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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stanford University's Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood's conclusion is stark. 'Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race,' they write. Think about that for a moment: at least under certain experimental conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities.

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.

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.

What's surprising about the 2016 election results isn't what happened. It's what didn't happen. Trump didn't lose by 30 points or win by 20 points. Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they'd chosen in 2012. That isn't to say there was nothing at all distinct or worthy of study. Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election. But the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat. 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.

The Civil War was only one hundred years in the past at the time the Civil Rights Act passed, and during that interregnum, the white South had been trying to balance its top domestic priority - the enforcement of white supremacy - with its forced membership in the broader United States. The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home. The Dixiecrat-Democrat pact is a powerful reminder that there are worse things than polarization, that what's now remembered as a golden age in American politics was purchased at a terrible cost.

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.

Still, Iyengar and Westwood’s research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won’t give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we’re going to listen to politicians on the other side of emotional, controversial issues—even if they’re making good arguments that are backed by the facts.

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.

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. Thus, a shortcut to newsworthiness has always been whether other news organizations are covering a story — if they are, then it’s newsworthy by definition. In the modern era, a shortcut to newsworthiness is social media virality; if people are already talking about a story or a tweet, that makes it newsworthy almost by definition. In both cases, the presence of other outlets and other voices serves to build a fortress of tautology: whatever everyone is covering is newsworthy because everyone is covering it.

Today, vegans are dismissed as extremists. I hope that in the future, the suffering that we impose on animals through industrial-scale factory farming is considered the shocking position.

Partisans are the ones George Washington warned us of in his farewell address. They: put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

As we become more political, we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity.

(popular elections came to the US Senate only with the 1913 ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment),

The South was in the Democratic Party, but it didn’t agree with the Democratic Party—particularly once liberalism’s vision of redistribution and uplift expanded to include African Americans. So southern Democrats had ideological reasons to compromise with Republicans but political reasons to compromise with national Democrats. Southern power kept the Democratic Party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the two parties from sorting themselves around the deepest political cleavage of the age.

The Man Who Knew Too Little,

The Varieties of Democracy Project,

It was a strategy to mobilize an alienated minority of the Republican base in order to prevail in a crowded, fractured field, and though it worked in the primary, everyone knew, or thought they knew, that a party divided against itself could not win a general election. Punditry was thick with predictions of a Republican wipeout, followed by an intraparty civil war.

So here, then, is what we know: even gentle, incidental exposure to reminders that America is diversifying -- and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation -- pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican party.

subservient, timid mentality of the permanent minority”[21] makes it easier to work with the majority but harder to win back the majority

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

The underlying principle in all this is that the two parties both represent huge swaths of Americans, and the fact that one has the majority does not mean the other should be deprived of a voice.

Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort. Amid the battery of questions that surveyors ask Americans in every election lurks something called the “feeling thermometer.” The thermometer asks people to rate their feelings toward the two political parties on a scale of 1 to 100 degrees, where 1 is cold and negative and 100 is warm and positive. Since the 1980s, Republicans’ feelings toward the Democratic Party and Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party have dropped off a cliff.

I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,”19 Reagan said.

If it bleeds, it leads.

polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences;

what to cover—decide, that is, what is newsworthy.

Dick Cheney, then a member of the House of Representatives, put it sharply in 1985. “Confrontation fits our strategy,” he said. “Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?”[22]

is as powerful a political motivator as love.

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.

Then there are the parts of my personality that seem like preferences but can act like identities when challenged.

That is a profound finding: when awarding a college scholarship—a task that should be completely nonpolitical —Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student’s GPA. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.

It actually drove them further apart. Among those with weak math skills, subjects were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it bolstered their ideology. But partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.

this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties. Obama’s presidency was an example of the younger, more diverse coalition taking power; Trump’s presidency represented the older, whiter coalition taking it back.

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.

A central problem in any free political system is how to secure balanced competition.

identities. We don’t talk about big states and small states but about red states and blue states.

I think I’m an optimist, but that’s because I try to hold to realism about our past. For all our problems, we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history.

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.