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The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
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 as we do. This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion 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 groundbreaking work.
In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even 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 Putnam'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.
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 as we do. This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion 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 groundbreaking work.
In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even 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 Putnam'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.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2008
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July 20, 2008
Call it the "Election 2000" riddle: How is it that the country can be so fatally, psychotically split between the two irreconcilable extremes of Bush and Gore when everyone I know - literally everyone - is a Gore supporter except for my grandparents in Kerrville, TX, who took the Hobbit away from me when I was seven years old because they thought it was Satanic? The Big Sort suggests that for the first time in American history, the average person has the ability to choose where they want to live and, increasingly, this decision is being dictated less by where you were born and/or your level of socio-economic opportunity and more by the increasing self-selection of a community that fits your "lifestyle" - this is, though Bill Bishop never explicitly calls it this, the sort of "Nike-ization" of communities. You pick where you live because it has the same set of priorities that you do on things like abortion, gay rights, gun control, coffeeshops, megachurches, indie rock, monster trucks, etc. The aggregate effect of this self-selection by demographic (which is the Big Sort) is to create intensely like-minded communities which form gigantic echo-chambers and collectively intensify their own opinions - bike loving communities like Portland, OR or Seattle become psychotically bike worshiping, gun loving communities become psychotically gun worshiping, and dissent is generally not tolerated on the right or the left.
Bishop cites a lot of old studies about the tendency of homogeneous groups to become militant and hostile when confronted with an "other" to argue that the division of the country into increasingly like-minded factions has led us into a "winner takes all" nightmare where a President like Bush doesn't need to make even cursory nods to the 49% of the country he is not representing.
I'm only 29, so as far as I can remember, it's always been this way. The country has always been divided in a poisonous, non-discursive way, and Republicans have always seemed like dangerous lunatics with an incomprehensible, somewhat reprehensible way of life. The rural, conservative parts of the country exist to be occasionally romanticized and conceptualized like a vacation resort, or a gigantic, empty space between San Francisco and Boulder, or Boulder and Minneapolis, whatever. Bishop insists that things weren't always this way, and goes back to (of all things) the Carter administration as the time that people were most likely to live next to people who didn't square up with them exactly on every political issue. There's a bit of the romantic embedded in this too, at least from the perspective of a guy born in 1978 who has no frame of reference for a non-combative protomodernity where democrats and republicans banded together in their desire not to live next to black people.
Race is one of a lot of things missing from this book. Bishop acknowledges that the old bogeymen of race and class still exist in today's America, but he's not interested in them so they don't factor much. He's much more interested in church.
Prepare to hear a lot about church if you pick up this book. Bishop traces the philosophical genesis of "sorting" back to a strategic shift in American churches when they started figuring out that parishioners were more likely to be attracted to a church if it was staffed with people exactly like them. Churches stopped trying to administer to the town where they were located and started advancing themselves as a "lifestyle" church - young, hip sorts would go to one church, severe faced fundamentalists would go to another. He spends a good 100 pages on this strategic split, going so far as to interview churchgoers in various parts of the country and stand back and marvel at how irreconcilably different they are. It's not entirely clear to me whether he intends to put forth this change in church strategy as a particularly detailed example of The Big Sort at work or if he actually thinks churches are what caused The Big Sort in the first place. Either way, he spends way too much time on it, and neglects some of the bigger questions, like:
How does the internet, with its facility for non-geographically derived identity structures, speak to the Big Sort?
Are race and class that irrelevant, and if they are, how do you account for the demographic reorganization (and in some cases, out and out white flight) happening in high-immigration areas?
If The Big Sort is such a recipe for cataclysm, how can it be stopped, addressed or even talked about? Is this book meant, in any way, to try to address how to deal with the implications of this demographic resorting, or is this merely another entry into the Global Warming/Peak Oil lexicon of books that amount to passive description without taking the tough-but-necessary stab at a solution?
Oh, if you're from one of those hip towns like Portland, Ann Arbor, San Francisco or, especially, Austin, you should read this book just for the handjob. As much as he tries, Bishop can't hide the fact that he's from Austin and he moved there to get away from the Republicans. These towns and another dozen or so just like them, Bishop says, are producing about 90% of the creative energy in this country - the patents, the inventions, the art, the music, the brainpower. These cities are home to the "creative class", and it's a consistent subtext throughout the book that people who live in those cities are floating on islands of compassion, rationality and humanism lost in a sea of backward, paranoid prosimians slavering over their guns and fearing any and all change. This gives us liberal types the answer we've been secretly craving for the Bush vs Gore dilemma: The reason we don't ever meet Bush supporters is because they're crazy a-holes and we don't have the slightest bit in common with them. We're smarter than they are, we're more compassionate than they are, we're better than they are.
Of course, they feel the same way about us. Good thing we don't have to spend much time together.
Bishop cites a lot of old studies about the tendency of homogeneous groups to become militant and hostile when confronted with an "other" to argue that the division of the country into increasingly like-minded factions has led us into a "winner takes all" nightmare where a President like Bush doesn't need to make even cursory nods to the 49% of the country he is not representing.
I'm only 29, so as far as I can remember, it's always been this way. The country has always been divided in a poisonous, non-discursive way, and Republicans have always seemed like dangerous lunatics with an incomprehensible, somewhat reprehensible way of life. The rural, conservative parts of the country exist to be occasionally romanticized and conceptualized like a vacation resort, or a gigantic, empty space between San Francisco and Boulder, or Boulder and Minneapolis, whatever. Bishop insists that things weren't always this way, and goes back to (of all things) the Carter administration as the time that people were most likely to live next to people who didn't square up with them exactly on every political issue. There's a bit of the romantic embedded in this too, at least from the perspective of a guy born in 1978 who has no frame of reference for a non-combative protomodernity where democrats and republicans banded together in their desire not to live next to black people.
Race is one of a lot of things missing from this book. Bishop acknowledges that the old bogeymen of race and class still exist in today's America, but he's not interested in them so they don't factor much. He's much more interested in church.
Prepare to hear a lot about church if you pick up this book. Bishop traces the philosophical genesis of "sorting" back to a strategic shift in American churches when they started figuring out that parishioners were more likely to be attracted to a church if it was staffed with people exactly like them. Churches stopped trying to administer to the town where they were located and started advancing themselves as a "lifestyle" church - young, hip sorts would go to one church, severe faced fundamentalists would go to another. He spends a good 100 pages on this strategic split, going so far as to interview churchgoers in various parts of the country and stand back and marvel at how irreconcilably different they are. It's not entirely clear to me whether he intends to put forth this change in church strategy as a particularly detailed example of The Big Sort at work or if he actually thinks churches are what caused The Big Sort in the first place. Either way, he spends way too much time on it, and neglects some of the bigger questions, like:
How does the internet, with its facility for non-geographically derived identity structures, speak to the Big Sort?
Are race and class that irrelevant, and if they are, how do you account for the demographic reorganization (and in some cases, out and out white flight) happening in high-immigration areas?
If The Big Sort is such a recipe for cataclysm, how can it be stopped, addressed or even talked about? Is this book meant, in any way, to try to address how to deal with the implications of this demographic resorting, or is this merely another entry into the Global Warming/Peak Oil lexicon of books that amount to passive description without taking the tough-but-necessary stab at a solution?
Oh, if you're from one of those hip towns like Portland, Ann Arbor, San Francisco or, especially, Austin, you should read this book just for the handjob. As much as he tries, Bishop can't hide the fact that he's from Austin and he moved there to get away from the Republicans. These towns and another dozen or so just like them, Bishop says, are producing about 90% of the creative energy in this country - the patents, the inventions, the art, the music, the brainpower. These cities are home to the "creative class", and it's a consistent subtext throughout the book that people who live in those cities are floating on islands of compassion, rationality and humanism lost in a sea of backward, paranoid prosimians slavering over their guns and fearing any and all change. This gives us liberal types the answer we've been secretly craving for the Bush vs Gore dilemma: The reason we don't ever meet Bush supporters is because they're crazy a-holes and we don't have the slightest bit in common with them. We're smarter than they are, we're more compassionate than they are, we're better than they are.
Of course, they feel the same way about us. Good thing we don't have to spend much time together.
January 5, 2016
Intriguing title, disappointing delivery... where do I start?
Perhaps with the first 250 (of 300) pages, which repeats the same thing three or four times. There's a "Big Sort" going on, and it's suspicious. The author (barely) managed to convince me, but that doesn't mean I want to be convinced several times. This section should have been 100, 150 pages max.
The real decent ideas about why sorting ourselves into homogeneous groups is meaningful doesn't occur until the last 50 pages, and even then the author doesn't realize how meaningful it is. For example, he barely touches on the idea of political candidates trying to appear like they belong to the other party's group, and doesn't appear to realize why that is or IS NOT a good idea. No mention that doing that kind of thing makes you vulnerable to accusations that you don't really belong to the party you're actually in, which these days can be political suicide. And that's one reason the Big Sort might be tearing us apart.
About that: although it's the subtitle of the book, and supposedly one of the big points, there's only five pages spent presenting a feasible suggestion for why or how the Big Sort might actually be tearing us apart. This book needed to be planned better and written by someone who could think through their ideas and actually support their claims, when they bother to make any.
I came to this book skeptical of the title's claim, and after reading the first third was less convinced than when I started. I am now a tad more convinced that, in some ways, our sorting ourselves into homogeneous groups is tearing us apart, but only because I see the potential arguments and ideas that should have been elaborated in the book.
However, this is not the crisis the author keeps trying to hint. I'm a living counter example of what the author says is happening, someone who doesn't self-select into one party or the other, who actively considers both sides AND votes (and doesn't vote straight-ticket), and I have lots of friends with different opinions and we discuss them all the time. And I choose to live somewhere people often don't share the same values or beliefs as myself. To all of you who made it this far, sorry for the rant.
Perhaps with the first 250 (of 300) pages, which repeats the same thing three or four times. There's a "Big Sort" going on, and it's suspicious. The author (barely) managed to convince me, but that doesn't mean I want to be convinced several times. This section should have been 100, 150 pages max.
The real decent ideas about why sorting ourselves into homogeneous groups is meaningful doesn't occur until the last 50 pages, and even then the author doesn't realize how meaningful it is. For example, he barely touches on the idea of political candidates trying to appear like they belong to the other party's group, and doesn't appear to realize why that is or IS NOT a good idea. No mention that doing that kind of thing makes you vulnerable to accusations that you don't really belong to the party you're actually in, which these days can be political suicide. And that's one reason the Big Sort might be tearing us apart.
About that: although it's the subtitle of the book, and supposedly one of the big points, there's only five pages spent presenting a feasible suggestion for why or how the Big Sort might actually be tearing us apart. This book needed to be planned better and written by someone who could think through their ideas and actually support their claims, when they bother to make any.
I came to this book skeptical of the title's claim, and after reading the first third was less convinced than when I started. I am now a tad more convinced that, in some ways, our sorting ourselves into homogeneous groups is tearing us apart, but only because I see the potential arguments and ideas that should have been elaborated in the book.
However, this is not the crisis the author keeps trying to hint. I'm a living counter example of what the author says is happening, someone who doesn't self-select into one party or the other, who actively considers both sides AND votes (and doesn't vote straight-ticket), and I have lots of friends with different opinions and we discuss them all the time. And I choose to live somewhere people often don't share the same values or beliefs as myself. To all of you who made it this far, sorry for the rant.
November 15, 2013
Maybe because it's part of my job to understand how people think or what drives them to make certain decisions that The Big Sort has had such a big impact on my thinking.
Its thesis, in brief, is this: Since the 1970s, tens of millions of Americans have packed up and moved, largely for jobs. And when they do, they settle in neighborhoods where pretty nearly everyone is just like them: same outlook, same political leanings, same church-going habits (or not), same education level, same political party, etc. Once settled-in, these modern day tribe members have little need to talk to or associate with people who think differently. Add to that the fact that our niche-marketed economy reinforces this behavior and serves their tribal preferences, these folks have no desire to "think outside the tribe."
In political terms we call this polarization. Author and newspaperman Bill Bishop calls it dangerous to our nation.
Bishop, assisted by statistician/demographer Robert G. Cushing, pulls his conclusions largely from Census data and voting records, and backs it up with science-based psychological and behavioral studies. He makes a compelling case.
In a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, Bishop tells us that what we thought we knew about political polarization is wrong. It was not caused by repeal of The Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan Administration (giving birth to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh), he says. It was not caused by Karl Rove as he taught the Bush campaign to "play to your base." According to Bishop, it happened one little decision at a time over the years, every time someone relocated. The Limbaughs and Roves of this world, as well as niche marketers, simply exploited the reality they perceived.
One especially telling episode involves Christian celebrity pastor Rick Warren. Bishop describes the lengthy and painstaking demographic research that Warren did before establishing his wildly successful Saddleback church. In short, Warren studied the numbers to find the perfect location and then tailored the show to suit the audience.
Going even further back, Bishop describes how earlier missionaries---ones Warren leaned on---learned that the path to success lay in making the "target audience" feel welcome and comfortable, not in cramming the gospel down their throats. To extend this to contemporary migrations and affiliations: People go where they feel they fit and are welcome.
Edging close to Bowling Alone, Bishop describes the erosion of mainline churches, civic organizations, and Farm Bureau, all associations of heterogeneous groups, as their members vote with their feet and move to homogeneous (yes, polarized) organizations like evangelical Christian churches, or The Sierra Club---a church in its own right, if one listens to the words of its founder John Muir.
A couple other highlights (don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger)
* Since the 1970s, the "undecided middle" has grown smaller and smaller as one analyzes county voting patterns in presidential elections. "Landslide counties"---those where the winner wins a 20 percent or larger margin over the loser---are increasing rapidly in number.
* The single most telling indicator of all other behaviors and attitudes is church-going versus not
* Education is highly indicative and has an inverse relationship with church habits
* Lower-educated people tend to relocate to lower-educated places and earn less
What's the future for a society that is fragmenting like this? Disagreements about everything from social services to health care to banking subsidies to war to state funding of education (and what text books to adopt) permeate our society.
