A Very Bad Story --The Big Sort
Great data! They illuminate several critical bifurcations in key trends that are often obscured by aggregate indicators. I find strong echoes in these data with some of my findings on spatial segmentation at all levels: national, regional, urban, sub-urban, in a sort of Babushka doll effect. In a later post I want to pull out some of these.
But first, let me get at the heart of the matter that worries me in these findings.
Overall, this is a very bad story. If Bishop's analysis is right: the more poeple live in neighborhoods full of people like themselves, the more racist they become (rather than finding security and magnanimity in this security of being surround by like-minded, they become a bit (or a lot) more vicious. It suggests that the old notions about the cities and their diversity which "enforces" interaction is actually a better option. It may be that the the conflicts we see in these cities are far more visible as violence/conflict that in those homogeneous neighborhoods where it all looks so peaceful but in fact racisms find a free-ride.
A question to Bill: Is this really such a strong trend.
If it is, it suggests that much of the sense evoked by the non-American commentariat (from Europe and Latin America , especially) that the earnestness with which the US takes its values and parades them as the best int he world, and the US as the best country in the world, may well have a strong breeding ground in these increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods (which supposedly breed intolerance for alternative views and values).
And it suggests, as i already indicated above, that the racial violence we regularly see in cities may be peanuts compared with the racism and estrangement breeding in our increasingly partisan neighborhoods.
Saskia must have recently emerged from a cryogenic freeze circa 1960. Barack Obama is getting a lot of support in the white suburbs around the country. And how about the whole rural/suburban state of Iowa? It is hard to imagine how hardening racist neighborhoods would vote for a black man.
I don't know where Saskia lives, but I have traveled extensively, and the INCREASING racial tolerance is widespread -- and this includes some very backwoods counties in MS. Big cities, suburbs, farm communities -- it doesn't matter. This post might be the most pointless TPM blog ever -- it's absolute rubbish!!!
July 21, 2008 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brook:
BrookD,
I did NOT say that I believe this.
I said: if the data presented in Sort by Bill Bishop is correct (and see my questions to him!!), then it looks pretty grim, much grimmer than our aggregata date indicate.
I agree that Obama's candidacy is showing us that there is far more interracial openness than a lot of the accounts coming from the social sciences suggest. But did you read the Big Sort items posted today? do. and draw the implications. and you may also have some questions for Bill B.
saskia
July 21, 2008 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Racism" is such a loaded term.
Couldn't we use something like "otherness"?
July 21, 2008 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ms. Sassen's qualifications are in order, because it was a clumsily worded post (but that's the norm at TPM).
It is extremely lazy to talk as if "racism" was something that can be really meaningfully quantified. If we want to judge "progress on racial issues" - assuming that Obama's current position isn't enough for you - then there are two other phenomena that have to be considered. And their connection to "racism" is narrative, not just statistical.
First off, the rise of Hispanics in rural America and in the South gives us something other than black-white relations to look at. It reveals a three way competition for jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder. In effect, less well-off blacks AND hillbilly or redneck type whites are likely to resent Hispanics as competitors for jobs. But black men are more likely to react negatively to Hispanic men who partner up with black women than lower class whites are to react against either black or Hispanic men who attempt to pair up with white women from the lower socioeconomic stratum.
This reveals something that is lacking in the "analysis" of Bishop's team (whoever they were): the supposed "sorting" effect of migration is not compared with the effect of IMmigration.
I'm just not seeing a bright line here between the explanans and the explanandum - which is all right as long as you admit it, although Bishop shouldn't choose only to respond to easy questions as he is doing.
What isn't all right is that the bean-counting spirit is prevailing against any attempt to understand developments in America over 30 or 40 years, in terms any more complicated than more or less racist, more or less "red", more or less conservative, etc. At the end of the day I am quite sure that this analysis will never get close enough to reality to do any good, and it will remain just one more feckless musing about a curious set of poll-geeky numbers.
As for Bishop's "qualifications" - since when have newspaper columnists been required to know anything about their subjects? But I would like to know why he keeps using the pronoun "we" as if his book was the product of some social science institute.
