Why We’re Polarized
Article
Why We’re Polarized is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2021 and February 20, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “I was happy to be able to read his Why We’re Polarized”; “Why We’re Polarized was published too early to mention Biden”; “notes a book like this should hit, but I don’t feel too much more enlightened about Why We’re Polarized”. It most often appears alongside America, California, Ezra Klein.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 09, 2021
- Last seen: February 20, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- America (2 shared issues)
-
- California (2 shared issues)
-
- Ezra Klein (2 shared issues)
-
- Klein (2 shared issues)
-
- US (2 shared issues)
-
- vetocracy (2 shared issues)
-
- Vox (2 shared issues)
-
- 1960s America (1 shared issues)
-
- 1964 Civil Rights Act (1 shared issues)
-
- Amazon (1 shared issues)
-
- American Political Science Association (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Johnson (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.
Inline links: Why We're Polarized
(Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.)
But after a bit of this he regains his footing and segues into a stronger argument that might give even conservatives some food for thought. Klein notes that although both Democrats and Republicans have some extremists in their coalition, the institutional Democrats seem to be doing a better job preventing them from gaining power. In a purely structural sense, without getting into whether you believe they're morally equivalent or whatever, the democratic socialists/Bernie Sanders seem to be an "insurrection" comparable to the Tea Party/Trump on the Republican side. But the mainstream neoliberal Republicans surrendered to the Tea Party and to Trump in rapid succession, and the mainstream neoliberal Democrats are still resisting. The Democrats' Tea Party equivalent is probably AOC, but she and her allies are still a small minority in the Democratic caucus. And the Dem presidential nomination went to Joe Biden, a moderate who wouldn't look out of place running for president in 1988 (in fact...). Why We're Polarized was published too early to mention Biden in this context, but we can count him as a correct prediction for its theory.
In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy:
Inline links: Why We're Polarized, Vox article on vetocracy
First, is vetocracy the same as polarization? Klein sometimes treats the two concepts interchangeably; for example, he says he's written a book about "how the US government has becoming a dysfunctional vetocracy" (presumably Why We're Polarized). But elsewhere he doesn't treat them interchangably; for example, he talks about some kinds of shareholder activism in corporations as examples of vetocracy. But these don't seem linked to partisan politics. And a lot NIMBYism is unrelated to the Democrat/Republican divide.