WHy we’re polarized

ezra klein

The media is a conspiracy to surface the loudest voices, and it's gotten worse because now they have our numbers. The combination of direct competition and constant access to audience analytics has transformed newsrooms. 

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.

everyone is constantly angry and agitated, and politics becomes something only those with a high taste for constant conflict can stomach. But the bigger problem is how polarization interacts with our political institutions, which require high levels of compromise to function. My concern isn’t that politics is argumentative or uncivil or divided. It’s that we are trapped in arguments we cannot resolve, because in our political system, winning an election rarely gives you the power to actually govern. In our political system, bipartisanship is necessary. With parties this polarized, bipartisanship, as I show in the book, is irrational for the out-of-power party to offer. So what we’ve done, in effect, is escalated the intensity of our political fights, but made it almost impossible for one side or the other to win, at least in terms of policymaking. That leaves the public trapped in a system where everyone is fighting but their problems aren’t getting solved.