July 22, 2008 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
@ BrookD
I lived in Venice, Ca. for many years. Everyone talked tolerance but the place was tense, tense, tense and what you heard in public was very different from what was said in private and what was actually done.
Now I live in a very rural community. Almost no blacks but lots of Mexicans, many illegal. They aren't particularly liked but everything is pretty much in the open...and crime is of the very petty variety and not common.
I don't know whether the country as a whole is more tolerant but blacks, in particular, have a much larger voice than formerly and they are using it. They call in regularly to conservative talk radio and take their lumps or their kudos, same as everyone else. That's a very good thing.
July 21, 2008 2:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Saskia asks an interesting question. We thought originally that the political segregation we found was being driven by increased racial segregation. So, we checked. Using the same calculations, Republican/Democratic segregation at the county level increased by 50% from 76 to 04; black/white racial segregation at the county level decreased slightly from 1980 to 2000.
We don't know if some neighborhoods are growing more racists. (An experiment was done to see what would happen if a group of racists were asked to discuss race. As the law of group polarization would predict, the group grew more racists.) As far as we know, neighborhoods are growing more racially tolerant overall
We do know this, however: Counties that voted overwhelmingly Democratic in 2004 (where Kerry won by 20 points or more) had over the previous 30 years grown more racially diverse and collected a disproportionate number of foreign born.
Counties that voted overwhelmingly for Bush (containing more than a fourth of the nation's population) collected a disproportionate percentage of the nation's white population since 1970. The chart is pretty astounding. In 1970, counties that would vote overwhelmingly for Kerry and those that would vote overwhelmingly for Bush had the same percentage of the nation's white population. Over the next 30 years, Kerry counties saw their percentage of white population diminish. The reverse happened in Bush counties.
It was the big sort......
July 21, 2008 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill ---
Is there anything to be said for the effects of migration?
Are there distinctions in the levels of homogeneity between counties which are losing population and those gaining population?
Are counties attractors (people moving to likeness) or "detractors" (people feeling "otherness" moving out)?
July 21, 2008 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great questions. There is no polling that tracks people who move by their politics. But clearly migration is driving the big sort. People who leave "red" counties by and large move to other red counties. And, as you say, migration has twin effects: it changes both the county a person leaves and the county a person moves to.
There are flows of people in and out of communities, and these flows aren't random. We have charts in the book of Orange and LA counties in California. They are next door, but have totally different political trajectories. San Francisco County hasn't gained population in the last 30 years, but it's switched from a nearly 50/50 county in 1976 to one that is nearly 85% Democratic in 2004.
Most counties in the U.S. are tipping one way or another. Mostly because of migration, we think.
Are counties attractors or detractors? Our sense is they're both.
July 21, 2008 4:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Counties that voted overwhelmingly for Bush (containing more than a fourth of the nation's population) collected a disproportionate percentage of the nation's white population since 1970." (Bishop, TBS)
Bishop points to this as just another avatar of "The Big Sort". There are several things wrong with that. First, it may not be the main phenomenon, but just a concomitant. Second, even as interpreted it demands an explanation - and housing discrimination would seem the obvious first choice.
Third, the Big Sort conveniently does not play hopscotch but allows us to paint with a pretty large geographical and socio-economic brush: the so-called landslide counties fall into regions that are either rural or suburban, etc., and so they can be correlated with other measurable events.
Finally, since all this ends up being interpreted in terms of national electoral politics, a few political observations are in order. First, the "sorted" counties are found in clumps - but these clumps do not correspond to political entities per se. In other words, the supposed Big Sort has not really operated at the level of whole states - partly of course because so many black people have lived for so long in "red" states, while only a low percentage of them voted. Also, it's obvious that a "landslide" in one or more counties does not always or even often add up to a real landslide at the level of states.
Second: a voter breakdown of 65-35, 70-30 or worse does constitute an election "landslide" according to common definitions. But it certainly does not indicate that the locality in question is more racist, or more redneck, or anything of the kind. Taking the reverse, would we say that localities (counties, if you like) are more likely to be "tolerant" if their voting breakdowns are closer to 50-50? On election night, certain people are likely to react negatively about the "landslide" against them in some area, but their tendency to conclude, that the locality in question is for that reason essentially benighted, is silly.
