Why We're Polarized

nThe New York Times Bestseller nThe Wall Street Journal Bestseller n nFew books are as well-matched to the moment of their publication as Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized. --Dan Hopkins, The Washington Post n nIt is likely to become the political book of the year....Powerful and] intelligent. --Fareed Zakaria, CNN n nSuperbly researched and written... --Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post n nAmerica's political system isn't broken. The truth is scarier: it's working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us--and how we are polarizing it--with disastrous results. n nThe American political system--which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president--is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face, writes political analyst Ezra Klein. We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole. n nIn Why We're Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America's descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. n nAmerica is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. n nKlein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. n nThis is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.n