us to retrench.

0:48:20 EK: Yeah, and what I would say is that that is not… And one reason it’s a hard thing to reproduce in some… There are two things here. The backfire effect, which is I think what you’re talking about, is actually a little bit different. The backfire effect, the way political scientists use it, is the idea that even when something that is wrong is disproven, that can make you believe it more strongly. So, if I say to you…

0:48:39 SC: That’s why I paused when said “backfire”, ’cause that’s a word that…

0:48:41 EK: Right. If Barrack Obama… If you believe… The argument here is something like, if you believe the birther attack on Barrack Obama and then you read a New York Times article saying, “Actually no, he was born in Hawaii,” that that can make you believe the birther attack all the more, ’cause you’re like, “Well, screw the New York Times.” It might be true for some people, not as true as the early studies on that suggested. But what you’re saying is also true, but I wanna be careful here ’cause it’s true in certain conditions. And here’s a place where identity and groups matters a lot. There’s a study I talk about in the book, Chris Bail and other people at Duke did the study, which is they paid people, and this was the largest group they ever did this with, or anything like this with, who are on Twitter. They paid them to let them insert in their Twitter feeds members of the other political party, influencers from the other political party. And they had a way of defining this, and it was people who were very highly followed on the other side. And so, they put them in their Twitter feeds to see what would happen. And what happened was that it made Republicans more conservative to see a bunch of liberals in their Twitter feed.

0:49:40 EK: And while the effect was not statistically significant, if it did anything among liberals it was to make them more liberal. And this was, by the way, testing where they went on policy issues. So it’s interesting that it didn’t have as big effect on liberals. We can talk about… I think, actually, the right thing to say, though, is more research is needed into why. But it definitely did not make liberals less liberal. That did not happen. And the thing I would say there is that there’s a very big difference between reading the “other side” when they are literally the other side talking to their own people in a way that is gonna piss you off, and reading somebody from the other side whom you trust, who you don’t even really see as on the other side and who is actually trying to convince you. So, one of the examples I sometimes use of this is that, if you’re a liberal and you want to see what the other side thinks in a way that might affect you somewhat, and you start reading Breitbart, that is not gonna work. Because Breitbart is there to offend you. They’re not actually talking to you, they are talking to their own side. Their whole approach to politics is about exacerbating conflict. Whereas conversely, if you read Ross Douthat in the New York Times, that is a center-right conservative who is tuning his arguments to a liberal audience.

0:50:56 SC: He knows it’s the New York Times, yeah.

0:50:57 EK: He’s trying… He structures it in a way where he grants some points, and then he makes his point. So, I don’t think it is impossible to have your mind changed, certainly not even for me, and… Well, let me say that in a sec. I don’t think it is impossible to have your mind changed or to construct an informational ecosystem where exposure to alternative viewpoints gives you more empathy, or even you find some of those viewpoints actually persuasive. But the way people often do it, which is, they try to read the other side, if the other side is not trying to talk to you and it is structured such that you actually feel oppositional towards them it won’t work. What you need is people who you actually think of as on your side, they just happen to have some different political opinions than you do, and you’re talking to them. So again, a very big difference between you have a really smart friend who has some different views on China than you do and you might be willing to listen to that versus you turn on Fox News and Laura Ingraham is ranting about China and you’re probably not gonna listen to that.

0:51:57 SC: That’s a really excellent point and I don’t think I’ve ever thought of that quite explicitly. Because I was gonna ask, how can we be better? Because I know that I, and you and everyone else has these biases, has these filters, has these things we pay attention to. So part of the prescription would be we need more people who we disagree with, who are nevertheless trying to talk to us. Do such people exist either way? I know that… I’m on Twitter and I really try to get better and better, but still, it’s way easier to just be sarcastic about dumb things the other side does than to give a positive, substantive pitch to the other side for people that I think, for opinions that I have.

