One argument I make in “Why We’re Polarized” is that the alternative to polarization often isn’t agreement, or compromise. It’s suppression.
One way polarization can be healthy is it creates the conditions necessary for needed debates to actually happen.
One way polarization can be healthy is it creates the conditions necessary for needed debates to actually happen.
The same is true on identity politics. The alternative to a politics that takes identity seriously is not national unity, but the suppression of problems and priorities of weaker groups.
As I argue in WWP, identity politics is most powerful when it’s least visible, because that tends to mean one identity group has full control of the agenda.
That kind of identity politics is much more exclusionary than what we have now, particularly in the Democratic Party, which demands coalitions across identity groups
91% of Democrats — and 92% of white Democrats — express support for Black Lives Matter (as do 40 percent of Republicans). A politics of identity can be inclusionary, building bridges across experiences that would otherwise remain siloed.
We’re seeing, right now, the ways in which polarization can be healthy and identity politics inclusive. I make that case here, and won't try to repeat it all on Twitter: vox.com/21299730/georg…
Polarization still creates specific problems in our system because of our weird institutions: we have a system that gets paralyzed by party conflict very easily. The best way to solve that is through institutional reform.
But this is why it's important to get to a more precise account of how polarization and identity politics actually work: They can be good, they can be bad; they can be done well or done poorly; they can exist in a healthy or dysfunctional institutional context.
