In praise of polarization

How identity politics changed the Democratic Party — for the better.

Polarization, party sorting, and identity politics are central villains of our time. Politicians lament them. Pundits loathe them. Book after book has been written blaming them for society’s ills, from the decline of reason to the electoral travails of the Democratic Party to the death of American democracy.

But the past month of sustained, mass activism against police brutality offers evidence for the defense — that sorting around identity can be inclusive, that polarization can be productive.

The historically multiethnic nature of the Black Lives Matter protests, and the rapid change in polling around racial issues, is partly the result of decades of polarization that have put African Americans in coalition with Hispanics, Asians, and white liberals. The Democratic Party is increasingly a coalition of people who experience racism directly or base part of their identity on opposing it ideologically. This is something new in American politics, and it carries within it real reason for hope.

“If we were ever to have a national reckoning with our legacy of racial violence, it would require immense political power on the side of the people who wanted the reckoning,” says University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason, who studies polarization. “We’ve never had a political party that was almost entirely in agreement that systemic racism exists, particularly among the white partisans. But that’s changing very quickly.”

Racism is America’s founding sin, and it cuts the deepest divisions in our political history. But those divisions, across the 20th century, existed in both political coalitions simultaneously. In 1994, 39 percent of Democrats, and 26 percent of Republicans, said discrimination was the main reason Black Americans had trouble getting ahead. There was a gap, but it was modest. As Michael Tesler, a political scientist who studies racial polarization at the University of California Irvine, has shown, up through the 2000s, the parties were more similar than different when polled on racial issues.