Book Review: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop
Former Lexington Herald reporter Bill Bishop takes on an issue that crept up on the pundits, the pollsters and the pols. While other researchers see the quilt pieces, Bishop and his statistician partner, Robert Cushing, see the quilt spreading over America. 100 million Americans relocated during the 1990s – most deliberately went to agreeable places. Agreeable, not in climate, but in shared attitudes, values and culture; agreeable to those on the inside, but not so much to those who make a different choice.
 To see the pattern, Bishop and Cushing identified “landslide counties” – those with a margin of victory for one presidential candidate of twenty percentage points or more. These counties may have started out balanced politically when Carter ran against Ford, but they have been steadily tipped toward one party. Red state. Blue state. Enclaves of the other color are located within each: a GOP stronghold in Oregon; a Democratic bastion in Texas. While pollsters concentrated on states, Americans were sorting themselves out into communities of people who reinforced the things they held dear.
What difference does it make?
“This process of self-segregation would be inconsequential if only a few American s lived in politically homogeneous counties. But the numbers, we learned, aren’t small. In 2004, one-third of US voters lived in counties that had remained unchanged in their presidential party preference since 1968. Just under half lived in counties that hadn’t changed since 1980, 60 percent lived in counties that hadn’t changed since 1988, and nearly 73 percent lived in counties that hadn’t changed since 1992, voting consistently Democratic or Republican for four presidential elections in a row. National political choices were being carved in to local geographies…”
If it were only voting preferences, it might not be cause for alarm. But living in a politically homogeneous county means differences in lifestyles, beliefs and demographics:
*In strongly partisan GOP counties, 57% of the people are married.
In strongly partisan Dem counties, 47% of the people are married.
*In Republican counties, 21% earned over $75,000 a year.
In Democratic counties, 29% earned over $75,000 a year.
*Republican counties: 86% white.
Democratic counties, 70% white.
*GOP counties, 46% said they went to church at least once a week and half of those described themselves as Evangelicals.
In Democratic counties, 34% said they went to church at least once a week and 32% of that group described as Evangelicals.
Democrats tended toward urban areas. Their enclaves feature fewer clubs, lower church attendance and weaker family connections. Republicans moved toward more rural areas with more volunteer opportunities, traditional family groups and strong churches.
Bishop found that the millions of Americans who moved were making lifestyle choices. For example, those with bachelor degrees went where there were more people with bachelor degrees.
“Educated people congregated, creating regional wage disparities, which attracted more educated people to the richer cities-which further increased the disparities in regional economies.”
Young people are more likely to move than old. Young educated people moved farther away and more often than their less well educated brethren. In 1990, he says, young people were evenly distributed among the nation’s 320 cites. By 2000, twenty to thirty-four year olds were concentrated in a score of cities. Over 700,000 young people left rural areas and 80% of white youths who moved during the 90’s went to the twenty one cities highest in technology and patent production. The 119 cities producing the fewest patents had the highest proportion of people sixty five and older.
When groups with similar interests cluster, they reinforce each other’s belief systems. This is not an ideological argument. Bishop cites examples from the left and from the right. Human beings need to be part of a tribe and sociologists have repeatedly shown that we will do what it takes to remain part of our group.
Why spend time with those who disagree with you when you have like minded folks right next door? Opposites may attract in science, but like calls to like in migratory patterns. Debate becomes muted when disagreeing means exclusion from the group. Going to the same church, frequenting the same watering holes, seeing the same faces at work and play creates a culture of togetherness that rewards agreement and punishes dissent.
Much was made in past presidential elections about the religion gap between supporters of the two major parties. Bishop never leaves religion too far behind throughout the book and devotes one chapter exclusively to it. We Americans are more religious than other first world countries. Religion played a major role in the founding of America and it continues to play a major role.
Bishop explores the dynamics of Christian churches, tracing the history of the mega-churches (Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church) and the rise and fall of the traditional denominations. The stories of Bishop J. Wastrom Pickett, a missionary in India who is to church growth what Henry Ford was to cars and Donald McGavran, whose book “The Bridges of God” is an underpinning work for the Evangelical movement are fascinating. Each looked at what everyone else was looking at and saw something different. The mainstream denominations soundly rejected them, but pastors like Rick Warren got it and used it to build congregations of like minded individual numbering in the thousands.
Bishop looks at religion and sees an either-or division in mainstream Christianity and an emerging “neither” for Gen X’ers. He spends time at Bluers in Minneapolis and Sojourn in Louisville with young people who are rejecting the rigid rules of the Evangelicals and the “this is the way we’ve always done it” of the traditional denominations. The “congregations” of these two “churches” see more gray than black and white in the world they live in, unlike their elders who deal in shalts and shalt nots.
This book might only be an interesting look at American culture if it wasn’t so scary. Bishop identifies what many of us see every day – the shouting across the aisle has stopped-not because we are in agreement, but because we have stopped listening to each other. The open exchange of ideas that creates new solutions to old problems isn’t happening.
The Bush campaign in 2004 recognized that recruitment of the uncommitted was not the road to victory – reinforcement of the converted was. The campaign focused on like minded individuals contacting like minded friends and neighbors and bringing them into the tribe. It worked. (Of course, running against John Kerry, a man who sounds like few of us, lives like few of us and who has no tribe of his own outside of his Senate colleagues didn’t hurt either.)
Partisanship is the name of the game. Our presidential candidates are accused of flip-flopping if they dare mention the worth of an idea not springing from the ideological edges of their parties. Both John McCain, in his recognition of global warming, and Barack Obama, in his support for the FISA bill, have heard the squalling of true believers that they have strayed from the path.
If you are looking for an easy fix, it isn’t in this book. Bishop sees no end to the tilting toward enclaves of those who look like us, think like us, act like us, without either an issue that cuts across ideological lines or the rejection of the path we are on by the next generation.
Bishop attributes the Big Sort to economic prosperity giving Americans the option to choose. Young people in the 90s were able to remain in tech centers because they got good jobs. The energy of creation was fueled by venture capital money located in the neighborhood. Venture capital firms around Silicon Valley had a twenty minute rule – fund only companies within a twenty minute drive.
With the price of oil skyrocketing for no apparent reason, banks failing, jobs disappearing, the economic prosperity that moved Americans may be at an end.
We may not have time to wait for the next generation to change their minds and their addresses.
If Bishop is right, there is little good news for Kentucky in The Big Sort. The urban Bluegrass and predominantly rural eastern and western Kentucky drift farther and farther apart from each other. Young people who want to stay in Kentucky will gravitate to the two biggest cities in the state. Politicians will answer to their home constituencies who see nothing in common with “them over there”. To begin to solve the problems of poverty that exists across the Commonwealth will start with talking across the aisle to each other and not shouting.
It’s going to take a miracle or a disaster for that to happen.
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