Chris Lee

“had weightier matters on his mind than curtains.’ The Lady Blessington – who had not looked at Eliza since she came down from her high horse – now turned and frowned at this brazen attempt to get back up on a new one.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud

“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

“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

“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