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The untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided
America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do. This social transformation didn't happed by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion and news show -- most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this groundbreaking work.
In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.
The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.
- Sales Rank: #376162 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Published on: 2008-05-07
- Released on: 2008-05-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .87" w x 6.00" l, 1.28 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize–finalist Bishop offers a one-idea grab bag with a thesis more provocative than its elaboration. Bishop contends that as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics. There are endless variations of this clustering—what Bishop dubs the Big Sort—as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities—even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. Bishop's argument is meticulously researched—surveys and polls proliferate—and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our post materialistic society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that like does attract like becomes an exercise in redundancy. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* How did zip codes become as useful to political activists as to mail carriers? In the relatively new cultural dynamics of political segregation, Bishop discerns a troubling transformation of American life. Complex and surprising, the story of that transformation will confound readers who suppose that recent decades have made American society both more diverse and more tolerant. Pinpointing 1965 as the year when events in Vietnam, Washington, and Watts delivered body blows to traditional social institutions, Bishop recounts how Americans who had severed ties to community, faith, and family forged new affiliations based on lifestyle preferences. The resulting social realignment has segmented the nation into groupthink communities, fostering political smugness and polarization. The much-noted cartography of Red and Blue states, as Bishop shows, actually distorts the reality of a deeply Blue archipelago of urban islands surrounded by a starkly Red rural sea. Bishop worries about the future of democratic discourse as more and more Americans live, work, and worship surrounded by people who echo their own views. A raft of social-science research underscores the growing difficulty of bipartisan compromise in a balkanized country where politicians win office by satisfying their most radical constituents. A book posing hard questions for readers across the political spectrum. --Bryce Christensen
Review
"Essential reading for activists, poli-sci types, journalists and trend-watchers." Kirkus Reviews
"A timely, highly readable discussion of American neighborhoods and the implications of who lives in them." Library Journal
"A book posing hard questions across the political spectrum." Booklist, ALA, Boxed Review
"Bishop's argument is meticulously researched—surveys and polls proliferate—and his reach is broad." Publishers Weekly
"a gripping new book" - The Economist
"Jam-packed with fascinating data, "The Big Sort" presents a provocative portrait of the splintering of America." Boston Globe
"[a] rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying." The Wall Street Journal
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Very Good! An eye opening look into how America got so polarized
By Sean G
The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop, is an ambitious and really interesting book that presents a compelling argument that there’s been a major re-sorting of the American populace over the past 50 years driven by social, economic, political and cultural forces. This great sorting-migration has resulted in a nation of clustered regions of like-minded citizens living in ever more idealized communities, both urban and exurban, right leaning and left.
In 1965, we were a nation of 195,000,000 citizens, Democratics and Republicans evenly distributed across counties nationwide, of relative common mind, work, goals, politics and prosperity. By 2016 we’ve become a nation of 320,000,000, less individually prosperous, far less equally prosperous, all tightly sequestered in geographic, cultural and economic clusters. Politically polarized with a federal government frozen in perpetual stale mate.
The author cites numerous social science studies demonstrating the pernicious power of group-think and its ability to amplify ideologies, belief systems and behaviors while stoking extreme thinking. Mixed company moderates, like-minded company polarizes. And like-mindedness breeds isolationism, isolationism breeds extremist thinking. Because we’ve been sorting ourselves into like-minded clusters, we’ve lost the need for moderation, compromise and tolerance because we rarely interact with people with opposing views. Isolationism breeds extremism!
Bishop examines the culture wars of the 70s, 80s and 90s and reveals the links between generation, race, religion, tradition, abortion, birth control, guns, gays, identity rights, individualism, the environment and where you live and how you vote. He shows how GW Bush exploited this psychographic finding in his 2004 re-election campaign when his chief strategist Matt Dowd discovered there was no more “center” in the electorate. Dowd realized the middle was now just shallow water and wasting energy trying to persuade an undecided swing voter was folly, better to put all your energy into increasing turnout inside your deep base. And the partisan sentiment of the base was organically getting deeper by virtue of the Big Sort and its echo chambers. It was easier to build on an already rabid base than to convince a moderate swing voter to join your team. And it just so happens that right-leaning traditionalists were concentrating themselves inside electoral college battle ground states, making them easy to target.
Other interesting facts and observations Bishop presents include:
- Rural America defected en masse from the Democratic party in 2000
- Between Clinton ‘96 and Bush 2000, 856 counties switched from Democrat to Republican
- Republicans in 2007 were more religious than they were 20 years earlier. Democrats, less so.
- Republicans are “strict fathers” and Democrats are “nurturant parents.” (Everybody gets a trophy)
- Before the 1960s there was little difference in how Americans raised their children.
