Wednesday, February 9, 2022
When we were kids, and when politics came up in conversation, my mom would often repeat a saying she got from her father: “When Republicans are in charge, bread only costs a nickel, but I don’t have the nickel; when Democrats are in charge, bread costs a dime, but I’ve got the dime.”
I’ve often wondered whether this little capsule of political wisdom was original with my grandfather or if it was a common slogan at the time. I’ve tried to Google it but have come up blank, so unless someone can disabuse me, I’m left to assume that it’s my grandfather’s coinage. It may not bear much scrutiny today as economics, although it probably seemed solid enough during the New Deal. But its meaning is clear, its melding of class and party identity unambiguous: the Democrats were for working men and the poor, which in that generation meant the same thing. This little maxim continued to be meaningful to my mother long after the New Deal was over, long after her father, a coal miner, had died of black lung disease and cancer in his fifties. She repeated it to her children well into the 1960s and 70s, after the country had undergone its massive post-war economic expansion, demographic change, and political realignment. On its surface it seems to justify the common but nonsensical—and thoroughly hypocritical—Republican complaint that Democrats vote for politicians who give them things.
As if.
Our current polarization crisis—the extreme partisanship that’s tearing the country apart—feels like a relatively recent phenomenon, a defining feature of 21st century America. And in its extremity, its potential for outrage and violence, its sheer looniness, it is indeed recent. January 6, 2021, felt new, in a very bad way.
But this rift has been widening for decades. There’s now a small industry among historians and political journalists trying to pinpoint the moment, the spark, when huge segments of the nation started moving on radically divergent political paths, so that we find ourselves today living in discrete bubbles of national identity, bubbles of intense, bellicose patriotism, viewing fellow citizens in other bubbles as aliens, traitors, and enemies. Did our national bifurcation start, for example, in the 1980s, with Reagan’s ascendant conservatism? What about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, when the US thought it had lost its chief foreign foe, and Americans started looking around domestically for opponents to unite against? Or was Newt Gingrich the prime polarizer in the 1990s, with his partisan guerilla warfare in Congress, leading to the Clinton impeachment? What about the launch of Fox News in 1996, or 2004, when the Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity, funding Tea Party theatrics and pouring billions of private dollars into political obstruction? Or was it the Great Recession in 2007 and the election of a black president in 2008?
(In Meltdown, his simultaneously fascinating and annoying podcast series on Audible, journalist David Sirota seems to lay the whole extreme polarization thing at Obama’s feet, making the case—too simplistically, surely—that the Trump and MAGA phenomena are creatures of the Democrats’ failure to address decisively the financial crisis they inherited from Bush II—to fix it, that is, in a way that the white working class could feel. According to Sirota, in 2016 the Trump brand would have fallen flat politically if Congress and the Obama administration in preceding years had cared as much about helping working people keep their homes as they did about helping bankers keep their bonuses. Despite the flaws in this analysis, Meltdown is still a worthwhile listen, particularly in what it reveals about the horse-trading and compromises involved in getting legislation passed, the ways in which provisions can be watered down until they effectively accomplish nothing. Meltdown illustrates that there’s apparently more than one way to obstruct a bill: sometimes the best way is to support it and get it passed, with a few key, seemingly innocuous but castrating word changes—like changing “shall” to “may”—something to keep in mind as we observe the negotiations around Biden’s legislative agenda.)
Is our new polarization just the realization among rural and working-class whites, triggered by Obama’s election, that they could no longer count on being the majority? And how much of this craziness has been accelerated by runaway political correctness, virtue-signaling, and “canceling” on the left?
Maybe the answer is simpler than that. Maybe the meanness of our divide since 2000 is only the unintended byproduct of technological change, an inevitable function of the internet, of digital media’s ability, and tendency, to fragment the public into multiple tribal audiences. The technology to precisely target individuals and feed them exactly the information and misinformation they crave is a mere two decades old. Propaganda has existed forever, but its efficiency and perfection in this century are downright bone-chilling, supplying each of us, like lab rats, the dopamine-like narratives that raise our blood pressures and keep us enraged and engaged.
Yes, there’s a partisan psychosis in this country that feels new, but partisan identity is old. It’s been a feature of my family for almost a century.
My mom was born in 1925. She was a small child when the Depression closed the Pennsylvania coal mines and put her father out of work. What janitorial and other jobs he was able to find were never enough, and the family was often “on relief.” My mom remembered noticing at the dinner table that, while she and her brother and sister always had food on their plates, her parents, claiming not to be hungry, sometimes didn’t. When I see photos of my grandparents from the Depression, they do look awfully skinny. My mom grew up—literally next to the town’s railroad tracks—in rented houses without indoor bathrooms, only outhouses in the yard. She’d been a star student at Mahanoy City High School, in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, and when she graduated she won a college scholarship from the Daughters of the American Revolution—a scholarship she never got to use. On the morning of her wedding she bathed in a wooden tub set on the kitchen floor, with water heated in the kettle on the coal stove; it was a mental image that mystified me as a suburban kid growing up in 1960s New Jersey, and it still does, with its mind-bending anachronism, as if it had taken place—not, as it did, in 1950, on the threshold of the Affluent Society, of television and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe—but a full century earlier.
