Where do you fit?
In an increasingly polarized nation where Americans are moving to places where people think and vote alike …
By Douglas Burns
Democrats are more likely to own cats and belong to DVD rental services like Netflix. They tend to hang out with friends at public parks and watch late-night television.
Meanwhile, Republicans spend more time with their families and are inclined to talk about politics with people at church. They are also more likely than Democrats to have dogs.
In an increasingly polarized America, what Democrats and Republicans share in common more than at any other point in the nation’s recent history is this: They are less likely to be neighbors.
In his groundbreaking book, “The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart,” veteran journalist Bill Bishop of Austin, Texas, describes how the divisions in American politics between the Fox News watchers and MSNBC devotees are largely the reflection of how and why people live where they do.
Your grandma’s mid-20th century lemonade-on-the-front-porch, and seemingly sage, explanation for the oddball aunt’s presence at the family reunion is dead wrong. Opposites don’t attract. And as individuals, with modern freedoms of mobility, both real and virtual, decide with whom they will associate, our nation is going through a transformation Bishop calls “The Big Sort.”
Evidence of this abounds. Regional dialects are becoming more pronounced, and televised game shows are having trouble finding questions to which most members of a national audience can relate.
Former President Bill Clinton has read “The Big Sort” and tells people to take note of its consequences. The New York Times ranks the book as among the tops in any non-fiction category to be published in the last year. As much as any recent political work, Bishop’s steely eyed use of empirical data and exhaustive research shows us what is happening to us — why we can’t all get along and seem forever estranged from compromise or consensus.
Working with retired University of Texas sociology professor Robert G. Cushing, Bishop went through election data stretching back to 1948. Here’s what they found: In the 1976 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, a little more than 26 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties — places where one party won by 20 percent or more of the vote. In 2004, 48.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties.
“The Sort” explains much of what lurks behind the YouTubed anarchy at many elected officials’ summer town hall meetings.
The red state-blue state mapping of politics is only a window peep into what’s changing in the American house. The ideological and cultural segregation is taking place at the community level. Entire cities (Iowa City or Orange City) are defined by their politics, as are given neighborhoods. Iowa Republican Party chairman Matt Strawn made a point of noting at a Hoyt Sherman Place gathering this summer that the GOP was on enemy turf in the progressive Sherman Hills neighborhood of Des Moines.
On a day-to-day basis this cocooning has its advantages to be sure, Bishop said in a phone interview with Cityview.
“You can find the place and live in the place and live around the people that make you feel most comfortable and are doing the kinds of things you want,” Bishop says.
In Austin, this means support for alternative energy as the city, for example, will pay a third of the cost of installing solar panels.
“Then you go west of here and other cities have Bible study in their classrooms and they’ll allow teachers to carry guns into the school, or whatever it is,” Bishop says.
Overwhelming local majorities in much of America now possess the political muscle to create the “will and the way” for cities and counties to establish identities based on recycling programs or more accommodation for religion in public schools and civic affairs.
This arrangement may sound ideal — and millions of Americans have moved to their current locales because of it. But those who are so situated, comfortable with the ideological breast-feeding, don’t interact in the routines of life with people who hold different worldviews — and when the worlds collide, compartmentalized America often can’t deal with the conflict. Hence, a field day for YouTube at town hall meetings with spit-screaming. Western Iowa has its Steve King, and Massachusetts its Barney Frank.
“The trouble is what we have nationally is that you have no sense of the whole,” Bishop says. “You have this decreasing ability even at the state level to get anything done.”
Bishop devotes significant time to examining what happens when people on the right and left spend all their time together.
“The reason like-minded groups get more extreme over time is that people always want to be a little bit more extreme than the group is as a whole so they’re not mistaken for an outsider,” Bishop says.
This is reinforced in a number of ways in ideologically-rigid communities. Bishop cites an F.B Evans study in the 1960s revealing that insurance salesmen do better when they sell to people with similar politics.
“It’s just dangerous to be different,” Bishop says.
As the balkanization of America increases, and the language of the cultural wars between the divided camps intensifies, is there a danger that, if left unchecked, the logical conclusion is violence?
“We’re not close to that,” Bishop says. “People still see themselves as American. Where it leads to is just inaction. We’ve had a Civil War when the two sides of the country do become absolutely polarized, and we’re not at that state or even close to it. We’re at the state where we just don’t get anything done.”
After going through a spreadsheet of Iowa voting patterns one recent weekend, Bishop said the state is in a better place than much of America when it comes to diversity of ideas. One wag quoted in “The Big Sort” said his theory is that the farther you live from other people, the more likely you are to be a Republican. But Iowa is still a swing state, and while its rural areas are more likely to be Republican, Bishop, a former weekly newspaper owner in Texas who now edits a Web site for the Center For Rural Strategies, said small town residents are often better at navigating their way through disagreements.
“Sometimes small towns do better at that than large towns because you can’t ignore everybody,” Bishop says. “But maybe that’s just because I’m partial to small towns.”
He talked about a gay couple that moved to a small community in South Carolina because they wanted full integration into a life — not a self-segregated existence in, say, San Francisco.
“Not many people make that lifestyle choice for difference,” Bishop says. “It’s uncomfortable, and it’s hard and you just don’t do it.”
Could small towns become last refuges for decent, honorable discussions between people who disagree, a place for a sort of generalized tolerance?
“That would drive all my neighbors crazy, to think that somehow a small town is freer than our neighborhood,” Bishop says.
“I think that is true personally,” he adds. “The numbers would not show that. The numbers would tell you that smaller towns, rural areas, are more monolithically Republican than cities.”
Since publishing “The Big Sort,” Bishop has talked about it on programs ranging from Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” to local call-in radio.
As Bishop discusses the book, he learns more about the increasingly localized nature of group think and how it doesn’t always hew to stereotypes.
Two callers on a program in Minneapolis said they realized they were in the wrong neighborhoods because other people in them were using lawn chemicals.
“One of the women who called in was black,” Bishop says. “It wasn’t that all her neighbors were white that teed her off. It was that they were using whatever kind of chemicals they were spreading.”
Here’s something else Bishop found: Highly educated people are most inclined to hang around with people who think like they do politically.
“People who attended graduate school had the least diverse group of discussion partners,” Bishop says. “The people who had not graduated from high school had the most diverse group, politically anyway, of people they discussed current events with. In that sense, their lives were richer in terms of their political discussion mates than people who had been to graduate school.” (People with college degrees have increased the most in population in Democratic landslide counties. By 2000, the percentage of young adults with a college degree in rural areas was only half that of the average city.)
Two key demographics for the political parties to watch as “The Big Sort” proceeds are young people, and minorities. (By 2000, 21 percent of the population in Democratic landslide counties was foreign born compared to just 5 percent in Republican landslide counties.)
“My sense is that the generational shift is even more profound,” Bishop says.
Younger people are more likely to accept diversity, Bishop says. At the same time with the advent of social networking existences, younger Americans see their identities as more organic, less top-down — which could open opportunities for conservatives focusing on a more libertarian, less moralizing, approach to politics.
But for the time being, geography will continue to be a road map — even a crystal ball — into our politics.
Or as Bishop puts it, “Americans have used wealth and technology to invent and secure places of minimal conflict.” CV
(Editor’s Note: Bill Bishop is co-editor of the Center For Rural Strategies’ Daily Yonder, a Web site that functions as a national online rural newspaper. Writer Douglas Burns, a columnist for his family’s Daily Times Herald newspaper in Carroll, Iowa, as well as a Cityview freelancer, has contributed articles and commentaries to the Center For Rural Strategies.)
