Excerpts: “And while we often speak of identity as a singular, it is always a dizzying plural–we have countless identities, some of them in active conflict with each other; others lying dormant until activate by threat or fortune” (p. xxii).

“Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth–purposes like increasing their standing in their community or ensuring they don’t find themselves exiled by the leaders of their tribe” (p. 91).

“There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right” (p. 93).

“Kahan’s work suggest that cognition exists on a spectrum, ranging from issues where the truth matters and our identities don’t to issues where our identities dominate and the truth fades in importance” (p. 102).

“But the other perspective takes identities as living, malleable things. They can be activated or left dormant, strengthened or weakened, created or left in the void. In this telling, all this identity-oriented content will deepen the identities it repeatedly triggers, confirms, or threatens. It will turn interest or opinions into identities” (p. 156).

“If individual donors give money as a form of identity expression, institutional donors give money as a form of investment. Individual donors are polarizing. Institutional donors are corrupting. American politics, thus, is responsive to two types of people: the polarized and the rich” (p. 190).

“What they find is that the Democratic Party is a diverse collection of interest groups held together by policy goals, while the Republican Party is built atop a more united base that finds commonality in more abstract, ideological commitments” (p. 232).

“America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural area over dense, urban ones” (p. 241).

“If the beginning of wisdom on identity politics is recognizing that all of us are engaging in it all the time, the path of wisdom on identity politics is to be mindful of which of our identities are being activated, so that we can become intentional about which identities we work to activate” (p. 262).

“The search for a static answer will always be folly. There is no one best way for the system to work. There is only the best we can do right now” (p. 267).

Klein, Ezra (2020). Why We’re Polarized. New York: Avid Reader Press.