How America became so polarized

Vox founder Ezra Klein on why deepening political polarization is delegitimizing US democracy

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-feb-3-2020-1.5449813/feb-3-2020-episode-transcript-1.5450516

Guests: Ezra Klein

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP
VOICE: American momentum is now around winning. The winning that outsider candidate Donald Trump promised us, not the anarchy Democrats a.k.a. a demon rats want to impose on us. The tactics of these demon rats and Trump painting leftists are backfiring. Americans are now buying in to and choosing results over politically correct losing behaviour of other presidents.

MG: Well, that was Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections. It's that kind of vitriol that's become common in U.S. politics. In his new book, Why We're Polarized. Ezra Klein looks at the roots and the consequences of that approach to politics. News junkies would know Ezra Klein as the co-founder of the news and opinion website Vox. Ezra Klein, good morning.

EZRA KLEIN: Glad to be here.

MG: Demon rats?

EZRA KLEIN: Demon rats.

MG: When you hear that, what is it tell you about the state of America?

EZRA KLEIN: So that doesn't tell me as much as one might think, which is to say that you can go back into the earliest moments of American political history and find that kind of nonsense coming from nonsensical people like that. It's always been there, right. Heavy political rhetoric, attacking, demonizing the other side. What is different now is the sheer number of layered identities and conflicts and ideologies that split the two parties. So there's always been political enmity. There's always, even in this country, been political violence. What there has not always been is such a vast array of disagreements layered on top of each other. It's very hard for people to imagine being on the other side. And when I hear Jeanine Pirro making arguments like that, she is you know, she is what she is. She is a provocateur. But there are a lot of other people who are not. But what they see when they look at the other side is something more like what she's framing. And the problem for American politics is that unlike a lot of other political systems, including many ways the Canadian system, with this level of enmity, our political system ceases to function because it demands high levels of bipartisan compromise to move forward. And compromise is not something that most of the players in American politics and certainly not on the Republican side want right now.

MG: In some ways, like an obvious question, but when you look at it, how bad is it right now? How bad is the state of polarization? We might have an opinion from outside or people who are in it might say this is the worst that it's ever been. Truly, how bad is it?

EZRA KLEIN: So we had a civil war in this country. So it has been worse. The thing I would say here is that polarization itself is not a situation where the worse it gets, the more it is bad. Polarization is in many ways neutral. Too little polarization can also be bad in the mid century American political system. Political scientists felt that the big problem in American politics was we too little party polarization can be a problem because if the parties are not running on clear agendas or they're not honouring those agendas when they get elected, then the American people do not have the ability to have votes that count. There may be voting for a conservative Democrat in the South and a liberal Democrat in the north. And then the Democratic Party itself doesn't actually hew to either agenda. So polarization is what it is. It can be very bad. It can be good. Having disagreements that are clear and clearly constructed sometimes allows us to have them. Oftentimes the alternative to polarization, which is true for much of the mid 20th century in American politics, is not peace, but it is suppression, suppression of things like racial equality and some of the other issues that would divide the country and maybe need to divide the country for a resolution. The problem in our system is that the way polarization interacts with a presidential system with divided dimensions of democratic political power and I mean here small d Democratic political power, popular majority political power that has made it so that when you get this awful polarization, it's very bad for the political system. You can imagine a political system that works and even thrives among deep disagreements between the parties. But that is not what we have. And so you have someone like Barack Obama who have very different political style, obviously, than Donald Trump, have very different ideas. But he was very polarizing himself, despite all of his efforts to not be. He was the most polarizing president in the record of polling until Donald Trump.

MG: Give me an example of that because people might say, what? How would he be as polarizing as?

EZRA KLEIN: I mean, he says literally that in polling, Republican approval and disapproval of him was the highest gap from Democratic approval and disapproval of any president in history, since we had polling. Which to be fair, is only for 60 or 70 years at that point. But nevertheless, like we've had a lot of polarizing moments in that period. And by the way, before Obama, the record was set by George W. Bush and before George W. Bush, by Bill Clinton, and then after Obama, by Donald Trump. So the point I'm making here is that polar polarization is a trend in American politics. It absorbs different kinds of politicians with different approaches, even the ones who try to be non polarizing. And so what you're seeing there is something happening to the system, something happening to the structure of American politics and party dimensions, not something that is a direct result of just what a president says or even what they tried to do.

