written by Joseph Klein. white working-class native voters, many of whom, it is claimed, will turn overnight into a fascist army. Surely it’s no accident that inter-party polarization really got going around the time the Carter and Reagan administrations went full neoliberal, and that it’s only worsened as income inequality and industrial decline have cut deeper. In more than 15 years as a political journalist, Ezra Klein has worn many hats. Polarization gives way to self-lobotomization. As frustration has mounted over the years, it has erupted inLind is not a populist. . Klein is a new public intellectual making a major contribution to journalism. . Ezra Klein is an enigma. .The virtues and vices of these books mirror each other. He dismisses proposals to expand access to higher education and encourage entrepreneurialism as “neoliberal panaceas,” noting Instead, he calls for a return to the kind of democratic pluralism that emerged in the United States and Europe after World War II, a power-sharing system in which a variety of subnational entities or institutions give working-class members a genuine voice and influence. Instead, they seem to have simply fed an already raging case of partisan polarization—another virus for which there is as yet no treatment or vaccine.
Today, however, Americans’ political identities have become “mega-identities.” The labels “Democrat” and “Republican” increasingly subsume other sources of identity, including race, religion, and The most striking evidence Klein produces for this isThis partisan divide poses grave danger, Klein argues. Before then, both major political parties were big-tent operations, “scrambled, both ideologically and demographically, in ways that curbed their power as identities and lowered the partisan stakes of politics.” Indeed, in 1950, U.S. political parties were so undifferentiated ideologically that the American Political Science Association published a report Whereas Klein is mostly focused on polarization in the United States, Lind sets out to explain the wider, global populist surge that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, France’s “yellow vest” protests, and the rise of the nationalist politician Lind also begins his story in the 1960s.
In 1950, Thomas Dewey, the former governor of New York and the GOP’s 1944 nominee for president, freely admitted that if … would lose every election.” Instead, national working classes are divided along many cleavages, including race, religion, region, and, “most important,” the divide between “old-stock” whites and “recent immigrants and their descendants,” creating a “split labor market,” in which elites can play subgroups of the working class against one another. , is responsible for Brexit, the election of Trump in 2016, and perhaps other major political events. Klein’s story takes into account a multitude of factors—institutional, cultural, psychological—that he says work together to produce identity-reinforcing feedback loops. In Klein’s telling, polarization’s original sin dates back to the 1960s. If Klein’s explanation for the rise of polarization and populism is correct—tracing it to the peculiar racial realignments brought about by the civil rights movement—then why are the Conversely, when it comes to the rise of populism in the United States, Lind doesn’t grapple with facts suggesting that additional factors are at play besides class. It has become difficult to ask even the most basic questions—whether a certain medicine works, whether a city has enough ventilators and protective equipment—without triggering a political brawl, usually revolving around President Donald Trump. Klein says that in conceiving his book as a “map to the machine that shapes political decisions,” he was inspired by systems thinking, the idea that “complex systems often fail the public even as they’re succeeding by their own logic.” Unwittingly this also serves as a description of That’s not to say that the papers he cites are not, indeed, interesting or that they do not explain some of polarization’s causes; they are and they do. Review; Podcast; Close Menu.
Read between the lines of Early on, Klein confesses that he feels, as a member of the media, some responsibility for the dysfunction bedeviling American politics.
The preferred alternate reality of Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein is one in which Elizabeth Warren is in charge.
In more than 15 years as a political journalist, Ezra Klein has worn many hats. Societies marked by conflict along many different axes are far less prone to civil war than societies with a single major cleavage.
Lind’s thesis is monocausal, focusing on class alone, at the expense of numerous other factors, such as racial resentments and demographic fears. . His explanations center on psychology, identity, and the dominant role that party affiliation plays in Americans’ … Ezra Klein’s solution to cure what ails America: Be more like Ezra KleinThe overall effect is, not surprisingly, a little like reading a policy explainer on Vox: everything seems at once comprehensive and reasonable and consequential, but on closer inspection there are major omissions and unresolved contradictions.