Ezra Klein Quotes

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.

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.

So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.

I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.

Do not respond to people being upset by confidently giving them advice on how to solve their problems

If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

Just as youth is wasted on the young, money is wasted on the rich.

The simplest way to activate someone's identity is to threaten it, to tell them they don't deserve what they have, to make them consider that it might be taken away. The experience of losing status -- and being told your loss of status is part of society's march to justice -- is itself radicalizing. There's a quote I occasionally see ricochet around social media. "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." There's truth to this line, but it cuts both ways. To the extent that it's true that a loss of privilege feels like oppression, that feeling needs to be taken seriously, both because it's real, and because, left to fester, it can be weaponised by demagogues and reactionaries.

The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a weight so heavy that it can take an election as bizarre as 2016 and jam the result into the same grooves as Romney’s contest with Obama or Bush’s race against Kerry. We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.

Demythologizing our past is necessary if we are to clearly understand our present. But an honest survey of America’s past offends the story we tell ourselves—it offends our sense of America as a true democracy and the Democratic Party’s sense of its own honorable history

Unfortunately, the term “identity politics” has been weaponized. It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of historically marginalized groups. If you’re black and you're worried about police brutality, that’s identity politics. If you’re a woman and you’re worried about the male-female pay gap, that’s identity politics. But if you’re a rural gun owner decrying universal background checks as tyranny, or a billionaire CEO complaining that high tax rates demonize success, or a Christian insisting on Nativity scenes in public squares — well, that just good, old fashioned politics. With a quick sleight of hand, identity becomes something that only marginalized groups have. The term “identity politics,” in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of the weaker groups by making them look self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate. But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. WE are left searching in vaid for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.

As Kahan’s term suggests, our reasoning is most vulnerable when our identities are most threatened. And for many, this is an era of profound threat.

What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?

Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.

This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back.

In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?

To be fair, something strange had happened. Donald Trump won the election. There was a Maya Angelou quote that ricocheted across social media during the 2016 election: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Trump showed us who he was gleefully, constantly. He mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam and suggested Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate JFK; he bragged about the size of his penis and mused that his whole life had been motivated by greed; he made no mystery of his bigotry or sexism; he called himself a genius while retweeting conspiracy theories in caps lock.

Political identity is fair game for hatred,” he says. “Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.”27

To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage. You can arouse that passion through inspiration, as Obama did, or through conflict, as Trump did. What you can’t do is be boring.

We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants.

crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.

progress is more about implementation than it is about invention.

The news is supposed to be a mirror held up to the world, but the world is far too vast to fit in our mirror. The fundamental thing the media does all day, every day, is decide what to cover — decide, that is, what is newsworthy. Here’s the dilemma: to decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news. It makes journalists actors rather than observers. It annihilates our fundamental conception of ourselves. And yet it’s the most important decision we make. If we decide to give more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to her policy proposals — which is what we did — then we make her emails more important to the public’s understanding of her character and potential presidency than her policy proposals. In doing so, we shape not just the news but the election, and thus the country. While I’m critical of the specific decision my industry made in that case, this problem is inescapable. The news media isn’t just an actor in politics. It’s arguably the most powerful actor in politics. It’s the primary intermediary between what politicians do and what the public knows. The way we try to get around this is by conceptually outsourcing the decisions about what we cover to the idea of newsworthiness. If we simply cover what’s newsworthy, then we’re not the ones making those decisions — it’s the neutral, external judgment of news worthiness that bears responsibility. The problem is that no one, anywhere, has a rigorous definition of newsworthiness, much less a definition that they actually follow.

We give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more. The time spent spraying outrage over Trump's latest tweet - which is, to be clear, what he wants you to do; the point is to suck up all the media oxygen so he retains control of the conversation - is better spent checking in with what's happening in your own neighborhood.

An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.” Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.

When everyone says the same thing about some complex topic, what should come to your mind is, 'wait a minute, nothing can be that simple, something's wrong.' That's the immediate light that should go off in your brain when you ever hear unanimity on some complex topic." (The Ezra Klein Show 2021/04/23)

We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.

The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.

It is disastrous that democracy has become a partisan issue, with Republicans viewing efforts to expand the franchise as conspiracies to weaken their party.

Someone wisely told me once: the world always makes sense. When it doesn't make sense, it just means we don't have all the information yet.

Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.

Even Trump’s team didn’t believe he was going to win. Plans were afoot for him to start a television channel in the aftermath of his loss. And then came election

The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.

energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.

We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.

Burned by regulations and inattention to cost-effective production, basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland.

economist Jed Kolko notes that the most common age for white Americans is fifty-eight, for Asians it’s twenty-nine, for African Americans it’s twenty-seven, and for Hispanics it’s eleven.

America’s modern run of polarization has its roots in the civil rights era, in the Democratic Party choosing to embrace racial equality and the Republican Party providing a home to white backlash.

It’s become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now and you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces—the fear is not that the government is regulating speech but that protesters are chilling speech, that Twitter mobs rove the land looking for an errant word or misfired joke. In our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we’ve lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of politics and, indeed, much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear.

Political identities aren't about tax cuts. They are about tribes... This is the result of the incredible rise in political polarization in recent decades. It used to be that both the Republican and Democratic parties included both liberals and conservatives. Since parties contained ideological multitudes, it was hard for them to be the basis of strong, personal identities. A liberal Democrat in New Jersey didn't have a lot in common with a conservative Democrat in Alabama. But now that's changed. The parties are sharply sorted by ideology. What were once fractious coalitions have become unified tribes.

There's a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence, and such experts are never very far away.

The point is to obscure the fact that the decisions being made are decisions at all. It’s best if newsworthiness feels like a quality external to journalistic judgment, as if it were a weight attached to each story and measurable with proper instrumentation. Because of that, judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too.

Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.

As such, I have found that American politics is best understood by braiding two forms of knowledge that are often left separate: the direct, on-the-ground insights shared by politicians, activists, government officials, and other subjects of my reporting, and the more systemic analyses conducted by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others with the time, methods and expertise to study American politics at scale. On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making. Together, however, they shine bright light on how and why American politics work the way it does.

But what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, the more mistaken they were about the other party (the one exception was the income category: high levels of political knowledge led to more accurate answers about the percentage of Republicans earning more than $250,000). This is a damning result: the more political media you consume, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.

White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of white vote. Though this changed before Obama — Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers — the election of an African American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.

For both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.

technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view.”[iii][9] You can call this the echo chamber theory of polarization: we’ve cocooned ourselves into hearing information that only tells us how right we are, and that’s making us more extreme.

Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition—pure political tribalism

As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity. “It is not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests,” they write, “rather, it is that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual’s goals when forming a policy opinion.

As the parties become more racially, religiously, ideologically, and geographically different, the signals that tell us if a place is our kind of place, if a community is our kind of community, heighten our political divisions. The more sorted we are in our differences, the more different we grow in our preferences.

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.

In an era of high polarization, weak parties, and strong partisanship, it’s easy to see how extremists and, more than that, demagogues penetrate the system. America was lucky, if that’s the right word, that Trump proved himself, once in office, distractible, lazy, and uninterested in following through on his most authoritarian rhetoric. He’s done plenty of damage, but he’s not emerged as a dictator in control of American political institutions, as many liberals feared in the direct aftermath of the election. But the world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues. They are the ones who truly threaten republics, and they are watching.

Aren’t we better than this? I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

‘Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,’ said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. ‘It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.’ Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

And yet, we have not changed so much, have we? We still coach Little League and care for our parents, we cry at romantic comedies and mow our lawns, we laugh at our eccentricities and apologize for harsh words, we want to be loved and wish for a better world. That is not to absolve us of responsibility for our politics, but to trace a lament oft heard when we step away from politics: Aren’t we better than this? I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.

In stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well—on a narrow range of performance criteria, that is—the ones that they get rewarded on in their current political or economic or commercial configuration. In the drift into failure, accidents can happen without anything breaking, without anybody erring, without anybody violating the rules they consider relevant.

Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power — and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive. The rest of the country then has to choose from more polarized options, and that in turn polarizes them — remember, the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.

There was violence here, and even attempted coups, as when members of Louisiana’s White League stormed New Orleans in 1874, trying to eject Governor William Kellogg, a Republican, and install his unsuccessful Democratic challenger, John McEnery. The insurgents took control of the city, forcing President Ulysses S. Grant to send in federal troops to restore order. In a telling postscript, a monument was erected in New Orleans in 1891 memorializing the White League members who died trying to take over the city. It was finally pulled down in 2017.

We could fix the manufactured scarcities of our immigration system and make it easier for the world’s most brilliant people—who often graduate from American schools—to stay and work in the US. We could increase federal research and development spending rather than allow it to decline as a share of the economy, as we did for much of the second half of the twentieth century. But perhaps most important, we could fix the incentives of the American innovation system to help each dollar of funding find the right scientist taking the right risk at the right time.

Journalists are hardly immune to these forces. We become more polarized, and more polarizing, when we start spending our time in polarizing environments. I have seen it in myself, and I have watched it in others: when we’re going for retweets, or when our main form of audience feedback is coming from partisan junkies on social media, it subtly but importantly warps our news judgement. It changes who we cover and what stories we chase. And when we cover politics in a more polarized way, anticipating or absorbing the tastes of a more polarized audience, we create a more polarized political reality.

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong, active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.

The results of that mistake are everywhere. In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it was 6 times the average annual income.5 Between 1999 and 2023, the average premium for employer-based family health insurance rose from $5,791 to $23,968—an increase of more than 300 percent—and the worker contribution to that premium more than quadrupled.6 In 1970, the average annual cost of tuition and fees was $394 at public colleges and $1,706 at private colleges. In 2023, it was $11,310 at public colleges for in-state students and $41,740 at private colleges.7 Child care for an infant and a four-year-old costs, on average, $36,008 in Massachusetts, $28,420 in California, and $28,338 in Minnesota.

This is a profound enough point worth dwelling on for a moment. When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate. An example here is health care: Democrats and Republicans spend billions of dollars in election ads emphasizing their disagreements on health care, because the debate motivates their supporters and, they hope, turns the public against their opponents. The upside of this is that important issues get aired and sometimes even resolved. The downside is that the divisions around them become deeper and angrier.

We venerate centrists, moderates, independents. In a telling experiment, Samara Klara and Yanna Krupnikov cued subjects to think about political disagreements and then handed them photographs of strangers, some of whom were identified as independents and others of whom were said to be partisans. The independents were rated as more attractive, “even when, by objective standards, the partisans were actually more attractive.” In another test of the theory, Klar and Krupnikov found that Americans are nearly 60 percent more likely to call themselves “independents” when they’re told they need to make a good impression on a stranger. Being independent isn’t about whom you vote for. It’s about your personal brand. Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people—you and me—reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes. What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.

Let's define the Karikó Problem like this: American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas. What is most obvious is that American science is getting older. In the early 1900s, some of the most famous scientists – Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger – did their breakthrough work in their twenties and thirties. Indeed, their youth may have been critical to their paradigm-busting genius. But these days the twentysomething scientist is an endangered species. The share of NIH-funded scientists who are thirty-five years old or younger declined from 22 percent in 1980 to less than 2 percent by the 2010s.54 American science also seems to produce far too many papers that don't create new knowledge while overlooking researchers with promising new ideas. A 2023 study titled "Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time" found that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper from the same field decades ago. This could be because too many papers are essentially worthless. Or it could mean that scientists feel pressured to herd around the same few safe ideas that will keep them in good standing with their peers. "When you look at the diminishing returns in medicine, you can say, well, maybe all the easy drugs have been discovered," said James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. But the more compelling possibility, he said, is that "the very organization of modern science is leading us astray." In Evans's interpretation, the low-hanging fruit hasn't been plucked. The problem is that too many scientists are all looking at the same few trees.

