Why we're polarized

Resource Information

The work Why we're polarized represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in DC Public Library System. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Why we're polarized

Statement of responsibility

Ezra Klein

Title variation

Why we are polarized

Creator

• Klein, Ezra

Author

• Klein, Ezra

Subject

• Identity politics -- United States
• Polarization (Social sciences)
• Political culture -- United States
• Right and left (Political science)

Language

eng

Summary

""America'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. "The 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." In 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. America 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. Klein 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. This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself." --

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

SNR

Dewey number

306.0973

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

HN90.P57

LC item number

K54 2020

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography