Why We’re Polarized

“The American political system—which incorporates everybody from voters to journalists to the president—is filled with rational actors making rational selections given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We’re a group of practical components whose efforts mix right into a dysfunctional complete.”

“A considerate, clear and persuasive evaluation” (
The New York Instances E-book Overview),
Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this ebook presents a transparent framework for understanding all the pieces from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Get together’s leftward shift to the politicization of on a regular basis tradition.

America is polarized, before everything, by identification. Everybody engaged in American politics is engaged, at some degree, in identification politics. Over the previous fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, non secular, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that’s breaking a lot in our politics and tearing on the bonds that maintain this nation collectively.

Klein reveals how and why American politics polarized round identification within the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the best way we see the world and each other. And he traces the suggestions loops between polarized political identities and polarized political establishments which can be driving our system towards disaster.

“Effectively price studying” (
New York journal), that is an “eye-opening” (
O, The Oprah Journal) ebook that may change the way you take a look at politics—and maybe at your self.