The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist. To test the theory, they conducted a survey asking people “to estimate the percentage of Democrats who are black, atheist, or agnostic, union members, and gay, lesbian or bisexual and the percentage of Republicans who are evangelical, 65 or older, Southern, and earn over $250,000 per year.” They were asking, in other words, how much people thought the composition of the parties fit the caricatures of the parties. Misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party. Democrats believed 44 percent of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year; it’s actually 2 percent. Republicans believe that 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual; the correct answer is about 6 percent. Democrats believe that more than 4 out of every ten Republicans are seniors; in truth, seniors make up about 20 percent of the GOP. Republicans believed that 46 percent of Democrats are black and 44 percent belong to a union; in reality, about 24 percent of Democrats are African American and less than 11 percent belong to a union.

Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort.

But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other.

Far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp in a careful review of the literature. “The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim.

Anyone who has ever found themselves in an angry argument with their political or social circle will know how threatening it feels. For a lot of people, being "right" just isn't worth picking a bitter fight with the people they care about. That's particularly true in a place like Washington, where social circles and professional lives are often organized around people's politics, and the boundaries of what those tribes believe are getting sharper.

In 2016, Georgetown University political theorist Jason Brennan released a book entitled Against Democracy, in which he argued for an “epistocracy,” a system where the votes of the politically informed counted more than the votes of the politically naive.

The digital revolution offered access to unimaginably vast vistas of information, but just as important, it offered access to unimaginably more choice. And that explosion of choice widened that interested-uninterested divide. Greater choices lets the junkies learn more and the disinterested know less.

We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.

The catalytic ingredient in his Senate campaign was liberal loathing of Cruz, the thrill that he might be defeated. When O’Rourke was running against other Democrats, his personal charisma failed to recapture the magic of his Senate race.

And with that essential clarity, the parties sorted around virtually everything else, too. This transformation has taken the two parties from being coalitions that looked alike, lived similar lives, and thought only somewhat differently to two warring camps that look different, live different lives in different places, and find themselves in ever-deeper disagreement.

America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first year that a majority of US infants under the age of one were nonwhite.

3 This isn’t just a statement about the future; it’s a description of the present. The

This isn’t just a statement about the future; it’s a description of the present.

percent. To put it even more starkly, about seven out of every ten seniors are white and Christian, compared with fewer than three in ten young adults—a trend being driven not just by demographic change but by fewer young people identifying as Christian. “These changes are big enough to feel, they’re fast enough to feel,

became more divided by race: shown pictures of the Obamas’ dog Bo, more racially resentful Americans liked the dog better when told it was a picture of Ted Kennedy’s dog Splash.

Obama, being African American, discussed racial issues and put forward race-conscious policies more often than past presidents. You’d be wrong. “According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt,

Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,” Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.

In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote—a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. A few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t elect a president; by 2012, it could.

the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political

The result is that the Left feels a cultural and demographic power that it can only occasionally translate into political power, and the Right wields political power but feels increasingly dismissed and offended culturally.

This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were.

polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.

the chairman of CBS said of Donald Trump’s candidacy, and the ratings it drew, “it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.

history. You don’t need a big audience when you have the right audience.

The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression.

I’ve tried to show in this book, the polarization we see around us is the logical outcome of a complex system of incentives, technologies, identities, and political institutions. It implicates capitalism and geography, politicians and political institutions, human psychology and America’s changing demography. And for now, at least, it’s here to stay.

I have more confidence in my diagnosis than my prescription,

If DC and Puerto Rico have representation, that would be another push for the Republican Party to veer away from deepening racial polarization as an electoral strategy.

but more important than the details is the simple principle that voting should be easy, not hard. The harder you make it to vote, the surer it is that only the most polarized Americans end up at the polls.

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.

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.