Today, Explained - Shaken like a polarized picture

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

The political polarization of America didn’t start with Donald Trump and it won’t end in 2020 either. Ezra Klein explains "Why We're Polarized." (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just a warning. Ever since Donald Trump became the president of the United States, people have resorted to this refrain online, IRL. It's a bit of a mantra, a coping mechanism. See if you know it. It goes something like this. We are living in a simulation. It started after he won the 2016 election. We're living in a simulation became shorthand for

there's no way this can be the real outcome. This cannot be happening. We are living in a simulation. I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president. There's no way that Donald Trump's going to be president. Donald Trump has won the state of Florida, one of his must-win states right there. The AP now projecting that Donald Trump has won the state of Florida, one of his must-win states right there. The AP now projecting that Donald Trump has won the state of Pennsylvania. It's the biggest political shocker in American history.

Well, Vox's editor-at-large, Ezra Klein, has a counter-argument. What we are living through with Donald Trump has an almost eerie level of normalcy. The election of President Donald Trump was normal? You might have expected when somebody like Trump,

who has a very idiosyncratic personal style, kind of crashed into the Republican Party through the side door, ran in a way that people would have thought would have disqualified another candidate, bragged about his penis size. He referred to my hands, if they're small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee. He suggested Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

You can look that one up. He really did that. His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don't even talk about that. And during the campaign talked about how much he liked Planned Parenthood, Social Security, Medicare, at another point had praised the Canadian single-payer health care system. As far as single-payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland.

It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you're talking about here. This is not the kind of candidate who would win a Republican Party nomination. And even if he did, certainly not the kind of candidate who would win an election. And when you step back, what ends up happening is strikingly normal. The election of President Donald Trump was normal for a country that's super polarized. Despite being someone that during the campaign many Republicans expressed grave misgivings about, you just have an election that looks very much by the numbers,

like almost every other election we've had, that is the wages of polarization. When the two parties become this different ideologically and demographically, what happens is that the idea that you would vote for the other party, no matter who your party is running or what they are doing, becomes unimaginable. And rationally, that creates a politics, and we're seeing this play out in impeachment and a lot of other places, where the stakes of your side losing feel too ideologically and psychologically high to actually discipline your side when it is doing the wrong thing. Ezra's been thinking about polarization a lot lately. He just wrote an entire book about it.

Today on the show, we're going to figure out how this particular phenomenon functions in impeachment, in elections, in America. First up, how did we get so polarized? So in the 1950s, there is a move to make the parties more polarized. And that can sound weird to us today because we use the word polarized as a kind of negative word, an epithet sometimes, but we shouldn't think about it like that. What happens in the mid-century American politics was very well described. There's this famous report that came out from the American Political Science Association in 1950 called Towards a Responsible Two-Party System. And this report, which is covered on the front page of the New York Times, it argues that the political parties are breaking the way the American political system

is supposed to work. And the way they're breaking it is this, that they have these state-led and regional instantiations. And so when somebody is voting for, say, Strom Thurmond for Senate in the South. There's not enough troops in the army to force their southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. But he's a Democrat. But in that same election, you could have voted for Hubert Humphrey, also a Democrat in Minnesota, and he would have been one of the most liberal senators. The newspaper headlines are wrong. There will be no hedging and there'll be no watering down, if you please, of the instruments and the principles of the civil rights program.

And so the argument that the political scientists and many others made is that what parties are supposed to do in political systems is create a clear choice between different governing visions for the country. And then when you, as a citizen, cast your vote for members of one party or another, you're supposed to see that choice honored. That is one of the key ways you are able to exert power. Do I want Democrats to hold the Senate, the House, the presidency, or do I want Republicans to do those things?