MG: Does the rhetoric of polarization exist on each side? You heard from Fox News there, but on the other side, on the left, do you still hear that rhetoric of polarization?

EZRA KLEIN: Yes, I would say that there is not an analogue to Fox News on the Democratic side, not to say there are not players and media publications that would like to be the Fox News of the Democratic side. But the Democratic side is much more woven into mainstream media institutions. So a Pew poll came out that asked Democrats and Republicans which publications and media outlets they trusted, and they gave them 30 different outlets ranging from left to right. Democrats trusted either. I'm trying to remember this for 20 or 22 of them. And they trusted outlets ranging from left to centre right, like the Wall Street Journal. Republicans trusted only seven of the 30 outlets, and primarily those were highly conservative outlets like Rush Limbaugh. Fox News even more telling the outlet Republicans trusted most had had double the trust of any other outlet in the country was Fox News with something like 60 percent. And there was also the outlet that they relied on the most, 65 percent. I think it was if Republicans had watched Fox News in the previous week. Among Democrats, the single most trusted and relied on CNN, which say what you will about CNN, it is an outlet that prides itself on having both sides. It fired a bunch of Republicans for not being sufficiently pro Trump and brought on more pro Trump Republicans. So Democrats are dealing with a media are media outlets that often discipline their polarization. Pull it back a little bit. Even as others do want to push it forward, whereas Republicans are caught much more in a polarizing informational universe. So these things are not symmetrical. But it is certainly the case that if you listen to Democrats talk about Donald Trump, I would say from my perspective, as somebody who is in my old ways polarized with with some good reason, it is simply not the case that both sides are completely equal. But you can find some very alarmist rhetoric on the Democratic side. The difference is that that rhetoric reaches to the very top of Republican Party politics and media and dominates it in ways the Democratic Party, both in its politics and media, is more mixed.

MG: We're seeing this play out now with the talk around impeachment. If you take a look at the impeachment story, how could that exacerbate polarization in America?

EZRA KLEIN: I would say that impeachment is showing great polarization has broken American politics. So the American political system is built to have branches of government competing and checking and overseeing each other. Impeachment itself is meant to have a congressional, an institution of Congress and the House and the Senate that acts as an institution to check an out-of-control executive. And you saw that now have we were not built to have political parties. Exactly. So in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon ends up resigning, he resigns because Republican members of the Senate go to him and say he will not survive the vote. He does not actually get impeached. He resigns because his own party will not support him. I think there's no doubt that if Richard Nixon's impeachment happened in this era of American politics, he would have survived. In fact, was a very telling moment on Fox News, where whole Harold Rivera said to Sean HANNITY that you are the difference between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon. And that was maybe a moment that was a little more telling than they had intended it to be. So impeachment, it is very polarizing. But the problem is that it doesn't really need to be there isn't a deep existential reason why Donald Trump having abused power with a potential remedy for that, being that Mike Pence, who is in every way more down the line Republican and more liked, at least by the establishment Republican Party, would then become president. It's not like if you impeach Donald Trump, a Democrat becomes president. There's not a real reason that has to be polarizing. But right now, everything in American politics is polarizing. It cuts on party lines. And as such, not only is impeachment polarizing, but as a mechanism for controlling an executive, it is broken by polarization.

MG: You have said that this polarization in many ways is driven in the United States by race. Tell me more about that and what you mean by that.

EZRA KLEIN: So I would say that what was more distinct was at our deep polarization was driven by race and not in a great way. So in the aftermath of the civil war, American politics looks like it is two parties, Republican Democratic parties. But what it really has is for parties, it is a Democratic Party more or less as we think. But today it has the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, which are these Southern Democrats who have almost total control over the South. Remember, the Republican Party was a party that invaded and occupied the American South at that point in living memory. So the South hated Republicans. They hated them. Democrats occupied at certain points 95 percent of all political positions in the South. But the Democratic Party was like an authoritarian one party rule in the south. And then nationally, it acted in coalition with the National Democratic Party, where the basic agreement was. The Dixiecrats will help the Democrats hold power as long as the Democrats help the Dixiecrats protect racial segregation in the South. And so you had a wide range of opinion and Democrats and then similarly in the republic by liberal Republicans and Northeastern conservative Republicans elsewhere. And so what happens is that rupture begins around the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act is a very divisive issue in American politics, but it is not a party polarizing one. A higher proportion of Republicans vote Civil Rights Act in Congress than Democrats do, even though it is pushed and passed ultimately by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. But that begins this realignment of the parties. The Southern Dixiecrats become Republicans. Barry Goldwater runs against the Civil Rights Act, win some states of the old Confederacy for the very first time, and the Democratic Party becomes a Liberal Party, and after that, they get a lot of other kinds of polarization. You do get more racial polarization in the sense the Democratic Party is now fit about half an on white. The Republican Party is overwhelmingly white. We also begin to get a lot more religious polarization. The Democratic Party's single largest religious group is the unaffiliated, whereas Republican parties overwhelmingly Christian. You get more ideological polarization, as I mentioned, geographic polarization with a widening divide between cities and rural areas, psychological polarization, cultural polarization. It's sort of the whole thing begins to sort itself. And so it isn't that race is the only thing happening now, although it is one of the most combustible forms of polarization in American life when it connects to politics. But it is that race was the thing that had deformed American politics for a very long time. And once it began to sort itself by party, that created the conditions for the very high levels of polarization, not just on race. But really on everything that we see now.

MG: And is that reflected in how and who the various parties encompass and also reflect? If you take a look.

EZRA KLEIN: Absolutely.

MG: Who the Democratic Party brings in and who it listens to and who compared to how and who the Republican Party would listen to?

EZRA KLEIN: Absolutely. As I mentioned a minute ago, the coalitions or just very different. The Democratic Party is half non-white and in being half non-white, it's a coalition of a lot of different racial groups. It has obviously liberal whites, but it has African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, mixed race people. The Democratic Party's about 90 percent white. The Republic Party is about 90 percent white. Democratic Party. It is a coalition of a lot of different religious groups. I mentioned that its largest group is the religiously unaffiliated, but it has liberal white Christians. It has more traditional African-American Christians, it has Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, Jews, et cetera. So these ways of constructing parties are very different in the sense the Democratic Party has to be much more coalition all. It's much less one type of person demographically than the Republican Party is. That's true. Ideologically, to 75 percent of Republicans identify as conservative. Only 50 percent of Democrats do. So when you're a Democrat trying to win power, you have to appeal to many different kinds of people. Republicans don't. That's then amplified by the way geography works in the American political system. I mentioned earlier, Republicans are very dominant in rural areas. That's quite dominant in cities. But American politics amplifies the power of rural areas. It does it through the Electoral College, through the Senate, small state bias and also through geography and gerrymandering in the House. So Republicans are able to win elections despite not winning a majority of the vote. Most of the time about Donald Trump being a very good example of this. The Democratic Party can't do that. It actually tends to have to win more than 51 percent of the vote to hold power at the presidential Senate or House levels and throughout the Supreme Court. So Democratic Party just has to follow very different incentives in the Republican Party does.

MG: You often hear politicians and you'll hear from both sides of the aisle talk about the idea of a big tent. We want a big tent. We want a diversity of opinions to exist in our big tent. Does the base of either party, the Republicans or the Democrats, actually do they want a big tent?

EZRA KLEIN: As far as I can tell, the Democratic Party does tend to act in a way to have a big tent. We'll see if that continues, right. The forces. We might just be in a world where the Democratic Party is lagging behind the poll. The Republican Party's response to polarization. But if you even look at how Barack Obama ran in 2008 and 2012, he was a big tent kind of candidate. And Donald Trump very much, was not he? Donald Trump was very much about breaking the party into two halves and hoping his half would win. The resulting fight now. The fact that neither that even though both candidates had such different strategies, they actually ended up with not that dissimilar political coalition speaks to the power of polarization. Whether parties want a big tent does not mean they can have one. But nevertheless, there are different approaches. And again, I think it's done because among other things, Democrats realize they can't win without a bigger tent right now in the Democratic Party. The electability debate for 2020 is all about how can you win over these somewhat older, more working class, more conservative whites in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? You do not hear a similar story happening in the Republican Party as you think about how to win over Hispanic or African-American voters in California. And so just that that need to cater to America's political geography as it exists just demands very different things, the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. And that shows up in their strategies.