0:52:39 EK: Twitter is very bad. In general, Twitter’s not a good place to do this. Twitter is built to exacerbate conflict and disagreement. I have a couple of things to say here. One is that, and I wanna say this very clearly, these are systems that surround us all, including very much me. There is not a thing I argue in the book that I’m not at some point guilty of. What I’m trying to, in many ways, do is understand the system that shapes what I end up doing and what choices I have. And so, this is not something where people should ever feel that somebody has escaped it and they’re being criticized. This is like, every one of us is trapped inside of it and it’s hard to get any elevation on it. I wanna note that because it’s an important point for me. But number two, I think there are two questions there. One is, can we do things that’ll make the system better? And the other, though, is, is one of those things to try to reduce our own levels of polarization? And one thing that has happened in the discourse around polarization is it is coded as a negative word. “To be polarized” is bad, polarization is bad. But as I said earlier, most political systems are quite polarized. There’s natural reasons you might be polarized. You may want your own thinking process to be as clear-headed as you can get it, but even doing that you might still be quite polarized.

0:53:55 EK: In some ways, you might be more polarized. It’s possible, for instance, that… And I would say this is true, that if you wanna have a very clear eyed process that is not overly influenced by American pressure campaigns and politicians and status quo bias on, say, health care, you’re gonna end up supporting something dramatically to the left of what America has. Doesn’t need to necessarily be a Canada-style single payer, you may want German-style multi-payer, but nevertheless you’re not gonna be within the boundaries of the middle of the American debate. What we… Our healthcare system is ridiculous and terrible on every level. So I don’t think that this will necessarily depolarize you, and I don’t necessarily think it needs to. The thing that I do tell people to do more than I tell them to try to, if you wanna find people who you’ll listen to from the other side, I think that’s great and everybody should do it.

0:54:44 EK: And I can give you my recommendations for people on both sides of that. But I think the thing people should do that is the most useful, not just for the system but for them personally, is to engage less with national politics and more with state and local politics. That we have over the past couple of decades for a bunch of reasons, some of them technological, some of them in terms of the overall media financial system and business models, some of them just having to do with what has happened in American politics, people have in general made a huge turn towards nationalizing their political information and nationalizing their political identities. And I have a lot of evidence about this in the book. It is… Rather than being on Twitter shooting off tweets about how Donald Trump is bad into the ether, actually join some group near you that does real political work, actual activism or interest group or helping people fill out their taxes in your community, whatever it might be and move some of your political news consumption over to state and local sources.

0:55:50 EK: Just because those are important identities, it’s much more nourishing to be involved locally. And like a very powerful form, something that is very good at restraining polarization, is local political identity. For a very long time, one of the ways that the parties kept polarization reasonably low, or lower, in America is it… Yeah, it may be true that you’re a Republican, but you’re a Republican from this one district in Oklahoma. And if you voted for that bill, they would help you rebuild the bridge in that one district in Oklahoma. And so yeah, that was a Democratic bill and you’re a Republican, but you’re from Oklahoma. And what matters is that your people have a bridge. And this is how politics worked for a long time. And then under John Boehner they got rid of earmarks.

0:56:32 EK: And I would say getting rid of the earmarks is more of a symptom than a cause of nationalization. But it was also an accelerant of nationalization. And so the more people reinvest in state and local political identities, I think the healthier politics will tend to be, but also just they’ll be able to change things. People might listen to you, you have more ability to affect them. It’s more important in many ways. I’d push people not to just think about how to modulate their national political identities, but how to reinvigorate their more local ones.

0:57:02 SC: But the thing about the earmarks is interesting because I was gonna ask about just the game theory of it, if you are a politician. I had this amateurish theory that over time politicians have just become better at working in their personal self-interest, which is mostly getting re-elected. And if the process that we have to get elected is first you get nominated by your party and then you run against the other party, and most parts of the country are predominantly one party or the other, and the primary election is really the important one, then you’re driven to extremism, or at least driven to identify very strongly with that party’s feelings about a whole suite of issues. Is that at all sensible here or is that two systems?

0:57:43 EK: Yeah, that’s completely true. There’s a great line from the political scientist Julia Azari in the book. And her line is, “The central fact of this era is that we live in a period of weak parties and strong partisanship.” So, one way of saying what you’re saying is that it’s not just that you have to run in your own party’s primary, but it used to be that your own party controlled that primary in a relatively official way. So to use maybe presidential primaries as the example here, we used to decide who was gonna be the presidential candidate through a convention vote. And there were examples of these votes needing to be retaken hundreds of times as the different groups horse traded. And so Donald Trump could never have been the Republican Party nominee cause he would have never won delegates at a convention.

