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The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes.
No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics."
It is an idea that has all but obsessed Mr. Bishop since he began thinking about it years ago in his hometown of Austin, Texas. In his Austin neighborhood, he observed, there were virtually no Republicans. In another community of similar size nearby there were very few Democrats. Thirty years earlier, he was willing to bet, nothing like that uniformity would have been possible. Values, ideology and partisanship would have mingled more variously in even the most compact neighborhood, ward or district.
This hunch and others led Mr. Bishop to write a series of widely discussed newspaper articles, and now, finally, a full-length presentation of the argument. I have always been skeptical about the clustering thesis myself, but there is one simple statistic, rightly seized on by Mr. Bishop, that is difficult to explain away. It is this: In 1976, less than a quarter of the American people lived in so-called "landslide counties" – that is, counties in which the spread between the two major presidential candidates was 20 percentage points or more. By 2004, nearly half of us lived in this kind of politically tilted territory.
How could this be? Well, we know one thing: It isn't gerrymandering. Nobody redraws the boundaries of a county every 10 years; they often stay the same for a century. Nor does it have much to do with natural population increase, which might push one group or another into a new proportional dominance within a certain geographical area. As it happens, there has been relatively little population growth in most parts of the country. The longer one thinks about it, the more seriously one has to consider Mr. Bishop's claim: that the local landslide effect has been largely the result of demographic resorting.
Why in recent years and not before? In Mr. Bishop's view, resorting is what happens when individuals in a society become more affluent, better educated and freer to make their own personal and political choices. But he also believes that the Big Sort has been a form of escape. As the country attracts more and more immigrants, and as large metropolitan areas become multiracial and multilingual, people feel a strong desire to retreat to the safety of smaller communities where they can live among those who look, think and behave like themselves.
"Americans," Mr. Bishop writes, "lost their sense of a nation by accident in the sweeping economic and cultural shifts that took place after the mid-1960s. And by instinct they have sought out modern-day recreations of the 19th-century 'island communities' in where and how they live." Not red and blue states, he is quick to insist; he calls that cliché an illusion. The reality is red and blue wards and precincts, suburbs and counties.
To be sure, a few obstacles confront anyone who wishes to accept this argument in toto. Research by the political scientist Morris Fiorina, for example, shows that, on most important issues, one doesn't find a wide ideological division according to geography. Counties do differ in their attitudes toward Iraq, abortion and foreign trade but not by nearly as much as Mr. Bishop's Big Sort would suggest. Mr. Fiorina argues that it's the political parties and their leadership that are fomenting political culture wars, not rank-and-file voters.
I accept the validity of this research, but I don't think it necessarily undermines Mr. Bishop's thesis. What if voters looked at the candidates in 2004 and decided – in clusters – that one of the nominees was the kind of person that they would like to have as neighbor, tennis partner or fellow-parishioner – and the other one simply wasn't? This is how Mr. Bishop explains the results in 2004, and he makes a decent case.
Certainly it is a case that the two major parties have come to accept. Soon after the 2000 election, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd reported to Karl Rove that there wasn't much point in focusing any campaign on independents or moderate voters anymore. The country was too polarized, essentially along the cultural lines that Mr. Bishop lays out. "If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said in 2004. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for Bush." Mr. Bishop would agree. He would simply add that the yoga people have clustered in one set of culturally segregated enclaves and the gun owners in another.
Mr. Bishop has drawn a painstaking, and in my view, accurate picture of the first eight years of this century – certainly of its politics. Whether he has described the next eight years is not so clear. George Bush has been a deeply polarizing political leader. John McCain doesn't seem to be one; Barack Obama is determined not to be one; and Hillary Clinton has spent much of the past six months looking for ways to cast herself as a less polarizing figure than she has been in the past. If any one of them succeeds in campaigning and governing on such terms, "The Big Sort" may turn out to be a captivating account of recent history rather than an enduring explanation of American social life.
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| Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing Magazine |
Forget bowling alone: We’re barely talking with anyone who doesn’t share our views, habits, dress and bumper stickers.
Journalist Bishop is a Texan. But, he hastens to note, he lives in an Austin suburb that gave more votes to Nader than Bush in the last election and where the lone “out” Republican is a very lonely man. The mores of the neighborhood encourage political discussion, though only of a like-minded kind. The watershed year was 1965, before which Americans were used to the thought that people of different races, incomes, religions and voting habits might live more or less side by side.
Afterward, Bishop observes, through white flight and minority migration, whole cities were remade to be monoethnic, with even income distributions and similar levels of education, some higher and some lower. Thus the fact that in 1970 only 17 percent of the residents of Austin were college-educated, a number that had risen to 45 percent in 2004, whereas in Cleveland “the change was only from 4 percent to 14 percent.” All other things being equal, a liberally inclined college-educated person chose Austin, Portland or San Francisco over any of the old Rust Belt cities, even if the cost of living were substantially lower in the latter.
Just so, in those few surviving mixed cities where red- and blue-state types come together, they’re likely to do so only tangentially but live in neighborhoods that are more alike than unlike. The loss of diversity is of interest to more than just marketers, who have a lot of rethinking to do about demographics and target audiences, since “there is no longer national ‘brand loyalty’ in regard to religion,” much less sandwich spread or laundry soap. Instead, by Bishop’s account, this sorting tendency is of concern: We’ve cleansed our personal spaces of heretics but removed all the grit and tumult that make for debate and democracy, which spells trouble ahead for the republic.
Essential reading for activists, poli-sci types, journalists and trend-watchers. |
| Birds of a feather flock together, and that's not always a good thing, according to journalist and blogger Bishop in this timely, highly readable discussion of American neighborhoods and the implications of who lives in them. Writing with sociologist and statistician Cushing, Bishop looks at the "geodemographic segmentation" of America: like-minded people clumping together by age, income, education, religion, ethnicity, occupation, housing types, and family status in communities across the nation (e.g., Lubbock, TX, as opposed to Cambridge, MA), listening to and discussing only the news that suits them. This circumstance, Bishop says, accounts for the "landslide" effect (think Blue and Red states), by which candidates from either party win by enormous margins within counties owing to the "us vs. them" mentality that has taken over American politics in the last 30 years. This social polarization is, of course, only too evident in both houses of Congress; it is hard to imagine, from today's vantage point, that in 1965 half the Republicans in the Senate voted for President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare bill. Highly recommended for all libraries. |
| Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ |
| How did zip codes become as useful to political activists as to mail carriers? In the relatively new cultural dynamics of political segregation, Bishop discerns a troubling transformation of American life. Complex and surprising, the story of that transformation will confound readers who suppose that recent decades have made American society both more diverse and more tolerant. Pinpointing 1965 as the year when events in Vietnam, Washington, and Watts delivered body blows to traditional social institutions, Bishop recounts how Americans who had severed ties to community, faith, and family forged new affiliations based on lifestyle preferences. The resulting social realignment has segmented the nation into groupthink communities, fostering political smugness and polarization. The much-noted cartography of Red and Blue states, as Bishop shows, actually distorts the reality of a deeply Blue archipelago of urban islands surrounded by a starkly Red rural sea. Bishop worries about the future of democratic discourse as more and more Americans live, work, and worship surrounded by people who echo their own views. A raft of social-science research underscores the growing difficulty of bipartisan compromise in a balkanized country where politicians win office by satisfying their most radical constituents. A book posing hard questions for readers across the political spectrum. |
| Bryce Christensen |
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