Why We're Polarized Quotes
"The first thing I need to do is convince you something has changed."
"American politics offers the comforting illusion of stability."
"We are living through something genuinely new."
"The problem in 1950 was that the nation’s two major political parties weren’t honoring the intentions of their voters."
"Party affiliation was a tautology for itself, not a rich signifier of principles and perspective."
"It’s not just that we choose our politics by slowly, methodically developing a worldview, using that worldview to generate conclusions about ideal tax and health and foreign policy, and then selecting the political party that fits best."
"What if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and merely rationalized as calculation?"
"The irony is that the American political system was most calm and least polarized when America itself seemed to be on the verge of cracking apart."
"To put that more simply, a voter who mostly ignores American politics today is clearer on the differences between the two parties than political junkies and partisan loyalists were in 1980."
"It’s easier to tell apart a donkey and an elephant than a donkey and a mule."
"What if the winning that seems more important to them."
"Sports remain ubiquitous, and they are ubiquitous because they respond to human beings’ deep desire to sort 'us' from 'them,' to see our group triumph over outsiders in combat and competition."
"The living and dying through one’s allegiance. If it sounds like hyperbole, consider the possibility that the emotional experience it describes is not just real, but rational."
"We tend to dismiss the agony of social isolation or stigma as merely psychological. It isn’t."
"Our brains reflect deep evolutionary time, while our lives, for better and for worse, are lived right now, in this moment."
"When it comes to large-scale cooperation, we humans have clearly exceeded our programming."
"The behavior of partisans resembles that of sports team members acting to preserve the status of their teams rather than thoughtful citizens participating in the political process for the broader good."
"When partisans endure meetings, plant yard signs, write checks, and spend endless hours volunteering, what is likely foremost in their minds is that they are furious with the opposing party and want intensely to avoid losing to it—not a specific issue agenda."
"Political identity is fair game for hatred. Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not."
"The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages. But now party politics has taken on a life of its own—now it is the cleavage."
"There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified."
"When Obama was elected in 2008, there was much talk of America moving into a post-racial moment."
"There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President."
"According to content analyses conducted by political and communication scientists, Barack Obama actually discussed race less in his first term than any other Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt."
"The changes that led to Obama’s presidency are everywhere in our culture."
"For two hundred years, whites in America represented an undisputed politically, economically, and culturally dominant majority."
"How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people, or even saying you do, or that they’re not good, or whatever."
"Because it’s a changing country; the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore."
"We have very strong metrics we get every day about how many people are watching our show. It is our job to get people’s attention and to keep it."
"I’m not the first to observe this, but you’ve got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks."
"If Twitter tweaks its algorithms to put one Republican for every nine Democrats in your Twitter feed, that won’t increase moderation."
"The news is supposed to be a mirror held up to the world, but the world is far too vast to fit in our mirror."
"To decide what to cover is to become the shaper of the news rather than a mirror held up to the news."
"The news media isn’t just an actor in politics. It’s arguably the most powerful actor in politics."
"Newsworthiness is some combination of important, new, outrageous, conflict-oriented, secret, or interesting."
"Journalism academics have always known that newsworthiness, as the American press defines it, isn’t a system with any coherence to it."
"Judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too."
"In a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage."
"The media doesn’t just reflect the politics we have; it shapes it, even creates it."
"The most powerful critique of America’s political system was published in 1990 by a Spanish political sociologist named Juan Linz."
"Confrontation fits our strategy. Polarization often has very beneficial results. If everything is handled through compromise and conciliation, if there are no real issues dividing us from the Democrats, why should the country change and make us the majority?"
"Bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but irrational for the minority party to offer. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad."
"The age of cooperation is over. The disagreements run too deep, the debates are too nationalized, the coalitions are too different, the political identities are too powerful."
"The filibuster then was not like the filibuster now. Today, the filibuster can be shut down with sixty votes, a process known as cloture."
"The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices."
"The right has untethered itself from [mainstream media and academia] and built an informational ecosystem premised on purity rather than process."
"Republicans know that their coalition is endangered, buffeted by demographic headwinds and an aging base."
"A more democratic system won’t end polarization, but it will create a healthier form of competition."
"We give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more."
"The Varieties of Democracy Project, which has been surveying experts on the state of global democracies since 1900, gave the US political system a 48 on a 1 to 100 scale in 1945 and a 59 in 1965."
"The era that we often hold up as the golden age of American democracy was far less democratic, far less liberal, far less decent, than today."