0:58:28 EK: He could only be the Republican Party nominee after reforms made to the primary process so that primaries were actually quite binding. And so that thing where primaries are not just important and we haven’t just gerrymandered and sorted such that people tend to run in elections that are… Whoever wins the party nomination is gonna win from the relevant party, but we’ve also made the primaries… We like to think of it as small D democratic, but in fact very few people vote in, say, a House primary. Very few people vote in Senate primaries. And so in fact, in making them small D democratic, we made them very unrepresentative because it is the small group of activists and party loyalists who come out. And so you have to be very afraid of them and not that afraid of anyone else.

0:59:15 EK: Look, if you’re in Utah or South Carolina, you’re just not gonna lose at the Senate level to a Democrat. It’s not gonna happen. And so a couple of years ago in Utah, Bob Bennett was beat in a primary by Mike Lee. Bob Bennett was a conservative Republican, but he also was known for working with Democrats, like with Ron Wyden on a particular health bill called the Healthy Americans Act. And that was part of why he was beaten. And you see this playing out in different places. And so, yes, it is, I think your game theory there is more or less right, but I do wanna note that it’s not just primaries necessarily, but it’s also the weakness of parties.

0:59:52 SC: Right. And it has also a relationship to this small D democratization in the sense of the question, “How direct is our democracy versus how mediated is it through we vote for people and let them make decisions?” I had a wonderful podcast with Edward Watts, who is a historian, about the fall of the Roman Republic, and the Roman Republic fell and became an empire but it lasted for 500 years. And it really worked well for those 500 years, in part because it defined itself in opposition to Greek democracy, which was direct. So anytime you wanted to have a military campaign, the whole citizenry would vote on what to do. And it turned out to be a disaster. But I think that I can clearly see advantages and disadvantages in handing more power to the elites to make these decisions. Some decisions they’ll make a little bit more wisely, but maybe they’re gonna also have their own interests in mind. Is this something where we even have an intelligent conversation about this these days?

1:00:52 EK: It is not something where we have an intelligent conversation.

1:00:53 SC: Okay. [chuckle]

1:00:54 EK: Let me take this in two conflicting directions. One is that, Larry Bartels and Chris Achen in their book Democracy for Realists, which is a book I’d very much recommend people read, they make this argument… I think they have a nice little name for it that I’m forgetting now, but they basically say that in America, whenever there is a problem in democracy, our answer is always more democracy. We just have a value system such that you’re never allowed to say that the problem with this small D democratic process is that it has gone too far and you should ratchet it back. You always have to be, at least in theory, appealing to a small D democratic instinct. Now, that might lead you to say, and similarly, what I just said about primary conventions, it might you lead to say, “Well, we should get rid of that, we should move back towards elite gatekeepers and so on.” And maybe. There are places where that might be true, but on the other hand, I would say that if we actually were a democracy, a small D democracy, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t be the Senate Majority Leader and Republicans wouldn’t have built this firewall at the Supreme Court, and I think we’d be in better shape.

1:02:05 EK: Part of what is the problem in our system right now is that we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a very weird political system that amplifies the power of rural, mostly white, and affluent voters. And so, through that distortive lens where… There was just a paper that came out showing, mathematically, that because of the electoral college’s tilt towards Republican-leaning areas, that Republicans should be expected to win 65% of presidential contests where they closely lose a popular vote. That’s pretty concerning, I think. So you can imagine a system where it really was majority vote rules, and in that world, I think the Republican Party would have to moderate quite a bit if they were gonna continue being competitive at the national level, which it could do, by the way. Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan are very popular Republican governors of blue states, but right now, Republicans are winning elections in spite of losing more votes. And so, on the one hand, I am sympathetic to claims that we have gone too far in the direction of breaking down gatekeepers. On the other hand, given… I find that the argument that we are too un-democratic has more immediacy and more power than the argument that we are overly small D democratic.

1:03:21 SC: Which doesn’t quite let me… Give me a prescription for making things better, but there are things to keep in mind while we try to make things better, yeah. One of the aspects that puzzles me is just that if there is this polarization… You just talked about if the Republicans just have a slightly lower popular vote, is it surprising that the polarization sorts us into approximately 50-50 groups?

