Why we’re polarized /

Title

Why we’re polarized / Ezra Klein.

Edition

First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition.

Imprint

New York, NY : Avid Reader Press, 2020.

Description

1 online resource : illustrations

Formatted Contents Note

Introduction: What didn’t happen
How Democrats became liberals and Republicans became conservatives
The Dixiecrat dilemma
Your brain on groups
The press secretary in your mind
Demographic threat
Interlude
The media divide beyond left-right
Post-persuasion elections
When bipartisanship becomes irrational
The difference between Democrats and Republicans
Managing polarization
and ourselves.

Summary

“America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us–and how we are polarizing it–with disastrous results. ‘The American political system–which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president–is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face, ‘ writes political analyst Ezra Klein. ‘We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.’ In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.”– Provided by publisher.

Bibliography, etc. Note

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of Description

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCOhost, viewed September 21, 2020).

Available in Other Form

Print version: Klein, Ezra, 1984- Why we’re polarized. First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition. New York : Avid Reader Press, 2020

Linked Resources

Access provided by Berkeley Law Library

Language

English

ISBN

9781476700397 (electronic book)
147670032X (hardcover)
9781476700328 (hardcover)
1476700397