MG: How much does a voter's identity play in to how she or he would invest himself in the political party that they support?

EZRA KLEIN: So the more what we call stacked identities you have versus cross cutting identities. So these are identities that link into politics. If you're a Southerner who's a union member and a Democrat, but you're an evangelical and so on, that's cross cutting identity of identity, some that would pull you a little bit towards Democrats and they pull you a little bit towards Republicans and you make the choice you make. The more people have stagnate enemies. Imagine that your liberal, atheist, gay Californian who lives in Los Angeles like you are gonna find just empirically the Republican Party much more threatening to you. And by the way, that might be because our polling party literally is more threatening to you. So the more identities you have to stack up with the generalized nature of the political party, you're part of the more hostility and fear and dislike you're likely to have of the other, of the out party, of the outgroup. Of course, these are averages. They do not speak to every single individual. But in general, that's what we see. We actually see that identity is a much better predictor of how you feel about the other group than policy is. So Democrats whose policy preferences should make them Republicans. They're more hostile to the Republican Party than Democrats whose identities put them more or less in the Republican camp. So identity tends to drive politics much more than policy does.

MG: What is the Whole Foods Cracker Barrel political divide?

EZRA KLEIN: So that just relates to the fact that America's political geography maps onto a lot of other preferences in American life. So after the 2010 election, the electoral analyst Dave Wasserman noted that House Democrats now represented I believe it's 78 percent of all Whole Foods and House Republicans now represented a similar number of cracker barrels. I think Democrats only have about 25 percent of cracker barrels. And that's not because Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel want to only serve one party or another. It's because our politics maps onto other things like our psychology and our geographic preferences. And Whole Foods is for people who like to try a lot of new things and, you know, those people tend to live in big cities.

MG: AndmMaybe have the disposable income to go and spend a lot of more money on food?

EZRA KLEIN: Maybe that's actually not, that might be true for Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel. I don't know. It actually is not the case, the Democratic Party and the Republic Party have huge income differentials to them. A lot of very wealthy people are Republicans. A lot of very wealthy people are Democrats. Donald Trump in general did I believe his electoral coalition had a higher than median income. So it isn't the case as a stereotype sometimes have it that richer people are all liberals or the richer people are all conservatives. Income does not cut politics as sharply as a lot of people who like to boil politics down to class would prefer that it did.

MG: It speaks to something that you said earlier though, which is that it's hard in some ways to imagine being on the other side.

EZRA KLEIN: I think the disagreements here are pretty deep. Human beings are very sensitively tuned to groups. We have been that way, going way, way, way back into our existence, way before politics as we think of it now. So the more of our groups collect into one mega group, the more we're gonna feel some outgroup, hostility and fear the other group. The argument I try to make again and again in the book is that polarization. And the way we respond to it is quite rational as a response to increasing levels of difference between the two parties. So as the other party becomes more different than you in its policy and in its demographics, of course you're going to feel more hostile towards it. I make the point in the book that in 1976, Republican Party's national convention platform talks about abortion and anything it says about abortion is in our party. There are some who believe abortion should be legal in all cases and other who believe it should be illegal in all cases. And we respect that difference in opinion that is very different than what the Republican Party looks like now and somewhat. And to use another issue, if you look at Bill Clinton's 1992 1996 platform on immigration, it sounds like Donald Trump does today. So the. Parties are just much more sorted on issues today, and as such. If people find the other party more concerning, that isn't crazy. It isn't them being unable to imperfectly imagine themselves in somebody else's shoes. It is a rational response to the other party being more different.

MG: What is social media done to that divide?

