Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Big Sort Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. This is the untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided. America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote like we do. This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We've built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood and church and news show — most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking work. In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop made national news in a series of articles when he first described "the big sort." Armed with original and startling demographic data, he showed how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities — not at the regional level, or the red-state/blue-state level, but at the micro level of city and neighborhood. In The Big Sort Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today, and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory. The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come. The Clustering Of Like-Minded America. T hese days, the word “divided” is just as commonplace in the American vernacular as “lit”, “woke”, and “word.” It no longer warrants a surprising look, rather it is simply accepted as one of the key descriptors of our present society. Last night, I started to read a fascinating book that my friend, and old colleague from FirstMark, Jim Hao, recommended a while back called The Big Sort by Bill Bishop . It’s a deep and thoughtful analysis into the division of our country and its increased political polarization. It proffers a unique answer, of which I was previously unaware, as to why our country’s division is growing and what may be its root cause. The book begins in Texas, with the author, Bill Bishop, describing how he and his wife chose the location of their residence in Austin. My wife and I made the move to Austin, Texas, in the way of middle-class American migrants. We rented a Ford Taurus at the airport, bought an Austin map at a U-Tote-Um quick stop, and toured the city in search of a place to live. We didn’t have a list of necessities—granite countertops or schools with killer SATs — as much as we had a mental image of the place we belonged. We drove and when a place felt comfortable, seemed right, my wife, the daughter of one of Kentucky’s last New Deal liberals, drew a smiley face on the map. (pg. 1) What Bishop stresses from page one is that his decision to move, like that of many Americans, is not driven by some innate desire to be closer to your own political party, but rather by the simple and noble search for a community where they belong and a place that matches their desired way of life. I hadn’t previously given much thought to the migration patterns of Americans. As Bishop also admits, “this was not an area of concern for most of those who wrote about politics.” That was until he met Robert Cushing, a sociologist and statistician in Texas. They, along with a small group of researchers, began to look more closely at the impact American migration patterns were having on local economies, cultural shifts, and political partisanship. What they found, they characterized as “the big sort.” “Between 4 and 5% of the US population moves each year from one county to another—100 million Americans in the past decade.” (pg. 5) Another point Bishop makes early on in the book is that we, as citizens, actually do not live in states. We live in communities. We “have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics.” He continues “little, if any, of this political migration was by design, a conscious effort by people to live among like-voting neighbors.” He also shares how some of the first people to realize these new clusters were not politicians, but rather marketers. Bishop cites J. Walker Smith, a marketing analyst who described the clustering as a new sort of “self-invention.” “ Technology, migration, and material abundance all allow people to wrap themselves into cocoons entirely of their own making. They’re unwilling to live with trade-offs so they recreate their environments to fit what they want in all kinds of ways, and one of the ways is they are finding communities that fit their values—where they don’t have to live with neighbors or community groups that might for them to compromise their principles or their tastes.” One of the key indicators Bishop and his colleagues use to track the severity of clusters is how many voters live in landslide election areas—that is to say, somewhere that had ≥20% victory margins for one party or the other. In 1976, just over 26% of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2004, that number had skyrocketed to almost 50%. Bishop goes on to explain and eloquently discount the two previously dominant theories for the increased polarization in America: (1) a nefarious process of gerrymandering and (2) a political conspiracy by Republicans. Neither, he argues, appropriately account for the division. Rather, he posits a third theory might provide the most accurate answer to the question “what is driving America apart?” A final theory that I offer to explain the decline in partisan competitiveness at the congressional district level rests on the increased mobility of Americans and the corresponding growth in the freedom to select where they will reside. (pg. 35) I won’t go much deeper into the book, as you should all grab yourself a copy, but Bishop has most certainly captured my attention. He has a remarkable way of conveying complex political and