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.