The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart

Bill Bishop, with Robert G. Cushing
2008. Houghton Mifflin. 370 pp. $25.

“It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge,” writes Bill Bishop, summarizing several research projects in The Big Sort. “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.” {68}

His point is no longer academic. For the past forty years or so, without much conscious consideration, we Americans have used our prosperity and mobility to choose like-minded company in our neighborhoods, churches, media, and politics. And these homogeneous communities have changed the overall tenor of public discussion and the workings of democracy for the worse.

The sorting process is easiest to spot in politics. As recently as 1976, in the competitive presidential contest between Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter, about one-quarter of Americans lived in “landslide counties” — those that either candidate carried by more than 20 percentage points. By 2004, almost half lived in such counties. Many Kerry backers were mystified that the election was so close, because they didn’t know anyone who supported Bush.

Author Bill Bishop’s a journalist, but one who believes in organizing his thoughts and footnoting his sources – and in talking to people who actually know their subjects. (His collaborator in this book was retired sociologist Robert Cushing.) As a result, you don’t have to take his word for it. Not only is the book better documented than the average pop-sociology best-seller, it’s better-paced and more even-tempered as well. If you enjoy the gloom-and-doom style of James Howard Kunstler – by turns gloating and shrill – you’ll find this book bland.

In the old days Americans might choose up sides in hotly contested presidential elections like those of 1840 or 1884 or 1896, but in daily life they had to deal with members of the opposing side at work, in church, at the store, or just walking down the road. Over time these cross-cutting connections forced people to come to terms with people they disagreed with. (That’s why the Methodist Episcopal Church’s split along north-south lines in 1844, seventeen years before the Civil War, was ominous.)

Today it’s much easier to avoid inconvenient conversations than it was then. And ambitious ministers and ambitious politicians have no reason to promote them. Instead, it pays to go with the flow: “People wouldn’t be attracted to a church filled with a diverse membership . . . . they would come to a church custom-built for people like themselves.” {171} In a vicious circle, the process feeds on itself: the other tribe comes to seem more extreme just because of its unfamiliarity, while each tribe intensifies its beliefs and actually does grow more extreme. (A personal example: once convinced that I was a “liberal,” an intelligent conservative acquaintance some years back never managed to process the facts that I had supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment and had cast a protest vote for the Libertarian Party candidate in 2000.)

Bishop’s thesis fundamentally challenges the way reformers, journalists, and a lot of ordinary people think about society. We tend to think that if we could only explain the virtues of urban living, or deer hunting, or universal healthcare well enough to enough people, we could change their minds on that issue. That always was a tad naive, but in a society increasingly intensely tribalized by choice, it’s so far off the mark as to resemble the rooster who crows the sun up.

The currently successful approach is not to try to change minds, but to energize your tribe and get them to turn out (and vote, in political matters). “When politicians began to apply one-to-one marketing methods to elections, they abandoned the possibility of a common good,” writes Bishop. “Breaking the country into tiny market segments resulted in the death of consensus — and the possibility that Americans could agree at times to split the difference.” {194-5}

In a slightly different vein, Bishop makes a surprising point about the decline of social capital that Robert Putnam lamented in “Bowling Alone”: it may be a political or social problem but an economic solution. Bishop cites research showing a relationship between the health of the local civic culture and the well-being of the economy — a negative relationship. “The tighter the social ties, the fewer the patents, the lower the wages, and the slower the rates of growth. Bismarck, Baton Rouge, and Cincinnati all had whopping numbers of civic connections (social and volunteer groups, high rates of voter participation), but they had relatively few patents and showed slow (if any) growth. Cities such as San Diego, Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta (as well as Silicon Valley) all had bottom-of-the-barrel social connections but high rates of innovation and growth and high incomes.” {141-2}

The Big Sort sticks pretty close to political, racial, religious, and lifestyle divisions, but it has one obvious implication for those interested in urbanism, diversity, density, and walkability: there’s a large tribe whose members want nothing to do with any of that. Places to live are consumer goods; people can and do choose the kind they want. Same thing goes for journalism, in any medium. The generic place to live, like the general reader, is well on the way to extinction.

By way of example, Bishop mentions an Episcopal priest who “had moved from the reliably Republican Louisville, Kentucky, suburbs to an older city neighborhood so that he could be within walking distance of produce stands, restaurants, and coffee shops – and to be among other Democrats.” {22-3} Meanwhile, the other tribe’s members “were moving in another cultural direction, toward Bible studies, big backyards, and Bass Weejuns.” {200} A crude but dramatic measure is that counties voting for Kerry in 2004 averaged 836 people per square mile; those voting for Bush averaged 110. {205} One possible conclusion: the best you can hope for is to create places that are distinctive, and hope that some innovations may sneak into the other tribe’s habitat.

Bishop doesn’t project these trends very far into the future, nor does he issue a call to arms for some “solution.” As good journalists have always done, he tells us the news in its full context, including his personal involvement. He doesn’t waste our time slanting the story or pretending to be a prophet. What we make of the Big Sort is up to us.

#