- After 2004, answers about child rearing became a better indicator of party than income
- Democrats moved to cities while Republicans moved to where there’s more grass to mow
- Reversing a trend, Democrats are now pro states-rights advocates whereas Republicans are shifting to support Federal mandates.
Other wedge issues Bishop cites behind the culture wars are school textbook censorship in the 70s and the 90s, busing in Boston in the ‘70s, prayer in schools, mainline churches preaching “social good” over “personal salvation” (saving society vs saving souls), spotted owls and old growth forests, gun control, birth control, abortion, sexual revolution, the rise of individualism and feminism.
Economic factors behind the Big Sort were globalization, technology, automation and the resulting disappearance of blue collar jobs, especially in the mid west and rural regions. This Corporate-Wall Street-Globalist grand bargain gave us cheap imported goods and low inflation (and a soaring stock market) but sacrificed jobs, livelihoods and a sense of meaning and direction for millions. (Globalization helped pull 150 million people out of poverty in China but plunged 10s of millions of the U.S. middle class into chaos and anxiety towards an uncertain future.)
Other changes Bishop notes includes the loss in faith in government and institutions beginning in the mid sixties with Vietnam and accelerating after Watergate. In 1955 80% of the population trusted government, by 1976 only 33% did. Civil rights was another seismic event, causing the Democrats to lose the south after 1964. The anti-science movement also came out of a slow burn of anti-trust in establishment and institutions, stoked by conspiracy theorists on both the right and left.
Bishop’s research also shows that higher education is another differentiator and has been a key sorting mechanism in the Big Sort. Today, the clearest indicators of Democrat vs Republican are education, age, parenting style, religion and geography (urban vs exurban - not necessarily sub-urban). The higher the education, the more progressive or liberal the voter, but not necessarily the less dogmatic.
Overall, The Big Sort is an interesting look at how certain monumental social and economic shifts have been quietly, and not so quietly, taking place in our society over the past 50 years causing ever larger chasms between the left and right. This new clustering of people, culture, economics, politics and ideas, all force-multiplied by social media and echo chambers, may help explain how this great country of ours has just elected a bellicose, ignorant, fear-mongering, Reality TV demagogue as its president - a primal scream from a fearful, displaced, white, rural middle class.
May God Save America!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
THE BIG SORT LEADS TO TRUMP
By The Curmudgeon
This book was written just before the 2008 election so Bishop concentrates on the 2004 election. The point is that Americans are increasingly clustering in politically homogeneous neighborhoods, counties, and states. In 2004 half of the counties gave Bush or Kerry a landslide victory, defined as a twenty point victory. This has been a growing trend since 1976 when only a quarter of the counties had landslide victories. In a short afterword, Bishop confirms that the trend continued in 2008. There are now no more than about ten battleground states.
This political segregation is happening because it is now easy for Americans to move to places they find more congenial. They find the same people there and they vote the same. The country is thus segregating geographically, which is a return to the original condition of the founding states. This clustering has increased political conformity so that the independent vote is now only about ten percent.
People are also simply choosing the lifestyles they like and the result is political. Democrats prefer big cities and older suburbs while Republicans prefer newer suburbs and rural areas. This assorting migration is producing assortive mating and tribal attitudes with political polarization.
This cultural shift actually started in 1965 when people first began challenging institutions in the post-WWII era. It was initially a silent revolution because it was first picked up in voter attitudes polled by Gallup. People then became more partisan and the era of compromise and bi-partisanship began unraveling. It first started from the left in 1965 with anti-war demonstrations but in 1966 Republicans joined in with unexpected Congressional victories where they ousted local Democrat politicians. 1966 was also the year when Reagan won the California governor's race by upsetting the incumbent Democrat.
Bishop says this is part of a post-materialist society, meaning one where people's material needs are satisfied so they concentrate on higher value needs such as lifestyle and the accompanying political conformity. So the cause is prosperity as people can increasingly afford to move and cluster. Bishop says the 2004 election was the first big sort election where motivating the base was more important than chasing independents. The GOP latched onto this earlier and used marketing techniques to find conservative voters. The Democrats caught up in 2008.
Accompanying all this has been the increasing distrust of national institutions and political parties. The most recent example has been the election of Donald Trump who is the quintessential political outsider. He has broken all the political conventions and amassed a major following. The 2016 election has probably changed American politics indefinitely.
113 of 116 people found the following review helpful.
The big sort that starts at home
By John L. Borden
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, informative, insightful, and even entertaining. Somehow he pulls off the trick of letting us know of his participation in the "clustering" by living in a liberal Austin neighborhood where he fits in, without upsetting the balanced analytical perspective of the book. At least that's my take on it. It's an important book that seems to be gaining deserved recognition as we move toward November 4.
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