So in the 1950s, people in these parties realized it could help to be more polarized. How does it actually happen? So the rupture is the Civil Rights Act. Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War 100 years ago. What you'd had until this point was this Southern Dixiecrat wing, the Democratic Party that was there for historical reasons, but was very conservative. You have this liberal Northern

Republican wing. And the Civil Rights Act is actually itself in the Senate, in the House, a bipartisan bill. In fact, a larger proportion of congressional Republicans vote for it than do Democrats. But Barry Goldwater runs against Civil Rights Act as a standard bearer of the party in the following election. And sort of in doing that, he reshapes the parties around this axis of conflict. He begins to create the Republican Party as a party that is a fusion of ideological movement conservatism and white backlash politics and finds a connection between them, right? That a government that does less right, a smaller federal government is also a government that is not going to come in and enforce racial equality. The Democratic Party, which had long had this tension between being a party of racial redistribution and economic uplift and then also a party that contained this Southern Dixie crowd

wing, begins to then focus as well on redistribution, on worrying about poverty. And that is a very, very clear fusion into becoming a more diverse party because for a lot of the people who are poorest in the country, they're non-white. And a lot of the reason they're very poor is a legacy of horrific racial discrimination. So once that happens, and it takes time, it's not like every Democrat in the South becomes a Republican overnight or every Republican in the North becomes a Democrat overnight. But as it begins to happen, as the Democratic Party becomes the liberal party and the party of diversity and the Republican Party becomes the conservative party

and the party more of white Christian voters, that sets off both an ideological and a demographic sorting that really continues on to this day. So the parties actually start to look completely different. They actually change in who's in them. So Liliana Mason, the political scientist at University of Maryland, she's got these great figures in her book where she shows that if you go back to the 50s and you look at different demographic groups, be they religious or racial, even to some degree ideological, for most cases, actually with the exception of Southerners for reasons of the Dixie Crest, it is very hard to find a group that was more than 10 percentage points more represented in one party than the other. So the parties were pretty close in terms of what they looked like. And then now you look and like the lines on the chart just like race away from each other. The Democratic Party is about 50 percent non-white. The Republican Party is about 90 percent white. The Democratic Party has a high proportion of the country's immigrants.

The Republican Party much lower. The parties really look different than obviously the Republican Party is, I believe it's 75% are self-identified conservatives, the Democratic Party, 50% self-identified liberals. So these are very, very different parties now. And by the way, that goes down to other things, density and geography, culture. We can tell if you're a Democrat or Republican at pretty high levels of specificity, depending on whether or not you live near a Whole Foods or a Cracker Barrel. Really? Yeah. Democrats represent something like 78% of all Whole Foods locations, and I think 28% or something of Cracker Barrel locations. Okay. Well, beyond Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel, we're talking a little bit about how the parties are becoming more polarized, but what is actually happening to individuals? Are they becoming

more polarized even outside of politics or is this sort of like a strictly political phenomenon? It's a hard question. So the thing that is interesting here is that our political identities are becoming big enough and powerful enough to absorb a lot of other identities too. And so one of the things that you had for a long time was very deep division in the country but it didn't quite map onto politics and I'll give an example. Michael Tesler who is a political scientist at UC Irvine has studied racial controversies. Something he has looked at is how the polling broke down on racial controversies in the 90s versus now.

And the 90s by the way, you already had a lot of this polarization happening. But nevertheless, if you look at things that were racialized then, like the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bernard Goetz trial, the subway shootings in New York, that kind of thing, they were very divisive in the country, but they did not divide people by party. So Republicans and Democrats had functionally the same views on the O.J. Simpson trial, even as people were very divided over it. If you look at things like that now, the George Zimmerman trial, the question of whether 12 Years a Slave should win an Oscar a couple years ago, they were incredibly divided by party. And this is happening in a lot of different spheres of life

as these different identities fuse together, as the Democratic Party becomes not just the Democratic Party, but the Liberal Party, the party that represents and looks forward to a more diverse America, et cetera, et cetera, you have a lot of dividing issues that would have always created conflict in American life but now the particular way they create conflict is expressed politically. And that can be good and that can be bad but it does divide us even more and it makes things that maybe at another point we would have thought of as nonpolitical. It makes them political.

It latches them onto politics. Donald Trump, I should say, is a particularly aggressive purveyor. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired. He's fired. So you remember when Colin Kaepernick led other NFL players in kneeling during the national anthem. That's something that you can imagine being a dividing and conflictual issue in American life. But it's not something that I think most presidents would have decided they needed to take a position on, certainly not on Twitter and demanding he be fired.