demographic shifts in terms that all can understand but without loss of nuance. If the first 35 pages are any indication, this will continue to be a page-turner for me. For now, I’ll leave you with the quote from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness that Bishop shares at the onset of the book’s introduction: Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. A Conversation with Bill Bishop, author of THE BIG SORT. Q. Okay, what do you mean by "The Big Sort"? The quick answer is that most places, most communities in the nation, are growing more politically one-sided — either more solidly Democratic in presidential elections or more reliably Republican. The "red" and "blue" maps of the states are totally misleading. The real differences in American politics today are found at the level of the community. We're increasingly sorting into communities that reliably vote Democratic or Republican in presidential elections. But our political differences are really just the tip of what has been a social and economic transformation. The nation has sorted in nearly every way imaginable. Young people have congregated in some cities and left others. People with college degrees have increasingly clustered in particular places. Not only have demographic groups sorted themselves into particular places, we've also constructed our social lives so that we spend more time around like-minded others. Over the last thirty years, our civic clubs, our neighborhoods, and our churches have all grown more politically homogenous. Q. So, "birds of a feather," right? What's new about that? Nothing. From the first day we're alive, we learn that there is safety among those who are like ourselves — and danger in disagreeing with others. Birds of a feather flock together because that's the way birds survive. This has always been true and America has at times been extraordinarily polarized geographically. (There was the Civil War, after all.) What was remarkable to us was that the country is growing more politically and culturally polarized now. We live in a time when day-to-day survival for most Americans is assured; when social safety nets reduce the need to depend on family; when Americans have unprecedented choice about where and how to live — but given all this freedom and opportunity to live where and how we like the rates of political segmentation are increasing. Why are our communities growing more segregated now ? That's what the Big Sort is about. Q. Oh, so this is another one of those books about political polarization — the culture wars? Bob Cushing and I didn't go looking for political division. We started by trying to understand why some cities were doing so much better than others economically — why some places were producing loads of technology and patents while others seemed to stagnate. Bob was recently retired from the University of Texas sociology department, but he was a statistician at heart, a computer wizard. Bob went through dozens of calculations and what he saw over and again was that while different places in the country were busy converging after World War II, beginning in the 1970s, they began to diverge. The country was sorting and that was causing certain places to boom economically. The places where educated people moved were getting richer. The places where young people were moving were producing more patents. But the sorting wasn't strictly demographic. We could see that basic beliefs varied place to place. The communities that had less traditional cultures — for example, places where people were less likely to submit to traditional sources of authority — were the country's most economically vibrant cities. And, we eventually discovered, these places were growing more Democratic in presidential elections. Q. Isn't the whole lesson of the 2008 election that the country is sick of this "red" and "blue" way of thinking? No question. People — especially Americans — hate disagreement. That's why they put themselves in churches, neighborhoods, and clubs where they easily find agreement. It's interesting, however, that when pollsters ask about compromise, most Democrats and Republicans believe their side has given enough — that it's time for the other side to see the error of their ways. We all seem to think it's the other side that's causing the problems. So, yes, there's a lot of talk about the end of partisanship. We just don't see anybody changing neighborhoods. Q. Are you saying 2008 will be a repeat of 2000 and 2004? There's no telling, of course. But already you can see The Big Sort at work in the primaries. The maps of Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and Missouri in the Democratic primary are all deeply marked by geographic segmentation. Senator Barack Obama won the traditional Democratic spanholds in the cities. Senator Hillary Clinton won the communities that voted Republican in the last several presidential elections. Q. Some new states are up for grabs, though, right? The maps are changing. Sure they are — largely because of the Big Sort. Colorado has been trending Democratic recently — but not all of Colorado. The parts of the state that are magnets for people moving to Colorado from other states are the places where Democrats are gaining ground. The Colorado counties with the least in-migration are actually growing more Republican. It's significant that the county that has sent the most people to Colorado over the last fifteen years or so has been deeply Democratic Los Angeles, California. Q. Let's agree for the time being that we are segregating