Two fundamental realities are colliding head-on:
(1) as places become more densely populated, they tend to become more socialistic (to provide services and protect people from one another), hence both higher taxes and the need to tax those who disagree
(2) increasing fragmentation of society and greater resentment of being taxed to support things you disagree with
What's the solution?
Bishop gives us a lot to chew on. But not a lot of hope.
Its thesis, in brief, is this: Since the 1970s, tens of millions of Americans have packed up and moved, largely for jobs. And when they do, they settle in neighborhoods where pretty nearly everyone is just like them: same outlook, same political leanings, same church-going habits (or not), same education level, same political party, etc. Once settled-in, these modern day tribe members have little need to talk to or associate with people who think differently. Add to that the fact that our niche-marketed economy reinforces this behavior and serves their tribal preferences, these folks have no desire to "think outside the tribe."
In political terms we call this polarization. Author and newspaperman Bill Bishop calls it dangerous to our nation.
Bishop, assisted by statistician/demographer Robert G. Cushing, pulls his conclusions largely from Census data and voting records, and backs it up with science-based psychological and behavioral studies. He makes a compelling case.
In a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, Bishop tells us that what we thought we knew about political polarization is wrong. It was not caused by repeal of The Fairness Doctrine by the Reagan Administration (giving birth to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh), he says. It was not caused by Karl Rove as he taught the Bush campaign to "play to your base." According to Bishop, it happened one little decision at a time over the years, every time someone relocated. The Limbaughs and Roves of this world, as well as niche marketers, simply exploited the reality they perceived.
One especially telling episode involves Christian celebrity pastor Rick Warren. Bishop describes the lengthy and painstaking demographic research that Warren did before establishing his wildly successful Saddleback church. In short, Warren studied the numbers to find the perfect location and then tailored the show to suit the audience.
Going even further back, Bishop describes how earlier missionaries---ones Warren leaned on---learned that the path to success lay in making the "target audience" feel welcome and comfortable, not in cramming the gospel down their throats. To extend this to contemporary migrations and affiliations: People go where they feel they fit and are welcome.
Edging close to Bowling Alone, Bishop describes the erosion of mainline churches, civic organizations, and Farm Bureau, all associations of heterogeneous groups, as their members vote with their feet and move to homogeneous (yes, polarized) organizations like evangelical Christian churches, or The Sierra Club---a church in its own right, if one listens to the words of its founder John Muir.
A couple other highlights (don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger)
* Since the 1970s, the "undecided middle" has grown smaller and smaller as one analyzes county voting patterns in presidential elections. "Landslide counties"---those where the winner wins a 20 percent or larger margin over the loser---are increasing rapidly in number.
* The single most telling indicator of all other behaviors and attitudes is church-going versus not
* Education is highly indicative and has an inverse relationship with church habits
* Lower-educated people tend to relocate to lower-educated places and earn less
What's the future for a society that is fragmenting like this? Disagreements about everything from social services to health care to banking subsidies to war to state funding of education (and what text books to adopt) permeate our society.
Two fundamental realities are colliding head-on:
(1) as places become more densely populated, they tend to become more socialistic (to provide services and protect people from one another), hence both higher taxes and the need to tax those who disagree
(2) increasing fragmentation of society and greater resentment of being taxed to support things you disagree with
What's the solution?
Bishop gives us a lot to chew on. But not a lot of hope.
August 28, 2017
In my work exploring the future of education and technology I keep researching social, economic, and cultural trends. One part of that involves investigating what happened to both American education and society since 1975 or so, after the generation when we rebuilt higher ed. In that world (2008) has loomed large for the past few years, and I'm glad to have finally gotten to read it.
The key argument Bill Bishop* makes is that Americans have been balkanizing into like-minded communities since around 1975, building up "a new order based on individual choice."
How did this occur? In brief, "[t]he melting pot turned out to be a flop." (186) Bishop sees domestic (between and within states) migration turning a mixed nation into a divided one, as people physically pulled up stakes to be with their political and cultural ilk. He identifies a crisis or break point in the upheavals of the 1960s (1965 is his key year), after which a consensus culture was no longer possible, and we started the trek towards an American divided thoroughly into red versus blue.
Changes in city structures are also vital, as Bishop sees two kinds of cities appearing: -style creative class urban areas and more traditional, manufacturing and service-oriented ones, with each embodying a different culture.**
More: "After 1990... high-tech cities... were Democratic strongholds. Manufacturing cities and rural areas moved in the opposite direction, growing more Republican." (153) That urban-rural divide looms large for The Big Sort, as the countryside's red politics deepen. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from a Republican activist: "I have a theory that the farther away you are from another human being, the more likely you are to be a Republican." (204) Meanwhile Democrats sometimes see themselves as occupying no rural areas at all, but living in a set of cities linked by invisible cultural strands, which one 2004 manifesto dubbed (270).
At the elite level, Republican and Democratic politicians are not only more polarized in their policy work and public statements, but also cease to socialize with each other in private (248). Technology and service economies are also split, which Bishop neatly sums up as Google versus McDonald's (135).
Marketing plays a key role in making this happen, as advertising and political outreach shifted from broadcast messaging in the middle of the 20th century to targeting individuals. Religion also looms large in Bishop's account, as people sort themselves into not just denominations, but homogeneous churches, helped along by an ecclesiastical strategy of embracing like-minded small groups, even cells.
Education helps drive these differences (121), acting as a feedback loop:
I admire several things about the book, beyond its thesis, which makes a general sense. Bishop begins his account by setting it apart from some popular explanations for current political and cultural divisions. For instance, he criticizes the attention paid to as an explanation of conservative political power, noting that liberals rapidly developed their own "political infrastructure to counter foundations on the right" (228; 32). Later he credits Republican party activists for breakthroughs in data analysis and targeted marketing in 2004, developments sometimes overshadowed by the GOP's failures in 2008 and 2012 (253ff).
I was pleasantly surprised to see the book spending so much time on West Virginia and Kentucky, states usually ignored as flyover country, especially by many urbanists. Bishop's account of is very nicely done, being open minded and careful with local details (chapter 5). For a 2008 book, The Big Sort is noteworthy for focusing on the opioid epidemic, and with sympathy.
Perhaps most powerfully, Bishop notes that migration patterns are shifting economic power away from many red areas and settling them in blue cities. Ominously: "[t]here is simply no telling what the consequences will be of this kind of economic sorting." (56) . Readers may see the Trump presidency as one consequence.
I was impressed that Bishop took religion very seriously throughout the book. To put my cards on the table, I'm not a religious person, but I think many humanists fail to give it enough credit for shaping society and individuals. The Big Sort sees Americans sorting out through religious denominations and individual churches, and also reminds us that the supermajority of this population are religious, despite centuries of expectations that modern societies would become secular. I was especially impressed by Bishop's quotation from Peter Francia: "It is not a culture war between red states and blue states, but rather a war between Fundamentalists and biblical Minimalists within both the red and blue states" (caps in original; 126). This is one way of thinking about Democratic and liberal efforts to embrace or mobilize religion, like the campaign.
I was also impressed that The Big Sort addressed the contemporary socialization of warfighting, a topic weirdly and importantly invisible today. The book accurately notes that most soldiers now come from rural and poor areas (137-8).
However, The Big Sort runs into a series of problems which weaken its thesis and applicability.
For one, there's little attention given to forces and trends that oppose differences and individuation.
Bishop admits that there's a countervailing trend of homogenization through chain stores (37), but doesn't address this seriously, despite its major presence in the retail economy. Elsewhere his media argument suffers from a lack of awareness that for most of American history we've preferred openly partisan media (the mid-20th-century ideal of objective journalism and Walter Cronkite is an exception), and that mainstream media (think movies, tv fiction, network tv "news", non-local websites, most books, computer games, etc) often aims for a generic audience. Except for Hollywood, which is now pointed towards a Chinese market. I would love to see Bishop address American English issues, too, but that language remains a standard.
Race is a very silent part of The Big Sort . It seems like most of the populations the book investigates are white, or at least not racially identified, which is often the same thing. Rarely does it touch on non-white experiences. Passages like this only hint at a larger picture: "The melting pot turned out to be a flop. People, classes, and races didn't 'melt' as expected." (emphases added; 186) . The whiteness of Portland isn't a major factor in Bishop's description, nor the blackness of Detroit. Latino immigration doesn't seem to play a role in the book, despite its enormous impact on nearly every aspect of American life. Jews are mentioned only three times (two of those in footnotes). I couldn't find references to Asian-Americans and Native Americans. I don't think I need to argue why this is a problem.
At another level The Big Sort relies strongly on 's idea that Americans are changing our political priorities from a focus on material issues (economics) to "post-materialist" topics (culture, personal identity, sexuality) (84ff). Bishop's reading unfortunately downplays material concerns, neatly avoiding a left-wing critique of American economics and politics: "The new society was more about personal taste and worldview than public policy." (104) This also sidesteps the very real material concerns of marginalized populations too easily pigeonholed under "identity", such as personal safety and unequal compensation. To be fair, late in The Big Sort Bishop admits that "economic matters... and civil rights" issues from the early and mid-20th century persist, underneath "the new cultural issues [that were subsequently] added on." (230) But the latter are far, far more important in the book than the former.
In fact, The Big Sort is at times either apolitical or just plain centrist. The book's account of Bill Clinton taking the Democrats from liberalism to centrism weirdly insists Republicans had nothing to do with it (96-7), and that Clinton was basically following American predilections, rather than seeking to influence them. There's no mention of economic entities acting on their own terms, since the book focuses entirely on consumers. Financialization, for example, is hugely important in reshaping America from personal lives to education to cities; it doesn't appear. No does the decline of unions, which is allied to migration out of relatively union-friendly midwestern and northeastern states.
The book also suffers from a deep internal contradiction, which might be its greatest weakness. The Big Sort sees America divided into two, red versus blue, but increasingly due to technologies and methods that frame us an individuals. The latter necessarily means a more complex characterization of people than across two simple dimensions. By the book's own evidence, we should expect a plurality of communities to emerge, rather than American calcifying into a duopoly. Early on Bishop notes that "people don't live in states. They live in communities" (5), a sentiment I agree with. Yet his account can't allow those communities characteristics other than those defining states as red or blue.
As Bishop admits in the main religion chapter, "There is no longer 'brand loyalty' in regard to religion. There are, however, local micro-brands." (175). One paragraph describes a Catskills retreat area that plays host to a variety of religions - Hasidic, Christian, Hindu - and concludes that this is a form of "segregation", but cannot fit that very diversity into cleanly labeled red and blue buckets (200). The book's chapter dwells approvingly on new, youth-driven, and experimental church practices which appear as fascinatingly diverse, and Bishop barely tries to cram them into a red or blue bucket.
A key part of this plurality involves the online world, which barely appears in The Big Sort. One glancing reference occurs in the lifestyle chapter: "People can rent obscure movies through Netflix and buy books at Amazon.com that their local stores can't afford to stock..." (201), then backs away from that to argue for the far greater importance of face to face socialization:
Elsewhere Bishop observes of the 1970s that
Last note: there's a quiet nostalgia running through The Big Sort for a time when people lived together in heterogeneous communities. That strikes me as a deep misreading of the 1940s and 50s, and perhaps it's too much to ask the book to expand on that vision (how much was driven by wartime organization, for example?). Yet that nostalgia - if I'm right - leads to one conclusion I must disagree with. At the book's conclusion there's a longing for, well, obedience:
Let me take a step back to wrap this up. I think Bishop's thesis has a lot of explanatory merit, although he doesn't follow it to where it leads, nor does he factor in key elements. Along the way he offers some good analysis and arguments, accounting for often neglected history. I'm glad he keeps his partisan interest in check for most of the book. It's an important contribution to contemporary discussion, and worth reading both for what it says, and for what it misses.
*Although the book's voice is first person and Bishop is credited on the title page, Robert Cushing seems to have done a ton of stats work. He's also featured on the author flap.
**This is neat, on reflection. Bishop and Cushing worked with Richard Florida, and clearly admire the latter's work. But their insistence on the economic viability of non-creative-class cities has them quietly embracing the work of Florida's nemesis, . So they embrace both sides of a debate without dissing either. Nicely done.
***The LBJ reference is to the first half of Johnson's presidency, which Bishop accurately sees as generating a powerful range of policy activity, especially Great Society programs (Medicare, etc). It's not a pointer towards the, ah, less effective end of his presidency, nor a reference to the war in Vietnam.
The key argument Bill Bishop* makes is that Americans have been balkanizing into like-minded communities since around 1975, building up "a new order based on individual choice."
Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods,
and like-minded sources of news and entertainment.... [these] groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong.(39)
How did this occur? In brief, "[t]he melting pot turned out to be a flop." (186) Bishop sees domestic (between and within states) migration turning a mixed nation into a divided one, as people physically pulled up stakes to be with their political and cultural ilk. He identifies a crisis or break point in the upheavals of the 1960s (1965 is his key year), after which a consensus culture was no longer possible, and we started the trek towards an American divided thoroughly into red versus blue.
Changes in city structures are also vital, as Bishop sees two kinds of cities appearing: -style creative class urban areas and more traditional, manufacturing and service-oriented ones, with each embodying a different culture.**
This is the Big Sort. People who move to Portland [Oregon] want good public transportation and city life. People who don't give a hoot about those things migrate to Phoenix, suburban Dallas, south of Minneapolis, or north of Austin. But people don't move to Portland just because of bike trails and metro stops. They want to be able to buy certain books, see certain kinds of movies, and listen to particular styles of live music. (201)
More: "After 1990... high-tech cities... were Democratic strongholds. Manufacturing cities and rural areas moved in the opposite direction, growing more Republican." (153) That urban-rural divide looms large for The Big Sort, as the countryside's red politics deepen. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from a Republican activist: "I have a theory that the farther away you are from another human being, the more likely you are to be a Republican." (204) Meanwhile Democrats sometimes see themselves as occupying no rural areas at all, but living in a set of cities linked by invisible cultural strands, which one 2004 manifesto dubbed (270).
At the elite level, Republican and Democratic politicians are not only more polarized in their policy work and public statements, but also cease to socialize with each other in private (248). Technology and service economies are also split, which Bishop neatly sums up as Google versus McDonald's (135).
Marketing plays a key role in making this happen, as advertising and political outreach shifted from broadcast messaging in the middle of the 20th century to targeting individuals. Religion also looms large in Bishop's account, as people sort themselves into not just denominations, but homogeneous churches, helped along by an ecclesiastical strategy of embracing like-minded small groups, even cells.
Education helps drive these differences (121), acting as a feedback loop:
Every action produced a self-reinforcing reaction: educated people congregated, creating regional wage disparities, which attracted more educated people to the richer cities - which further increased the disparity in regional economies. The Big Sort was just beginning with education. Or was it ending with education? It was hard to tell.(133)Military experience is another vivid sign of cultural difference (137-8).
I admire several things about the book, beyond its thesis, which makes a general sense. Bishop begins his account by setting it apart from some popular explanations for current political and cultural divisions. For instance, he criticizes the attention paid to as an explanation of conservative political power, noting that liberals rapidly developed their own "political infrastructure to counter foundations on the right" (228; 32). Later he credits Republican party activists for breakthroughs in data analysis and targeted marketing in 2004, developments sometimes overshadowed by the GOP's failures in 2008 and 2012 (253ff).
I was pleasantly surprised to see the book spending so much time on West Virginia and Kentucky, states usually ignored as flyover country, especially by many urbanists. Bishop's account of is very nicely done, being open minded and careful with local details (chapter 5). For a 2008 book, The Big Sort is noteworthy for focusing on the opioid epidemic, and with sympathy.
Perhaps most powerfully, Bishop notes that migration patterns are shifting economic power away from many red areas and settling them in blue cities. Ominously: "[t]here is simply no telling what the consequences will be of this kind of economic sorting." (56) . Readers may see the Trump presidency as one consequence.
I was impressed that Bishop took religion very seriously throughout the book. To put my cards on the table, I'm not a religious person, but I think many humanists fail to give it enough credit for shaping society and individuals. The Big Sort sees Americans sorting out through religious denominations and individual churches, and also reminds us that the supermajority of this population are religious, despite centuries of expectations that modern societies would become secular. I was especially impressed by Bishop's quotation from Peter Francia: "It is not a culture war between red states and blue states, but rather a war between Fundamentalists and biblical Minimalists within both the red and blue states" (caps in original; 126). This is one way of thinking about Democratic and liberal efforts to embrace or mobilize religion, like the campaign.
I was also impressed that The Big Sort addressed the contemporary socialization of warfighting, a topic weirdly and importantly invisible today. The book accurately notes that most soldiers now come from rural and poor areas (137-8).
However, The Big Sort runs into a series of problems which weaken its thesis and applicability.
For one, there's little attention given to forces and trends that oppose differences and individuation.
Bishop admits that there's a countervailing trend of homogenization through chain stores (37), but doesn't address this seriously, despite its major presence in the retail economy. Elsewhere his media argument suffers from a lack of awareness that for most of American history we've preferred openly partisan media (the mid-20th-century ideal of objective journalism and Walter Cronkite is an exception), and that mainstream media (think movies, tv fiction, network tv "news", non-local websites, most books, computer games, etc) often aims for a generic audience. Except for Hollywood, which is now pointed towards a Chinese market. I would love to see Bishop address American English issues, too, but that language remains a standard.
Race is a very silent part of The Big Sort . It seems like most of the populations the book investigates are white, or at least not racially identified, which is often the same thing. Rarely does it touch on non-white experiences. Passages like this only hint at a larger picture: "The melting pot turned out to be a flop. People, classes, and races didn't 'melt' as expected." (emphases added; 186) . The whiteness of Portland isn't a major factor in Bishop's description, nor the blackness of Detroit. Latino immigration doesn't seem to play a role in the book, despite its enormous impact on nearly every aspect of American life. Jews are mentioned only three times (two of those in footnotes). I couldn't find references to Asian-Americans and Native Americans. I don't think I need to argue why this is a problem.
At another level The Big Sort relies strongly on 's idea that Americans are changing our political priorities from a focus on material issues (economics) to "post-materialist" topics (culture, personal identity, sexuality) (84ff). Bishop's reading unfortunately downplays material concerns, neatly avoiding a left-wing critique of American economics and politics: "The new society was more about personal taste and worldview than public policy." (104) This also sidesteps the very real material concerns of marginalized populations too easily pigeonholed under "identity", such as personal safety and unequal compensation. To be fair, late in The Big Sort Bishop admits that "economic matters... and civil rights" issues from the early and mid-20th century persist, underneath "the new cultural issues [that were subsequently] added on." (230) But the latter are far, far more important in the book than the former.
In fact, The Big Sort is at times either apolitical or just plain centrist. The book's account of Bill Clinton taking the Democrats from liberalism to centrism weirdly insists Republicans had nothing to do with it (96-7), and that Clinton was basically following American predilections, rather than seeking to influence them. There's no mention of economic entities acting on their own terms, since the book focuses entirely on consumers. Financialization, for example, is hugely important in reshaping America from personal lives to education to cities; it doesn't appear. No does the decline of unions, which is allied to migration out of relatively union-friendly midwestern and northeastern states.
The book also suffers from a deep internal contradiction, which might be its greatest weakness. The Big Sort sees America divided into two, red versus blue, but increasingly due to technologies and methods that frame us an individuals. The latter necessarily means a more complex characterization of people than across two simple dimensions. By the book's own evidence, we should expect a plurality of communities to emerge, rather than American calcifying into a duopoly. Early on Bishop notes that "people don't live in states. They live in communities" (5), a sentiment I agree with. Yet his account can't allow those communities characteristics other than those defining states as red or blue.
As Bishop admits in the main religion chapter, "There is no longer 'brand loyalty' in regard to religion. There are, however, local micro-brands." (175). One paragraph describes a Catskills retreat area that plays host to a variety of religions - Hasidic, Christian, Hindu - and concludes that this is a form of "segregation", but cannot fit that very diversity into cleanly labeled red and blue buckets (200). The book's chapter dwells approvingly on new, youth-driven, and experimental church practices which appear as fascinatingly diverse, and Bishop barely tries to cram them into a red or blue bucket.
A key part of this plurality involves the online world, which barely appears in The Big Sort. One glancing reference occurs in the lifestyle chapter: "People can rent obscure movies through Netflix and buy books at Amazon.com that their local stores can't afford to stock..." (201), then backs away from that to argue for the far greater importance of face to face socialization:
In the geography of niche markets, however, people can best fill their lives with the stuff or experiences they want only if they live around others with the same tastes. Those interested in seeing a recently released foreign film or the new documentary on Townes Van Zandt on the big screen need to live in a community that can fill that theater. Similarly, someone who wants to participate in a specialized sport, worship in a less than mainstream church, or catch the latest alt-country acts will be drawn to certain locations. (202)This is obviously true on its own terms, but downplays how resourceful we are in striking out beyond the limits of our locales. Our car-happy culture means we readily drive hundreds of miles for valued experiences. And clearly many people find a great deal of value in online life, from movies to romance to information. Partly I'm being unfair to a decade-old book, since the digitization of life has progressed even further since the book came out, but the signs and practices were clear then.
Elsewhere Bishop observes of the 1970s that
The divisions grew finer. The Pepsi Generation had to be divided again between LSD-laced rock singers and blond daughters of Republican presidents, and again between hockey players and golfers, between environmentalists and Evangelicals. Researchers parsed consumers into ever-smaller homogenous groups. (188)Are all hockey players Republicans? Are all proponents of drug decriminalization Democrats? The book is all about clear binaries, especially political ones, which aren't too useful when examining the full range of America.
Last note: there's a quiet nostalgia running through The Big Sort for a time when people lived together in heterogeneous communities. That strikes me as a deep misreading of the 1940s and 50s, and perhaps it's too much to ask the book to expand on that vision (how much was driven by wartime organization, for example?). Yet that nostalgia - if I'm right - leads to one conclusion I must disagree with. At the book's conclusion there's a longing for, well, obedience:
Presidential candidates and op-ed writers often lament the lack of leaders... What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers. The generations that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century lost trust in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of Catholic bishops to the degrees of Free Masons to the stature of federal representatives. There haven't been any new LBJs because the whole notion of leadership has changed - and the whole shape of democracy is changing."For the worse" echoed off of those pages, at least for me. That longing for obedience, that sadness about skepticism, depresses me as a writer, educator, parent, and human being.
(298-9)***
Let me take a step back to wrap this up. I think Bishop's thesis has a lot of explanatory merit, although he doesn't follow it to where it leads, nor does he factor in key elements. Along the way he offers some good analysis and arguments, accounting for often neglected history. I'm glad he keeps his partisan interest in check for most of the book. It's an important contribution to contemporary discussion, and worth reading both for what it says, and for what it misses.
*Although the book's voice is first person and Bishop is credited on the title page, Robert Cushing seems to have done a ton of stats work. He's also featured on the author flap.
**This is neat, on reflection. Bishop and Cushing worked with Richard Florida, and clearly admire the latter's work. But their insistence on the economic viability of non-creative-class cities has them quietly embracing the work of Florida's nemesis, . So they embrace both sides of a debate without dissing either. Nicely done.
***The LBJ reference is to the first half of Johnson's presidency, which Bishop accurately sees as generating a powerful range of policy activity, especially Great Society programs (Medicare, etc). It's not a pointer towards the, ah, less effective end of his presidency, nor a reference to the war in Vietnam.
March 27, 2013
The premise of this book is that Americans are self-sorting themselves into like-minded communities, which in turn makes them become more extreme due to lack of experience with opposing viewpoints.
I started this book with high hopes, but quickly became suspicious. Why start the baseline at 1976? We have political data going back at least a century--if this were really a trend, shouldn't adding more data just back it up? So I did a little research and found this:
And I quote: "1976 was the low point for the percentage of the population residing in landslide counties in the post-World War II period and 2004 the high point. Therefore, the choice of those beginning and end points exaggerates the “trend� in geographic polarization."
Not a very honest way to start a book. But I found the entire article to be very interesting. First, they argue that basing all information off the presidential election means ignoring other very relevant data. Like Montana, which went for Bush by 20 points, but elected a Democratic governor. So who are they? Crazy right-wingers, or crazy liberals? Suddenly it's not so clear-cut.
And even if we grant the author his thesis--that we ARE self-sorting into politically homogeneous communities--how much would it matter? The authors of the article argue that it wouldn't matter much at all. How often do YOU talk politics with your neighbors? For most people the answer is rarely, if ever. So how are we supposed to get ourselves all worked up into extremism by NOT talking to our neighbors in our homogeneous communities?
I'm not arguing that Americans aren't getting more polarized (although I do take issue with the claim that we're more polarized than ever--Vietnam? The Sixties in general?). But I think it's more a product of self-selected information sources than self-selected communities. So in a sense he's correct--we ARE self-sorting, but into virtual communities instead of physical communities.
But the virtual world still has to deal with reality at some point. I can spend all day watching Fox News and listening to Rush (I don't do either of those things, just to keep the record straight), but I'll still have to come back to the reality that about half my neighbors think differently than I do (including the very nice lady with the 'Occupy the Vote' bumper sticker and the dog named Barack). My guess is that unless you're totally crazy, you'll have to grant that there are a lot of very nice, decent people who think differently than you. And hopefully these encounters will temper the extremism it's so easy to fall into.
(Also, I was very perplexed by a section at the beginning of the book talking about abortion. The author first gives statistics about how 60% of Americans fall somewhere between "no abortions ever" and "abortions under any circumstances." Doesn't sound too polarized to me! But then he says, "But if you look at it solely through the labels 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life', almost all Americans pick one side or the other. Look how polarized we are!" Well, duh! When you limit choices, you're bound to get more polarization. But the only reason I can see that you would focus on the second set of numbers while ignoring the first would be if you were TRYING to show that Americans are getting more polarized. Which is exactly the thesis of this book. Once again, not very honest.)
I'm currently reading a book called "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haight. It's fantastic, and he's done an excellent job backing up his assertions with data. If you're looking for the real reasons behind the way we view the world, read this one or "A Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. All the information, none of the sketchiness.
I started this book with high hopes, but quickly became suspicious. Why start the baseline at 1976? We have political data going back at least a century--if this were really a trend, shouldn't adding more data just back it up? So I did a little research and found this:
And I quote: "1976 was the low point for the percentage of the population residing in landslide counties in the post-World War II period and 2004 the high point. Therefore, the choice of those beginning and end points exaggerates the “trend� in geographic polarization."
Not a very honest way to start a book. But I found the entire article to be very interesting. First, they argue that basing all information off the presidential election means ignoring other very relevant data. Like Montana, which went for Bush by 20 points, but elected a Democratic governor. So who are they? Crazy right-wingers, or crazy liberals? Suddenly it's not so clear-cut.
And even if we grant the author his thesis--that we ARE self-sorting into politically homogeneous communities--how much would it matter? The authors of the article argue that it wouldn't matter much at all. How often do YOU talk politics with your neighbors? For most people the answer is rarely, if ever. So how are we supposed to get ourselves all worked up into extremism by NOT talking to our neighbors in our homogeneous communities?
I'm not arguing that Americans aren't getting more polarized (although I do take issue with the claim that we're more polarized than ever--Vietnam? The Sixties in general?). But I think it's more a product of self-selected information sources than self-selected communities. So in a sense he's correct--we ARE self-sorting, but into virtual communities instead of physical communities.
But the virtual world still has to deal with reality at some point. I can spend all day watching Fox News and listening to Rush (I don't do either of those things, just to keep the record straight), but I'll still have to come back to the reality that about half my neighbors think differently than I do (including the very nice lady with the 'Occupy the Vote' bumper sticker and the dog named Barack). My guess is that unless you're totally crazy, you'll have to grant that there are a lot of very nice, decent people who think differently than you. And hopefully these encounters will temper the extremism it's so easy to fall into.
