具体描述
“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.
用户评价
##The Ezra Klein Show的听众表示书中旁征博引非常informative，但后半部分略显拖沓，并且结尾似乎有点乐观过了头？（来自大选前夕过分关注时事的焦虑读者）
##信息量好大
##Smart到Ezra Klein这个程度可以说是一件sexy的事情了......
##精彩
##heavily draw on past studies and data; good intro to polarizing America politics
Audio version is a mistake
##信息量好大
##could/should be a podcast
##有一定的洞察力。但这个书最大的优点是它的可读性，Ezra有能力把一些很麻烦的事情用非常清晰和简单的语言表达出来，在阅读上不会故意给读者制造任何障碍，也不会故意展现自己的聪明，但这种能力就是最高级的聪明。