The reality, Dekker says, is that complex systems often fail the public even as they’re succeeding by their own logic. If you discover the screw that failed or the maintenance shift that was missed, you might think you’ve found the broken part. But if you miss the way the stock market was rewarding the company for cutting costs on maintenance, you’ve missed the cause of the crisis, and failed to prevent its recurrence. Systems thinking, he writes, “is about understanding how accidents can happen when no parts are broken, or no parts are seen as broken.”6
That may not sound like American politics to you. It is, at this point, cliché to call it broken. But that is our mistake. 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. We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole. That the worst actors are so often draped in success doesn’t prove the system is broken; it proves that they understand the ways in which it truly works. That is knowledge the rest of us need, if we are to change it. This quote from Dekker describes much of what I have seen and much of how I intend to approach this investigation:
In stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well—on a narrow range of performance criteria, that is—the ones that they get rewarded on in their current political or economic or commercial configuration. In the drift into failure, accidents can happen without anything breaking, without anybody erring, without anybody violating the rules they consider relevant.
I am sensitive to these incentives because I live them. I am not outside the system looking in but inside the system looking out. I am a journalist, a pundit, and a cofounder of Vox, the explanatory news publication. I am a member of the political media, and I know that for all that we try to hide it, we are political actors, and the decisions we make are both cause and consequences of the broader forces that surround us. I am a voter, a news junkie, and a liberal. I am motivated in part by the radicalizing realization that I am often carrying out the biddings of a system I dislike, by the frustration that overcomes me when I realize I am acting more like American politics than like myself.
And I am not alone. I spend my days interviewing participants in the American political system, smart people doing their best, puzzling over the vast dysfunction that surrounds them and explaining away their own contributions to it. My background is in policy reporting, and over years of covering different issues, I have seen the same pattern play out again and again. Whatever the problem, it begins with meetings in which experts of all different perspectives sit together on panels and discuss the many ways it can be solved. At this point, there is always a large zone of agreement, a belief that a compromise can be reached that will leave everyone better off compared to the status quo. But as the process wears on, as the politicians focus their attention and the media focuses its coverage, agreement dissolves. What once struck participants as reasonable compromises become unreasonable demands. What was once a positive-sum negotiation becomes a zero-sum war. And everyone involved believes every decision they made along the way was reasonable. Usually, from their perspective, they are right.
As such, I have found that American politics is best understood by braiding two forms of knowledge that are often left separate: the direct, on-the-ground insights shared by politicians, activists, government officials, and other subjects of my reporting, and the more systemic analyses conducted by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others with the time, methods, and expertise to study American politics at scale. On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making. Together, however, they shine bright light on how and why American politics works the way it does.
There is much awry in American politics, and I won’t, in this book, attempt to catalog all of it. But I’ve come to believe the master story—the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants—is the logic of polarization. That logic, put simply, is this: to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.
Understanding that we exist in relationship with our political institutions, that they are changed by us and we are changed by them, is the key to this story. We don’t just use politics for our own ends. Politics uses us for its own ends.
Rescuing “identity politics”
There are many different types of polarization possible, and I’ll discuss some of them later in the book. But the locus of polarization I will focus on is political identity. And that requires saying a few words about a term that should be very useful in American politics but that has become almost useless: identity politics.
A core argument of this book is that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics. This is not an insult, and it’s not controversial: we form and fold identities constantly, naturally. Identity is present in politics in the way gravity, evolution, or cognition is present in politics; that is to say, it is omnipresent in politics, because it is omnipresent in us. There is no way to read the literature on how humans form and protect their personal and group identities—literature I will survey in this book—and believe any of us is immune. It runs so deep in our psyches, is activated so easily by even weak cues and distant threats, that it is impossible to speak seriously about how we engage with one another without discussing how our identities shape that engagement.
Unfortunately, the term “identity politics” has been weaponized. It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of historically marginalized groups. If you’re black and you’re worried about police brutality, that’s identity politics. If you’re a woman and you’re worried about the male-female pay gap, that’s identity politics. But if you’re a rural gun owner decrying universal background checks as tyranny, or a billionaire CEO complaining that high tax rates demonize success, or a Christian insisting on Nativity scenes in public squares—well, that’s just good, old-fashioned politics. With a quick sleight of hand, identity becomes something that only marginalized groups have.
The term “identity politics,” in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of weaker groups by making them look like self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate. But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. We are left searching in vain for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.II7
All politics is influenced by identity. Those identities are most powerful when they are so pervasive as to be either invisible or uncontroversial. “American” is an identity. So, too, is “Christian.” When politicians, including the irreligious, end speeches with “God bless America,” it is not because they are making an appeal to a higher power, but because they are making an appeal to our bedrock identities. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why there are so few open atheists or even agnostics in national politics.