arensb reviewed Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
Review of "Why We're Polarized" on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
There's no question that Donald Trump's campaign and presidency are unprecedented: he has no experience, no tact, no desire to govern, no respect for the norms and traditions of the presidency, and he ran on an explicitly racist platform. And while many books have been written that try to explain how he got elected, Klein begins by asking a different question: how is it that Trump even got close? What's wrong with the American political system that he even became a candidate?
Of course it's human nature to forgive flaws in your party's candidate, and exaggerate the flaws in the other party's candidate. But surely anyone who voted in 2016 could see that Trump was obviously unfit to wield power, and if you don't like Clinton, the only options are to hold your nose and vote for her anyway, or abstain. Yes? And yet, very few Republicans did that, so …
There's no question that Donald Trump's campaign and presidency are unprecedented: he has no experience, no tact, no desire to govern, no respect for the norms and traditions of the presidency, and he ran on an explicitly racist platform. And while many books have been written that try to explain how he got elected, Klein begins by asking a different question: how is it that Trump even got close? What's wrong with the American political system that he even became a candidate?
Of course it's human nature to forgive flaws in your party's candidate, and exaggerate the flaws in the other party's candidate. But surely anyone who voted in 2016 could see that Trump was obviously unfit to wield power, and if you don't like Clinton, the only options are to hold your nose and vote for her anyway, or abstain. Yes? And yet, very few Republicans did that, so stuck are we in our political grooves.
Spoiler: Klein doesn't offer a lot of solutions to the problems he discusses. Rather, he spends the book examining the problem of polarization and explaining how things got to be this way. He takes us back to a time when parties had a much wider range of opinions, when liberal Republicans were more liberal than conservative Democrats, to the point where half of the population couldn't tell you which party was the liberal one and which the conservative.
He then walks us through a number of findings touching on psychology, sociology, poli-sci, and game theory, to show how each step made sense at the time. For instance, if you truly thought the stakes were sky-high, matters of life and death, wouldn't you filibuster? Wouldn't you block a Supreme Court nominee for a year?
In the end, I may not have a handy list of reforms that'll solve everything, but I do have a bunch of insights into the problems, as well as a set of behaviors and attitudes to watch out for, both in others and in myself. And because of that, I think this book will stay relevant a lot longer than most political books, especially those about the Trump administration.