Ezra Klein

Why We’re Polarized

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

In his bestselling book, “Why We’re Polarized,” Klein revealed the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, Klein offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. Fareed Zakaria called it “the political book of the year.” Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang wrote that it “somehow reads as if it were written after the election. For anyone concerned about how polarized we have become — and why — this book is for you.”

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. In this talk, Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.