Political journalist and Vox co-founder Ezra Klein’s attempt to explain the polarization of American politics over the last few decades. Aside from the usual laundry list of social psychology findings on in-group/out-group dynamics and motivated reasoning, he wades into some more subtle point that I thought were interesting:

First, in a lot of ways the current era of polarization is a reversion to the mean rather than some new thing. The perception that this is new is a consequence of the current cohort of elites taking as a baseline their formative years in the mid-20th century, when the US was unusually depolarized. And that de-polarization was a bit of a historical contingency, a hold-over from the Civil War and reconstruction which made the Republican Party persona non-grata in the South. As a result, you had two parties and two orthogonal axes by which they were divided: liberal/conservative and north/south. So there was much less ideological consistency within parties and much more scope to make bi-partisan deals among ideologically similar constituencies that cut across the party divide.

Second, we tend to treat polarization as a bad thing (it is almost always deployed pejoratively in print) but it’s not. It’s important that voters have some clear idea of what exactly they are voting for (to the extent they are voting for a party rather than an individual candidate, which is mostly true). If you were a voter in 1955 and voting for a Democrat, it was hard to understand exactly what sort of policies you were supporting. Maybe your candidate was a liberal northern Democrat who was in favor of comprehensive civil rights legislation. But in practice they would be in coalition with the Dixiecrats who were both passionately opposed to civil rights legislation and deeply conservative across the entire spectrum of policy debates.

Party polarization then is actually a feature of a well functioning democracy because it frames clear choices for voters. The problem then really boils down to the fact that our system is not a well-functioning democracy. I won’t rehash all the ways in which our system is designed to structurally favor certain constituencies, but the result is that the system requires a high level of compromise to work because of the abundance of veto points embedded in the process. So in effect, once we are well sorted and properly polarized nothing gets done, which makes politics even more symbolic and polarized because there are no real stakes.

Well argued.