(Also, I was very perplexed by a section at the beginning of the book talking about abortion. The author first gives statistics about how 60% of Americans fall somewhere between "no abortions ever" and "abortions under any circumstances." Doesn't sound too polarized to me! But then he says, "But if you look at it solely through the labels 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life', almost all Americans pick one side or the other. Look how polarized we are!" Well, duh! When you limit choices, you're bound to get more polarization. But the only reason I can see that you would focus on the second set of numbers while ignoring the first would be if you were TRYING to show that Americans are getting more polarized. Which is exactly the thesis of this book. Once again, not very honest.)
I'm currently reading a book called "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haight. It's fantastic, and he's done an excellent job backing up his assertions with data. If you're looking for the real reasons behind the way we view the world, read this one or "A Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. All the information, none of the sketchiness.
January 31, 2021
For the past forty years (since the 1970s) the US population has been sorting and segregating and clustering in zip codes of people like them in terms of SES and political orientation and lifestyle. This is due to greater mobility more free movement and choices in housing and neighborhood. And what naturally happens is people either consciously or subconsciously sort themselves into like-minded enclaves. Added bonus people surrounded with like-minded others become more extreme in their views when no dissonant views are heard. They often egg each other on and are ignorant from lack of contact with people unlike themselves. This phenomenon now happens in social media but on steroids. This was written in 2007 and thirteen years on these trends have gone in the US as expected in balkanizing the country and causing gridlock and rage. Hello 2020
November 25, 2022
The biggest take away from this book was what it had to say about the political moderate middle. Those who don’t have polarized political views tend to participate or vote less because of indifference or uncertainty. The problem with our democracy is that it leaves little space for compromise when those open to it have little incentive to vote - and as the book addresses - that reality is exacerbated by the fact that counties have become drastically more polarized over the last few decades as people “vote with their feet� and move to like-minded communities.
“Partisans voted with certainty and with enthusiasm, while those who were tugged by both sides were less likely to cast ballots. Political scientists have since found again and again that partisanship increases participation�
The price of moderation in politics can be passivity.�
The author also argues that partisanship, lobbying, and recalcitrant congress began to drastically increase in the mid 1960s - a decade with assassinations of JFK and MLK, civil right struggles, and escalations in Vietnam. He claims that these events, in a sense, broke the American psyche.
However, what I believe is overlooked as a cause of partisanship is the proliferation of commercial television that began in the late fifties. More than fifty percent of American homes now had TVs and were watching political debates (JFK and Nixon), mistreatment of African Americans, and the horrors of the Vietnam war (Cam Ne). Suddenly it was quite easy to have an opinion on distant events.
Politicians saw media’s potential and began using it to campaign, but it was costly, leading them to increase their campaign fundraising efforts, increasing lobbyists� power. Everything and anything the political leaders said was broadcast to every home - causing them to appeal to their base rather than simply make decisions based on their best judgement.
“Partisans voted with certainty and with enthusiasm, while those who were tugged by both sides were less likely to cast ballots. Political scientists have since found again and again that partisanship increases participation�
The price of moderation in politics can be passivity.�
The author also argues that partisanship, lobbying, and recalcitrant congress began to drastically increase in the mid 1960s - a decade with assassinations of JFK and MLK, civil right struggles, and escalations in Vietnam. He claims that these events, in a sense, broke the American psyche.
However, what I believe is overlooked as a cause of partisanship is the proliferation of commercial television that began in the late fifties. More than fifty percent of American homes now had TVs and were watching political debates (JFK and Nixon), mistreatment of African Americans, and the horrors of the Vietnam war (Cam Ne). Suddenly it was quite easy to have an opinion on distant events.
Politicians saw media’s potential and began using it to campaign, but it was costly, leading them to increase their campaign fundraising efforts, increasing lobbyists� power. Everything and anything the political leaders said was broadcast to every home - causing them to appeal to their base rather than simply make decisions based on their best judgement.
May 8, 2023
The Big Sort (2008) by Bill Bishop examines the trend of political and ideological segregation in American society, i.e. affinity clustering. Bishop's presents several lines of empirical evidence alongside anecdotal commentary that suggests that Americans are increasingly clustering themselves away from those with different values and views.
Bishop argues that people are more likely to choose to live in communities where they feel culturally aligned with their neighbors. This, in turn, reinforces existing beliefs and makes it less likely that people will encounter opposing viewpoints. This isn't always an incredibly intentional process either.
These trends Bishop identifies have big consequences for American society. They contribute to polarization, inequality, and stagnation. Social and economic inequality is exacerbated by the growing disconnect between rural and urban America. Much of the engines of economic growth in advanced societies are embedded in cities so those not connected to cities often lose out on the benefits of growth.
The Big Sort has only grown in relevance to today's political landscape since its publication. Demographic realities lie at the heart of the political upheaval of the moment: radical identity politics, national populism, political violence, alienation and anomie, etc.
The Big Sort is astute in that it highlights how the sorting runs much deeper than racial and ethnic groupings. However, Bishop also reckons with findings like those of Robert Putnam, which shows that diversity does represent a significant challenge to cohesion and unity. Bishop is unable to outline a clear way forward on this issue.
This book generally doesn't plot the way back to a more integrated America, which is probably a wise editorial choice, but its critical to understanding this issue. The chances of bridging these chasms is looking increasingly dire. Nonetheless, we need to know the deep influences shaping our discourse and politics. This is an important read for all civic-minded Americans.
Similar books include Charles Murray's Coming Apart and Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.
Bishop argues that people are more likely to choose to live in communities where they feel culturally aligned with their neighbors. This, in turn, reinforces existing beliefs and makes it less likely that people will encounter opposing viewpoints. This isn't always an incredibly intentional process either.
These trends Bishop identifies have big consequences for American society. They contribute to polarization, inequality, and stagnation. Social and economic inequality is exacerbated by the growing disconnect between rural and urban America. Much of the engines of economic growth in advanced societies are embedded in cities so those not connected to cities often lose out on the benefits of growth.
The Big Sort has only grown in relevance to today's political landscape since its publication. Demographic realities lie at the heart of the political upheaval of the moment: radical identity politics, national populism, political violence, alienation and anomie, etc.
The Big Sort is astute in that it highlights how the sorting runs much deeper than racial and ethnic groupings. However, Bishop also reckons with findings like those of Robert Putnam, which shows that diversity does represent a significant challenge to cohesion and unity. Bishop is unable to outline a clear way forward on this issue.
This book generally doesn't plot the way back to a more integrated America, which is probably a wise editorial choice, but its critical to understanding this issue. The chances of bridging these chasms is looking increasingly dire. Nonetheless, we need to know the deep influences shaping our discourse and politics. This is an important read for all civic-minded Americans.
Similar books include Charles Murray's Coming Apart and Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.
Want to read
October 3, 2008Arghhh :( this book is depressing me. I made it to chapter two, and then I realized, maybe it is not a good idea for me to read this right now, as the presidential election is using up enough of my political brain for the time being. I wish there were an answer to the party sorting this book chronicles. We need to be more open to listening to other viewpoints, and not just dismissing them summarily or tuning out because we don't agree or yelling over them so we cannot hear their thoughts. I also feel a great deal of this polarization can be blamed on *some* churches/church leaders who feel they should be able to "tell" their congregation how to vote (i.e. you can't vote for anyone who is not pro-life). It amazes me that this kind of practice is successful even today.
Another point, this book claims that NPR is left and Fox is right. Now I know about Fox, but NPR? One reason I appreciate NPR so much is that they take great pains to give equal time to both parties. I also appreciate that NPR's shows are NOT hosted by crazy extremists (of either persuasion) that yell at & denounce anyone or their views. So I take issue with NPR being considered left.
Anyway, I will have to read this book next year sometime, when it will be the only political thing stressing me out.
Another point, this book claims that NPR is left and Fox is right. Now I know about Fox, but NPR? One reason I appreciate NPR so much is that they take great pains to give equal time to both parties. I also appreciate that NPR's shows are NOT hosted by crazy extremists (of either persuasion) that yell at & denounce anyone or their views. So I take issue with NPR being considered left.
Anyway, I will have to read this book next year sometime, when it will be the only political thing stressing me out.
Want to read
September 29, 2020(2020 update to this non-review:)
Due to a discussion elsewhere, I referenced this still-unread book. It’s now twelve years old, but still relevant. An acquaintance was referring to the 𝔒𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔗𝔢𝔞𝔪 and said something like “we all know quite a few flat-earthers, don’t we?� and I responded, no, not really. We know they’re out there, but probably don’t actually know them. Here on ŷ, we probably don’t even see their book reviews if they’re even the slightest bit vocal on political issues.
That led me to stumble onto the original New York Times review, . I came to my non-review to link to that, as well as to highlight a few tidbits from it.
Why to-be-read: I'm a little surprised I've just now gotten around to adding this to my to-be-read shelf. I heard the hypothesis quite some time ago, and this book has been referenced in quite a few of the other cognition books that I've read. Even though I very much disagreed with Charles Murray's conclusions in , this "sorting" was effectively the framing of the problem he was addressing.
What made me come here and explicitly add this was an episode of the podcast from David McRaney titled “�. Only part of the hour-plus podcast directly ties to this book, but the entire thing is well worth listening to.
The connection comes in the last portion of the podcast, when results of an experiment are presented, within which people who were adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage were engaged in an effort to discover whether the technique of changing people's minds actually works. (The technique emerges in the earlier portion of the podcast.)
And it did. But what it relied on was that the people with prejudices actually spent one-on-one face time with a person who is the target of their prejudice in a non-contentious, mostly "normal" conversation. The key there is that it has to be a person who was in the target group of the prejudice. If a gay person is on the other side of the conversation, the reduction in the prejudice was substantial as well as long-lasting. If the same conversation had been with a straight person, the reduction doesn't last very long.
Why this is important with respect to this book should be obvious: the fact that people in the United States are increasingly sorting themselves into like-minded communities means we, collectively, are not spending any time with the targets of our prejudices. I can see this almost every day amongst my liberal friends here in San Francisco, some of whom treat conservatives as an alien species, whom they don't expend any effort to actually understand. And I can see it among conservatives, too —although there isn't a hint of the violent attitudes among my liberal acquaintances that is sometimes disturbingly present in the comments of folks on the extreme right.
Well, duh. I suspect these ideas are part and parcel of this book. (As you might have recognized, the foregoing is really just a note to myself :-D )
Due to a discussion elsewhere, I referenced this still-unread book. It’s now twelve years old, but still relevant. An acquaintance was referring to the 𝔒𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔗𝔢𝔞𝔪 and said something like “we all know quite a few flat-earthers, don’t we?� and I responded, no, not really. We know they’re out there, but probably don’t actually know them. Here on ŷ, we probably don’t even see their book reviews if they’re even the slightest bit vocal on political issues.
That led me to stumble onto the original New York Times review, . I came to my non-review to link to that, as well as to highlight a few tidbits from it.
❝W’r � or at least only with people whoresemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivableway.�
❝This intense geographic sorting helps account for an abiding weirdness in American politics. Congress is split right down the middle, or nearly so; the last two presidential elections* have been achingly close; half the nation, almost by definition, must disagree with you politically � and yet you have probably met very few of your antagonists. “How can the polls be neck and neck,� the playwright Arthur Miller lamented during the 2004 election, “when I don’t know oneBushsupporter?”❞(End of update.)
�(This was written a few months before Obama’s victory in the2008election.)
Why to-be-read: I'm a little surprised I've just now gotten around to adding this to my to-be-read shelf. I heard the hypothesis quite some time ago, and this book has been referenced in quite a few of the other cognition books that I've read. Even though I very much disagreed with Charles Murray's conclusions in , this "sorting" was effectively the framing of the problem he was addressing.
What made me come here and explicitly add this was an episode of the podcast from David McRaney titled “�. Only part of the hour-plus podcast directly ties to this book, but the entire thing is well worth listening to.
The connection comes in the last portion of the podcast, when results of an experiment are presented, within which people who were adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage were engaged in an effort to discover whether the technique of changing people's minds actually works. (The technique emerges in the earlier portion of the podcast.)
And it did. But what it relied on was that the people with prejudices actually spent one-on-one face time with a person who is the target of their prejudice in a non-contentious, mostly "normal" conversation. The key there is that it has to be a person who was in the target group of the prejudice. If a gay person is on the other side of the conversation, the reduction in the prejudice was substantial as well as long-lasting. If the same conversation had been with a straight person, the reduction doesn't last very long.
Why this is important with respect to this book should be obvious: the fact that people in the United States are increasingly sorting themselves into like-minded communities means we, collectively, are not spending any time with the targets of our prejudices. I can see this almost every day amongst my liberal friends here in San Francisco, some of whom treat conservatives as an alien species, whom they don't expend any effort to actually understand. And I can see it among conservatives, too —although there isn't a hint of the violent attitudes among my liberal acquaintances that is sometimes disturbingly present in the comments of folks on the extreme right.
Well, duh. I suspect these ideas are part and parcel of this book. (As you might have recognized, the foregoing is really just a note to myself :-D )
January 30, 2014
The most frightening book I've read in years. Too depressing to read; too well-written and informative to put down. Nearly every page had information or insights that were new to me: did you know that Eisenhower was courted by both Republican and Democrat parties? That churches in the 1960s/70s started getting socially responsible... and lost members as a consequence?
If you've studied electronics you know what a is... and you know that it is a Very Bad Thing. That's what's happening in the US. We're using our mobility to sort ourselves into like-minded communities. No contact with opposing viewpoints. This leads to further polarization. And then we remember that this book was written six years ago and we weep.
The cost of this polarization is appalling: communities feeding on and perpetuating ignorance. When you don't know or interact with different-minded folks, everything becomes more black and white. Less nuanced. No room for moderates or thought or wisdom. And that's tragic.
And then there's the churches (and certain political parties). For all their science-denying, they're pretty astute in how they use big data and psychological/neurological techniques to manipulate people. Combine this with Haidt's findings on morality (i.e. the Obedience To Authority that rules too many peoples' minds) and we have a very grim forecast indeed.
Read this. It's six years old but still—no, even more—relevant today. Well researched, well written, and engaging despite its message.
