Chris Lee

“Kahan calls this theory “identity-protective cognition”: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are and our relationships with the people we trust and love.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges— periods like this one. Demographic change, the election of the first black president, and the downstream cultural and political consequences of both have “led a sizeable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered. As a result, this racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The most recent incarnation of the rules, as of 2022, that debt should be falling as a share of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in five years’ time is particularly ludicrous.44 It means government policy is being set in order that a distant forecast, that will definitely be wrong, falls just the right side of an arbitrary line.”
― Sam Freedman, Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It

“It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks, and other minorities—in part because it seemed like the right thing to do. Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition—pure political tribalism.[17]”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized