The book looked good. As if to reflect the book’s subject, Polarization, its jacket is a rich Black with the title embossed in White on the top half of the jacket face and the author’s name in Gray, centered in the lower half. Both title and the author’s name in the same font and point size. The jacket’s liner notes describe “The truth…(that our system isn’t broken, that it’s working exactly as designed)…” The author of the notes, presumably Klein’s editor, goes on to reveal Klein’s intent: a bold effort to describe our political system, its actors; the politicians, and all the supporting cast, meaning mainly journalists in print, cable and internet media, and of course, us, the voters. The back of the jacket had obligatory blurbs from fellow writer and media host, Chris Hayes; NYT “best-selling author” Rebecca Traister; and academic star occupant of the Thomas Cooley Chair at NYU Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt. All of them attesting to Ezra Klein’s chops as Explainer-in-Chief.
I was pumped. So far so good, although one thing stuck in my mind, that the current polarization was designed, like it was some sort of project thought up in a think tank located in an abandoned missile silo in the Midwest.
By the twelfth page of the introduction there were over thirty separate numbers consisting of dates and poll percentages. Page 13 contained over twenty such numbers. By the end of the introduction I was numbered numb. Looking back it seemed as though Klein had created an enormous jigsaw puzzle which he then sets about assembling in the subsequent chapters. He presumes from the outset that our political system is failing or has failed, and his aim in Why We’re Polarized, is to present a plan of political resuscitation. This despite the explanation he gets from Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University whose opinion he values. Bartels averred there was nothing unusual about the 2016 election; it was normal.
Klein is eloquent (if academic). His writing style is smooth, direct and even personable. He is a reader’s writer. He quotes from a range of academics and journalists who support his thesis that polarization we are witnessing today is the result, chiefly, of Identity politics. Voters look for parties and candidates to serve as their mirrors even if their deeper principles or moral values are not in alignment with their representatives. While Klein says that this is a book about systems, it’s also about individuals. It’s hard to write about Identity politics and Political Polarization without taking names. The book is rife with comments from big-wigs. The intro alone cites no fewer than ten politicians.
Klein distinguishes two sorts of polarization; one in which voters gravitate to a particular pole because it reflects their…”policy opinions, while in the other….the poles they are clustering around reflect their political identities.” I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Splitting a hair doesn’t change the hair, but if this is what Klein is doing, he does it very well.
So what is a Political Identity? There is a hint early in the book when Klein refers to a “…feeling thermometer”. Although the phrase appears in quotation marks there is no attribution for the source until some seventy pages later. (Not that Klein is chary when it comes to acknowledgements. His grand array of poll numbers, data, and quotes from other political observers is shot through with nods to experts.)
This invocation of a “feeling thermometer” contains the essence of Klein’s argument; that voters’ political decisions are based mostly on visceral emotions and not on their analysis of relevant policy issues, be those domestic or international. The implication being that voters align themselves with emotive groups whose strength manifests itself in antipathy for “other” groups, i.e. Democrat or Republican. Klein sees politics as a form of sport where fans/voters equate participation with damning the opposing team(s) or party(s). Political campaigns are viewed through the lens of sporting events, albeit with graver consequences. Klein gives short shrift to the notion that voters make decisions based on self-interest or community interests. Once politics is defined as fanship, it’s not a shock to see voters plumping for candidates whose policies hurt those very same voters.
The pandemic—along with Trump’s buck-passing (and worse)[1] response—generate anger that motivates the liberal left and brings into focus the borders Trump maintains—the ones that divide America. Not that his predecessor Obama had much success in breaking down those borders, despite his view that the natural state of Americans was to be united. Obama emphasized this repeatedly beginning with his 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention. His notion, so eloquently phrased, is a myth, a beautiful one, but a myth none-the-less. Trump has proven this by shining a light on America’s inherent divisions. Immigration is a good example. Sure, everyone, not a Native American is an immigrant or a descendant of one. But these immigrants came here with Hope and Fear. Sure, they might get something, but they were hyper-aware it might be taken away from them. The door must be shut and the wall build to protect newer arrivals from the threat posed by the next wave who might be willing to work for less money. This has always been part of the American dream, the nightmare part. It is the aspect that Trump locks in on and leverages. Immigration anxiety was also leveraged by Obama, and by Bill Clinton before him. Candidates must play to myth. It worked for Trump and it worked for Obama and Clinton. Fredrick Douglass understood that. He watched the myth of Reconstruction descend into Jim Crow in one generation and we have been stuck there ever since. If politics is just sport by a different name then as in sports, if your team racks up fouls or outright frauds, like using an under-weight football, so what? The point is to win, by any means. Team Trump doesn’t give a shit about the pussy grabbing, the false information, the anti-immigrant rants. Those things are for pissing off Liberals. The more he incites Liberals the stronger he gets.
The effect of all this produced “Virtue Signaling”. A term first coined by James Bartholomew in an article in The Spectator magazine in 2015. Virtue Signaling is the means whereby individuals could create and project their identities using symbols. A semiotics for politics in all its forms. On this score, Klein’s premise isn’t new. It has just been dressed up in pollsters’ clothing.
Go figure. Klein went and figured, and figured, and figured out some essential truths about our political process by observing the extent of the political pendulum’s swing and its propulsion. It’s worth noting that in the past our pendulum has swung even farther toward the extremes than it has now. At its worst we killed hundreds of thousands of our once-and-future fellow citizens…and survived as a country to fight another day. Perhaps, as my mother used to say, “This too shall pass.”
Culture wars are fought over feelings not facts. Today, and perhaps always, we remain a society in which facts are subservient to feelings. The question arises, with climate change in the back of our collective consciousness…is there any turning back? But only a few are thinking consecutively about that. The airwaves and the internet are suffused with opinionators whose real job is to reinforce their audiences’ feelings.
Why We’re Polarized is a book written by a self-proclaimed anxious person written for others like him, which are part of the current political, “out group” whose members are infused with worries inherent in our crowded and overpopulated world. The author understands that in such a world one’s personal identity is of paramount importance. Like our smartphones, we are constantly seeking signals that suggest communities we could be a part of. The most primitive signals are fear and anger. Trump uses anger as an attractant, like peanut butter as bait on a mouse trap. Anger releases adrenalin, one of the most powerful chemicals the body produces. Forget serotonin, that’s for the people who spend hours collecting “likes” on Facebook.
Beginning in the later twentieth century there has been a proliferation of specialized groups and communities. Klein offers a sample list taken from a conservative political ad against Howard Dean: “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading…body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show…”. With such a list as a starting point you can construct a veritable sociopolitical thesaurus.
Klein’s high wire act balances his fearsome descriptions of social and political partisanship with the near truism that society is better off with more varieties of partisanship. The more there are, the more fluid society becomes and such fluidity is a requisite for change. He cites as an example how Phil Knight, boss of Nike, decided to use Colin Kaepernick, the publicly humiliated and shit-canned quarterback, as a brand spokesperson for Nike, which subsequently took its own trashing and thrashing from social media to Nike’s income statement. Klein does not go on to say that Nike enjoyed a full recovery to both its reputation and income statement in relatively short order. It was the overlapping of symbols, Nike’s Swoosh–their motto, “Just Do It”, branded on their sports clothing–that quelled the media outrage over Knight’s choice of Kaepernick as a Nike representative. As for the NFL, their ratings remain intact. The fans came back.
Since the launch of Fox and MSNBC a huge industry has sprung up like a government bureaucracy. Its purpose is to explain all things political. It has grown like topsy into a juggernaut of jive, politicizing everything in its path, compressing opinions into sound bites. The public laps these up like canapes at cocktail party, hungry to dull the necessity of having to think for themselves. Klein is at home in that world but his book provides a profound critique of it when he offers up his observations about human nature and the myth of the rational actor. He shows the reader how individual reasoning can be, and is, subverted to group-think, which explains how individuals can support and vote for policies that will hurt them. He points out that in the changing demographics of America, White Americans are the new minority, and getting ever more minor according to the US Census Bureau. Fox News commentators have used the rhetoric of Civil Rights to justify the White backlash, and the return to the myth of America’s former greatness when it was a truly WASP nation.
In many respects Klein is a debunker of myths. A very big one is the belief among many liberals, that Trump is somehow a caricature, a stupid, bumbling buffoon, when he is a marketing genius who understood from vast experience, how to harness the emotions of his supporters and his opponents. This experience has garnered Trump probably more media time than any past president by a long shot. A fool Trump isn’t.
Each of our main political parties, in striving for power, seeks to manipulate voters. As Klein’s book demonstrates, power comes not through the barrel of a gun, at least not yet, but by catering, or as the other side would say, pandering, to the psychology of constituents. Not facts, but that “Feeling Thermometer” is the key to political decisions.
On reflection, Klein’s theory of the case reminded me of what Fredrick Douglass drove home in every speech and every polemic…The Golden Rule is what counts, and what everyone really wants, in the word made famous by Aretha Franklin, is respect.
Reading Why We’re Polarized felt like a trek through the political jungle being led by a political botanist. Klein has taken the forest of politics and examined it tree by tree.[2] He has shown how the rise of other cultures, Hispanic, African, Caribbean, Asian, and Feminist, in American Society has posed a major challenge to WASP hegemony. Trump has successfully played on the anxieties this has produced. His appeal is not class-based, it is race-based. This all has roots in the failure of Reconstruction. Jim Crow is alive and well. Trump is now the President…but his days are numbered. Despite all the gerrymandering the number of White Americans is shrinking. Klein rightly views this, and the greater diversity that has emerged, as a positive.
After relentlessly exposing the cancerous underbelly of American politics and how it got that way, Klein manages to be optimistic. In support of his optimism, he invokes the country’s recent murderous past since 1963: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Harvey Milk; and the attempts on Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Lynchings of African-Americans were still being conducted in the eighties. He recalls the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and urban riots. He points to the secret bombing of Cambodia, the resignation of Richard Nixon, after it was revealed that he conducted a secret espionage campaign against his political opponents and the murders of students at Kent State University (and Jackson State). Against this backdrop he believes that America is far more liberal and democratic today…yes, you read that right…in the age of Trump. I’m reminded Woodrow Wilson, another optimist, thought the League of Nations would prevent a future world war.
Why We’re Polarized should be required reading in high school, though I doubt it will give students a patriotic lift. I myself can’t pretend to share Klein’s willful optimism. Being somewhat older that Ezra, my feelings can best be summed up in a song written by P.F. Sloan in 1964, whose best-known recording was by Barry McGuire, “The Eve of Destruction”.
Notes
1 With Trump, there’s always bullshit distraction around the corner, but his suggestion Joe Scarborough had a hand in the death of one of his assistants was special. It reminded me of Fredrick Douglass’s timeless observation: ”There are certain convenient forms under which a thousand lies may lurk in safety, such as, ‘It is said’, ‘It is rumored’, ‘It is generally believed to be true’, ‘It is an open secret’…They are all convenient formulas under which to hide a slander.”
2 I question the premise that there are such people as, “Political Scientists.” A more apt term would be Political Analysts…a variation on Financial Analysts. Such analysts make their calls from the observation, examination and parsing of data to support a particular point of view. To call oneself a Political Scientist, when you are a Pollster in practice, is misleading.