Hello. Good evening, everyone. Welcome again to sixth i. I do start to start by asking who is here at sixth i for the first time tonight . Hello. Whether you are a first timer or if repeat offender we have a bunch of programs you might want to check out from a conversation from dan pfeiffer two concert with the incredible songwriter josh ritter to a party where you can come and see all of them did just a few weeks into the new year and the new decade im sure the reality has set in for us all we are now undeniably in 2020 approaching what is the most anticipated and polarized american president ial election of all time. The 2016 elections results were shocking to many of us in this d we didnt know a country, communities or friends as well as we thought we did. The aftermath so people questioning each others values and stark divisions and already divisive twoparty political systems. Tonight we are thrilled to welcome ezra klein back to dc to help us make sense of it all and hear his perspective on how the playstation has been growing for decades. And why were polarized why the system isnt broken but is working how it was designed. He reveals how the system is polarized in us and our identities are polarizing it with disastrous results. The bonds that hold the country together. As i guessing you already know, ezra klein is the editor at large and cofounder of the hosted the ezra klein podcast and executive producer on the netflix show explained. Previously he was a columnist and editor of the washington post, policy analyst at msnbc and a contributor to bloomberg news. He is joined in conversation tonight by an opinion columnist for the new york times, political analyst for cbs news and former chief Political Correspondent for slate. Slate. Also a talented photographer you can pick out debate could check out his digital account. Thank you for coming ou out andi thought pleastonightnow please m welcome to ezra klein and jamelle bouie. [applause] before we start i want to say thank you. This is the first event of the book tour in a city that means a lot to me and any venue that means a lot to me and it means a lot to me that we are here working on a book as a solitary strange experience and to see there are human beings out there that care is a wonderful thing so thank you all for being here. [applause] i saw your book, got copy in the mail and then reading the title, why were polarized. When i see books with these kind of titles, my immediate thought is come on we are not that polarized. Its not that big of a deal. Things have been worse in the 50s, 1930s, even the 1960s. So, if we are uniquely polarized in the present moment, what makes it unique and youve acknowledged in the buck things have been worse but now its different in a way that maybe the trend is worse than it looks. Looks. What i didnt realize when we titled the book, i want to note when you use the word polarized when youre completely right. You get an immediate intuition in the audience decid audience t youre doing is lamenting how bitter everything is today and its much, much worse. The thing that is different today in the mid20 century politics is important to say that the baseline american politics that 20th century and theres a lot of people that run political publications but the political comingofage wa was a mid20th century an and when i o to dc it was like the 1980s and just constantly like why cant we have a reagan and tip oneill getting a drink and fixing social security, like that was the iconic way the system was supposed to work. And what i came to have to explore and think about is that seemed wrong, but why and what way is the information correct, and the way that its wrong mid20th century american politics is very unusual in that it wasnt polarized. Politics is usually polarized in most countries in most places at most times, but the second thing that i think is very unintuitive is that polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. And its not necessarily a synonym for disagreement or bitterness or extremism. If was a time of more foundational tractor then we are in right now. Theres National Guardsmen at kent state and urban riots and Richard Nixon and watergate and political assassination after political assassination. You have all of this and the country itself. And by the way, a much larger range of the ideological opinion, not democratic socialism like norway to the republicanism as we see it today, that communism, like actual stolen his right away to milton friedman. The recent memory of some of the people who had come of age in politics, it was a meaningful faction in politics. It was the real thing you had to deal with. What is different now is infection or fracture. Its the way that they are lying on top of each other, the way that we become polarized by party and that identity has linked to a lot of other identities and fractures in american politics. I always think a good example is intensely divisive piece of legislation that comes after a long hard fought political battle and in congres ended cone for it and then medicare which comes right around the same time gets i think 13 or 17 republican votes in the senate, to imagine the major pieces of the decision representing the political complexities of the era passing with very little Party Polarization its almost unthinkable today, so i think that is what im trying to illuminate the american politics and the way the parties function and the relationship is actively different than it was at other times that we have to build our understanding of how it works on that and not an overly nostalgic view in the past. In the book you begin talking about how american politics got polarized in the way it is now in the civil rights story is part of that story that the Civil Rights Act essentially realigns the liberal and conservative factions in both parties briefly to the respective parties, liberal, republicans, they become democrats and become republicans and the political system in a way that its never been before has a Straight Line of ideological polarization. You describe it is not necessarily a bad thing and i want to talk about why it wasnt a bad thing even if the consequences hadnt been great for the political system. I think implicitly people often believe the alternative to polarization is agreement compromise, civility, comedy. When the alternative is often suppression and often times the political systems in particular the reason that you are not, quote on quote, polarized i polt is inthe disagreement could pold over or somehow or another being suppressed. If the american political system way they are suppressed is by a twoparty system collapsing into a four party system an system iy that make it coherent and its ability to service certain kinds of disagreement in particular piece disagreement over race. So there is a Democratic Party that has what they think o we ta Democratic Party that is less on economics and concerned with redistribution of poverty, based on the structural barriers to opportunity and then the party that is quite conservative are the members were quite conservative but there was a wide range of economic opinion. Most fundamentally conducting a Foreign Policy to the rest of the nation and wasnt one party at home and then ensuring the National Political system enforced White Supremacy in the south. Then as the liberal republicans, conservative republicans, and this was considered at the time a problem. I quote a lot of it here from a friend sam rosenfeld. What he shows it as there were people looking at this thing and theres something wrong with the system into the association released a report in 1950 and its become famous and infamous but what they say is a problem in american politics is that the parties are not politically responsible and what they mean is they are not putting forward a separate agendas. You have a democrat voting for Hubert Humphrey so you have this period where american politics in any way function on the thing that its functioned upon but the cost of that is this the poor and compromise. The Civil Rights Act doesnt end up at all at once and this is the part people underestimate. It does lead to some parts of the old confederacy for the First Time Ever but it takes a long time for the south to become solidly democratic well into the 90s i would put it. In terms of. I dont think you can look at those compromises and to say that they were moral or just so its a nice wine from our friend where he calls them im going to get it wrong that he talks about it as a false peace pressing the issues like this. One of the arguments made in the book is that its not polarization per se. It is often another word we have for disagreement we have coming to the service. The problem in the system is that it is built so that in conditions of polarization there isnt a way to resolve the disagreement. It is a gridlock in the forms of violence is her palace is a cont that the political system in the designed problem, not a polarization problem. We can go to Different Directions but the polarization direction first you talk about the party system but you also talk about the ways in which different identities are becoming polarized along the political winds. You walk through the different theories of polymerization. Can you sketch out in a little more detail what that process looks like and what exactly is happening such that in the present you can basically guess who someone is going to vote for off the proximity to us and those wonderful establishments. Henry is born a polish jew and moves to france in the 30s because he cant go to the university in portland because hes jewish and we are working on an optional Good InternationalHolocaust Remembrance Day t debate he movs to france and endless surfing world war ii and is captured and becomes a prisoner of war. He survives because hes understood as a french prisoner of war and not a polish jew. When he comes back his whole family has been killed in the holocaust and she begins thinking, obsessing about the idea but in this context they only thing that mattered was an identity and deciding whether or not he lived and died and if so many people they loved had died. So he becomes fixated on this question of Group Identity, what is it and how does it work and he starts running a series of experiments called the Minimal Group paradigm and the idea basically as if hes going to call subjects into a lab and subject them to conditions that begin to create coherence and see at what point the Group Identity and discrimination begin to take hold so he has these kids from the same school and he has been look at these sheets of paper and screens. How man many docs do you think e are and then h they separate thm into two groups. The over estimators and under estimators and its totally random they do not care how many, but the over estimators and under estimators and the authors say you know what while we have you here we wanted one other experiment this isnt related to the first one but if you dont mind hanging out for a minute we are going to look at the different groups just give us a second here. They then put them into this new experiment allocating money to other kids and these are kids who know each other and are all from the same school and theyve been sorted into these completely random groups and immediately they began favoring the under or over estimators and this was not an expected outcome. It was the first meant to be below the level. He found first he couldnt create a test so subtle a meaningless characteristic that was in it self true and he still got this so he did begi city thh paintings. You prefer again its false which paintings were preferred. The same thing happened and then just when he shows Group Discrimination and becomes powerful. People will choose to give everybody less money if it means their group gets more money compared to the other. Its the winning that is important. The point of that is we are very sensitive to the Group Identity with endless numbers of times in all kinds of subjects so if you do not believe what im saying think for a few seconds about sports, its all based on this. These are contests, im sorry with no states that people actually riot and burn the city as an aftermath. Identity is powerful and doesnt require that much to activate it or he is a thing that becomes very important is that they hold a lot of different identities. I am jewish, california, author, journalist, liberal. So on and so forth. I have a dog and not a cat. Some of these weak in me and some become very strong. What becomes important in politics is the way that your identities are linked to each other. So for a lot of history is in terms of the groups connected to them because they are so internally mixed in favor is. They have similar religious compositions and not even that dissimilar but once it becomes the conservative Party Accepted the period not just of ideological sorting but demographic and overwhelmingly christian party, the Democratic Party is the single large religious group with no affiliation at all and beyond thathat its a coalition of a lt of different religious groups and communities. Even within the ideology of the party is about half. So its not just ideology that race, religiosity, geography, psychological qualities and openness to experience the conscientiousness. Where you live and penalties downstream cultural things, do you watch that dynasty or madmen come amadmen, so they become the identities where we know a lot about you in general by who you vote for and theres a lot of things that can reinforce your political identity and three, the other party becomes much more ideologically different from you and more demographically different. I feel that they are not your group. Theres a study that shows to get a sense of how powerful this is in countries with the most stacked identities just like all of the identities aligning versus those with the most costcutting identities in the Different Directions, to the countries with most costcutting or 12 times as likely to have civil war these are big numbers that drives a lot of political behavior. It takes some work to feel the stakes of politics like should china be a currency manipulator, what should the policy become etc. But the Group Dynamics once you have a sense of the other party, it isnt going to be good for people like you, it is a very, very powerful thing. And the more of that you have come ahave,the more aggressivell react in favor of your side and against them. So far in this conversation, you have been talking about the path to polarization as essentially moving some events happened in the 60s, the parties began the realignment. There are other parties that of a kind of take their own path. You dont necessarily think that in all of this there are political factors making choices about how to best change advantage or win an election or how to do whatever i and the choices end up feeding into the polarization putting us on a certain path but it becomes more as we go on but we have to kind of move in addition to these groundlevel materials stages. I dont want to say the individual behavior has no effect on politics. That would be untrue, but i do want to say individual behavior has a lot less of a range of choice in politics than we think it does. Particularly american political journalism through individuals in a way that is unhelpful understanding whats happened here so theres definitely a l lot. If donald trump had undergone it would be different. If barack obama had in front of iit would just be different, but i dont think that the underlining trend would be all that different over the long run. Is that a matter of Newt Gingrich becomes the speaker of the house he is a powerful force in driving the party to the right but if they never escape georgia for some reason he is. A lot of people. [laughter] what someone like that have a period eventually that this is a disagreement i have in the polarization literature it is over Newt Gingrich like thereso much in the literature in my view and its not that he is himself truly a polarization innovator, he came up with stuff at every polarization book includes a long story about how Newt Gingrich gives speeches when the cspan cameras run and a few democrats are not cowards you will come up and answer like nobody was there because it is 2 00 in the morning. It is a good story and its true, the question is not what did Newt Gingrich come up with. Its why was the Republican Party for goals will in the first place, and now we have Mitch Mcconnell. We have very different personality and to get overly personalized to him as doing what so many what do he didnt invent new powers come he just didnt allow the vote on so many in thand if all of them had bron with Mitch Mcconnell he wouldnt have had the power to stop it so in general i think that you have to look for what it got taken out of th the box at one point i described it as american politics focuses on the flowers and not disloyal. This meeting and that person, the other walked out or its a great book i would highly recommend a. Its the history of modern republicanism as an actual distinct thing but if you take a step back from the book what you notice is the way that he describes what is going on is a moderate republicans are always this close to figuring it out and it collapsed because they made the wrong strategic move. They are getting blown out in the elections and have totally crazy people who make these decisions and they win. I think that in a way the service like almost all of the e british industriepartisanship ha little bit too little to understand why the players who win did win because they didnt makmake a ton of mistakes. Newt gingrich is sometimes a political operator but sometimes a complete fool. The fact of the matter is the other people didnt win. It wasnt good for them and on the de