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Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization. Launched in 2014, Vox reaches more than fifty million people across its platforms each month. Klein is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein Show, cohost of the Weeds podcast, and an executive producer on Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. Previously, Klein was a columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and appeared on many programs including Face the Nation, the Daily Show, and PBS NewsHour.

“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 this book, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, Klein 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 fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those 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 twentieth 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. A revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

Shani O. Hilton joined the Los Angeles Times as deputy managing editor in June 2019. Previously, she was at BuzzFeed News in New York City for six years, where she worked as vice president of news and programming, executive editor and deputy editor-in-chief. She oversaw the company’s news show programming and led efforts to diversify BuzzFeed News revenue through shows with a focus on live video, including “AM to DM” on Twitter and the documentary series “Follow This” on Netflix. Hilton’s role also included structuring the news team, running special projects and managing a U.S. news staff of more than 200 award-winning journalists. She worked as an editor and oversaw tech, politics, national, entertainment and business coverage.

Prior to working at BuzzFeed News, Hilton was an editor and reporter at outlets including NBC Washington, Washington City Paper and the Center for American Progress. She grew up in Fontana and Stockton, CA, and studied journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C.