Polarization through Political Sorting and Identity Politics
The best explanation and analysis of the polarized state of American politics has been provided by Ezra Klein in his book, Why We’re Polarized. There are many factors that have contributed to the extreme partisan divide that we are witnessing in the United States. These issues are systematic in nature—like reinforcing loops on a flywheel.
Klein, a long-time political journalist and podcaster with affiliations to The Washington Post, Vox Media, and the New York Times, offers us this assessment:
I've come to believe the master story—the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants—is the logic of polarization. That logic, put simply, is this: to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarized further, and so on.1
Let’s unpack the field of play for just a moment. First, the participants—political institutions, political actors, and the public. There are no simple definitions for drawing boundaries around political institutions and political actors. For simplicity, let’s define political institutions as organizations where people are active in politics by either publicly held elections or internal membership elections, as well as by pure appointment of elected officials. This would include all government bodies at federal, state, and local levels across all branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial. Some might prefer to place the judicial system outside of politics, but that is not possible. Political parties, with internally elected officials, are key political institutions.
Political actors include all the individual participants in the aforementioned institutions. To that group, we add all the organizations that take an interest in influencing political outcomes. This includes political action committees, not-for-profit activist groups, any corporation that employs or contracts with lobbyists, the lobbyists themselves, the Media at large, the partisan and nonpartisan think tanks for policy research, and all the individuals who work for or volunteer at any of these organizations. A term that is frequently used across political dialogue is the “elite”. The elite would encompass those individuals and organizations that by virtue of greater wealth, greater fame or visibility, and greater access to power channels of communication have a larger influence on the direction of thought and action that occurs in the public sphere of life.
Lastly, we are left with the public as the voters. The public can fall into several categories—the engaged voter in a political party institution (always votes in primaries or attends caucuses, etc.), the general voter registered with a political party institution or registered as independent, the disengaged voter that selectively voices preferences regarding political matters, or the fully disengaged member of society who is eligible to vote but will not register and avoids participation.
So, the feedback loop of interactions among these groups is amplifying and reinforcing polarization, but what is causing the division in the first place? Let’s look at sorting.
Political Sorting
Partisan (favoring a political party or cause) sorting is an effect in politics in which voters sort themselves into parties that match their ideology. Political sorting may encompass policy issues, but more broadly is driven by our sense of identity—who we are, what we stand for, what we value, and how we want to see the world and live in it. Identity, and thus ideology, is a multi-factor variable. The political landscape in our day has sorted along the conservative-to-liberal spectrum of political considerations.
Klein offers further input on political identities influencing the public:
Our political identities are changing—and strengthening. The most powerful identities in modern politics are our political identities, which have come, in recent decades, to encompass and amplify a range of other central identities as well. Over the past fifty years, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking our institutions and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. This is the form of identity politics most prevalent in our country, and most in need of interrogation.2
We know that political parties are shortcuts to choosing whom we can trust to reflect our values in the policy arena of political decision-making. The major political parties of our day have platforms that run 45-90 pages in length—far too many values and positions to map neatly onto every participant. Still, the general direction of the choices that we are being offered is toward more conservative (more tradition, less change, less government) and more liberal (more government leading to more progress on societal goals). This division can overlap with psychological frameworks that identify individuals as open or closed personalities.
Let’s consider a few sorting categories as just mentioned. Regarding religion, Republicans carry a large identification with evangelical Protestants while Democrats carry a large identification with the religiously unaffiliated, or the “nones” in reference to church affiliation. We are quite sorted by race: for Democrats, nonwhite voters make up 40%; for Republicans, nonwhite voters make up 14%. We are sorted by geography: landslide counties where 60% of the vote or more went to the winning presidential candidate in 1992 represented 39% of voters in the nation; by 2016, 61% of voters lived in landside counties. Extreme landslide counties (where the winning candidate won by 50 percentage points or more) had just 4% of the electorate in 1992, but increased to 21% in 2016. Klein sums up the geographic sorting this way: “In less than twenty-five years, the percentage of voters who lived in a district where almost everyone thought like them politically went from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5.”3
Identity Politics
Having mentioned race, religion, and geography, we come to ideology and cultural identities. These are very much psychological factors that speak to personal identity formation and group affinity—the ability to feel belonging. Klein provides the following thoughts on how significant this type of sorting is to our society:
Psychological sorting, in other words, is a powerful driver of identity politics. If you care enough about politics to connect it to your core psychological outlook, then politics becomes part of your psychological self-expression. And as the political coalitions split by psychology, membership in one or the other becomes a clearer signal, both to ourselves and to the world, about who we are and what we value. 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. And that's when our relationship to politics, and to each other, changes.4
The distinction between transactional politics and identity politics is significant. It’s easier to deal with transactional politics when the choice is about budget dollars supporting a little more or a little less military spending or road infrastructure. When political decisions impact laws about family formation or bodily autonomy, the transactional nature disappears and is replaced by strongly held passions that map along our sense of identity. For disengaged political people, the common thought is: what will this policy do for me? (transactional thinking). For engaged political people, the common thought is: what does this party/policy say about me? (identity thinking).
In her book Uncivil Agreement, author Lilliana Mason summed it up this way:
The American political parties are growing socially polarized. Religion and race, as well as class, geography, and culture, are dividing the parties in such a way that the effect of party identity is magnified. The competition is no longer between only Democrats and Republicans. A single vote can now indicate a person's partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store. This is no longer a single social identity. Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.5
Having combed our way through political sorting and identity politics along its many variables, we need to bring two other key thoughts into view to help understand polarization. The first is negative partisanship. The second is rational analysis.
Negative Partisanship
Negative partisanship is a key to understanding the political division of our day. Positive partisanship is the degree to which we map onto a political platform (a set of causes) in the affirmative. If I can enthusiastically support 75 out of 90 major platform goals, then I would have high positive partisanship. If I only agree with about 15, but those are really a big deal for me, then I generally have low positive partisanship. Negative partisanship is based on the idea that my partisan affiliation is based on my choice of what I don’t like. If I only can choose between X and Y, and I really dislike Y all the time no matter what, then I choose X. Choosing X says little about how much I actually like or agree with X. It’s just that X is always preferable to Y because I always hate Y.
Political polling during the last decade has confirmed that negative partisanship is driving voter choice and selection, both among those registered in the two major U.S. political parties and among those who register as unaffiliated (independents).
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 Democrat-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.6
Rational Analysis
Now, the second issue is rational analysis. In earlier essays of The Common Sense Papers, we have looked briefly at how part of the founding design of the governmental structure was based on the belief that reason (rational thinking) would guide politics and that the system must be protected from factions that get animated by their passions. Well, advances in the study of psychology and sociology have shed more light on the interplay between reason (thinking about the facts and drawing conclusions) and passion (animating our opinions based on emotion and deeply held beliefs and identities).
The evidence of various studies leads to the idea that cognition exists along a spectrum, ranging from issues where the truth is more important than our identities to issues where our identities dominate and the truth fades in importance. Consider two medical issues that are fresh to society: the danger posed by the fatality rate of COVID-19, and the risks and benefits of the mRNA vaccines designed to protect individuals from infection or severe infection from COVID-19. How you feel about the danger of the virus and the risk/benefit analysis of the mRNA vaccines is not the same as how you reason about them based on scientific analysis using medical journals and studies. How you feel about the two COVID-19 issues may be driven by your personal health profile (sense of physical vulnerability), your employment (do I have to work closely with people in public to get paid or can I work from home alone; was my business open during the pandemic shutdown or did I lose my business/employment), observing people around you either 1) get the virus and recover without issue or 2) get the virus and land in the hospital or die, observing people get the vaccine and suffer severe negative side effects or not, listening to government recommendations that you do or don’t trust, listening to news organizations cover the issues that you do or don’t trust, and listening to the views of family and friends. How you feel about these two medical issues has lots of complicating factors. How you reason about the two medical issues associated with COVID-19 is more straightforward in process, but requires much more work—tracking data on case fatality rates from when data was less available until it became more available and accurate, tracking data on mRNA vaccine studies for both beneficial effects over time and for incidence of adverse side effects. Most people don’t have sufficient time or expertise to reason about the two issues, so we look to others to form our reasoning. Who we look to for reasoning can depend on how we already feel about the issue.
