Book Review: Why We’re Polarized, by Ezra Klein
10th February 2021
Klein calls this “the Democratic party more successfully resisting polarization”, and thinks of this as related to structural differences between the two parties. He says that the Republican Party represents the modal American on various characteristics, eg Christian (the most common religion), white (the most common race), straight (the most common sexual orientation), etc, whereas the Democrats represent everyone else (eg Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion; blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and every minority race; etc). That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform – Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness. That means ideology can’t really capture the Democratic Party in the same way it captures the Republican Party. One point kind of in support of this – ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it’s dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be.