Both of my parents were lifelong and steadfast Democrats. In their minds, Republicans were the factory owners, the mine owners, the strike breakers, the non-ethnics, the Protestants. My mom resented the fact—she mentioned it often as an adult—that it was the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer that they recited every morning in her public school. I’m sure neither of my parents ever voted for a Republican, and neither have I. I’ve been voting for almost 50 years, and it has never occurred to me, even once, to split a ticket. Voting for me has always been a very simple decision: I blacken one oval. From the GOP’s perspective, I am unreachable: I have never given a Republican candidate for any office even the most fleeting, curious, hypothetical consideration. In my twenties I had a brief intellectual flirtation with Libertarianism, because it intersected tangentially with gay rights, but the infatuation didn’t last long; it was Reagan, by the way, whom I detested, who cured me of it. I don’t think my little thought experiment, my Libertarian fling, ever affected my behavior in the voting booth. I am a Boomer, with a Boomer’s experiences, very different from my parents’ experiences, and in so many ways I do not think like them: my mother, for example, unlike me, never flew on an airplane, never traveled farther north or west than Dearborn, Michigan, or farther south than northern Virginia, never traveled out of the country, never went to college, worked very little outside the home after her marriage, never smoked weed, seldom drank more than a sip of wine once a year on New Year's Eve, never touched a computer or smart phone, and never stopped believing in her Catholic faith. (Although Mom was constitutionally rebellious and anti-authoritarian, atypical as a Catholic of her day, always ready with her polite but acid tongue to put priests and nuns in their places, when they deserved it, as they sometimes did; she was always faithful, but never a sheep.)
In this one thing, this sense that we are Democrats, my family remains solid. It amazes and a bit confuses me how I and my siblings have maintained this allegiance while so much has changed around us, including big policy, demographic, and cultural shifts in the Democratic Party, not to mention economic and class changes within our family. My explanation is that I think my parents always thought of themselves as poor people, even after they stopped being poor, that this was fundamentally their identity, and that it had an irradicable moral dimension, a dimension that the GOP could never approach. It was an identity with constituent resentments and antipathies, most of which I’ve inherited and have little inclination to challenge or abandon. I’ve worked for an investment company and have thus been exposed to a whole affluent suburban culture of golf, Mercedes, Range Rovers, McMansions, and—God help us!—horse farms, all of which has remained alien to me, and most of which provokes me to roll my eyes.
My dad, after returning from the war, was a factory worker, a union worker, a Teamster. He did okay—but only by working an unimaginable amount of overtime. Through most of my childhood he worked the midnight shift seven days each week. But like so many white Americans after the war, my folks bought a little tract house in the suburbs, paid off their mortgage, bought US Savings Bonds and new cars every eight years or so, and saved a little money. In addition to paying their local school taxes, they pulled out their checkbooks to send us to Catholic school. Their children were able to go to college. It didn’t occur to my parents to change their Democratic allegiance when the complexion of the party changed—when it got browner—or when the party allied itself with abortion rights, though this certainly annoyed my mother and complicated matters. But my parents’ strongest moral tug, I think, was the plight of the poor, with whom they identified, regardless of color, and this was to them politically straightforward. If there’s one thing I am proudest of, in regard to my family, it is that my parents remained deaf to the GOP’s malign, seductive dog whistles and “southern strategy,” its cynical attempt to divide white working-class voters, not all of whom were in the South, away from the Democratic Party, by stirring up racial resentments after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
I have a few Republican friends, and we tacitly conspire not to discuss politics, an arrangement that creates its own artificial distance and superficiality, since very little is more important to me than politics. But as the experience of my family illustrates, political identity—or what social scientists are calling “affective polarization,” the tendency for partisans to distrust those of the other party—is not new. What we are experiencing now is a matter of degree, partisan identity hyped into hatred and potential violence. How, then, did we get here?
* * * * * * * * * *
Two relatively recent books explore this territory brilliantly and have helped me understand where we’ve been, what we are now, and how we might save ourselves, and I enthusiastically recommend them: Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, which came out in January 2020, two years ago now, and George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, which was published just last summer. It’s almost disorienting to consider how they straddle a threshold: Klein’s book was written in “the beforetimes”: before COVID, before Trump’s first impeachment, before George Floyd was killed, before the 2020 election, before January 6. Packer’s book, by contrast, has taken all these things in. Yet both, in different ways, are relevant and illuminating. I’m going to summarize Why We’re Polarized here and discuss Packer’s book in an upcoming post.
Ezra Klein—one of the founders of Vox who is now an opinion columnist and podcaster at The New York Times—has one of those minds that inspires awe: he is always logical and analytical, massively well informed, both comfortable and casual with data, and precisely phrased. An avowed liberal, it is Klein’s business in this book to understand the logic, the internal coherence, and the incentives and drivers of Republican behavior, as well as the ways that liberals and Democrats themselves contribute to polarization. This book, he tells us in his Introduction, “is not about people”—meaning that he isn’t interested in the kind of stuff that I began this essay with, with politics as a personal or familial story, or with the personalities and motivations of politicians. “This is a book about systems,” he tells us up-front, and his subject is how our politics “became a toxic system, why we participate in it, and what it means for our future.” Politicians, in this framework, are only “marionettes of broader forces,” and he seeks to understand and describe those forces. He’s been studying politics for 20 years and has lost faith, he writes, in the stories and perspectives of political actors:
We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and confuse our theories of repair. We try to fix the system by changing the people who run it, only to find that they become part of the system, too.
A system has its own logic and design. We may think that it is broken because it fails to serve our needs, when in fact it may be functioning perfectly according to a design that couldn’t possibly serve our needs. Our political system is full of “rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” who are themselves “functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”
The system Klein describes has a number of key components. The first of these, what he calls the “master story,” is “the logic of polarization,” a feedback cycle in which institutions and politicians are incentivized to behave in more polarized ways to appeal to a polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which further demands more polarization from its institutions and politicians. And so on. It’s a rhetorical analog to escalating arms races between competing nations. Nation 1’s defensive measures look threatening to Nation 2, which then builds its defensive posture, which looks increasingly threatening to Nation 1, and so on, leading to war.
This may not seem like much of a revelation—it doesn’t help us identify the problem’s first cause, its prime mover—but it’s an important point to keep in mind as we proceed. The logic of polarization certainly accounts for much of the bizarre politician behavior we see on our TV screens. It’s why ignoramus trolls like Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Bobert, Mo Brooks, and Paul Gosar obtrude on our consciousness: it is in fact why they’re in Congress in the first place. The logic of polarization explains as phenomena the cringeworthy histrionics of Senators Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, for example. It explains outrageous laws, like the recent Texas abortion ban, guaranteed to infuriate huge segments of the population. It explains Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID pronouncements, apparently designed to get as many Floridians killed as possible. According to the logic of polarization, the outrage these policies generate is the point. Johnson and Cruz and Greg Abbott and DeSantis may all, to some of us, look like clowns, but they’re just regular guys behaving rationally, following the money, following the cues. In their places we’d all be doing exactly the same things.