But he does. And so what ends up happening after that is Republicans become very grim on the NFL. Their ratings have turned very unfavorable and Democrats begin to like it about as much as they had or even more. And so the NFL becomes very highly polarized. So that's this issue here where political polarization now includes enough identities that are in other contexts, nonpoliticalical that it can absorb almost any fight into itself. And you'd argue this kind of polarization can be good even though it feels bad. Does the cost justify the benefit of, say, just knowing which party you belong to?

This is very important. There is nothing conceptually wrong with polarization. As these APSA arguments and others suggest, in some ways, it makes much more sense for parties to be polarized, which is simply to say for them to be very different from each other so you can make a very clear choice than for them not to be polarized, than for them to include a vast range of opinion that has to be worked out inside the party. The problem in the American political system is that we have a system that can only function well amidst very high levels of compromise, almost reaching up to consensus. Polarization often breaks our ability to govern.

It breaks our ability to do big things and to do them clearly and cleanly because it takes away that central capacity to have that high level of compromise. In other systems, we also have high levels of polarization that are more parliamentary, what happens is that somebody wins power and they have the power to govern. And then the other polarized party can be mad at them. It can say you should elect us instead because you don't like what they're doing. But it can't usually stop them from governing. What we're able to do in this country is a minority can often stop the majority from being able to govern effectively and then try to win back power on top of that sabotage. But the kind of macro effect of that is people end up in a political system that is not meeting their needs, where one party after another promises to solve problems and doesn't. And that creates a high level of frustration and

alienation that ends up making the underlying polarization problems, in my view, worse. Is that what we're seeing play out with impeachment right now? Just comparing the way this impeachment's going to say how Nixon's went is stunning. I mean, Nixon resigns. Trump is denying everything, fighting everyone, threatening those who disagree with him. Yeah, a couple things here. So the thing I would say is that impeachment does not function amidst conditions of polarization. So as you know, I have this podcast, Impeachment Explained, on Saturdays.

And I say on it often that fundamentally what it has ended up being is a podcast about polarization. Because impeachment was a mechanism built by the founding fathers at a time when they thought the American political system would resist parties. And so the primary way the system would work is that the branches would compete against each other. Ambition would check ambition institutionally. Congress would have a sense of itself as Congress in competition for power and centrality and primacy with the executive branch. Of course, that is not how things played out, but we have our political parties that cooperate across branches.

We're seeing that in this impeachment trial extremely explicitly. Mitch McConnell has said that he is in close coordination with the White House on how he will manage the trial. Lindsey Graham and others have said that they are not going to approach this as impartial jurors. They think this is all ridiculous. They think the president is great and they're going to protect him at any cost really. And so something that is so simple to say is you can't do impeachment given the supermajority requirements it needs in the Senate particularly if you do not have two political parties that are willing to set aside their interests as political parties, both of them, and act as trustees of the American Constitution and the American system of government into the future. Nixon, when he resigns, what happens is that a delegation of Republican senators go to him and say, you will not survive this because we will vote against you. You will not survive because the Republican Party thinks that what you have done is wrong,

even though you are our party leader. And Nixon resigns because his own party tells him to resign. I think a very scary thing to consider is what would have happened if the Nixon impeachment occurred in this political condition. And I don't think there's really any question about it. If Richard Nixon's crimes had come to light in 2020, he would have survived because the Republican Party and Fox News would have protected him. Very tellingly, Geraldo Rivera appeared on Sean Hannity's show a couple months ago, and he said to Hannity, You know the difference between Donald J. Trump and Richard Nixon? In Nixon's case, if he had someone that stuck up for him,

he wouldn't have been, you know, motivated to cover up that burglary. He would have let the perpetrators... And it was one of these moments that was probably more telling than he had intended it quite to be. What to do about our polarized political system? More with Ezra in a minute on Today Explained. spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp,

