[Foreign Book] Trump Defeated Clinton Due to Polarization in US Politics

Ezra Klein 'Why We're Polarized'

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Byung-hee] The 2016 U.S. presidential election shocked the world. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential primary, other Republican candidates laughed at him, showing an attitude of "Do you even understand politics?"

Even when it became likely that Trump would be nominated as the candidate, he did not receive support from the Republican Party. When he defeated the prominent politician Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and entered the White House, many lamented that American politics had deteriorated.

However, American political critic Ezra Klein argues in his book published on the 28th of last month (local time), Why We're Polarized, that the American political system has not broken down. Rather, he claims that the American political system is functioning exactly as originally intended. In other words, polarization is the intended outcome of the American political system.

Klein asserts that over the past 50 years, political division has deepened as religion, race, region, ideology, and cultural identity combined with partisan tendencies. He explores and analyzes the process in which polarized identities and polarized political groups influence each other. This provides a framework to explain why Trump rose and why the Democratic Party has shifted further left.

Klein diagnoses that polarization is intensifying, pushing the United States into crisis. He also states, "American politics is full of actors who make rational decisions based on immediate interests."

CNN praised Why We're Polarized as the political book of the year. Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford University professor famous for The End of History, praised the book in a review for the Washington Post, calling Why We're Polarized "an excellent book born from excellent research."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.