If you've studied electronics you know what a is... and you know that it is a Very Bad Thing. That's what's happening in the US. We're using our mobility to sort ourselves into like-minded communities. No contact with opposing viewpoints. This leads to further polarization. And then we remember that this book was written six years ago and we weep.
The cost of this polarization is appalling: communities feeding on and perpetuating ignorance. When you don't know or interact with different-minded folks, everything becomes more black and white. Less nuanced. No room for moderates or thought or wisdom. And that's tragic.
And then there's the churches (and certain political parties). For all their science-denying, they're pretty astute in how they use big data and psychological/neurological techniques to manipulate people. Combine this with Haidt's findings on morality (i.e. the Obedience To Authority that rules too many peoples' minds) and we have a very grim forecast indeed.
Read this. It's six years old but still—no, even more—relevant today. Well researched, well written, and engaging despite its message.
August 23, 2014
Documents a disturbing trend in American political and cultural life: increasingly, we are sorting ourselves into islands of homogeneity, with troublesome implications from the Congress to Ferguson. It is hard to 'get along' and solve common challenges if we live in parallel worlds.
August 12, 2023
This book was fascinating to me. My main reason for the three star rating is that it was published in 2008, so obviously really significant political events have taken place since then. I heard about this book from Ezra Klein’s (much more recent) book Why We’re Polarized, which I loved. Despite the out of date-ness of this book, it was still super interesting to learn about how we got to where we were culturally in the early 2000s (he’s mostly referencing the Bush/ Kerry election) and what that means for the future. I was hoping he’d predict 2016, but he thought the polarization would wind down lol. My other complaint is I think the book could have used a few more edits. There were a few typos, and there were paragraphs/ sections that didn’t need to be there. Otherwise I loved it and I’m glad I read it!
September 29, 2008
Discusses the recent geographic re-alignment of Americans in the past 25 or so years and how political parties have either benefited or lost from this realignment.
The book was spot-on with the social realignments that have been sweeping the country. I have experienced this phenomenon myself at both the macro and micro level. The book went into grave detail with the various causes of the re-alignment and provided proof with many examples. However, in the end I was looking for more insight or predictions with what will happen in the future as a result of this realignment. For example, is it good or bad that liberals flock to places like Austin, TX or Portland, OR while conservatives are found in rural areas or suburban places like Orange, CA? Is the country doomed as a result or is there is eventually going to be some kind of social backlash that turns things around? From the title alone, the author suggests that the social homogeneity is not a good thing. However, I would've liked to see more of his own or others' input who are trying to reverse the trend or if we should even bother.
The book was spot-on with the social realignments that have been sweeping the country. I have experienced this phenomenon myself at both the macro and micro level. The book went into grave detail with the various causes of the re-alignment and provided proof with many examples. However, in the end I was looking for more insight or predictions with what will happen in the future as a result of this realignment. For example, is it good or bad that liberals flock to places like Austin, TX or Portland, OR while conservatives are found in rural areas or suburban places like Orange, CA? Is the country doomed as a result or is there is eventually going to be some kind of social backlash that turns things around? From the title alone, the author suggests that the social homogeneity is not a good thing. However, I would've liked to see more of his own or others' input who are trying to reverse the trend or if we should even bother.
March 16, 2018
There's a funny bit of history about this book: it was written in 2005-6 as an explanation of how President Bush won a landslide election and how Republicans had built an insurmountable, generational majority.
Ha!
Far from being an anachronism, the emerging American geopolitics and new electoral strategy outlined in this book were adopted by every presidential campaign since. The Big Sort-era election winners each won with strategically similar campaign. Bush, Obama, and Trump are eerily similar. They eschewed political persuasion or classic triangulation (playing to fringe in the primary and the center in the general). Each campaign's paramount goal was getting their own geopolitical tribe to vote. And, on the other hand, the best explanations for the failed campaigns of McCain, Romney, and Clinton remains under-motivating their voters.
In the Big Sort era, all attempts at political persuasion of the undecided or the moderate are electoral malpractice. Political campaigns are now such a team sport that one doesn't even need to take the same field: each side gins up their own people in their own areas. The vote counting, below the presidential level, tends to be predetermined by where the election is being held.
Why? From presidential to local elections, a large part of the partisan decision is made the city, county, or district lines around the voters. Some places are so politically similar, that no lines can be drawn to make a district anything close to 50/50. People live in places with others who vote like them. And they signal to the other tribe that they aren't welcome. If you're in a Whole Foods, there's something like a 90% likelihood that the surrounding county voted for the last Democratic candidate for president.
Especially striking was the story of the author's neighborhood email list in his posh Austin neighborhood (deep blue city, bright red state). The lone Republican in the mix was publicly shamed for daring to voice dissent to the neighborhood's 2004 election protest. Imagine that: liberals being intolerant! I must set my smugness aside: daring to support a Democrat will get you run out of most suburban evangelical churches. This is American geopolitics, and it's tribal.
The real question is what do we do about the big sort? This book didn't have much.
I have moved away from Republican places twice. As a usually-Republican voter, my peregrinations are the 1 or 2 out of 10 (the other 8 moved to areas with similar voters). The exurbs of DC and ATL held no attraction for me, despite them being homogeneously rich, with large backyards and loose gun laws. I like much better the liberal cities of Portsmouth, Washington, and (now) greater-Boston. Perhaps I'm a genetically disfigured conservative, more open to new experiences and living in close quarters with neighbors. Maybe I'm a secret liberal!
The story of one doesn't undermine the data of the big sort: more people than not move to places where their neighbors share their politics. How can we combat this regional tribalism? Maybe we can all take a road or train trip to the other side of the line and learn how the other half lives. That is, if we can find decent eats.
Ha!
Far from being an anachronism, the emerging American geopolitics and new electoral strategy outlined in this book were adopted by every presidential campaign since. The Big Sort-era election winners each won with strategically similar campaign. Bush, Obama, and Trump are eerily similar. They eschewed political persuasion or classic triangulation (playing to fringe in the primary and the center in the general). Each campaign's paramount goal was getting their own geopolitical tribe to vote. And, on the other hand, the best explanations for the failed campaigns of McCain, Romney, and Clinton remains under-motivating their voters.
In the Big Sort era, all attempts at political persuasion of the undecided or the moderate are electoral malpractice. Political campaigns are now such a team sport that one doesn't even need to take the same field: each side gins up their own people in their own areas. The vote counting, below the presidential level, tends to be predetermined by where the election is being held.
Why? From presidential to local elections, a large part of the partisan decision is made the city, county, or district lines around the voters. Some places are so politically similar, that no lines can be drawn to make a district anything close to 50/50. People live in places with others who vote like them. And they signal to the other tribe that they aren't welcome. If you're in a Whole Foods, there's something like a 90% likelihood that the surrounding county voted for the last Democratic candidate for president.
Especially striking was the story of the author's neighborhood email list in his posh Austin neighborhood (deep blue city, bright red state). The lone Republican in the mix was publicly shamed for daring to voice dissent to the neighborhood's 2004 election protest. Imagine that: liberals being intolerant! I must set my smugness aside: daring to support a Democrat will get you run out of most suburban evangelical churches. This is American geopolitics, and it's tribal.
The real question is what do we do about the big sort? This book didn't have much.
I have moved away from Republican places twice. As a usually-Republican voter, my peregrinations are the 1 or 2 out of 10 (the other 8 moved to areas with similar voters). The exurbs of DC and ATL held no attraction for me, despite them being homogeneously rich, with large backyards and loose gun laws. I like much better the liberal cities of Portsmouth, Washington, and (now) greater-Boston. Perhaps I'm a genetically disfigured conservative, more open to new experiences and living in close quarters with neighbors. Maybe I'm a secret liberal!
The story of one doesn't undermine the data of the big sort: more people than not move to places where their neighbors share their politics. How can we combat this regional tribalism? Maybe we can all take a road or train trip to the other side of the line and learn how the other half lives. That is, if we can find decent eats.
March 10, 2010
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart is another of those books that tries to bring a corpus of social scientific work to a popular audience, ala Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and The Tipping Point. It isn't nearly as readable nor as well-organized as Gladwell's work, but rather a somewhat disorganized mishmash of a variety of ideas, the causal relationships among which remain unclear. The question that the subtitle suggests will be answered is never clearly answered.
The core idea of the book is that America has assortively segregated itself into local enclaves that are highly homogeneous, not so much demographically, but in terms of political and religious ideology and, from this book's perspective almost as an afterthought, in terms of lifestyle.
That we are a clustered nation is an important point, though you'd hardly have to read this book to get that idea. Bishop's approach is mainly in terms of our political divisiveness, which he sees as a rooted in a "moralized" politics. That is, the root difference is in religious perspective: liberal, social gospel views in contrast to traditional, fundamental, "personal savior" views. Bishop's arguments and evidence in this regard are worth reading.
But beyond that it gets somewhat muddled. Bishop does have a chapter on lifestyle segmentation, but it isn't clear whether lifestyle clusters are merely a correlate of political-religious clusters, or something more. It seems reasonable to suspect that the religious and political distinctions are the tip of the iceberg, with lifestyle being the ice, and Bishop explores this a bit in talking about people who migrate to locations for the cultural and environmental qualities, and in discussing how education and the rural/urban social geography are related to the division. But this is a very brief treatment relative to the attention lavished on politics and religion, and one gets the sense that the heart of the problem really lies in the submerged part of the iceberg. This, I think, is the biggest flaw in the book, that it focuses on what is probably an epiphenomenon and one particular causal mechanism, with very little attention to the underlying phenomena or, the more likely full set of causes.
Also, to what extent is the clustering a result of choice and voluntary sorting versus to what extent is produced by the differing social contexts in which people find themselves? The migration data show us that some portion of it is self-selection, but there are many hints that another force, which again Bishop doesn't explore, is also at work here.
Another issue is the extent to which the clustering represents a change. In a book whose thesis is that Americans have sorted themselves post-WWII, it is curious to see so many examples that hint at a far deeper history of assortive segregation. Maybe what has changed is not a tendency toward sorting, but the SCALE of the sorting. Where people once sorted into neighborhoods of small towns and cities, they now sort into entire zipcodes, or to some extent, separate COUNTIES, in MSAs.
Also the media of communication have changed, so that we are simultaneously less provincial and yet (paradoxically?) more insulated in separate social network "echo chambers" that lead to polarization.
Bishop's chapter on the Psychology of the Tribe, which shows how homogeneous groups tend to radicalize, toward groupthink, is one of the best in the book, and no doubt an eye-opener for some.
Analytically there is a great deal of sloppiness in this book. A great variety of effects are attributed to the sort, many of which have other possible explanations. It isn't clear which variables are causal and which are effects. Bishop doesn't seem too clear on this, as he often presents data in a way that reverses the obvious causal structure, most notably in a series of bar graphs in Chapter 2 which imply that one's race and education, among other variables, are determined by the extent to which the county one lives in tends to vote Republican or Democrat, when clearly he intends to argue exactly the opposit.
The core idea of the book is that America has assortively segregated itself into local enclaves that are highly homogeneous, not so much demographically, but in terms of political and religious ideology and, from this book's perspective almost as an afterthought, in terms of lifestyle.
That we are a clustered nation is an important point, though you'd hardly have to read this book to get that idea. Bishop's approach is mainly in terms of our political divisiveness, which he sees as a rooted in a "moralized" politics. That is, the root difference is in religious perspective: liberal, social gospel views in contrast to traditional, fundamental, "personal savior" views. Bishop's arguments and evidence in this regard are worth reading.
But beyond that it gets somewhat muddled. Bishop does have a chapter on lifestyle segmentation, but it isn't clear whether lifestyle clusters are merely a correlate of political-religious clusters, or something more. It seems reasonable to suspect that the religious and political distinctions are the tip of the iceberg, with lifestyle being the ice, and Bishop explores this a bit in talking about people who migrate to locations for the cultural and environmental qualities, and in discussing how education and the rural/urban social geography are related to the division. But this is a very brief treatment relative to the attention lavished on politics and religion, and one gets the sense that the heart of the problem really lies in the submerged part of the iceberg. This, I think, is the biggest flaw in the book, that it focuses on what is probably an epiphenomenon and one particular causal mechanism, with very little attention to the underlying phenomena or, the more likely full set of causes.
Also, to what extent is the clustering a result of choice and voluntary sorting versus to what extent is produced by the differing social contexts in which people find themselves? The migration data show us that some portion of it is self-selection, but there are many hints that another force, which again Bishop doesn't explore, is also at work here.
Another issue is the extent to which the clustering represents a change. In a book whose thesis is that Americans have sorted themselves post-WWII, it is curious to see so many examples that hint at a far deeper history of assortive segregation. Maybe what has changed is not a tendency toward sorting, but the SCALE of the sorting. Where people once sorted into neighborhoods of small towns and cities, they now sort into entire zipcodes, or to some extent, separate COUNTIES, in MSAs.
Also the media of communication have changed, so that we are simultaneously less provincial and yet (paradoxically?) more insulated in separate social network "echo chambers" that lead to polarization.
Bishop's chapter on the Psychology of the Tribe, which shows how homogeneous groups tend to radicalize, toward groupthink, is one of the best in the book, and no doubt an eye-opener for some.
Analytically there is a great deal of sloppiness in this book. A great variety of effects are attributed to the sort, many of which have other possible explanations. It isn't clear which variables are causal and which are effects. Bishop doesn't seem too clear on this, as he often presents data in a way that reverses the obvious causal structure, most notably in a series of bar graphs in Chapter 2 which imply that one's race and education, among other variables, are determined by the extent to which the county one lives in tends to vote Republican or Democrat, when clearly he intends to argue exactly the opposit.
June 1, 2009
For years now, I have heard people saying things like, "Doesn't it seem like the country is becoming more divided?," or "I feel like people just don't try to get along any more." This book reveals the growing chasm between liberals and conservatives in the U.S. through extensive use of statistics.
