The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart

1. Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city. Congressmen lived, ate, and slept at boarding houses. Members living in the same boarding house sat together on the same floor and voted similarly, sectional conclaves. 2. Cultural segregation in early America was enforced by lack of mobility. 3. Many political leaders reflect the political segregation of American communities. They are coming out of a society that is more self-isolated and self-absorbed. 4. What we think of what hear or see depends largely on who said it. We are likely to find evidence that confirms our preconceptions. 5. People find safety in groups. "We come to accept a wide array of positive outcomes with acceptance and love from others." 6. Like-minded groups enforce conformity and tend to grow more extreme in the majority view. Like mind company polarizes. 7. People are more committed to a position once they have voiced it. 8. Isolation creates clashes of opinion. Federalist believed the best antidote to factions was to see that communities weren't cut off from new and sometimes conflicting ideas, a constant mixing of opposing opinion. 9. Should legislators mirror the interests/opinions of the people they represent? A republican form took the view that the representative would act for the general benefit of the whole community. 10. Homogeneous communities become self-propelling engines of partisanship. 11. People's faith, culture, and politics have a lot to do where they live. 12. The mass culture by media, organizations, and association brought about more segmentation and more homogeneousness. The Economies of the Big Sort: 1. 100 million American resettled across a county border in the 1990s. There was an order to the flow of movement. A large group of people migrated to Los Vegas. Economies, lifestyle, and politics merged in the Big Sort. 2. U.S economy, its culture, and its politics were changing town to town, city to city. 3. People with College degrees moved to places where other people with degrees lived. The personage of adults with college degree increased for 17 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2004. In 2000, 45 percent of twenty-five to thirty four year olds had finished college in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. 4. The cities that grew the fastest and the richest were ones where people with college degrees congregated. People with different levels of education sort themselves into cities. The migration patter set off segregation by income. 5. People went to high-tech cities: Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Boise. 6. Corporations began moving where pools of talent were deepening. 7. Creatives are people who think for a living: manager, artists, writers, engineers, and teachers. Creative class workers were sorting themselves into the same cities: Washington, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin. Few cities had a sizeable working class and a large creat

It may take a journalist to write an important work on politics that can be understood and enjoyed by those without a PhD in political science. This is essential reading for those who want to understand where the rubber meets the road in American politics at the grassroots level. It is a penetrating analysis that is also thoughtful, thoroughly researched and very well-written. With that said, an editor more concerned with selling books than with the weight of objective evidence may have insisted on the subtitle, "Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart." That is because James Madison wrote in 1787, "The latent causes of factions are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society." Bill Bishop brings this up to date 221 years later by describing how the adherents of those factions have chosen to live apart by segregating themselves into separate clusters of residential neighborhoods in cities across the country. He is far less persuasive in making a case that this is somehow tearing us apart any more today than it did in the atmosphere of bitter factionalism that existed in Madison's era.

Now that Bill Clinton is using Bill Bishop's book "The Big Sort" as the basis for his current speeches, I should finally post a review. I read this book as soon as it was published and liked it, but not being one who regularly picks up social science books on political culture I procrastinated. Now it's time, and here are a few observations. "The Big Sort" refers to the fact that lifestyle choices are leading like-minded folks to live together in communities where they feel comfortable and perhaps unchallenged. That has significant ramifications for our country's political and social development. To quote the book, "The lesson for politics and culture is pretty clear. It doesn't matter if you're a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward extremes." The fact that Republican strategists understood this well before the Democrats is detailed in a discussion with Matthew Dowd, George Bush's pollster in the 2000 election and chief strategist for the Bush campaign in 2004. According to Bishop's account, Dowd understood that "American communities were 'becoming very homogeneous'. He believed that to a large degree, this clustering was defensive, the general reaction to a society, a country, and a world that were largely beyond an individual's control or understanding. For generations, people had used their clubs, their trust in a national government, and long-established religious denominations to make sense of the world. But those old institutions no longer provided a safe harbor. 'What I think has happened,' Dowd told me early in 2005, 'is the general anxiety the country feels is building. We're no longer anchored'." Bishop decodes this further, saying "Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans---and it had loosened long established social moorings. Americans were scrambling to find a secure place, to make a secure place...Most Americans have done that by seeking out(or perhaps gravitating toward)those who share their lifeworlds---made up of old, fundamental differences such as race, class, gender, and age, but also, now more than ever, personal tastes, beliefs, styles, opinions, and values." "The Big Sort" identifies 1965 as the beginning of the major shift in American political and social demographics. The result today, in a political sense, is underscored by the findings of Bishop and his sociologist/demographer contributor Robert Cushing. Statistics showed that in the 1976 presidential election only 20% or Americans lived in counties that voted for one candidate or the other by more than a 20% margin. By 2004, 48% of America's counties were this type of landslide county with 20% plus margins for one of the candidates. Big change. Bishop's book manages to deal with this subject comprehensively while being fluidly written, informati

I remember back in high school, I was talking to a teacher about his growing up in Pittsburgh in the twenties and thirtiesand how, back then, people seemed to live in communities. For example, his father working in the steel industry, as did a few other neighbours. The guy next door, however, was a doctor. Today you don't see that as much... That's because we live in class enclaves. Bishop pinpoints 1965 as the epicenter. Myself, I'd place it at the end of World War II, when housing plans were popping up. Housing plans ensure that the residents living within the confines are, to a degree, very similar. But enough with my ideas. Bishops recognizes that the political division that the country is going through has a physical aspect as well, which is something I've not before considered. This is an important book that describes the further radicalisation of American politics. One must wonder what the ramifications will yeild a decade from now...

This book is intriguing, convincing, also sad and scary for anybody who hopes to be living in a democracy. After reading it, I look around and see the uniformity (amid the Benetton ethnic mix and DIY style-diversity) of my own social networks in the city. All I did was exercise "free" choice about where to live. I've wound up in this cool 'hood, so cool I have to whisper that I voted for Clinton, not Obama. Bishop and Cushing have done mighty work. They track back the origins of the mega-churches (would you believe in India and Korea?) and pull together decades of bizarre social psychology research. They prove what's happened by following the votes, the money, and the feet of Americans on the move. Stories are good reading -- the comic book "tribe" in Portland, emergent church kids, moderates squeezed out of Congress, the textbook wars of the 1960s in particular blew my mind. Anybody who thinks Karl Rove masterminded the state we're in is going to be stunned. We're living a new segregationist era, and it goes a whole lot deeper than skin.