And to be fair, the logic of polarization explains much of Joe Biden’s behavior as president. Biden won the general election, in part, as a moderate, an institutionalist, a friend to the working class, an older white guy with pals across the aisle who knew how to work with Republican senators, a Catholic guy who attends Mass and voted earlier in his career to outlaw abortion. He is, indeed, all these things, but he has discovered—much too late, in my opinion—that none of it matters, that the other side is completely closed to negotiation. The logic of polarization, therefore, has required him to yield to the pressures of his constituency, including defending abortion rights and calling for changes in the Senate’s filibuster rules. I’m happy for these position changes, but viewing them through Ezra Klein’s frame is to see, not leadership and personal growth, but merely the irresistible forces at work in a system.
Identity politics is the second key component—an essential and central component—in the framework mapped out in Why We’re Polarized. Though we may argue about policies and ideologies, all our political conflicts are fundamentally about the competing statuses of various identities in our society, and about the way people behave in groups. Summarizing the literature of group psychology, Klein points out how easily individuals bond with a group, on what superficial bases we can categorize others as outsiders, how little provocation it takes to see outsiders as threatening, and how promptly we engage competitively. In psychological terms, there is little distinction between the way we follow politics and the way we follow sports: in both cases, emotions are intense and the goal is to win. Klein mentions the title of a 2006 book by Will Blythe about the basketball rivalry between Duke University and the University of North Carolina—To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever—for how it illustrates the addictive euphoria of having enemies.
It wasn’t all that long ago when the phrase “identity politics” had a fringe flavor, a sense that it only applied, pejoratively, to certain marginalized groups. African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims, women, queer folk, etc.—they were the ones who could be criticized for practicing identity politics, no?
Well, after Trump came down the golden escalator, and after Charlottesville 2017, we’re so much smarter now. “A core argument of this book,” Klein writes in his Introduction, “is that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics. . . . It runs so deep in our psyches, is activated so easily by even weak cues and distant threats, that it is impossible to speak seriously about how we engage with one another without discussing how our identities shape that engagement.”
Hence how I began this essay.
Each of us has multiple identities, not singular but “dizzyingly plural”:
Much that happens in political campaigns is best understood as a struggle over which identities voters will inhabit come Election Day: Will they feel like workers exploited by their bosses, or heartlanders dismissed by coastal elites? Will they vote as patriotic traditionalists offended by NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, or as parents worried about the climate their children will inhabit?
Identity politics isn’t new, but something new and dangerous has been happening to identity politics over several decades. Since around the 1950s, the range of ethnic, religious, personal, geographic, ideological, cultural, and class identities that American citizens inhabit have been coalescing around our political—i.e. partisan—identities: “Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.”
It’s worth emphasizing this point. None of our various identities is new, and each identity has—and has always had—its own share of emotional power, of affection and attachment, of principle, nostalgia, hopefulness, shame, loyalty, perceived threat, defensiveness, etc. What is new is that our identities have been sorting themselves into two discrete categories, like columns in a ledger, one column labeled “Democrat” and the other labeled “Republican.” The sorting process has compounded the emotional power in the individual identities and produces a composite result that is grander, apocalyptic. Klein uses a different metaphor; to him, the sorting of our identities has been like stacking magnets.
Here’s just one example: In the middle of the last century, it wouldn’t have occurred to white evangelical Christians to view one of the two major political parties as an existential threat. But today we know exactly on which side of the partisan aisle white evangelicals are likely see their political champions and, conversely, where they think they see threats to their beliefs and cultural significance. And they’ve sorted themselves with very unlikely bedfellows, like Nazis, Matt Gaetz, Alex Jones, QAnon. The fact that Trump is glaringly not a believing, practicing Christian, and that Biden is, is irrelevant in this framework. A 2018 tweet from former, disgraced Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., which Klein quotes, illustrates this attitude perfectly:
Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys’. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascist Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!
In other words, Trump may be a pagan, he may be a monster, but he’s our pagan, our monster.
The same can be said for African-Americans, for the LGBTQ community, for rural citizens, for urban citizens, for non-Cuban Hispanics, for Cuban Hispanics, for students and academics, for women who identify as feminists, for environmentalists, for AIPAC-friendly Jews, for J-Street-friendly Jews, for Wyomingites, for Californians, for Muslims, and certainly for whites who identify strongly as whites: for the majorities of each of these groups we could reliably predict which of the two parties appears to be an existential defender and which an existential threat.
Consider geography. A century ago, the idea of red states and blue states, so prominent in our political consciousness today, wouldn’t have made sense. The political parties were pretty evenly distributed across the country, and states routinely swung from Democrat to Republican and back again, from election to election. People were more likely to vote for personalities and policies. (Except, of course, for the authoritarian one-party rule imposed on the Dixiecrat South: more about this later.) The earmark system prevalent in Congress in the 20th century connected voters transactionally, in every state and locality, to politicians of both parties, making national policies manifest everywhere as roads, bridges, school buildings, etc. Today, however, researchers can precisely map the party affiliation of any US county by its population density, driven not transactionally, but by culture, ideology, and identity: the dividing line is 900 people per square mile, above which counties vote Democratic and below which they vote Republican.
Even more fundamentally, basic personality types as measured by psychologists are today comprehensively sorted into one or another of the two political parties. Whether described in terms of relative “openness” or “closedness” to new experiences, or degree of innate fearfulness and alertness to threats, or general optimism or pessimism, there is now a high correlation between personality types and party affiliation. (This, like everything else, isn’t perfect: I can see exceptions in my own family.) Nothing, Klein cautions, is changing in Americans’ psychological makeup. Our population today probably has the same proportion of cheerful and optimistic and “open” people, versus fearful or pessimistic or “closed” people, as it had in the middle of the 1900s:
What is changing is how closely our psychologies map onto our politics and onto a host of other life choices. As the differences between the parties clarify, the magnetic pull of their ideas and demographics becomes stronger to the psychologically aligned—as does their magnetic repulsion to the psychologically opposed.