by political belief. What makes that such a bad thing? There are advantages to the Big Sort. While the national government is stymied by disagreement between two intractable sides, local governments where majorities are span are engaged in thousands of policy experiments. Some open Bible classes in their high schools. Others adopt regulations aimed at reducing the gases that contribute to global warming. Federalism is alive, well and multiplying like dandelions. America was established, however, to benefit from this national diversity. The Founders believed that when people with diverging opinions hashed out their differences face-to-face, the country would be better off. The clashing of opinions would produce a better result. It was a brilliant insight. The Founders sought to make diversity a creative force. Differences didn't have to end in hate. They could be wielded to craft the best answer to problems. The Founders sought to turn the vice of disagreement into the virtue of new understanding. Now that simply doesn't happen — in Congress, in our legislatures, or between our increasingly isolated neighborhoods. We've replaced a belief in a nation with an oversized trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings. Q. So how did all this come about? We trace this story in the book. Briefly, though, the country fractured in the 1960s — around 1965, to be precise. In that one year, trust in major institutions began to decline; membership in mainline churches started to drop; divorce and crime rates began to climb; allegiance to political party dissolved as people lost faith in traditional party labels; membership in long-standing civic organizations (the Elks, bowling leagues) started to drop, as did the percentage of daily newspaper readers. Society seemed to unravel all at once, and when it came back together, the broad-based institutions that had sustained this country were replaced by ones that were more politically homogenous. For example, as mainline churches — Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans — lost members, independent and evangelical churches gained. Preachers coming through seminary in the 1970s and '80s, such as evangelist Rick Warren, were taught to build their congregations by catering to like-minded groups. This technique was literally called the "homogenous unit principle" of church growth and it was wildly successful in this new, post-'65 world. Similarly, just as the broad-based clubs like the Elks lost people, more targeted groups, like Common Cause, formed and found a following. This shift in association — from general to specific — happened across society. For companies, there weren't mass markets any longer, only individual consumers to be targeted and then supplied with just the product they wanted. The country sorted into separate groupings of lifestyle and belief. We left behind a country that was striving to be whole in 1965, with the passage of civil rights laws and universal health care coverage for the elderly, and we began to sequester ourselves into tribes of like beliefs, images, neighborhoods, and markets. Q. And where is this going — in, say, November 2008? Remember, the Big Sort isn't at heart a political phenomenon. It's the way we've come to live over the past thirty years. Still, the 2008 campaign will be played out on this landscape. The Bush campaign in '04 was the first to figure out that the way to win the presidency wasn't through persuasion, but by mobilizing the social groups defined by church, neighborhood, and communities of interest. So far, Senator Obama has done the best job building a political campaign among these local social networks. There are a couple of question for the fall campaign. Has there been enough migration to change the statewide totals in states such as Colorado, Nevada, or Virginia? Will those living in the inner suburbs continue to shift toward the Democrat? Will either side be able to recreate the social network campaign Bush devised in '04? Of course, the question the country ought to be trying to answer has nothing to do with one election. It's whether the nation can adequately function if we've lost the democratic tradition of accommodating difference through compromise and a shared understanding of a way of life. That may be one of the most important issues facing the man or woman who wins the presidency. Political segregation The Big Sort. SOME folks in Texas recently decided to start a new community “containing 100% Ron Paul supporters”. Mr Paul is a staunch libertarian and, until recently, a Republican presidential candidate. His most ardent fans are invited to build homesteads in “Paulville”, an empty patch of west Texas. Here, they will be free. Free not to pay “for other people's lifestyles [they] may not agree with”. And free from the irksome society of those who do not share their love of liberty. Cynics chuckle, and even Mr Paul sounds unenthusiastic about the Paulville project, in which he had no hand. But his followers' desire to segregate themselves is not unusual. Americans are increasingly forming like-minded clusters. Conservatives are choosing to live near other conservatives, and liberals near liberals. A good way to measure this is to look at the country's changing electoral geography. In 1976 Jimmy Carter won the presidency with 50.1% of the popular vote. Though the race was close, some 26.8% of Americans were in “landslide counties” that year, where Mr Carter either won or lost by 20 percentage points or more. The proportion of Americans who live in such landslide counties has nearly doubled since then. In the dead-heat election of 2000, it was 45.3%. When George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004, it was a whopping 48.3%. As the playwright Arthur Miller put it that year: “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?” Clustering is how. County-level data understate the degree of ideological segregation, reckons Bill Bishop, the author of a gripping new book called “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart”. Counties can be big. Cook County, Illinois, (which includes Chicago), has over 5m inhabitants. Beaverhead County, Montana, covers 5,600 square miles (14,400 square kilometres). The neighbourhoods people care about are much smaller. Americans move house often, usually for practical reasons. Before choosing a new neighbourhood, they drive around it. They notice whether it has gun shops, evangelical churches and “ W ” bumper stickers, or yoga classes and organic fruit shops. Perhaps unconsciously, they are drawn to places where they expect to fit in. Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “Big Sort” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more. For Americans who move to a new city, the choice is often not between a posh neighbourhood and a run-down one, but between several different neighbourhoods that are economically similar but culturally distinct. For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you've heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be. At a bookshop in Bethesda (one of those posh Maryland suburbs), Steven Balis, a retired lawyer with wild grey hair and a scruffy T -shirt, looks up from his New York Times . He says he is a Democrat because of “the absence of alternatives”. He comes from a family of secular Jews who supported the New Deal. He holds “positive notions of what government actions can accomplish”. Asked why he moved to Maryland rather than Virginia, he jokes that the far side of the river is “Confederate territory”. Asked if he has hard-core social-conservative acquaintances, he answers simply: “No.” Groupthink. Because Americans are so mobile, even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbours leads over time to severe segregation. An accountant in Texas, for example, can live anywhere she wants, so the liberal ones move to the funky bits of Austin while the more conservative ones prefer the exurbs of Dallas. Conservative Californians can find refuge in Orange County or the Central Valley. Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called “Hearing the Other Side”, Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them. Intriguingly, the more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. (Hence Mr Miller's confusion.) Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile. One study that covered most of the 1980s and 1990s found that 45% of young Americans with a college degree moved state within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high- school education did. There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats. Residential segregation is not the only force Balkanising American politics, frets Mr Bishop. Multiple cable channels allow viewers to watch only news that reinforces their prejudices. The internet offers an even finer filter. Websites such as conservativedates.com or democraticsingles.net help Americans find ideologically predictable mates. And the home-schooling movement, which has grown rapidly in recent decades, shields more than 1m American children from almost any ideas their parents dislike. Melynda Wortendyke, a devout Christian who teaches all six of her children at her home in Virginia, says she took her eldest out of public kindergarten because she thought the standards there were low, but also because the kids were exposed to a book about lesbian mothers. “We now live in a giant feedback loop,” says Mr Bishop, “hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.” Shouting at each other. One might ask: so what? If people are happier living with like-minded neighbours, why shouldn't they? No one is obviously harmed. Mr Bishop does not, of course, suggest curbing Americans' right to freedom of association. But he worries about some of its consequences. Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems. America, says Mr Bishop, is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” He has a point. Republicans who never meet Democrats tend to assume that Democrats believe more extreme things than they really do, and vice versa. This contributes to the nasty tone of many political campaigns. Mr Bishop goes too far, however, when he says the “big sort” is “tearing [America] apart”. American politics may be polarised, but at least no one is coming to blows over it. “We respect each other's views,” says Mrs Wortendyke of the few liberals in the home-schooling movement. “We hate each other cordially,” says the liberal Mr Balis. This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The Big Sort" The Big Sort : Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing Us Apart. The author proves beyond a shadow of a doubt with well researched and documented evidence that "The Big Sort" is a real modern phenomenon. Where this book fails is proving that it is bad. There's some . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. In this interesting book Bill Bishop describes the polarization of American politics from 1965 onwards. He is fairly obviously a Democrat but goes out of his way to speak to new millennium Republicans . Читать весь отзыв.