That might not sound like a very interesting read, but it is. Bishop and his slightly-less-than-co-author (listed on title page but not on the front of the book) Robert G. Cushing are journalists, and began thinking about the Big Sort as an off-the-wall series of articles in an Austin newspaper. What they discovered is that since the mid-sixties, the American population has been sorting itself geographically, politically, religiously, and in terms of lifestyle into more and more homogeneous enclaves. When this happens, people who think alike tend to reinforce each others' opinions, leading eventually to more radical opinions that individual community members originally held, and less ability to tolerate conflicting opinions.
The last paragraph pretty well says it all:
I found this book fascinating, and very useful in thinking about the challenges facing this country. The reader will find many interesting tidbits, whether finding out that for every twelve doorbells that political volunteers rang, one additional voter cast a ballot in this country, to discovering that the Republican Party based George W. Bush's second campaign for President partially upon the merchandising success of the Applebees Restaurant chain. Since I write a lot of juror questionnaires for criminal trials, realizing that asking four questions on childrearing can accurately predict party affiliation and that asking someone their attitude on public land use was an accurate indicator of their core beliefs probably topped my personal list.
That might not sound like a very interesting read, but it is. Bishop and his slightly-less-than-co-author (listed on title page but not on the front of the book) Robert G. Cushing are journalists, and began thinking about the Big Sort as an off-the-wall series of articles in an Austin newspaper. What they discovered is that since the mid-sixties, the American population has been sorting itself geographically, politically, religiously, and in terms of lifestyle into more and more homogeneous enclaves. When this happens, people who think alike tend to reinforce each others' opinions, leading eventually to more radical opinions that individual community members originally held, and less ability to tolerate conflicting opinions.
The last paragraph pretty well says it all:
Beginning thirty years ago, the people of this country unwittingly began a social experiment. Finding cultural comfort in "people like us," we have migrated into ever-narrower communities and churches and political groups. We have created, and are creating, new institutions distinguished by their isolation and single-mindedness. We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings. And we have worked quietly and hard to remove any trace of the "constant clashing of opinions" from daily life. It was a social revolution, one that was both profound and, because it consisted of people simply going about their lives, entirely unnoticed. In this time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives, cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life with the sensibility of customers who are always right. "Tailor-made" has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government, too. But democracy doesn't seem to work that way.
I found this book fascinating, and very useful in thinking about the challenges facing this country. The reader will find many interesting tidbits, whether finding out that for every twelve doorbells that political volunteers rang, one additional voter cast a ballot in this country, to discovering that the Republican Party based George W. Bush's second campaign for President partially upon the merchandising success of the Applebees Restaurant chain. Since I write a lot of juror questionnaires for criminal trials, realizing that asking four questions on childrearing can accurately predict party affiliation and that asking someone their attitude on public land use was an accurate indicator of their core beliefs probably topped my personal list.
January 24, 2015
I'm thrilled that this book came along and I hope it will kick off some important discussions in our country, because the trends that Bishop describe are so damaging to our democracy. Essentially, he shows how ever-more-mobile Americans have spent the last couple of decades sorting themselves into communities of people who have a world view that matches their own, driving the deeply entrenched polarization in our country.
This is something that I (and many others) have been noticing for a while, but even I was shocked by the statistics Bishop throws out. Nearly half of Americans, for example, live in communities that are so heavily Democrat or Republican that election outcomes are now preordained. This is a wonky book in terms of vast amounts of data and stats, so if you're into that, you'll be be very happy.
I live in San Francisco, which is notoriously homogenous, and I thought it had always been so. Even in work meetings, people often speak openly about politics with a very leftward slant, assuming that everyone in the room is on-board (and they usually are). When I describe the San Francisco I now live in to my parents--who were here briefly in the '60s, as political activists--it's unrecognizable to them. Bishop confirms that San Francisco was once much more diverse. in 1976, 44 percent of San Franciscans voted for Republican Gerald Ford.
Similar demographic shifts have been going on in communities across the country. Bishop gets into the nitty-gritty of the factors driving this shifting and its consequences--like folks on both sides becoming more extreme in their politics, more prone to political "road rage," and more intolerant and distrustful of people who don't agree with them. Politicians, of course, have benefitted greatly from stoking this us-against-them mindset (and practice it themselves on Capitol Hill).
Well-researched, with a great birds-eye-view and drill-downs into things happening at the community level. One of the most important books I've read in a while.
This is something that I (and many others) have been noticing for a while, but even I was shocked by the statistics Bishop throws out. Nearly half of Americans, for example, live in communities that are so heavily Democrat or Republican that election outcomes are now preordained. This is a wonky book in terms of vast amounts of data and stats, so if you're into that, you'll be be very happy.
I live in San Francisco, which is notoriously homogenous, and I thought it had always been so. Even in work meetings, people often speak openly about politics with a very leftward slant, assuming that everyone in the room is on-board (and they usually are). When I describe the San Francisco I now live in to my parents--who were here briefly in the '60s, as political activists--it's unrecognizable to them. Bishop confirms that San Francisco was once much more diverse. in 1976, 44 percent of San Franciscans voted for Republican Gerald Ford.
Similar demographic shifts have been going on in communities across the country. Bishop gets into the nitty-gritty of the factors driving this shifting and its consequences--like folks on both sides becoming more extreme in their politics, more prone to political "road rage," and more intolerant and distrustful of people who don't agree with them. Politicians, of course, have benefitted greatly from stoking this us-against-them mindset (and practice it themselves on Capitol Hill).
Well-researched, with a great birds-eye-view and drill-downs into things happening at the community level. One of the most important books I've read in a while.
December 27, 2016
This has the dubious distinction of having been published in 2008, and like any work of history or science fiction (maybe just everything), it says as much about the time in which it was written as it does whatever else it might be saying. While Bishop makes a compelling argument as to the splintering of our politics, national discourse and the atomization of our lifestyles, echoes of the 2016 election will haunt you at just about every page, in turns prescient and painful and altogether too mistakenly hopeful.
The book deserves a 2016 addendum, taking into account the Obama presidency, as well as a deeper discussion as to how race intersects with socioeconomic status in the big sort.
The book deserves a 2016 addendum, taking into account the Obama presidency, as well as a deeper discussion as to how race intersects with socioeconomic status in the big sort.
October 14, 2008
I found this book fascinating. The premise is that Americans have been moving into more and more homogenous neighborhoods and cities over the past 30+ years. College educated people move to certain cities, Democrats are more likely to live in certain places, Republicans in others. Bishop's theory is that this polarizes is even further, as we become more extreme when surrounded by only like-minded individuals.
It was an interesting read, particularly in our current political climate.
It was an interesting read, particularly in our current political climate.
August 4, 2016
Helpful analysis of how Americans are segregating themselves by religion and lifestyle.
"Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it." - Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
"People don't need to check voting records to know the political flavor of a community. They can smell it." - new resident of a Dallas exurb
"Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally, and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining, and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling." - David Brooks, NYT columnist
Can two walk together, except they be agreed? - Amos 3:3
Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city. Over a 40-year study, The Washington Community, historian James Sterling Young mapped three Washingtons, one created for each of the three branches of government. The nine members of the US Supreme Court lived in the same house until 1845. Executive branch workers gathered in one section of the city near the White House, while congresspeople were bunched together nearer the Capitol. "Men whom the Constitution merely separated into different work groups separated themselves into different societies," wrote Young.
Congresspeople lived in boarding houses. They formed eating clubs around common tables, and they slept together, two to a room. Without plan or foresight, the city had been transformed into an archipelago of culturally homogenous and politically insular fraternity houses.
The homogeneity of the boarding houses crisply reflected the country, where communities were isolated by rivers, mountain ranges, and vast distances. The cultural segregation in early America was enforced by the lack of mobility, whereas today it's the ease with which Americans are able to move that has created political segregation. Even though we know much more now about the psychological effects of living in like-minded groups, the founders understood the dangers of self-segregation in ways we do not, and they sought to temper those influences.
"He has betrayed those with whom he broke bread."
Like-minded groups were quicker to stop talking to the person with the contrary opinion and rated them lower on the preference list for club membership.
As Holly Golightly put it in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."
As any successful talk radio host has realized, acclaim (and ratings) accrue to the most zealous. It's not enough to disagree. These days, you must call for extreme action.
Isolated groups are seedbeds of extremist. The federalists believed that the best antidote to factions was to see that communities weren't cut off from new and sometimes conflicting ideas. The best hedge against extremism is the constant mixture of opposing opinion.
The men who wrote the US Constitution and Bill of Rights rejected the "right to instruct" and adopted instead a government of deliberation and compromise within a heterogeneous legislature. Cass Sunstein sees the rejection of the "right to instruct" as an explicit example of the framers' realization that like-minded communities could produce extreme politics, a tendency that would be weakened by debate and understanding.
Quick action by a legislature is "oftener an evil than a benefit," Hamilton claimed. It is the "jarring of parties" that "often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority." The "constant clashing of opinions" that Brutus feared wasn't to be avoided, according to the federalists. It was to be sought after. Sunstein told me that the most profound insight of the men who framed the Constitution "was to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue."
The civil rights movement was both brutal and triumphant in March 1965, as Alabama state police assaulted protestors crossing Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Three days later, MLK, Jr, led a larger march across Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. There were dozens of marches across the country made in concert with King's trek; for instance, 10,000 people joined Governor George Romney in a demonstration in Detroit. At the end of the month, Johnson "declared war on the Ku Klux Klan." In August, however, the shoulder-to-shoulder success of the Selma-to-Montgomery march was lost in the anarchy of the Watts riots. South Los Angeles was ablaze for days.
That was 1965.
The religious news of 1965 was largely about ecumenicism and reform. In March, US Catholic churches began changing their services to conform to the calls from the Second Vatican Council for more active participation by congregants. Also in March, the World Council asked the USA to pull out of Vietnam. Just as Catholics and traditional Protestant denominations were promoting racial reform and world religious cooperation, members of most of these churches had begun to leave. They headed to independent Evangelical and fundamentalist churches that distrusted ecumenical religious organizations.
In the 1990s, the Big Sort was segregation by education, particularly apparent in rural areas. By 2000, the percentage of young adults with a college degree in rural areas was only half that of the average city.
An astounded 40% of the country's 320 metropolitan areas lost white population int he 1990s. Whites fled to two kinds of cities. They abandoned older factory towns in the North and Midwest. Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Jersey City all lost tens of thousands of white residents. Whites also left the nation's largest cities, some of which were growing increasingly expensive: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia.
Whites went to high-tech cities: Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Boise. And they filled retirement or recreational cities: Las Vegas, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Tampa. Blacks moved to cities with strong black communities: Atlanta, Washington, New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Philadelphia.
In 1990, young people were evenly distributed among the national 320 cities. By 2000, 20-30-year-olds were concentrated in just a score of cities. Older people clustered in the country's least dynamic (economically and technologically) cities. The 119 cities producing the fewest patents had the highest proportion of people age 65 or older.
The cast of Harlan County, Kentucky's community play Higher Ground consisted of retired coal miners, teachers, bluegrass musicians and members of church choirs. In 2005, Harlan County was producing a community play about civic failure -- about the county's battle with drug addiction, primarily the painkiller OxyContin. In the 1930s, "Bloody Harlan" became the center of union organizing efforts by both the Communist Party and the United Mine Workers of America. In the 1970s, it was the scene of another mine strike chronicled in the Academy Award-winning film Harlan County USA. Close to 80,000 people lived there in the 1940s. Now the population is roughly 1/3 that size and dropping with each census.
Traveling the eastern coalfields is a reminder that the most abundant product of the Big SOrt has been inequality.
The Way We Live Today -- The Strict Father/Nurturant Parent Divide
Hetherington and Weiler constructed a scale based on answers to 4 questions:
1) Was it better for a child to demonstrate independence or respect for elders?
2) Obedience or self-reliance?
3) Curiosity or good manners?
4) To be considerate or well behaved?
Those who picked respect, obedience, good manners and well behaved were the most authoritarian = strict fathers. Those who favored independence, self-reliance, curiosity and being considerate = nurturant parents. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners and being well behaved; they were strict fathers. Democrats were nurturant parents.
This splitting of moral perspectives and its connection to political affiliations was new. In the 1960s, there was little real difference in how American raised their children. During the cold war, the political scientists wrote, authoritarian types could be found aplenty in both parties. In the 1960s, there were plenty of strict father Democrats. Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004, the gap had grown wide and deep.
Heatherington and Weiler concluded: "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
Congress gave up governing by the summer of 2006. And not a whole lot had been happening before. Nelson Polsby, a congressional scholar, calculated that the federal government had been largely deadlocked since the late 1960s. It was as if Americans had lost the ability to speak a common civic tongue.
Abortion
Birth Control
Gay Unions
Guns
Education
The Environment
In the past, when the nation had failed to reach a consensus, the custom was for local governments to strike out on their own. Progressive majorities in the Midwest bypassed a polarized Congress in the early part of the 20th century, and enacted laws governing railroad rates, limiting corruption and promoting conservation. The same thing is happening now. With Congress more polarized than at any time since the end of World War II, people see no sense waiting for the national 50-50 division to resolve itself. The federal stalemate has touched off an eruption of activity state and local governments -- federalism that doesn't sleep. [Federalism is a system based upon democratic rules and institutions in which the power to govern is shared between national and provincial/state governments.]
Just Enough to Win the Turkey
Tell just enough to win the turkey -- don't tell all.
The idea of community has been 'miniaturized,' observed Francis Fukuyama.
"Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it." - Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
"People don't need to check voting records to know the political flavor of a community. They can smell it." - new resident of a Dallas exurb
"Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally, and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining, and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling." - David Brooks, NYT columnist
Can two walk together, except they be agreed? - Amos 3:3
Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city. Over a 40-year study, The Washington Community, historian James Sterling Young mapped three Washingtons, one created for each of the three branches of government. The nine members of the US Supreme Court lived in the same house until 1845. Executive branch workers gathered in one section of the city near the White House, while congresspeople were bunched together nearer the Capitol. "Men whom the Constitution merely separated into different work groups separated themselves into different societies," wrote Young.
Congresspeople lived in boarding houses. They formed eating clubs around common tables, and they slept together, two to a room. Without plan or foresight, the city had been transformed into an archipelago of culturally homogenous and politically insular fraternity houses.