And this psychological sorting powerfully drives identity politics:
If you care enough about politics to connect it to your core psychological outlook, then politics becomes part of your psychological self-expression. And as the political coalitions split by psychology, membership in one or the other becomes a clearer signal, both to ourselves and to the world, about who we are and what we value. When we participate in politics to solve a problem, we’re participating transactionally. But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity. And that’s when our relationship to politics, and to each other, changes.
Think of how much healthier and happier this nation would be if we thought of politics transactionally, as distinct problems we wanted to solve, as specific ways to form a freer, more affluent, more productive and creative society. That very sentence sounds utopian and naïve—though in a democracy it shouldn’t.
Think of what our new tribal partisan sorting, plus the logic of polarization, means for elections. We are in a period, in Klein’s terms, of “post-persuasion” campaigns. Already by the 2000 election, campaign professionals were realizing that efforts to convert the small population of independent, swing voters weren’t worth it. The real payoff came in energizing one’s base, making sure that the much larger population of folks with minds already made up went through the rigmarole of registering and voting. In this environment, the real currency is hyping the emotion in one’s own bubble:
The Democratic Party will not be able to win elections without an excited, diverse coalition. The Republican Party will not be able to win elections without an enthused white base. Democrats will need to build a platform that's even more explicit in its pursuit of racial and gender equality, while Republicans will need to design a politics even more responsive to a coalition that feels itself losing power.
Neither the logic of polarization nor identity politics nor the behavior of people in groups is new: they’re constants of human nature, and though essential to our understanding of our current crisis, they don’t tell us what prompted us to sort our identities under political parties, and what flooded our partisan politics with such anger and fear in the first place. And yet something has decidedly changed since, say, the 1950s, when Washington conducted its business with markedly more compromise and vastly less rancor and obstruction than it does today.
The answer both is and is not in the structure of our political system, which hasn’t changed appreciably since the 1950s—or even, really, since the Constitution was ratified in 1789. We’ve added more states, abolished slavery, limited the number of terms a president can serve, extended the franchise beyond white men with property, and now directly elect our senators. (Oh, and—alas!—accidentally invented the filibuster.) Structurally, not much else. And the same two major political parties have been competing fiercely for power for 160 years.
And yet our political system is, indeed, part of the problem, in that it is inherently unstable. We did, after all, fight a devastating civil war before the nation was even a century old. Instability—a tendency to conflict and crisis—is baked into our Constitution and hidden in plain sight. The wonder is that it’s been able to remain hidden and dormant for very long stretches of time due to fortuitous circumstances that sometimes, as now, evaporate.
Klein cites the famous 1990 paper, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” by political scientist Juan Linz, expressing surprise that the unique American style of democracy hadn’t produced more constitutional crises than it had. Our presidential structure is unique, exceptional, simply in managing to survive, unlike other presidential democracies that have been tried across the world. Tellingly, after World War II, when the US guided the defeated Axis powers of Japan and Germany and Italy to form new democratic constitutions, we did not export a system anything like our own. All other successful democracies in the world are parliamentary, in which the government’s executive leader is also the leader of the majority party or coalition in the legislature. In the UK, as in all other parliamentary democracies, people vote for their local MPs with the understanding that they are giving one party or coalition a mandate to govern for as long as it can maintain the people’s confidence. Crucially, only one party or coalition holds power at a time. In the US, on the other hand, people vote for presidents, for their representatives in the House, and for senators in essentially different elections, held at different times and structured in different ways, giving each entity a different claim of legitimacy, a different constituency, a different mandate. Ours is a system in which basic functional governance requires compromise, which the incentives don’t always favor; the result can sometimes be compromise, but also sometimes the complete failure of governance.
Klein illustrates this problem with a story searingly recent and familiar to us all: President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Mitch McConnell refused even to consider the Garland nomination on the pretext that it was too close to an election, and then cheerfully reversed himself in considering Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett even closer to an election. Democrats were outraged at the apparent hypocrisy, at McConnell’s disrespect for President Obama, at the trampling of norms, but Klein asks the right question: Why would anyone expect McConnell to have done anything different? Obama had one constituency to serve, McConnell a different one with a different agenda. Obama was a legitimate president with the power to nominate, but Republican control of the Senate with the power to obstruct was also legitimate, and the GOP had a mandate to fill the court with like-minded judges.
The rules, as set down in the Constitution and our institutions, push toward partisan dysfunction, conflict, and even collapse. The system works not through formal mechanisms that ensure the settlement of intractable disputes but through informal norms of compromise, forbearance, and moderation that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough.
. . .
As Lynz argued, a presidential political system in which power is divided among different branches works when the parties that control those branches are ideologically mixed enough to cooperate with one another, and that was, for much of the 20th century, the secret to the American political system's success. But now America's political parties are ideologically polarized.
To repeat, our system is made for dysfunction and only works “through informal norms of compromise . . . that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough.” And in much of the 20th century our parties were “ideologically mixed enough to cooperate with one another.”
This is the key.
What has changed over the decades, the prime movers in this narrative of dysfunction, are the parties. Though Democrats and Republicans have been competing fiercely for power for over a century and a half, and thus offering an illusion of American political stability, the two parties are in fact very different today from their mid-20th-century namesakes, and they’re different in two ways.
First, party leadership is much weaker today than in the 20th century. In an earlier era, with its proverbial smoke-filled rooms, party leaders were effective gatekeepers in presidential elections, vetting candidates, deliberately weeding out contenders with glaring weaknesses and vulnerabilities, eliminating anyone alienating, embarrassing, or extreme. We’ve since replaced party control with the primary system, presumably a more democratic vehicle for choosing candidates, but a vehicle that attracts highly engaged and potentially more polarized voters, not average general-election voters. A strong Republican Party system in 2016 would never have allowed a vulgar, transgressive, demagogic tornado like Trump near the nomination. Party leaders have lost control over the nominating process in presidential elections, and the primary system favors more polarized candidates.
