The Big Sort

Bill Bishop, “The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart”, 2008, Houghton Mifflin, 309 pp, plus extensive notes. 

Bill Bishop (in collaboration with sociologist and statistician Robert Cushing) demonstrates with data how Americans have sorted themselves geographically, economically, and politically into like-minded communities over the last three decades. This is the story of why America is so culturally and politically divided.  As recently as 1976, Americans were most likely to live, work, or worship with people who supported a different political party than themselves.  Only 26 percent of them lived in counties that were considered landslide districts (i.e., districts where candidates were elected with 20% or more of the votes).  But a cultural shift powered by prosperity and economic security was occurring; freed from want and worry that had so greatly influenced the Great Depression generation, people were reordering their lives around their values, tastes, and beliefs. Tradition, economic class and occupation, religious denomination, civic structures, and party politics—the ways of life that had molded the country—were losing their influence.  Instead, people were clustering in communities of like-mindedness, and not just geographically.  Churches grew more politically homogeneous, as well as civic clubs, volunteer organizations, and political parties.  By 2006 only 10% of voters clustered in the middle as Independents.  Politicians now spend little time trying to persuade the Independents; instead they concentrate on getting out the partisan vote.

My Notes:

Pg. 31:  Gerrymandering is falsely accused of responsibility for the dramatic increase in noncompetitive (landslide) districts.  This clustering of people in like-minded districts is part of a longer, secular decline in the underlying competiveness of House districts since the mid 1980s. (However, this clustering naturally presents districts to gerrymander).  

Pg. 87:  In 1965, there was a sudden dealignment, a mass withdrawal of support for both parties.  The dealignment of voters was almost entirely a white phenomenon.  Until the Watts riots in August 1965, a majority of northern whites said that Democrats were pushing integration about right.  By 1966 the proportion who said that integration was proceeding too fast nearly doubled, jumping from 28 percent to 52 percent.  Similarly, in 1965 street crime appeared just behind public education on the list of most important issues.  By 1968, 81 percent of Americans agreed that law and order had broken down in this country.  The gap in the party preferences of white men and women that became so pronounced in the 1990s and has continued into this century resulted from white men leaving the Democratic Party beginning in the mid-1960s.

Pg. 178:  The lesson learned in scores of group polarization experiments is that like-minded groups grow more extreme over time.  For those who are finding Wikipedia too liberal, there is now Conservapedia. 

Pg. 237:  In the past, when the nation had failed to reach a consensus, local governments would strike out on their own and pass the necessary legislation.  The same thing is happening now.  With Congress more polarized than at any time since the end of WWII, local and state governments are striking out on their own.  Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law is a good example.  Moderates have been disappearing from the U.S. House and Senate.  In 1949 about half of each group was moderate, now it is less than 10 percent.  The 2004 Bush campaign took advantage of this knowledge and quit trying to persuade the undecided to vote Republican; instead they devoted 80% of their time and money motivating partisan Republicans to vote.

•People with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation's cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated in particular cities, a phenomenon that decimated the economies in some places and caused other regions to flourish.

• The generation of ministers who built sprawling mega-churches in the new suburbs learned to attract their stadium-sized congregations through the "homogenous unit principle." The new churches were designed for cookie-cutter parishioners, what one church-growth proponent described as "people like us."

Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “Big Sort” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more.

And the home-schooling movement, which has grown rapidly in recent decades, shields more than one-million American children from almost any ideas their parents dislike.

Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.