Klein sums up this rational analysis issue well:
My whole career—and much of politics more generally—is based on the idea that gathering good information helps us understand hard policy issues and that putting the two together can change minds and lead to a better world. But once our political identities and interests push themselves in front of our cognition, that model of reasoning falls to pieces.7
This issue of reason vs. passion, or thinking vs. feeling our way through issues has implications for our political divisions. Another essay in Part IV will deal with Big Media, but important to the political sorting process and concomitant polarization of the engaged electorate has been the rise of new forms of communication in society. The rise of Big Tech and social media has transformed our ability to find voices that map onto our social identities and affinities. We have great access to information that supposedly highlights how those we don’t agree with are actively working to undermine our values and objectives in society. The tribalism that extends to global reaches through online communities has enabled the sorting process and the community identity-building process to move at hyper-speed through society. The rise of online information sources has also introduced difficult debates about information, misinformation, and disinformation. The ability to use information as weapons of war has complicated more fundamental analysis of what is true information that can be used for proper reasoning. By creating forms of misinformation and disinformation, media purveyors can lead the public away from rational analysis and toward identity-based decision-making regardless of the facts.
So, negative partisanship, voting against the group that appears most threatening, and loss of rational analysis by allowing identity issues to take precedence over concrete forms of rational policy analysis have contributed to the polarization that is driving political outcomes in our country. Klein wraps it up this way:
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.8
Conclusion and Ties to Previous Common Sense Papers
To bring political sorting, identity politics, and polarization full circle, let’s connect to other issues already presented in The Common Sense Papers. Let’s tie back to identity, thoughts on human nature, and the widening gyre of a competition game.
First, we looked at the issue of identity as one of the three key temptations in society at large, as presented in the story of Jesus (Common Sense Paper No. 19). His temptation was to overcome the harmful urge to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple to prove his identity would save him. If individuals are not willing to keep identities in check by avoiding proving-ground tactics offered by society for the purposes of escalating identity wars, then we risk having inflamed factions of partisans dictating political outcomes and divisions.
Including views of human nature reminds us that we all have a need to belong, a need for security, and other basic human needs. Also, when circumstances in our lives become sufficiently toxic or dysfunctional, we seek change regardless of how much change we welcome when times are smooth. We change and adapt to fit in, to fit ourselves, or to find new places to grow.
Think of those who change to inhabit very new spaces of life and personal growth:
The church convert
The employee-turned-entrepreneur
The recently married or recently divorced
The unhealthy or the abused seeking healing (physical/emotional/mental)
The immigrant seeking a better opportunity
All of these experiences create powerful new group identifications with commonly shared human experience—we suddenly have reason to associate with those who get where we came from, or somehow know the new terrain of where we want to be (or are forced to be) going.
Yale law professor, Amy Chua, helps confirm how the current polarization is reinforcing the widening gyre (Common Sense Paper No. 4):
For two hundred years, whites in America represented an undisputed politically, economically, and culturally dominant majority. When a political tribe is so overwhelmingly dominant, it can persecute with impunity, but it can also be more generous. It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks, and other minorities—in part because it seemed like the right thing to do.9
Remember Common Sense Paper No. 2 emphasizing virtue and calling for do-the-right-thing in every moment? It’s easier when your personal/organizational power, personal/organizational income sources, and personal/organizational identity are not at risk of decline by doing the right thing.
Professor Chua concludes:
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."10
And there is the grand result—no one feels safe. Everyone has the online tools to attack whoever represents the biggest threat to individual or group identity and ideology. The coordination game is gone (Common Sense Paper No. 4) because the stakes of losing are too high. The competition game means war—anything to win—the ends justify the means—I need to do the dirty hit-job to you first, before you do your dirty work to undercut me. It’s a bad place to be.
One hopeful view of the present polarized political climate is that people are beginning to desire change from the toxic systemic forces that make us feel threatened by political division. If enough change starts to emerge and if the direction of change can become unified, a tipping point can be reached that brings new breakthroughs beyond our present political dilemmas.
Notes for new readers:
The Common Sense Papers are an offering by Common Sense 250, which proposes a method to realign the two-party system with the creation of a new political superstructure that circumvents the current dysfunctional duopoly. The goal is to heal political divisions and reboot the American political system for an effective federal government. If the movement can gain appeal, a call to crowdfund the project may occur in 2024. Subscribe for free with an email to follow along.
The tabs on the top of the Substack page can bring you to earlier essays that spell out key political issues. Common Sense Paper No. 1, No. 2, No. 4, and No. 5 can help anyone get up to speed on the project.
Common Sense 250 is exploring the launch of a podcast this fall for those who want to listen to the political strategy but don’t have time to read. Subscribe and watch for an email announcement.
Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), xix.
Ibid., xxii.
Ibid., pp. 38-39.
Ibid., 48.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 102.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 111.
Ibid.