  | Book Details Title: Why We’re Polarized |
Book DescriptionReview “The story of this impeachment is the story of American politics today: polarization. It affects almost every aspect of American political life and has been studied by scholars from many different angles, with dozens of good historical and experimental approaches. Wouldn’t it be great if someone would digest all these studies, synthesize them and produce a readable book that makes sense of it all? Ezra Klein has done just that with his compelling new work, Why We’re Polarized. It is likely to become the political book of the year. . . . Powerful [and] intelligent.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN“Few books are as well-matched to the moment of their publication as Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. . . . Klein’s careful book explains how different groups of Americans can see politics through such different lenses, examining how various psychological mechanisms allow committed partisans to rationalize almost anything their party does. . . . This book fully displays the attributes that have made Klein’s journalism so successful.” —Dan Hopkins, Washington Post“Why We’re Polarized delivers. . . . What Klein adds especially to [is] our understanding of how we got here—why Trump is more a vessel for our division than the cause, and why his departure will not provide any magical cure. . . . A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis.” —Norman Ornstein, New York Times Book Review“Superbly researched and written . . . Why We’re Polarized provides a highly useful guide to this most central of political puzzles, digesting mountains of social science research and presenting it in an engaging form. . . . An overall outstanding volume.” —Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post“Brilliant and wide-ranging. A book about what just might be our central, perhaps fatal problem. This is the kind of book you find yourself arguing with out loud as you read it and will stick in your head long after you’ve finished. Absolutely crucial for understanding this perilous moment.” —Chris Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC and author of A Colony in a Nation“Eye-opening . . . Klein’s brilliant diagnosis and prescription provide a path to understanding—and healing.” —O Magazine“A fascinating book, rich in politics, history, psychology and more.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times“Well worth reading.” —Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine“Even at his most wonky, a deep strain of humanism runs through [Klein’s] journalism and that infuses his new book, Why We’re Polarized.” —Krista Tippett, On Being“In this thoughtful exploration of American politics, Ezra Klein challenges the conventional wisdom about why and how recently we’ve come apart, and suggests that the fantasy of some unified American middle is perhaps at odds with the ongoing fight for truly representational politics. Why We’re Polarized makes the compelling case that the centuries-long battle to perfect our union means we were built to be split; Klein’s provocative question is whether America’s democratic systems and institutions can bear up under the weight of our divides.” —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad Read more About the Author Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization. Launched in 2014, Vox reaches more than 50 million people across its platforms each month. Klein is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein Show, cohost of the Weeds podcast, and an executive producer on Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. Previously, Klein was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. Read more Customers Review: In this Review: The key finding. Why 5 stars? Brief synopsis by chapter. What’s missing? And where to find it.It’s hard to believe how easily humans polarize, but Klein lays out the scientific evidence so clearly, and the experiments he draws on are so well-designed, that there’s no room for doubt. On the slightest pretext, everyone from young children to adults will divide the world into Us and Them. And Us will happily harm Them even when doing so harms Us as well.So how has our nation – or any nation – ever held together? Klein’s answer is cross-cutting identities. He defines identities broadly – ethnicity and gender, of course; economic and social class too, but also religion, politics, age, urban/rural, sports-team fandom, etc. And he shows how powerful some of these can be. We can disagree on politics, but if we share, say, religious and sports identities, it’s hard to hate each other.Klein even has data on how these cross-cutting identities reduce the chances of civil war.The problem comes when these identities start merging into “mega identities.” It’s happening now as conservatives, religious, older-white, and rural identities all align and merge into a single mega identity which then sees itself in opposition to another mega identity: the left, secular, multi-ethnic and urban. That’s the key finding about why we’re in trouble, but there’s much more to it.Klein takes a deep dive into the polarization problem, and you may be wondering, “Should I buy this book?” Here’s my answer: It depends. Klein brilliantly explains the deeper forces at work over the long term and how we got to where we are today. That’s why I give him 5 stars. If that’s what you’re looking for, nothing else comes close. But if you want to understand how those forces are playing out in this election year, and what we can do about it, it’s not here. For that, have a look at Ripped Apart: How to Fight Polarization. It’s not a shortcoming of Klein’s book, the two books just address different questions.Together, the two books complement each other without overlapping in content. For example, both blame the culture war more than economics – as Klein puts it, “economic anxiety cannot explain away our political or cultural divisions.”Getting back to Why We’re Polarized: I began by covering Chapters 3 and 4. In the first two chapters, Klein shows that America was not very polarized in the 1950s, but in that period the political system was also far from ideal. But by 1964, with the Goldwater-Johnson election, the polarization we see today was starting to develop. This political history provides much needed perspective on our situation today. In a brief “INTERLUDE” in the middle of the book, Klein announces that from here on he will “show the feedback loop of polarization: institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on.” It’s a vicious circle and it’s getting worse.CHAPTER 6 shows how the media plays its part in this “feedback loop.” The result is that those who consider themselves the most politically well-informed –– among both Democrats and Republicans — are in fact the most misinformed. I won’t spoil his shocking statistics showing how bad this can get.CHAPTER 7 concerns our political parties. They have been getting weaker since the early 1970s, while partisan fervor has gotten stronger, because primaries, with their low turnout, favor the partisan extremes. This led to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Which leads Klein to wonder why for 2020 the Democrats chose to weaken their party by favoring their partisans more. Good question.CHAPTER 8 takes a careful look at our two-party system, and the picture gets even grimmer.CHAPTER 9 argues that Republicans have been more afflicted by polarization, and explains why the Democrats’ diversity has partially protected them. CHAPTER 10 surprisingly, at least to me, concludes, “I don’t consider polarization, on its own, to be a problem.” Chapter 10 also offers some potential solutions, however Klein admits they’re not the book’s strength. And all of them would take years to implement.In my view his conclusion reflects one small weakness of this critically important book. He mentions issue-based polarization in chapter 6, and earlier discusses the emotional content of polarization. Clearly he sees a distinction between the two: issue-based polarization and emotional polarization. But he never adopts the standard term “affective polarization” to describe the hateful/emotional kind, nor does Klein introduce any other term to flag it. Issue polarization is not the problem, instead it’s emotional polarization that’s so dangerous, and so it’s important to name it. It would have been helpful to differentiate more clearly between these two throughout the book. I doubt that Klein would want to say “I don’t consider emotional polarization, on its own, to be a problem.”
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