The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded
American Is Tearing Us Apart
By Bill Bishop
(Houghton Mifflin, 384 pages, $25)
This presidential election has already produced its fair share of
predictable foolishness and sheer demagoguery. The candidates have
promised to heal the sick, fix the economy, and create wealth
without risk, even if they don’t quite understand economics.
Amid all this noise, suddenly we hear a signal coming from new
book The Big Sort by journalist Bill Bishop. While John
McCain and Barack Obama promise to lead the nation costlessly
toward nirvana, Bishop informs our understanding of the past and
suggests a future that belies the hopes of both candidates for the
White House.
Bishop argues that over the past 40 years Americans have
increasingly chosen to live near others who are culturally and
politically similar. When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, less than
one-fourth of Americans lived in counties where the presidential
election was a landslide. By the time George W. Bush won
re-election, almost one-half lived in landslide counties.
Bishop writes well. The book is an engaging read, filled with
stories about how the United States has changed over the past 30
years. But Bishop is more than a storyteller.
He worked with Robert Cushing, a sociologist from the University
of Texas at Austin — to document the internal migrations that have
made the nation both more separate and more homogenous.
THERE IS A larger story here. Americans are become wealthier and
more economically secure. That security has brought what my
colleague Brink Lindsey calls, in the title of his latest book,
The Age of Affluence, a period when material concerns no
longer dominate politics and life.
In the place of such concerns, Bishop says, people reorder
“their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs.”
Neighborhoods, churches, and civic organizations became more
homogenous as have the political parties.
The Big Sort traces these cultural divisions to the
conflicts of the 1960s and afterward. Religion is an important part
of Bishop’s story. He traces the decline of mainline Protestantism
and shows how evangelicals succeeded in attracting new members by
emphasizing what people had in common. Bishop is a liberal — he
says as much from the first page of the book — but his treatment
of Christianity, and not least of conservative Christians, is fair
enough.
Bishop also has some blind spots. He emphasizes the collective
consequences of migration decisions by Americans. The subtitle of
the book passes a harsh judgment on those choices: “Why the
Clustering of Like-minded American Is Tearing Us Apart.”
But these decisions about where to live are choices made by
adults, choices that are fundamental to their conception of what
makes for a good life. The United States promises the pursuit of
happiness, not the pursuit of happiness unless it makes us too
polarized.
The book also worries too much about the political consequences
of the Big Sort. Americans are coming to live in small tribes,
Bishop argues, where cultural and political differences are not
encouraged.
Living with the like-minded is perhaps a matter of some regret.
But living with the enemy also has its problems. Who is to say that
moving to a place bounded by a horizon does not make more sense for
a family and the nation? The alternative might be greater conflict
locally.
THE BIG SORT has some vital lessons for the presidential
candidates. McCain speaks of “our nation” as if we were a family
while Obama says there is only a United States rather than red and
blue states. On the evidence in this book, both candidates are
wrong.
The nation is deeply divided culturally and politically. The
geographical separation reflects the cultural divisions that have
informed politics for many years. People do not enjoy living near
people who despise their deepest commitments. They move away from
them. The nation becomes less united.
That change has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages?
Greater division means the nation lacks the unity necessary to go
on great collective crusades. We simply don’t agree about the goals
for such a crusade.
A genuine enemy might enable McCain to unite a disparate nation,
but few now believe radical Muslims represent a mortal danger. Once
Obama stops talking about “a common purpose” and starts governing,
he will discover concretely how little Americans have in
common.
The nation does need a leader that understands and accepts that
Americans need some geographical, political, and cultural distance
from one another. America needs, in other words, a president who
knows We do not exist.