Second, both parties in the 21st century have developed consistent ideological identities, which they didn’t have 70 years ago. Today, we take the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans so much for granted—we consider it so screamingly self-evident that Democrats are liberals and Republicans are conservatives—that it’s shocking to remember that this is a very new phenomenon. I’m going to quote one of Klein’s paragraphs in full:
Rewind to 1950. That was the year the American Political Science Association (APSA) Committee on Political Parties released a call to arms that sounds like satire to modern ears. Entitled Towards A More Responsible Two-Party System, the ninety-eight-page paper, coauthored by many of the country’s most eminent political scientists and covered on the front page of the New York Times, pleads for a more polarized political system. It laments that the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why. “Unless the parties identify themselves with programs, the public is unable to make an intelligent choice between them,” warned the authors.
Klein reminds us that in 1954 a “Minnesota Democrat pulling the lever for Hubert Humphrey, her party's liberal Senate candidate . . . , was also voting for a Senate majority that would include Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina [Dixiecrat] senator who was among the chamber’s most conservative members.” Congress contained not only extremely conservative (i.e., segregationist, white supremacist) Democrats, but also left-leaning Republicans. Consider John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who won his first term as mayor of New York City in 1965, who four years later lost the Republican primary and ran successfully as a candidate of the New York Liberal Party, and who ultimately cut ties with the GOP in 1971 and ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic presidential primaries. Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal New York Republican, could be Vice President of the United States as late as 1977.
The parties, in other words, were ideological mush: fairly close reflections of each other. This situation did make it difficult for voters to make clear choices, but it had tremendous advantages for national stability, including a general sense of continuity from one administration to the next. It also made for the kind of cooperation in Congress that got bills passed. Absent were today’s genuine terror and loathing at the prospect of the other side winning. I remember being disappointed when Ronald Reagan won the White House, but not terrified; the world wasn’t going to end, and my understanding of what it meant to be an American wasn’t undermined. Fast forward to today: the word dystopian isn’t strong enough to describe a world in which Trump might again become president with a GOP-controlled Congress.
The ideological consolidations of the two parties since the 1950s have been gradual. Consider that the Democrats’ Medicare legislation in 1965 received seventy GOP votes in the House and thirteen GOP votes in the Senate. It was Nixon who proposed the Environmental Protection Agency, considered a basic minimum income, and “proposed a national health-care plan more ambitious than Obamacare.” In the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans voted against abortion in equal numbers, and the GOP platform acknowledged that its members were divided on the issue. Reagan promoted amnesty for illegal immigrants. Both Reagan and Bush I raised taxes, and Bush I signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Clinton reduced the deficit, balanced the budget, slashed welfare, proclaimed that “the era of big government is over,” and dissed Sister Souljah for good measure. Bush II ran in his 2000 campaign as a “compassionate conservative,” believing that government should “actively help our citizens in need.” None of these positions would be possible today.
Ticket splitting among voters, which was common in the 20th century, and which “requires a baseline comfort with both political parties,” has virtually disappeared: “Behind that demise is the evaporation of that comfort.” Negative partisanship rules. The primary driver of voter behavior is not affection or even support for one’s own party, but the conviction that the other party will lead the country to ruin: “When you vote, you're voting to keep a candidate, a coalition, a movement, a media ecosystem, a set of donors, and a universe of people you don't like and maybe fear out of power.”
So back to the prime-mover question: What caused the two parties to become manifestly more different over the past several decades? How did Democrats become liberal and Republicans conservative? Like so much else, Klein writes, the answer involves race.
My Pennsylvania coal miner grandfather in the 1920s was loyal to a Democratic Party with a very dirty secret in the South. In the former Confederate states, from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s up to the 1960s, Democrats controlled everything under a system that was thoroughly undemocratic, authoritarian, and essentially lawless. Southern blacks, under a perpetual threat of violence, did not vote, segregation and white supremacy reigned supreme, and the GOP provided no effective political competition. Why did the rest of the country tolerate this? Chiefly because the solid Dixiecrat South buttressed the power of the national Democratic Party in Congress, provided it held its nose and looked the other way. It was real power. The decades-long Democratic stranglehold on Southern elections meant that Southern senators monopolized the seniority system; the most powerful committee chairmanships were always in their pockets, giving Dixiecrats an effective veto on all national legislation. Northern, more liberal Democrats generally accommodated Dixiecrat demands as the cost of doing business. What the Dixiecrats demanded, above all things, was maintenance of “states’ rights”—that reliable euphemistic mantra of American conservatism that translates as segregation and white rule.
Consider the history of anti-lynching bills, none of which Congress ever passed. In 1918 the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill—which would have made that charming Southern tradition of extra-judicial killing and community entertainment a federal crime—was proposed in the House by Missouri Republican Leonidas C. Dyer. It was filibustered in the Dixiecrat-controlled Senate. It was passed again in the House in 1922 and again blocked in the Senate by Southern Democrats. Similar anti-lynching legislation in the 1930s, the Costigan-Wagner Bill, was proposed by northern House Democrats and lobbied for by Eleanor Roosevelt, but FDR declined to champion it, fearing the loss of white votes in the South and of Dixiecrat support for New Deal legislation in the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s liberal shift on race, defying its own white Southern power block, began with Truman’s integration of the Armed Forces in 1948 and reached its crisis with LBJ’s determination to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act only passed because Johnson enlisted Republican votes in the Senate to defeat the filibuster launched by Southern members of his own party. It was an act of principle and courage, because Johnson knew that by championing civil rights and succeeding in getting the bill passed he thereby lost the solid block of political power held by Southern white segregationists, a power that Democrats had long enjoyed.