1:03:46 EK: It is very surprising. I have talked to… A couple things on this. Frances Lee wrote a great book, political scientist at Maryland, called Insecure Majorities. And what she shows, and I have this chart in the book, which everybody should buy, what she shows is that this is the most competitive era in American politics ever. For most of American political history, we’ve had what they call sun and moon parties. We have had a modified one-party system. There was a long period when Republicans held power after the Civil War, long period where Democrats tended to hold power after the Great Depression. We can sometimes miss this in retrospect, because the presidential level has been a lot more competitive than the congressional level. But if you aggregate all this together, what you used to have is long periods of functional one-party dominance with much larger majorities than you have here, and so that led me to ask… Lee argues that this is a big reason for polarization and winner-takes-all politics, that everybody’s always so close to either winning or losing power that it creates this desperation, this no-holds-barred nature to the political tactics and approaches that they’ll endorse. And so, everything is in a state of constant knife’s edge competition.

1:04:54 EK: Everybody’s always playing like it’s overtime and they’re one point down. But it led me to ask her and others, “Well, why? Why are we so well-sorted right now? Why is it so close?” And political scientists do not have an answer to this question. And I have my theories. Specifically, I have a theory that the media plays, to some degree… A nationalized political media, plays a thermostatic function, where because the media is reasonably oppositional to whoever is in power, it tends to cover scandals and mistakes. The media likes conflict, it likes negativity. And because whoever is out of power is more desperate and you can nationalize that desperation much more easily now, I suspect that it’s creating a bit of a thermostatic result. But nevertheless, it’s weird, it’s genuinely weird. This is a weird period in American politics, we don’t have a very good answer for why it’s happening, and nobody has a real theory of how it will change.

1:05:57 SC: I think that this is why we need more the physics of politics. This is the book I’m gonna write.

[chuckle]

1:06:05 SC: Okay, but you also mentioned the media. This is the final thing that I really sort of wanted to home in on. To the extent that things are changing and to the extent that we want to look for a systematic or structural explanations rather than just blaming Mitch McConnell or Bill Clinton, or whatever, the biggest obvious change we’ve had over the past several decades is in the way people get their information. It seems that way to me, anyway. Whether it’s Twitter or whether it’s just the fact that we read screens, or whether the fact that we don’t all watch Walter Cronkite at night. Despite this homeostatic impulse to keep conflict going, is it clear that there’s a relationship between increased polarization and the fragmentation of the media? Or is that just a correlation that may or may not be causal?

1:06:53 EK: So I have a chapter on the media. I think the media is a huge player here. I don’t know that I would say I think it is the main player or it’s like the only thing or the main thing that has changed this period, but there’s no doubt that the media is a huge player in polarization, and I’d pull out a couple of things there. The way the media has changed is that we have entered into an era of choice-based media, nationalized, choice-based media, and so I have great research in here from Markus Prior, and I talk with people like Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed and my background is in media, and I’ve started an organization and the whole thing. So I’ve seen this from all of the different angles. But it used to be that people bought a television to watch “I Love Lucy” and then they were also there when the news happened. Right? ‘Cause the news happened the same time every night, and like all of them did the news at the same time every night, that was how that worked.

1:07:40 EK: Similar issue with radio, you might get a newspaper because you want to get the sports section but on the front page is politics. What Markus Prior and others have found is that as we entered into the era of cable news, and then internet news, what happened is we sorted by preference. So there was a theory that with all this information we’d become much more knowledgeable about politics, and that didn’t happen. And what had happened is that the people who were very invested and interested in politics became much much much more knowledgeable, whereas the people who didn’t like political news just opted out altogether. And so one of the key things here, and this is why I’d slightly reverse the causality on what you said, is that the media had to be in competing for a much more polarized audience.

1:08:22 SC: Okay.

1:08:23 EK: Because that was the audience that was still interested. So the people who it used to have, because you had a local newspaper monopoly or there were only three network news channels, they were gone. And by the way, in some ways it’s more like early forms of the media in this country. Newspapers used to just be partisan outlets. Most newspapers in the early period of the country were funded or attached in explicit way to political parties, and that’s why you’ll still see something like the Arizona Republic used to be called the Arizona Republican, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Democratic-Gazette, is a Democratic paper. Not anymore, but that’s how they were started.

1:08:56 EK: So you can still see vestiges of that in the media now. But so, but what happened in the 20th century is that went away, we had these monopolistic business models or government-granted monopoly business models, and what you’re trying to do there was be inoffensive. You needed everybody who might shop at the department store to read your newspaper and that meant you couldn’t be swinging too far to one side or the other.