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Today, today explained. You spoke to President Obama about these very issues in 2015. You asked him directly about polarization in the American political system. What did he say? He ran very directly on a platform of reducing polarization. He argued, you know, in that famous 2004 DNC speech. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. Red states for Republicans,

blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. And I think that Obama himself really tried in the ways he could to be less polarizing. He had this like almost tick rhetorically of whenever he would say something, he would first explain, you know, the other side has some good points. Like here's our arguments. Here's why I don't ultimately agree. But he really tried, I think. And he failed. You say he tried. He was then followed by President Donald Trump. Right. So he was himself, by the time I spoke with him in 2015 about this,

the most polarizing president in the history of polling. And then that crown would be taken a couple years later by Donald Trump. And then you also have to think about, well, why did the Obama era end in Donald Trump, right? Why is that what we got after Obama, after his efforts to tamp down polarization, that the level of conflict in the country escalated into the current presidency and conditions we're in? And I think there are a lot of reasons. But one thing that Obama said to me in that time was that— Everybody's got a family member or a really good friend from high school who is on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum. And yet we still love them, right?

And his argument was that our polarized political identities are not our truest identities. That if we can pull people out of that political frame and pull them into their more community frame, into their family frame, I mean, these are people who love their children and care for their aging parents and so on, that we would see that a lot of our divisions are not as deep as we think they are and are, in fact, illusory. And the thing that I think he ultimately was somewhat wrong about is that those political identities are not that true and not that deep. And as more and more identities fuse into our core political identities, those identities strengthen. They become activated

by constant threat, by constant reinforcement, and it makes it much harder to get out of them and much easier to pull them forward. So if you look at our system and, say, see polarization as this sort of infection, as this disease that we have that's leading people to vote for a party without thinking, putting party before principle or causing divides in our discourse. I just wonder, like, what do you see as ways to address it? I think about a couple of things. One is that I think in an era of polarization,

which I do not think we're going to get out of for reasons I describe in the book, I think we're going to have to move towards permitting more majoritarian forms of governance, which is to say, if bipartisan compromise is increasingly basically impossible, then you're going to have to limit the damage that not being able to get it can do and make it possible to govern even when it is absent. So there are some simple ways to do that like getting rid of the filibuster, which would at least take out the supermajority requirement in the U.S. Senate. You can think about things like getting rid of the Electoral College, dealing with gerrymandering. I think we should make D.C. and Puerto Rico states

because we should do that because those are American citizens and they deserve representation, but also not having them as states. One of the things it does is it means that the Senate, which is already very tilted towards more rural and white areas, is even more so because we've disenfranchised two parts of the country that are heavily non-white. You're talking about things here that seem wildly implausible considering how polarized we are. Blue states are OK to get rid of the electoral college, but red states aren't. D.C. wants statehood, but Republicans don't ever want D.C. to get it. I mean, what is an individual to do right now when the system is stuck?

There isn't some magical answer here. American politics, though, is highly responsive to the people who are most engaged. And so the question of whether or not it's going to become more manageable or more polarized, more bitter, or more conciliatory comes a lot from what is happening from the people who are volunteering, who are calling their members of Congress, who are paying a lot of attention to political media like this show, who are donating. And so what they do and where they attach themselves is truly kind of what will drive the system forward.

But being involved at the state and local level is, on the one hand, a check against polarization because it's what you call a cross-cutting identity. The place you live has different needs than the two major political parties and in terms of their national collisions can deal with. And so, you know, it used to be that one of the ways that you would get, say, votes from the other party is that, yeah, you know, you're a Democratic majority and you're trying to win over an Oklahoma Republican. But that Oklahoma Republican, there's a bridge that is broken in his district. And if you can help him rebuild that bridge, he'll vote for you on the

bill because he's an Oklahoma Republican. It matters more the district he's from than the party he represents. So I really urge people individually to spend a little bit less time on Twitter and take a note of nationalized political media and a little bit more time getting re-engaged in state and local politics. It won't fix everything for any individual person to do that, but if people did it en masse, I think it would be both better for them and better for politics. Ezra Klein, thank you so much. Thank you. Ezra Klein is now officially the author of the longest Vox article of all time.

It's a book called Why We're Polarized, and it comes out Tuesday wherever you buy your books. I'm Sean Ramos-Viram. This is Today Explained.