At about the same time, Barry Goldwater, despite badly losing the 1964 presidential election, was influencing the GOP to consolidate around conservative principles. Goldwater (“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”) was an ideologue, a passionate libertarian, and a genuine man of principle. He hated the philosophical mushiness of his party, the accommodation it made to a broad spectrum of ideologies. Goldwater’s influence achieved apparent success when Reagan took the presidential oath in 1981, by which time the GOP had already learned the power of the dog whistle, was already capturing the segregationist white South that LBJ had lost.
Thereafter, gradually and steadily, due to the logic of polarization, the power of identity politics, and the inherently confrontational structure of our system of government, the Democratic Party became increasingly liberal and the Republican Party purged itself of all but the most conservative voices. And as the parties consolidated ideologically they collected, like Klein’s stacked magnets, diverse identity groups looking for partisan homes. Blacks, gays, feminists, urban dwellers, and immigrants have potentially discrepant needs and demands, but today they’ve clustered under the big tent that is the Democratic Party. Likewise, though there’s no obvious transactional synergy between evangelicals, business interests, trade protectionists, libertarian philosophers, the NRA, conservative Catholics, police unions, Midwest farmers, QAnon, and anti-vaxxers, their identities, sympathies, and demands have nearly homogenized as today’s Republicans.
After the 1960s, when the GOP was able to capture southern whites away from the Democrats, congressional races tightened, each side winning with narrower and narrower margins, giving the parties less and less incentive to cooperate in crafting legislation. Through much of American history, Klein shows us, elections haven’t been all that competitive. We’ve had long periods of Republican dominance followed by long periods of Democratic dominance. During these periods, minority parties, perceiving little chance to capture the majority anytime soon, could influence legislation only through cooperation and negotiation.
Today’s elections, on the other hand, are savagely competitive. “When winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of cooperation dissolves”:
Once a political party has decided the path to governing is retaking the majority, not working with the existing majority, the incentives transform. Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.
Partisan consolidation has been accelerated by the changing technology and economics in the business of journalism, a fascinating story in itself. American newspapers from the colonial and revolutionary eras up through the end of the 19th century used to be highly partisan, with multiple Democratic and Republican publications in each city; this changed in the 20th century, as economies of scale permitted single publishers to dominate complete metropolitan areas. With new large, diverse audiences, newspaper publishers avoided overt partisanship and developed an objective reporting style that wouldn’t offend any segment of the public. The same drivers and mindset governed broadcast journalism as it emerged; the major networks had huge national audiences and weren’t in the business of alienating any partisans anywhere.
But technology changed again as the 20th century closed, vastly expanding audience choice. In the new information economy, where everything is available all the time, and where political news competes with cat videos and cooking shows and round-the-clock sports and the entire historical catalog of movies and TV shows, no one ever has to pay attention to politics at all. Today, the people who consume political journalism are already politically engaged, viewing politics as a team sport, a drama of personal identity. And most only want to hear what they want to hear, and they want to hear it loud. Political journalism has become identity journalism.
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So that’s how we got here—how our political system became toxic, how it metamorphosed over the last seventy years or so from something reasonably moderate, stable, functional, and conciliatory to an apparent dead end in governance. We witness today a stand-off between a Democratic president and a Senate Republican minority with the power and determination, backed by irresistible incentives, to filibuster almost everything it can; with an RNC censoring any member who cooperates with any action taken by the narrow Democratic majority; and with a large minority of voters rejecting the legitimacy of the majority’s party.
Our system is unmistakably in crisis, but it would be wrong to see this only as a story of decline and fall. One of the lessons in this narrative, Klein tells us, is that there may be worse things than polarization; we bought our mid-20th-century political stability and Congress’s gentlemanly forbearance at too high a price. Our system of compromise began to crumble when the Democratic Party took a step in the 1960s, in response to protests by African Americans and their allies and with the help of like-minded Republicans, away from white supremacy and segregation and towards a more democratic society. This step was itself likely a by-product of World War II and the Cold War. In winning the war against Hitler, we flattered ourselves that we were the good guys, defending and exporting democracy, only to realize, to our shame, that a sizable chunk of our own country was living under its own kind of tyranny. And in our propaganda war with the Soviet Union, as we criticized Communist dictatorships, the Russians may have done us an inadvertent favor by throwing the plight of black America back into our faces and embarrassing us with our own injustices, wielding whataboutism to great effect. In passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the panoply of mid-century civil-rights legislation, Democrats and Republicans worked together to restore the 19th century’s abortive racial liberation process—a process begun by the GOP under Lincoln, cultivated by Republicans during Reconstruction, and by 1880 crushed by that generation’s Democrats. By decisively switching sides on the racial issue in the 1960s and allying itself with the momentum of civil rights, the Democratic Party set in motion a sorting process that has over the decades radically changed both parties. It was perhaps inevitable that the GOP, in response to the mid-century Democratic initiative on race, provided “a home to white backlash.” Still, despite all our rancor, and despite genuine anxiety about what’s coming next, we are a freer and more just country than we were in the 1950s.
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Why We’re Polarized does not argue a false equivalence between today’s Democrats and Republicans. Polarization has infected both parties, Klein maintains, but asymmetrically, because today’s Democratic Party has a stronger immune system, inoculated by the diversity of the groups under its tent, by its commitment to democracy, and by the breadth of its media and information sources. If “polarization has given the Democratic Party the flu,” Klein writes, “the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.”
Democrats have indeed shifted leftward, but their sheer heterogeneity has helped them resist the tendency to purge and purify ideologically. “Sorting,” in other words, Klein writes, “has made Democrats more diverse and Republicans more homogeneous.” Part of this is simply a function of our undemocratic Constitution, which emphasizes the power of geography over the power of the majority of the people. State equality in the Senate and the Electoral College, in combination with the redistricting process for House seats and the conservative dominance on the Supreme Court, “restrains polarization among Democrats and unleashes it among Republicans”: “To win, Democrats don't just need to appeal to the voter in the middle. They need to appeal to voters well to the right of the middle.” Hence Biden’s nomination and election. On the other hand, the “GOP's geographic advantage permits it to run campaigns aimed at a voter well to the right of the median American.”