1:09:15 EK: As we entered this era of unbelievable choice and attention-based media. And people who did not like politics could watch the home gardening network and people who did like politics could watch cable news, it turned out that the audience for politics were people who already had very strong opinions, very strong political identities ’cause otherwise why would you actually be paying that much attention. And that forced the media to run more polarized and more polarizing stories, which in turn polarizes the audience, this is another one of these feedback loops. The audience gets more polarized, the media becomes more polarized to compete and it kinda keeps going on like that. If you compare the intensity, let’s call it, of New York Times or Washington Post headlines to where they were 15 or 20 years ago, it’s no… There’s no comparison. Even the very august institutions, still understood as trying to hew to some version of “objective journalism”, they’ve changed a lot.

1:10:07 EK: And so I think the media is a very big player here, but I see the media like, everything else, as operating within a system. It isn’t so much that people in the media woke up one day and they’re like, “We’d like to polarize the country,” it’s that the country polarized, their audience polarized, and as they began to write still good, true, reasonable stories that ended up with them developing more polarized audiences. And then you would have more competition from the rise of a Fox News or something, and that creates pressure on the system. So choice-based hyper-competitive media is gonna be a polarizing form of media, and that’s what we’ve seen.

1:10:45 SC: I mean, it seems to me, correct me if I’m wrong here, ’cause you are the expert, but that’s even evident to me I think at Vox.

1:10:52 EK: Yes, absolutely.

1:10:52 SC: It seemed to me that at the beginning it was trying much harder to be completely non-judgmental about things and just the language, the rhetoric, is a bit more like “Come on. This is crazy.” [chuckle]

1:11:01 EK: I actually don’t know that I agree with that. I think it’s true about Vox in a big way. I’m not sure I think that’s true about our beginning. In some ways, I think we’re… I don’t know if I’d say toned down, I think a hard thing in this is Trump made all this a lot harder.

1:11:15 SC: Yeah, that is definitely a factor.

1:11:16 EK: This is another way in which the systems you’re… The reality you’re dealing with is hard. For me to state clearly what is going on in the White House… By the way, even when people in the White House are telling me what’s going on in the White House, is to say things that sound like almost slander. “The President is lying.” “The President is saying a bunch of incoherent things about windmills.” “The President made a bunch of bigoted statements today.” “The President made fun of somebody’s weight.” “The President tweeted… ” I mean, literally just a couple of days ago now, “The President, re-tweeted some random person on Twitter who had photoshopped Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi into Muslim garb and said they love the Ayatollah… ” For me to say clearly what is going on has just become itself more polarizing.

1:12:04 EK: So some of what you’re seeing there is I think an accurate rendering of reality. That said, I am somebody, I come from the blogging background. I’ve worked at the Washington Post and so on, but I believe in saying clearly what I think we found and what I think is true, but I have a lens. I’m a liberal person and I have certain values and commitments. And I try very hard to look for the truth, but there’s no doubt that at some level, I believe immigrants coming into this country are a good thing, not a bad thing. And that inflects how I cover things. Or I think gay marriage is a good thing, not a bad thing. So Vox, like a lot of places, does not hew to an idea that you should write story headlines where it is unclear what the conclusion of the story is, or write stories where it’s unclear what the conclusion of the story is. But Vox started in the age of social media, and so like a lot of groups that are in the social media I think that made our headlines more overheated and more polarizing.

1:12:51 SC: Punchy, yeah.

1:12:51 EK: And so I think, my view is, we do a pretty good job in the context we have. But there’s no doubt, and you’ll see this very much in the media chapter, that something I’m working through there is that I think it’s become… The incentives of the media right now are to be very polarizing. To be very blunt, the struggle of Vox is to keep it from becoming more polarizing and not to get it there. Like where Twitter wants to pull you is way to the left or way to the right, and it’s a constant fight to keep people hewing to an open process and making sure our reporters are talking to people they don’t agree with and so on, and so forth.

1:12:51 SC: Well, good. This leads exactly into what I promise will be the final question. You raised the consideration that the word polarization has this negative valence. It sounds bad, but maybe it’s not always bad, maybe there’s some interest in having it there. But on the other… And I agree with that, but there is certainly a cost, if nothing else, at the personal level. The amount of anxiety induced by talking to people and the other side of the aisle seems to me to be much higher now even in our families or in our neighborhoods than it was 10 years ago. And part of that is Trump, but I don’t think that it’s his fault. I think that it is a bigger thing. Is there some worry that there’s a social fabric issue, that we can’t get along, all we can do is fight the other side and see who wins?

