Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” and the Drawbacks of Explainer Journalism

About halfway through his new book, “Why We’re Polarized,” Ezra Klein inserts a helpful “Interlude,” a mini-chapter summarizing what has thus far been an ambitiously synthetic argument. Klein is the co-founder of Vox, the explanatory news site that launched in 2014, and his “Interlude” is quintessential Vox: a plainspoken, user-friendly distillation of an otherwise complex phenomenon. Once (so this summary goes), the country’s two major political parties generated a weak sense of group affiliation. Economic classes, social types, and racial groups were distributed somewhat evenly between them, and so any one group’s influence on either party was softened. For fear of repelling a core constituency, the parties could not afford to become ideological monoliths.

Another way to put this is that the Democratic and Republican parties once performed, internally, the work of liberalism. They moderated passions, forced dissimilar people to coexist, and settled differences with compromise. They also, as Klein makes clear, formed a duopoly committed to moral complacency, especially on the issue of race. Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the Democrats passed major civil-rights legislation, and the American electorate began a great re-sorting. As black voters gravitated toward the Democrats, white voters fled toward the Republicans. Over time, the effects registered more broadly. Voting patterns are now highly correlated with religion, race, ethnicity, gender, and neighborhood, Klein notes. In the Trump era, each party has a world view that is internally coherent, and those world views are mutually exclusive and hostile to each other. Our social and partisan selves have all but merged.

Klein is a maestro at compactly and elegantly summarizing the work of others, and he patiently moves us through the scholarship of Alan Abramowitz on political polarization and Lilliana Mason on social polarization, along the way to concluding that “our political identities have become political mega-identities.” Then, in Chapter 3, he hits upon his big idea. When the two parties were less sorted, our politics worked helpfully against our deep tribal instincts. “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose.

“The mechanism is evolutionary,” Klein writes, because “our brains know we need our groups to survive.” The style of argumentation on display here will be familiar to most readers of contemporary nonfiction. Our distant ancestors were born into small, kinship-based bands; blind loyalty enhanced their chance for survival; they passed their loyalty genes down to us. By mixing experimental psychology with evolutionary biology, then aligning their findings with exciting new developments in cognitive neuroscience, political commentators can explain any social behavior by pointing to its origins in an adaptive advantage. Behind every parochial explanation lies Darwin, the Ultimate Explainer, whose influence has dominated the pop-intellectual mode since Richard Dawkins published “The Selfish Gene,” in 1976.

In a recent conversation with Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates described “Why We’re Polarized” as a “cold, atheist book.” He had in mind the broadly systemic, impersonal framing of its argument. In place of a call to worship or to arms, Klein offers us a theory of human cognition, by which our inborn tendency to group chauvinism compromises our ability to reason. “What if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and merely rationalized as calculation?” he asks. There is an amiable hope at the center of the atheism: that we might remove the goggles of human partiality, acknowledge our character as a species, and build a better liberal polity, one that takes into account our tribal disposition. Klein exhorts us to do so with an easygoing intellectual generosity, as if to imply by the grace of his own example that science might lead us back to civility, and civility might heal us.

But Darwinian truisms are true only to the extent that they describe what is more or less fixed about the human animal. It may be that we “naturally form groups,” as Klein writes, but the groups that we form are not facts of nature; they are contingencies of time and place. Klein’s argument is addressed to a historical predicament—to the rise of polarization and, consequently, of Trump and Trumpism. But the authority that the book projects derives from ahistorical constructs, like brains and genes. Early on in “Why We’re Polarized,” Klein seems to suggest, accurately, that the core alliance of the modern G.O.P.—economic élites and poor whites—is the strategic creation of nameable individuals. But then those individuals recede from view. As elegant as the ensuing presentation is, I struggled to understand who the protagonist was. I think Klein did, too.

Klein begins “Why We’re Polarized” by telling a story. Its protagonist is Strom Thurmond, the late senator from South Carolina who is commonly remembered as a leathery centenarian with an unyieldingly right-wing world view and a mixed-race daughter whose existence he never publicly acknowledged. But, when Thurmond was a younger man, he did something remarkable: he created the Republican Party. Republicans try to hide that fact by calling it “the party of Lincoln,” but this is a cynical sleight of hand. The contemporary G.O.P. is, in nearly every respect, the party of Thurmond.

The clarity with which Klein describes how Thurmond led the exodus of white Southerners out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party is outdone only by the rapidity with which Thurmond disappears from the book’s pages. Not coincidentally, this disappearance happens just as Klein goes from telling a story to offering an Explanation. The Story featured a villain—a particular, nameable Southern politician fighting tooth and nail against racial justice. The Explanation features an undifferentiated first-person plural—we, us, our. (According to Klein, “the political psychologists” argue that “our politics, much like our interest in travel and spicy food, emerges from our psychological makeup.”) Klein impresses us with summary upon summary of peer-reviewed studies and books with titles like “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences,” all of which purport to show, via patterns in the data, that we are an inherently tribal, in-group-identifying species. But the effect is not clarifying.

“The parties are dividing over fundamental identities that tend to generate intolerance and hostility,” Klein writes. But, in fact, the parties are dividing because of hostility and intolerance, as encouraged by one party in particular. Perhaps Klein is oblivious to cynicism because he himself is so uncynical. But I think something else may be going on here. At one point in the book, Klein, who briefly worked on Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign, in 2004, cites an anti-Dean TV ad that featured a counterfeit man-on-the-street interview. In it, an older couple, played by actors, are asked what they think of Dean. “Well,” the fake husband begins, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading”—and here the fake wife picks up the beat—“body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” The ad is a showpiece of Orwellian cynicism. Yet Klein is so devoted to a morally neutral framework that the most he can say is, “And, that, my friends, is pure, un-cut mega-identity politics.” Maybe the appeal, in the ad, is to the selfish gene, but the spot was made by specific selfish rich people—the anti-tax zealots at Club for Growth. Lost in Klein’s gloss is not just the staggering amount of money that has been spent turning people like me into reprehensible bogeymen, but why it has been spent.

The normative framework of transparency and reason, a broader humanistic appeal to values, a faith in institutions: these constitute the “liberal” in “liberal democracy.” Living on the coast, owning a Subaru, dicing scallions to NPR: these comprise the “lib” in “libtard.” The cynical confusion of liberal democracy with a well-heeled social type that is easy to despise is an attempt to undermine the very civic virtues that Klein cherishes. But the more one relies on Darwinian explanations for the decisions that people make, the less room is left for the motivations of conscious, rational agents.

Journalism has always been small-E explanatory; it links events semi-causally, which is to say narratively—this happened because of that, and, further, this is meaningful because of that. Such storytelling has its own drawbacks and shortcomings, which are often on display during campaign season, as questionable narratives gain in popularity and shape reporting. One way to beat back a bad or inaccurate story is with a better, more accurate one, but that is not Klein’s primary approach. Much of “Why We’re Polarized” is an analysis of a political system riddled with glitches and coding errors and good intentions gone awry—to be solved, accordingly, with patches, hacks, and good-faith bipartisanship. Even this sort of wonkery, though, is subsumed by the book’s Darwinian formalism. Darwin can be used to explain anything; in the psycho-evolutionary rummage bin, you can dig up totalitarian tendencies just as easily as you can unearth an inherent love of liberty. Along the way, the difference is lost between Explaining and Explaining Away. Is my “negative partisanship” best explained by my genes, my neural pathways, the great Pleistocene We? Or by the fact that the Republican Party has become transparently racist and anti-science? Do the methods of the contemporary G.O.P. work because of some ahistorical constant, or because white Americans are susceptible to race panics? Klein, ultimately, cannot square his desire to nudge the polity back toward capital-L Liberalism—the creation of a polis built on the dialogue of free citizens with one another—with his inclination to offer capital-E Explanations for our political behavior.

Darwinism played a significant role in the first Gilded Age. By equating success with biological fitness, it forgave industrial capitalism its cruelties. Darwinism has played a subtler, but no less legitimating, role in the second Gilded Age. The universe, Darwin taught us, is blind, morally neutral, mechanistic, and design-free. Nonetheless, its powers of pattern-making are exquisite—witness galaxies, crystals, dendrites, the whorls of a flower—and science is the apprehension of spontaneous and self-organizing systems, which, once detected, can be formalized mathematically, for purposes of prediction and control. Among human institutions, the closest thing to a self-organizing system that can be formalized mathematically is a market. From there, it is easy to argue that the closest thing to a true science of human behavior is economics.

The most prominent explainer journalists belong, more or less, to the center-left; they include Klein, his Vox colleague Matthew Yglesias, their former Vox colleague Max Fisher (who is now at the Times), and the data-oriented FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. They and many of their peers are youngish white men who came of age during a period of general decline in the humanities and a corresponding rise of economistic styles of explanation. For them, simply digesting and distilling existing news stories is not enough of a “value-add,” to use an economistic term of art; that would be mere summary. The holiest of intellectual grails, circa 2020, is to discover a “pattern in the data”—i.e., to arbitrage what everyone sees against what only you see, then sell it as an “explanation.”