The Democratic Party today is less an ideology than a coalition of interest groups. It accommodates open socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialist Independents like Bernie Sanders, moderate Independents like Angus King, organized-labor advocates like Sherrod Brown, gun-rights champions like John Tester, plus a whole range of other well-known and obscure names both left-of-center and right-of-center. Most Democratic senators are right-of-center, as indeed are most Democratic voters. There are certainly some persons under the Democratic tent with views that might be considered out of the mainstream, or at least farther left than the nation at large, but they exert influence without control. The cartoon version of Democrats one encounters on Fox News and in other conservative media—Communists, city-burning black rioters, vast networks of ANTIFA terrorists and anarchists, China collaborators, deep-state tyrants, PC indoctrinators, warrior atheists, foreign Jewish globalists, floods of illegal aliens invited in to replace white voters—are of course pure propaganda, extremist caricatures invented by the right precisely because the real Democratic Party has been able to maintain a degree of moderation and broad appeal. It has had to.
Part of what has kept the Democrats unified in their diversity and won them their narrow majorities has been the nihilistic bleakness of the alternative. Democrats have earned votes from not only liberal and moderate white Americans, but even from relatively conservative white Americans, repulsed by the new, highly polarized GOP. Democrats benefit from conservative, anti-Trump phenomena like The Lincoln Project. From the perspective of many white and even conservative Americans—and especially since January 6, 2021, a year after Why We’re Polarized was published—the GOP has turned itself into something truly scary, thoroughly radicalized, genuinely extreme, contemptuous of governmental institutions and norms, open to violence as a political weapon, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white, ideologically purged and purified, and disciplined under an autocrat and obedient to his whims. It’s an extremism driven by desperation:
Republicans know that their coalition is endangered, buffeted by demographic headwinds and an aging base. And that has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the GOP's tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes. It feels to many that if they lose, they may never win again—and perhaps, with their current coalition, there's a kernel of truth in that. Still, there is nothing more dangerous than a group accustomed to wielding power that feels its control slipping.
Conservatism in the GOP even seems to have ceased being an ideology and become an identity, one in which discrete, previously cherished tenets of conservative thought—small government, for example, or anti-corruption, or free speech—have been jettisoned in defense of the mega-identity, the cult, of Trumpism. Justin Amash, the Michigan libertarian GOP congressman who has since left the party, observed that today’s Republicans no longer care about overspending, the size of government, or budget deficits, but only about fighting a war against a bogey on the left.
Finally, mainstream journalism, with its objective ethos and disciplined process, has been a crucial factor in the Democrats’ ability to resist the extremes of polarization. The Democratic public gets its information from a wider, more diverse set of sources than do Republican voters. For American liberals there is no dominant news source, nothing even remotely comparable to the monopoly that Fox News enjoys on the right. Openly progressive media like MSNBC, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Slate get a relatively small share of liberal attention; more Democratic voters rely on traditional, less partisan outlets like CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, ABC, the BBC, NBC, PBS, and the Atlantic, and even on traditional conservative voices, like the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. The Democratic “informational ecosystem” is not only diverse but disciplined by a tradition—and business model—driven by objectivity, fact-checking, and the correction of mistakes.
The conservative media ecosystem, on the other hand—Fox, Breitbart, Infowars, the late Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon’s podcast—is highly concentrated and mostly propagandistic, rejecting traditional journalism’s tethering to facts and its ethos of objectivity. Republicans complain that mainstream media has a liberal bias—but that seems mostly to mean that traditional outlets refuse to repeat Trump-cult lies as if they were true. The audience has been disciplined into believing that every story challenging their preferred narrative is “Fake News.”
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Having devoted nine chapters to analyzing our political ills, Ezra Klein is skeptical, in the tenth and final chapter of Why We’re Polarized, of his own proposed solutions, and even of the need for a reassuring conclusion at all. He writes, “I have more confidence in my diagnosis than my prescription.” Our polarization “is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions,” and it may not be going away anytime soon. What he suggests, therefore, is that we “reform the political system so it can function amid polarization.” This is much easier said than done, but he groups his proposed reforms into three categories: bombproofing, democratizing, and balancing.
By “bombproofing,” he suggests that lawmakers make it more difficult for political combatants to do serious damage to the nation while they battle each other, and his prime target here is the debt-ceiling limit. I won’t belabor the debt-ceiling—you either get it or you don’t—but his point is that it’s a completely unnecessary weapon in Congressional hands, a kind of terrorist device disguised as a fiscal decision, a suicide vest for angry partisans. It’s a technicality that can turn “routine bickering in Congress and transform it into a full-blown global financial crisis.” That’s a nice global economy you got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it. In a similar vein, Klein proposes an expansion of automatic economic stabilizers to keep partisans in Congress from making economic problems worse for political gain; it’s always beneficial to the party out of power to deepen the nation’s current economic woes, and the party out of power can always do that through simple obstruction. Other wonky ideas along these lines are possible, but in principle, Klein’s “bombproofing” means to take certain decisions out of politicians’ hands “where congressional inaction can do great damage.”
The chance is close to zero that any of Klein’s “democratizing” reforms will be enacted anytime soon. If part of our problem is that “the Republican Party has been warped by its ability to win elections without fashioning a majoritarian agenda,” then forcing more democracy into the system could force the GOP to appeal to a broader coalition of voters and consequently moderate itself. This part of the book feels especially dated, and the two years since its publication now feel eternal, because in the interim the GOP has made it clear how mobilized they are against expanding American democracy. Nevertheless, these are all good, if currently politically infeasible, ideas.
The first is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), “an agreement by states to throw their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote.” Absent a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College, it’s a way that individual state legislatures could democratize presidential elections. (If you’re not familiar with it, it’s worth looking up: the Wikipedia page on NPVIC is especially detailed and valuable.) Because it demands mobilization at the state level, and because Pennsylvania, my state, has not yet joined the compact, I find NPVIC an appealing idea: maybe something to work on.