1:14:32 EK: Yeah, yeah, I think there is every reason to worry about that. I don’t think at this juncture it has gotten so bad that I am deeply worried about our social fabric over the long term. Trump has definitely made this, in my view, a lot worse. But as I was saying earlier, in the ’60s I think our social fabric was coming apart in a much more profound way. And I would also argue that one thing about polarization is that the alternative to polarization is often suppression. What was very polarizing in the ’60s was that a lot of disagreements that had been bottled up were forced into the open, like say over civil rights. The Dixiecrats for a long time kept consideration of civil rights and anti-lynching bills off of the floor of the House or Senate, and so that debate was suppressed. When they lost the power to do that, we began having the debate, and it led to a sharp polarization in the country.

1:15:18 EK: So, one, I think it is okay to have difficult debates. I think the thing where people feel they have trouble talking about politics with their families also sometimes reflects that they’ve become unused to having political disagreement, because we sort into places and hang out with people who tend to think a lot like us, particularly if we’re very into politics. And so sometimes it’s only around that Thanksgiving table that you hang out with people who you both love and have to talk to every year, but who really think differently than you do, and sometimes having people that you need to toughen up a little bit about that. That said, there’s no doubt that I think polarization is tough on a society. And, I think this is really important, it is making it quite impossible to govern. It’s very… In a country where what you need to do is win the House, and then win the Senate with its super majority filibuster requirement for most bills, and get the President on board, and depending on how you wanna look at it, have a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court.

1:16:13 EK: Yeah, like polarization with that many veto points, and many, many, many inside that, that I didn’t mention, what polarization tends to do is increase paralysis. And I think one thing that makes these fights harder and worse, is that people are frustrated by their problems not actually being solved, and while they may not love the way the other party would solve them, I actually think it’d be better if parties were able to govern, if their majority agendas they were just able to pass them and then people could evaluate the outcomes of that. But absent the ability of parties to actually govern, you’re just caught in this endless struggle for power that you never quite achieve to enact a governing agenda you’re never quite able to enact, such that the American people can never really judge you based on what did or didn’t happen.

1:16:55 EK: And so, yeah, polarization interacts very badly and very dangerously with our system in particular. Parliamentary systems, if you get elected you can govern. In our system, there’s nothing like that guarantee. And so I’m very worried about polarization, but the particular distinction I make is that I think a lot of people will listen to an analysis like that and say, “Well, we gotta bring down polarization” and for reasons I try to show in the book, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think the feedback loops it has kicked off are very hard to stop and very unlikely to change. What I do think is possible, as you could imagine if we wanted to, a political system that worked better amidst polarization. Some of that could just be bomb-proofing against the worst possible outcomes, like there’s no reason we should have a debt ceiling at all, such that we could trigger a global financial crisis for no reason. Let’s just not do that, as other countries don’t do that, and not create the possibility for one side or the other to trigger a huge financial catastrophe.

1:17:51 EK: But you can also imagine getting rid of the filibuster, you can imagine forms of proportional representation that would lead to multi-party systems which could have some good effects on this. I think it would be good for DC and Puerto Rico to be states. I would, in many ways, restructure American politics quite radically, given a magic wand. But for all the reasons I just said about polarization making it hard to do anything, it makes it very hard to systemically change the nature of the American political system. So I don’t have a ton of optimism that my agenda there is gonna get followed.

1:18:21 SC: No, but we need a… The rule here at Mindscape is we end on a optimistic note, so the optimistic note is…

1:18:26 EK: Man, your podcast works very differently than my podcast.

1:18:30 SC: Very different… [chuckle] But there is an optimistic note there. And I like the idea that the impossible-sounding task of reducing polarization isn’t the task we should be devoted to. It’s working in an environment where there is polarization and nevertheless having a functioning government. Part of that, maybe you didn’t say it out loud, but we also have to work to guarantee the rights of the tinier party, right? That is what our governmental system was meant to do. And it’s gone a little bit too far, but I think that if that’s where we focus our efforts maybe we can make things better.

1:19:02 EK: That seems like a good optimistic note to end on.

1:19:05 SC: Alright. The book is called, “Why We’re Polarized-How I Managed To Write a Whole Book Without Including a Subtitle.” Ezra Klein, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:19:13 EK: Thank you, Sean.

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