The homogeneity of the boarding houses crisply reflected the country, where communities were isolated by rivers, mountain ranges, and vast distances. The cultural segregation in early America was enforced by the lack of mobility, whereas today it's the ease with which Americans are able to move that has created political segregation. Even though we know much more now about the psychological effects of living in like-minded groups, the founders understood the dangers of self-segregation in ways we do not, and they sought to temper those influences.
"He has betrayed those with whom he broke bread."
Like-minded groups were quicker to stop talking to the person with the contrary opinion and rated them lower on the preference list for club membership.
As Holly Golightly put it in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."
As any successful talk radio host has realized, acclaim (and ratings) accrue to the most zealous. It's not enough to disagree. These days, you must call for extreme action.
Isolated groups are seedbeds of extremist. The federalists believed that the best antidote to factions was to see that communities weren't cut off from new and sometimes conflicting ideas. The best hedge against extremism is the constant mixture of opposing opinion.
The men who wrote the US Constitution and Bill of Rights rejected the "right to instruct" and adopted instead a government of deliberation and compromise within a heterogeneous legislature. Cass Sunstein sees the rejection of the "right to instruct" as an explicit example of the framers' realization that like-minded communities could produce extreme politics, a tendency that would be weakened by debate and understanding.
Quick action by a legislature is "oftener an evil than a benefit," Hamilton claimed. It is the "jarring of parties" that "often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority." The "constant clashing of opinions" that Brutus feared wasn't to be avoided, according to the federalists. It was to be sought after. Sunstein told me that the most profound insight of the men who framed the Constitution "was to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue."
The civil rights movement was both brutal and triumphant in March 1965, as Alabama state police assaulted protestors crossing Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Three days later, MLK, Jr, led a larger march across Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. There were dozens of marches across the country made in concert with King's trek; for instance, 10,000 people joined Governor George Romney in a demonstration in Detroit. At the end of the month, Johnson "declared war on the Ku Klux Klan." In August, however, the shoulder-to-shoulder success of the Selma-to-Montgomery march was lost in the anarchy of the Watts riots. South Los Angeles was ablaze for days.
That was 1965.
The religious news of 1965 was largely about ecumenicism and reform. In March, US Catholic churches began changing their services to conform to the calls from the Second Vatican Council for more active participation by congregants. Also in March, the World Council asked the USA to pull out of Vietnam. Just as Catholics and traditional Protestant denominations were promoting racial reform and world religious cooperation, members of most of these churches had begun to leave. They headed to independent Evangelical and fundamentalist churches that distrusted ecumenical religious organizations.
In the 1990s, the Big Sort was segregation by education, particularly apparent in rural areas. By 2000, the percentage of young adults with a college degree in rural areas was only half that of the average city.
An astounded 40% of the country's 320 metropolitan areas lost white population int he 1990s. Whites fled to two kinds of cities. They abandoned older factory towns in the North and Midwest. Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Jersey City all lost tens of thousands of white residents. Whites also left the nation's largest cities, some of which were growing increasingly expensive: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia.
Whites went to high-tech cities: Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Boise. And they filled retirement or recreational cities: Las Vegas, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Tampa. Blacks moved to cities with strong black communities: Atlanta, Washington, New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Philadelphia.
In 1990, young people were evenly distributed among the national 320 cities. By 2000, 20-30-year-olds were concentrated in just a score of cities. Older people clustered in the country's least dynamic (economically and technologically) cities. The 119 cities producing the fewest patents had the highest proportion of people age 65 or older.
The cast of Harlan County, Kentucky's community play Higher Ground consisted of retired coal miners, teachers, bluegrass musicians and members of church choirs. In 2005, Harlan County was producing a community play about civic failure -- about the county's battle with drug addiction, primarily the painkiller OxyContin. In the 1930s, "Bloody Harlan" became the center of union organizing efforts by both the Communist Party and the United Mine Workers of America. In the 1970s, it was the scene of another mine strike chronicled in the Academy Award-winning film Harlan County USA. Close to 80,000 people lived there in the 1940s. Now the population is roughly 1/3 that size and dropping with each census.
Traveling the eastern coalfields is a reminder that the most abundant product of the Big SOrt has been inequality.
The Way We Live Today -- The Strict Father/Nurturant Parent Divide
Hetherington and Weiler constructed a scale based on answers to 4 questions:
1) Was it better for a child to demonstrate independence or respect for elders?
2) Obedience or self-reliance?
3) Curiosity or good manners?
4) To be considerate or well behaved?
Those who picked respect, obedience, good manners and well behaved were the most authoritarian = strict fathers. Those who favored independence, self-reliance, curiosity and being considerate = nurturant parents. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners and being well behaved; they were strict fathers. Democrats were nurturant parents.
This splitting of moral perspectives and its connection to political affiliations was new. In the 1960s, there was little real difference in how American raised their children. During the cold war, the political scientists wrote, authoritarian types could be found aplenty in both parties. In the 1960s, there were plenty of strict father Democrats. Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004, the gap had grown wide and deep.
Heatherington and Weiler concluded: "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
Congress gave up governing by the summer of 2006. And not a whole lot had been happening before. Nelson Polsby, a congressional scholar, calculated that the federal government had been largely deadlocked since the late 1960s. It was as if Americans had lost the ability to speak a common civic tongue.
Abortion
Birth Control
Gay Unions
Guns
Education
The Environment
In the past, when the nation had failed to reach a consensus, the custom was for local governments to strike out on their own. Progressive majorities in the Midwest bypassed a polarized Congress in the early part of the 20th century, and enacted laws governing railroad rates, limiting corruption and promoting conservation. The same thing is happening now. With Congress more polarized than at any time since the end of World War II, people see no sense waiting for the national 50-50 division to resolve itself. The federal stalemate has touched off an eruption of activity state and local governments -- federalism that doesn't sleep. [Federalism is a system based upon democratic rules and institutions in which the power to govern is shared between national and provincial/state governments.]
Just Enough to Win the Turkey
Tell just enough to win the turkey -- don't tell all.
The idea of community has been 'miniaturized,' observed Francis Fukuyama.
October 13, 2014
Bishop's central contention is simple - Americans more and more are segregating themselves into communities of people who share the same lifestyles and values (e.g. bike-friendly, local restaurants or large lawns, quiet neighborhoods). In turn, he argues that we are de-facto sorting ourselves politically in a way that undermines the democratic process. He finds that as we concentrate ourselves subconsciously into communities that share our political preferences we form more extreme opinions driven by group psychology. He laments that our proclivity to live among the like-minded shields us from opposing opinions, hampers political debate, and has left our country more divided than ever, evidenced by a gridlocked congress and increasingly polarized presidential election results.
While I agree that politics have become dangerously divisive and a geographically segregated America could potentially have negative implications for the health of the United States, I also feel that Bishop overlooks or misinterprets several key considerations in his analysis.
1) As political scientists Samuel Abrams & Morris Fiorina , Bishop's reliance on presidential election returns limits the utility of his conclusions. They remark that party identification is a better indicator of partisan preference, and that this data is unavailable at the neighborhood level. So while Bishop decries the loss of political independents, county-level registration of independent voters has actually increased since the 1970s. To quote the authors of the article, "Does our analysis prove that political residential segregation is not occurring? No. That is not our position. We are simply pointing out that Bishop's sweeping argument about geographic political sorting has little or no empirical foundation."
2) To again reference the previous publication critiquing the book, the central thesis that segregated neighborhoods harm our nation's democracy rests on shaky assumptions. The assumptions are, as Abrams & Fiorina write, a) neighborhoods are important centers of American life, b) residents of neighborhoods talk to each other, and c) politics are an important discussion feature. As the authors show, neighborhood ties are weaker than they were in the 1950s, neighborhoods a more suburban, and as such organized in ways that discourage interaction, and that a majority of people note either not discussing or rarely discussing politics. Furthermore, although political preferences can certainly be inferred (a central point of Bishop's argument), a Georgetown study revealed that 3 out of 4 participants believed they could guess their neighbors political views, and a majority of that group believed they lived among people with opposing political views.
3) Bishop's America seems to be reflective of a wholly white America, one concentrated in rural, suburban, or hip urban areas. Yet as we knew, that image is becoming far less representative of our nation. So as our nation becomes more diverse racially, so to does it alter the political landscape, challenging the author's vision of a body politic divided into two bodies that possess diametrically opposing viewpoints. How does the expanding Latino community, with generally liberal views on economics or labor but socially conservative views on abortion fit within his America? Notice that all his examples depict places like Austin, Portland, or liberal inner-ring suburbs on one end, and rural West Virginia or outer-ring suburbia on the other. Bishop concentrates solely on a core group that will certainly not reflect the America of the future.
4) Bishop challenges the historical narrative that the Vietnam War fractured our nation, and instead posits that changes to our society began prior to that, and referencing other countries, argues that these changes merely reflected a general "post-materialist" society resembling other advanced industrial nations. However, in this argument Bishop ignores several considerations. First, historians would never make the argument that Vietnam and the unrest came out of nowhere. Clearly, fractures in society had been developing for years that galvanized around the Vietnam War. Consider the "New Left" political movement that was able to unite disparate agenda items under the banner of anti-War sentiments.
Second, he fails to see the dissidents in the United States as part of a more global movement that is challenging authority, convention, and the status-quo.
And third, he cites declining trust in established institutions other than just government (religion, civic institutions, etc.) as evidence that the upheaval of the 60s (assassinations, Vietnam, Civil Rights) did not contribute to the rift in our society as much as material abundance (which gave us the freedom to sort by lifestyle). In this analysis Bishop unnecessarily simplifies the era. Any study of the turbulent 60s reveals that dissidents were challenging the core of society - established norms. Teach-ins were about more than Vietnam - they were about the ability democratic control and place some student control over university affairs. Vietnam fractured the Cold War Consensus that Bishop rarely (if ever) mentions, the driving force of political unity. No longer was militant, unquestioning anti-communism a certainty. In Bishop's unfocused fixation on the "post-materialist" world, he overlooks the extant to which the events of the 60s provided an outlet for the frustrations of youth and the oppressed.
Would he truly be willing to make the argument that the galvanizing events of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests, and the sexual revolution that allowed people to organize around the causes that divided the nation our cultural and political shift would have looked the same?
5) Bishop's analysis strangely fixates largely on the roughly 30 years between the 1970s and 2000s. Yet as he notes in passing, the politics of the days of Madison and Hamilton were equally, if not more, divisive. Seen through a historical perspective, does that actually make the "golden age" of American politics that he references an aberration? Either way, doesn't the continually shifting landscape challenge our political allegiances, making it difficult to predict partisan divides? In the post-war era the consensus of the Cold Warriors along with the unfettered economic prosperity meant the two major parties, for political survival, resembled each other. However in the face of questions about gay rights, racial relations, and uncertain economic growth, isn't it logical that competing visions for society would arise? To use the cooperation of the immediate postwar era as a benchmark to judge today's political landscape by is to ignore the extent to which historical considerations and events color our policy debates.
This is not to condone the divisive partisanship of today's congress. The fact that our representatives can hardly look each other in the eye or even socialize with one another is definitely a sad reflection of a damaged political culture caused by bickering and distrust. However, given the volatility in society, volatility that creates or alters cultural, economic, or environmental affairs, who's to say that we will not develop new attitudes that will once again shake up our political affiliations.
While I agree that politics have become dangerously divisive and a geographically segregated America could potentially have negative implications for the health of the United States, I also feel that Bishop overlooks or misinterprets several key considerations in his analysis.
1) As political scientists Samuel Abrams & Morris Fiorina , Bishop's reliance on presidential election returns limits the utility of his conclusions. They remark that party identification is a better indicator of partisan preference, and that this data is unavailable at the neighborhood level. So while Bishop decries the loss of political independents, county-level registration of independent voters has actually increased since the 1970s. To quote the authors of the article, "Does our analysis prove that political residential segregation is not occurring? No. That is not our position. We are simply pointing out that Bishop's sweeping argument about geographic political sorting has little or no empirical foundation."
2) To again reference the previous publication critiquing the book, the central thesis that segregated neighborhoods harm our nation's democracy rests on shaky assumptions. The assumptions are, as Abrams & Fiorina write, a) neighborhoods are important centers of American life, b) residents of neighborhoods talk to each other, and c) politics are an important discussion feature. As the authors show, neighborhood ties are weaker than they were in the 1950s, neighborhoods a more suburban, and as such organized in ways that discourage interaction, and that a majority of people note either not discussing or rarely discussing politics. Furthermore, although political preferences can certainly be inferred (a central point of Bishop's argument), a Georgetown study revealed that 3 out of 4 participants believed they could guess their neighbors political views, and a majority of that group believed they lived among people with opposing political views.
3) Bishop's America seems to be reflective of a wholly white America, one concentrated in rural, suburban, or hip urban areas. Yet as we knew, that image is becoming far less representative of our nation. So as our nation becomes more diverse racially, so to does it alter the political landscape, challenging the author's vision of a body politic divided into two bodies that possess diametrically opposing viewpoints. How does the expanding Latino community, with generally liberal views on economics or labor but socially conservative views on abortion fit within his America? Notice that all his examples depict places like Austin, Portland, or liberal inner-ring suburbs on one end, and rural West Virginia or outer-ring suburbia on the other. Bishop concentrates solely on a core group that will certainly not reflect the America of the future.
4) Bishop challenges the historical narrative that the Vietnam War fractured our nation, and instead posits that changes to our society began prior to that, and referencing other countries, argues that these changes merely reflected a general "post-materialist" society resembling other advanced industrial nations. However, in this argument Bishop ignores several considerations. First, historians would never make the argument that Vietnam and the unrest came out of nowhere. Clearly, fractures in society had been developing for years that galvanized around the Vietnam War. Consider the "New Left" political movement that was able to unite disparate agenda items under the banner of anti-War sentiments.
Second, he fails to see the dissidents in the United States as part of a more global movement that is challenging authority, convention, and the status-quo.