Klein’s other democratizing ideas include:
· ranked-choice voting in congressional elections, which would empower third parties and require House candidates to compete for all voters everywhere in their states;
· elimination of the Senate’s filibuster;
· statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; and
· making voting easier.
Republicans, of course, as we have seen, not only oppose all these reforms but are working feverishly to make voting harder. Nevertheless, “there is no less dysfunctional politics without a less dysfunctional GOP, and the path to a less dysfunctional GOP is forcing the party to reach beyond the ethnonationalist coalition Trump rode to victory.”
Good luck with that.
By “balancing,” Klein means something a bit more abstract, and his suggestion is more tentative. The theoretical foundations on which James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution built our system of government included one brilliant insight and two colossal misreadings of the nation’s future development. Their brilliant insight was that power needed to be structured to balance competing interests. Their first misreading of the future was their assumption that the states would always be America’s competing interests. In their day, the tension in the Constitutional Congress was between the big states, like New York and Virginia and Pennsylvania, and smaller states, like Rhode Island and Connecticut and Delaware. The framers constructed a bicameral Congress that gave each state the same power in the Senate but larger states more representation in the House. Unfortunately, that’s no longer how we’re polarized. The framers’ second misreading of the future was their naivete about parties themselves, which they despised and hoped would never develop in America:
A central problem in any free political system is how to secure balanced competition. The problem in our system is that what we balanced for is no longer what’s competing. Today, the strongest and most politically important identities are partisan identities. We don't talk about big states and small states but about red states and blue states. If there is a threat to American unity, it rests not in the specific concerns of Virginians or Alaskans but in the growing enmity between Democrats and Republicans. And here's the thing: the Founders did not think about how to balance parties, because they didn't think parties would exist.
. . .
Those who trust in the Founders’ wisdom need to take this more seriously: if they were wise to recognize that the most potent political units need to be represented in the system in a balanced, predictable way, then the path to honoring their insight lies in correcting their oversight. Perhaps there are places in the political system where, rather than unleashing the parties to fight to the death for every scrap of power, we should lower the stakes by guaranteeing them—or, in a multiparty system, any party that achieves support above a certain threshold—equal power.
Klein doesn’t get much more specific than this. He leaves it as something to think about.
Klein’s final prescriptions in Why We’re Polarized have to do with us as individuals, as citizens caught in a toxic system designed to manipulate us, to provoke our identities for its purposes. His chief prescription is a kind of political mindfulness practice, by which we train ourselves to be more aware of our emotional vulnerabilities to national news and to moderate our engagement with political media. It is, Klein admits, a counter-intuitive recommendation from a lifelong political journalist. And he recommends that we try to channel some of our civic identities away from national and toward local politics, where we’re likelier to have more impact and influence and also likelier to work with people unlike us and view them as fellow citizens.
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Writing this newsletter is a kind of political mindfulness practice for me, especially the homework part, the necessary reading and thinking behind each post. It’s a way to disengage from sheer outrage at the events of the day, to move from helplessness to reflection. It is also preparation, I hope, for a practical and focused kind of activism. I’ve developed for myself a huge and probably impossible reading list in relevant American history, political theory, and political journalism, and to the extent that I’m able to build an audience for The Mess We’ve Made, I invite my readers to read along with me. The goal is to react less emotionally to current problems and injustices, to gain a deeper understanding of our history, and to figure out effective ways to resist prevailing toxic trends. Upcoming books include George Packer’s Last Best Hope, as I’ve mentioned, plus Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities, The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch, and Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor.
I’ve also begun a side project of sorts of reading in the history of the American Revolution, partly in reaction to the cosplay and rhetoric on the right that positions its insurrection as a kind of new 1776. January 6, 2021, provoked me to ask, “What actually was 1776?”—this from someone who lives surrounded by the geography of the American Revolution, who walks in Valley Forge Historical Park three times each week.
I’ve already encountered some surprises: more about this later. But if you’re looking for a big book to invest in this winter, and you’re considering War and Peace or Ulysses or Proust, let me suggest something entirely different—Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, an intellectual history of the political and literary ferment that surrounded the war for independence and the development of the Constitution. If it has always seemed to you, as it has to me, that the revolution was something of an over-reaction to a few little taxes imposed by Parliament, Wood’s massive study will be a revelation. It is a big, academic book, a bit repetitious and probably longer than it needs to be, but it reveals in detail how politically sensitive and engaged the American public was, starting in the 1760s—actually how obsessed everyone seems to have been, at all levels of society, with issues like liberty and loyalty and democracy and republicanism and the right structure of constitutions, how polarized people were, how angry and easily provoked, and how susceptible to propaganda. And there was lots of propaganda. Ezra Klein’s “logic of polarization” certainly applied to the revolutionary period. The literacy rate and standard of living among whites, by the way, were much higher in the British American colonies in the 18th century than they were in Britain or Europe, and lots of average colonists were not only prodigious readers but writers as well. Some British MP at the time quipped to the effect that every tavern keeper and scullery maid in America seemed to be scribbling, and that it was a wonder that there was any ink left in the colonies. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the first American best seller, which came out in 1776, was just the most famous item in a deluge of political pamphleteering that inflamed the American public practically from the end of the French and Indian War till Jefferson became president in 1801. The Federalist Papers didn’t appear in a vacuum. Moreover, this ferment represented considerable diversity, multiple philosophical influences, and a rapid evolutionary development. Don’t let anyone tell you that radical democracy, equality, and socialism are not part of the American political tradition; it’s possible to find 18th-century texts to demonstrate otherwise.
Finally—as advice to myself and everyone else, for the sake of balance and sanity—all political reading should be interspersed with poetry and fiction that have nothing to do with politics. I’ve just started The Lincoln Highway, the new novel by Amor Towles, and I expect to love it.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-Were-Polarized/Ezra-Klein/9781476700366
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663/lastbesthope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
https://uncpress.org/book/9780807847237/the-creation-of-the-american-republic-1776-1787/