EZRA KLEIN: Nothing good. Social media is not the beginning of this divide. These trends well predate social media and in fact in other countries you see in some cases declining polarization in countries with the very highest levels of broadband penetration. So the effect of social media is complicated in American politics. I don't think as any doubt that social media is a polarization, accelerant and in particular, polarization, accelerant, because political elites are very woven in to highly politicized forms of social media and they respond to the politics they see there. It's a continuing refrain. The Democratic primary this year that Twitter is not real life, and that's because so many members of the Democratic Party are on Twitter. And in particular, candidates and their staffers and the media on Twitter seem these very highly polarizing fights and seeming to think that reflects the actual electorate when the elected primarily is not on Twitter, does not care, is not paying nearly as close attention. And so a political campaign that runs a Twitter strategy is missing how most people actually feel about politics. But the more that political elites are on Twitter and Facebook and so on and are responding to that very, very super polarized ecosystem they see there, they end up in many cases creating a political system they believe is in existence and that means that the rest of us have to make more polarized decisions because they're the ones structuring our choices.

MG: What are you most worried about when it comes to the level of polarization that exists right now?

EZRA KLEIN: I'm worried that American government will not be able to translate popular vote majorities into governing power, into effective policy, and then that the American public will not be able to make decisions about whether or not they'll like how they're being governed so that we can have a system that has clear lines of governing authority and governing accountability. I don't think polarization itself is a huge problem for a system, or at least it doesn't have to be. But I do think being unable to govern and solve problems and unable to have a clear way for the public to judge whether or not they like one party's agenda or the other. That is a kind of thing that breaks in American political system or breaks a political system.

MG: Is that system already broken? People talk about and I mean, again, it's not new now, but people will talk about how little collaboration, cooperation, shared vision there actually is. Is that already happening now? That breaking of the system?

EZRA KLEIN: Yes.

MG: That's not encouraging.

EZRA KLEIN: No, it's not. I always want to tell people that I don't think people like me are in the hope business. I'm trying to accurately describe the way the American political system works. And I don't think that if you accurately describe it, it should leave you feeling particularly optimistic. I think having a good understanding of how it works is the first step to fixing it. But I also don't think it means that you're going to be able to fix it. The one more hopeful thing I'll say is that the American medical system has often been terrible. I think we have a nostalgic view of our past. But you wouldn't prefer to be in the system of 40 years ago or 80 years ago or 120 years ago. And that should at least give us some confidence about where we are now. We might be at a bad moment in our trend, but we're not at a particular bad level or much more of a democracy than we were 60 years ago, for instance. So, look, politics is often bad. It's often frustrating. It's going to continue to be so. But yes, American politics at the moment is either broken or it is breaking and we should take that seriously and try to understand why that is.

MG: People will see this as an American story, but how have America's adversaries capitalized on the polarization you've been talking about?

EZRA KLEIN: When you look at the way Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, they tried to interfere by exacerbating these points of polarization and aggravation. So if you look at say, the social media campaign, it is very much about increasing racial polarization. They had these fake Black Lives Matter groups and then fake sort of white nationalist groups. And what they were doing with, I think, a very adroit understanding of how American politics worked was what they're trying to do was increase levels of polarization, just such that Americans are fighting with each other more. What Russia cares about above all else is discord and the decline of faith that Americans are having in their democracy and making American moxie look bad around the world. So the more they can pit us at each other and show that we have no way of resolving our problems in a decent way, the more they are achieving their goals.

MG: You're not in the business of hope and selling hope, but what is the answer in terms of trying to turn the polarization down?

EZRA KLEIN: I'm a believer in democratization, but I want to be very clear that I don't think there's an answer in terms of turning polarization down. I think there's an answer in terms of reforming the American political system to work amidst polarization and the set of ideas I have around that have to do with making it clear for popular majorities to be able to win powers, getting rid of things like the Electoral College and gerrymandering, and then making sure that power can actually express itself in terms of policy. So getting rid of things like the filibuster, reforming campaign finance, et cetera. But I think that people often want to solve polarization by reversing polarization and to my knowledge, there is no scalable solution for reliably doing that. So we're yeah, we're not going away from this anytime soon. There's not a magic answer.

MG: Ezra Klein, it's great to speak with you. Thank you.

[