Why We’re Polarized - Ezra Klein torrent

Category: History, Political
Language: English
Keywords: #MAGA Alt-Right Charlottesville Democrats Independents Republicans This Moment Trump

Written by Ezra Klein
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: It’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us - and how we are polarizing it - with disastrous results.

“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 50 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 20th 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.

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#1: This is not my rip. Often, things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar, but not this time.

#2: The audiofile makes a reference to an accompanying PDF, however when analyzed by VirusTotal it notes that the PDF “Makes use of AcroForm objects”, which could potentially be misused to launch exploits, and therefore I have chosen to exclude it here, as I cannot validate it as completely safe.