And third, he cites declining trust in established institutions other than just government (religion, civic institutions, etc.) as evidence that the upheaval of the 60s (assassinations, Vietnam, Civil Rights) did not contribute to the rift in our society as much as material abundance (which gave us the freedom to sort by lifestyle). In this analysis Bishop unnecessarily simplifies the era. Any study of the turbulent 60s reveals that dissidents were challenging the core of society - established norms. Teach-ins were about more than Vietnam - they were about the ability democratic control and place some student control over university affairs. Vietnam fractured the Cold War Consensus that Bishop rarely (if ever) mentions, the driving force of political unity. No longer was militant, unquestioning anti-communism a certainty. In Bishop's unfocused fixation on the "post-materialist" world, he overlooks the extant to which the events of the 60s provided an outlet for the frustrations of youth and the oppressed.
Would he truly be willing to make the argument that the galvanizing events of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests, and the sexual revolution that allowed people to organize around the causes that divided the nation our cultural and political shift would have looked the same?
5) Bishop's analysis strangely fixates largely on the roughly 30 years between the 1970s and 2000s. Yet as he notes in passing, the politics of the days of Madison and Hamilton were equally, if not more, divisive. Seen through a historical perspective, does that actually make the "golden age" of American politics that he references an aberration? Either way, doesn't the continually shifting landscape challenge our political allegiances, making it difficult to predict partisan divides? In the post-war era the consensus of the Cold Warriors along with the unfettered economic prosperity meant the two major parties, for political survival, resembled each other. However in the face of questions about gay rights, racial relations, and uncertain economic growth, isn't it logical that competing visions for society would arise? To use the cooperation of the immediate postwar era as a benchmark to judge today's political landscape by is to ignore the extent to which historical considerations and events color our policy debates.
This is not to condone the divisive partisanship of today's congress. The fact that our representatives can hardly look each other in the eye or even socialize with one another is definitely a sad reflection of a damaged political culture caused by bickering and distrust. However, given the volatility in society, volatility that creates or alters cultural, economic, or environmental affairs, who's to say that we will not develop new attitudes that will once again shake up our political affiliations.
June 30, 2017
This is an informative, disturbing and provocative account of what is happening in the United States. Written in 2008, it seems particularly relevant currently. Utilizing Robert Cushing’s statistical analysis, the book shows how in a society that is changing and confusing, people seek out like minded people to live among. The fact that our population is mobile to some degree is another factor. Technology has also contributed to the change as has the deterioration of civic groups that brought people with different views together. The evangelical church which has had such an influence in the history of the United States, learned from the experience of missionaries to get like minded congregations by finding out what people in particular areas wanted. Taking a hint from the advertisers who working for manufacturers discovered that niche marketing was more effective than mass marketing, the churches grew in power. There is a lovely description in a chaper entitled Books, Beer, Bikes and Birkenstocks that offered the specific example of Portland, Oregon as a place where people to whom these were attractions congregated. This was particularly relevant to me because I remember visiting Portland on a conference and was so enchanted with it that I wanted us to move there. Social media, fragmentation of information with so many television channels and the breakdown of diversified communities accented the division. What happens when people are with like minded people is that their opinions grow more extreme. In a thought provoking final chapter Bishop talks about some religious evangelicals who are different, the Bluer and Sojourn groups. They focus around music and around the idea that there are legitimate different points of view rather than the one truth that most churches offer. They see grey instead of black and white. Bishop talks about the division in religions between the personal and the public where some churches, the public, feel that they need to become active and change the world rather than maintain traditions. Evidence indicates that people who can see both sides of an issue tend to be more passive than those who have fixed ideas about the world, either left or right. Having people who don’t care passionately about politics can have a leavening effect. Bishop talks about tribes in Africa who do not allow people to marry within the tribe. By marrying outside the tribe, there are ties that families have with other tribes that lead to more ways of resolving issues than warring. Bishop also talks about the way in which partisanship leads to the elimination of moderates. He describes Republican politicians who were hounded out of the party by extremists. He says that two-faced politicians in many ways were able to moderate between the different sides, giving Lyndon Johnson as an example. This is a book more people should be reading now.
July 12, 2017
While the analysis of polarization is deep, well-researched, and thorough, its accounting for race is subpar. The central argument is that as Americans become wealthier, they choose to live among people who share their same political beliefs.
The entire book is based on the break happening in 1965, the year of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Bishop discusses the cultural divisions of the year and mentions race as one of them. Later on, he states that in 1963 Americans became more focused on race as an issue. Yet he does not ascribe causality to race as the factor that tipped the scales towards polarization. In chapter 2 Bishop contends that the real white flight has occurred not from city to suburb, but from democratic counties to republican ones. Could that be another correlated factor, or an indication that race is one of the main divides? He then uses an example of a textbook fight, and mentions in passing that the initial concern about them was the use of "African American dialect" and "a view of America from a black perspective."(p116-122) He even goes on to state that the KKK marched to support the textbook opponents.
We could even argue that all of this is mounting but anecdotal evidence. Yet Bishop has to use footnotes to exempt black people from his analysis of religious perspectives (177) and minorities in general from disciplinary approaches (211) as predictors of whether a person has a conservative or liberal worldview, and how that is intensified by the communities of choice that the Big Sort has created.
All of this begs the question: was the Big Sort a predominantly white phenomenon? Why don't minorities have the same determining factors? Why are Republican counties becoming whiter and whiter? Why is the Republican party the refuge of fist-pumping working class whites with low levels of education? I dare say that race continues to be more important than ideology. Working class whites with less than a college education have realized that being white is no longer enough to be a step ahead someone else --and they don't like it one bit. They have been told that the welfare programs and free education they receive is abused by minorities and therefore they vote against the very programs that help with their own financial support.
If we are to look for answers to the last election, geographic polarization has supported an echo chamber of like-minded individuals. But the knot is, as has always been in American history, race.
The entire book is based on the break happening in 1965, the year of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Bishop discusses the cultural divisions of the year and mentions race as one of them. Later on, he states that in 1963 Americans became more focused on race as an issue. Yet he does not ascribe causality to race as the factor that tipped the scales towards polarization. In chapter 2 Bishop contends that the real white flight has occurred not from city to suburb, but from democratic counties to republican ones. Could that be another correlated factor, or an indication that race is one of the main divides? He then uses an example of a textbook fight, and mentions in passing that the initial concern about them was the use of "African American dialect" and "a view of America from a black perspective."(p116-122) He even goes on to state that the KKK marched to support the textbook opponents.
We could even argue that all of this is mounting but anecdotal evidence. Yet Bishop has to use footnotes to exempt black people from his analysis of religious perspectives (177) and minorities in general from disciplinary approaches (211) as predictors of whether a person has a conservative or liberal worldview, and how that is intensified by the communities of choice that the Big Sort has created.
All of this begs the question: was the Big Sort a predominantly white phenomenon? Why don't minorities have the same determining factors? Why are Republican counties becoming whiter and whiter? Why is the Republican party the refuge of fist-pumping working class whites with low levels of education? I dare say that race continues to be more important than ideology. Working class whites with less than a college education have realized that being white is no longer enough to be a step ahead someone else --and they don't like it one bit. They have been told that the welfare programs and free education they receive is abused by minorities and therefore they vote against the very programs that help with their own financial support.
If we are to look for answers to the last election, geographic polarization has supported an echo chamber of like-minded individuals. But the knot is, as has always been in American history, race.
February 19, 2023
I kept putting this book off thinking I have already read enough books on the topic and there is little more yet another book could offer me. Boy was I wrong!
This book is not just about redlining neighborhoods, although I think a good portion of the issue the book addresses does come from the original segregationist practices. This book is about us sorting ourselves into tiny like minded bubbles in every conceivable way. From the places we live to the media we consume to clothing we buy to pets we own. Somewhere we as a culture have become highly allergic to disagreement and just decided to avoid it altogether in every way.
Having read this book I now see it everywhere. People are existing in different realities. And it is not just liberal vs conservative,, it is people who watch youtube creators vs people who watch ticktok. People who hang out in bars vs people who make daily starbucks runs. Every single one of them has their own version of reality and being unable to accept that there might be a slightly different view on a small detail they have sorted themselves into their own tiny community.
The part that really sucks is that I do not see a way to fix it. I also do not think the author provided an answer, as is customary in these sort of books. At some point all of this will have come to a head and I am afraid to find out what that will look like.
PS: a good book to pair with this is “Fantasyland� by Kurt Andersen
This book is not just about redlining neighborhoods, although I think a good portion of the issue the book addresses does come from the original segregationist practices. This book is about us sorting ourselves into tiny like minded bubbles in every conceivable way. From the places we live to the media we consume to clothing we buy to pets we own. Somewhere we as a culture have become highly allergic to disagreement and just decided to avoid it altogether in every way.
Having read this book I now see it everywhere. People are existing in different realities. And it is not just liberal vs conservative,, it is people who watch youtube creators vs people who watch ticktok. People who hang out in bars vs people who make daily starbucks runs. Every single one of them has their own version of reality and being unable to accept that there might be a slightly different view on a small detail they have sorted themselves into their own tiny community.
The part that really sucks is that I do not see a way to fix it. I also do not think the author provided an answer, as is customary in these sort of books. At some point all of this will have come to a head and I am afraid to find out what that will look like.
PS: a good book to pair with this is “Fantasyland� by Kurt Andersen
May 19, 2023
Whew! What a well researched, complex analysis of how we have, over the past 40 years, divided ourselves into groups/tribes/thought communities �.where we only interact with those we identify as being like us. We’ve sorted ourselves geographically, culturally, politically, socially, economically, spiritually, educationally. The result of that isolation, that tribalism � is more radicalized or extreme points of view within the group, and a belief that those not in “my group� are the enemy.
Our democratic form of government is based on compromise, sharing of ideas and reaching consensus. And it’s based on legitimacy � a belief by the majority that our democratic institutions represent us and can be trusted.
The author makes a compelling case that unless we find a way to address the growing tribalism, democracy as Intended by the founders cannot survive. He offers little hope for fixing it, noting 1) America’s historical aversion to confronting what divides us, and 2) The marketing interests of business, media, churches, social/ cultural groups, and our political parties�.who have learned that actively promoting/encouraging and creating “lifestyle/values� communities is a powerfully effective way to grow their brands and sell their wares/point of view.
Our democratic form of government is based on compromise, sharing of ideas and reaching consensus. And it’s based on legitimacy � a belief by the majority that our democratic institutions represent us and can be trusted.
The author makes a compelling case that unless we find a way to address the growing tribalism, democracy as Intended by the founders cannot survive. He offers little hope for fixing it, noting 1) America’s historical aversion to confronting what divides us, and 2) The marketing interests of business, media, churches, social/ cultural groups, and our political parties�.who have learned that actively promoting/encouraging and creating “lifestyle/values� communities is a powerfully effective way to grow their brands and sell their wares/point of view.
December 21, 2020
Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort" is a book about the evolution of American culture, with regard to politics and religion, over the past 50 years. Bishop writes about how American prosperity has had some unforeseen impacts on our culture, including that prosperity allows people to pick up and move wherever they might want to. The main point of the book examines, when people do move, where do they move, and why have they chosen that particular place. Then, once they get there, how does their arrival impact the culture already there.
Bishop touches on a number of reasons why people move, focusing on the idea that people tend to move to places that have people like them. It seems that for all of our cultural mantras about respecting inclusion and diversity, when it comes right down to it, people don't want to be around people who look, act, or think differently than they do. Is this just human nature expressing itself? Probably, although there are other factors inevitably at play, which Bishop explores.
The book is interesting, although at times weighted down by too many facts. Overall, Bishop tries to make what could be a very dry story and make it intriguing for our time. The patterns described in the book, continue to play out, and even get worse. The Big Sort has just gotten bigger to date.
Bishop touches on a number of reasons why people move, focusing on the idea that people tend to move to places that have people like them. It seems that for all of our cultural mantras about respecting inclusion and diversity, when it comes right down to it, people don't want to be around people who look, act, or think differently than they do. Is this just human nature expressing itself? Probably, although there are other factors inevitably at play, which Bishop explores.
The book is interesting, although at times weighted down by too many facts. Overall, Bishop tries to make what could be a very dry story and make it intriguing for our time. The patterns described in the book, continue to play out, and even get worse. The Big Sort has just gotten bigger to date.
October 25, 2021
I read this shortly before the crash in 2008. It talks about the trend of more mobile Americans being free to choose their neighbors and lifestyle tend to flock to places with people like themselves. We are comfortable around people with similar interests and values. But here is the thing being surrounded by people only from your own SES or political orientation or lifestyle choices will warp your view of the world. It also in politics makes similar people egg each other on to more and more extreme positions and radical positions. This has been happening all over the us people are more in more homogeneous enclaves and this trend has balkanized the US and added to extreme polarization. I read it in 2008 but it is so much more obviously worse now.
January 17, 2018
Pretty interesting in a lot of ways. Often boring. Also repetitive.
It would be great if he wrote a new edition or an update, since a lot has changed in the last 10 years.
I feel like this book should have been called "How George Bush Got Elected Twice When I Don't Even Know Any Republicans: An Explanation for My Liberal Friends."
My biggest beef was that the organization was very poor. Most of the time I had no idea why or how different chapters were related. Then at the end, Bishop made some really insightful summative comments and I was like, "Wait, where did he state the thesis of this book?" I don't know that he did.
It would be great if he wrote a new edition or an update, since a lot has changed in the last 10 years.
I feel like this book should have been called "How George Bush Got Elected Twice When I Don't Even Know Any Republicans: An Explanation for My Liberal Friends."
My biggest beef was that the organization was very poor. Most of the time I had no idea why or how different chapters were related. Then at the end, Bishop made some really insightful summative comments and I was like, "Wait, where did he state the thesis of this book?" I don't know that he did.
March 13, 2021
Fascinating sociological story of how we self-segregate by ideology, creating increased political polarization and hindered communication. Funny that in 2006 what he diagnoses as hyper-partisan behavior is the Bush-Kerry election - oh how the times have changed. Most interesting for me was the way churches have self-segregated not so much by doctrine but by political ideology within towns. Highly recommend this one for explaining our present moment in a pretty fair and nuanced way!
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