Third, over and above the tendency to defend white enclaves through housing discrimination as a form of economic competition (understandable if not acceptable), there is simply the idea that the Republican Party is not a governing philosophy, but a kind of machine that exists in order to reward its supporters. If the whole point were to win the votes of these supporters, then wouldn't they be asked to relocate to blue counties in order to redress the imbalance there? But in fact it turns out to be more convenient to have them living in one place, which place becomes known as "Bush territory" or whatnot, and which is thenceforward fertile ground for fundraising efforts.
It's possible to conceive of multiparty democracy as no more than a procedure for making sure that the rewards of leadership are distributed. In the abstract, no doubt it's true that ideological differences between the parties are important. On a case by case basis, they may not be as important as simply winning, rewarding one's supporters, and shutting out one's opponents as long as possible.
Looking at things this way, many of the individual cases of sorting could be transitional stages on the way to a consensus that makes LOCAL government more efficient - thanks to a "sorting" that is by no means a pogrom, but that simply reinstates a certain community homogeneity that is not a prerequisite for local comity - but which doesn't hurt, either. The idea that perfect communities must eventually reflect the gross "diversity" of the larger unit is precisely that which gives charges of "quota-ism" their force.
July 22, 2008 5:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"the more poeple live in neighborhoods full of people like themselves, the more racist they become (rather than finding security and magnanimity in this security of being surround by like-minded, they become a bit (or a lot) more vicious. It suggests that the old notions about the cities and their diversity which "enforces" interaction is actually a better option."
Except the liberal talking heads are suggesting the opposite for why Obama wins in majority white rural areas, but not so much in mixed race areas.
All in all I think that you people need to start importing some new categories of analysis, besides race. No one in America in 2008 loves stroking this pernicious devisive shit like you academics.
You need to get out more. And what a hell Columbia has become these past few years, huh? How's that urban "diversity" working out among the enlightened upper classes?
Nope. Not recommended for human consumption.
July 21, 2008 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it is very difficult to draw conclusions about why people behave the way they do based purely on statistical analysis.
I think the stratification of the population is happening more for economic/lifestyles issues than it is happening because of racial issues. To be sure there is a racial component to some of the stratification though. But then again each area of the country is different. Here in the highly populated northeast people choose to live in the suburbs mainly based on economic reasons. The schools are better, there is less crime, lower mill rates, etc. At least here I don't see it as much as 'well I want to live near people who think and look like me'. In fact African-Americans and Latinos also flee the urban centers when possible and settle in the 'burbs...and are for the most part totally accepted into the community as a whole.
I see this as literally about the 'bottom line' more than racial. But my observations, being solely about the very 'blue' northeast and my reality, might not apply everywhere else. But I do think when it comes to personal economic security the much discussed 'American red-blue cultural divide' usually takes a back seat for the majority of Americans.
July 21, 2008 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that's exactly it. Few people are actually moving houses to get away from (or to get closer to) neighbors of a cxertain race. They're also unlikely to move so that they can live near Democrats or Republicans. I think they're making economic and aesthetic choices and that racial or political segregations are just byproducts of those choices.
I live in a big city because I like that kind of living. So happens that most of the people who share my enthusiasm for New York are politically liberal. But we're just a bunch of liberals who came because we like the city stuff, not a bunch of people who built a city so that we can be liberals together.
July 21, 2008 4:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
@ destor23
In immigrant neighborhoods, when I was growing up during in the '40s, your statement would have been completely and totally wrong. Immigrants wanted very much to be among their own people, culture, kind, whatever. They moved for two reasons; because they could afford a better larger home and/or because their own neighborhood was being invaded by untermentchen.
I think those motivations are fundamental, not limited to immigrants, place or time. You've a great deal of work to show me I'm wrong.
July 21, 2008 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's an excellent point about immigrant neighborhoods and it makes a lot of sense, too. It's easier to adapt from life in Mexico to life in New York if you're around people who are going through that as well.
But I don't think this applies at all to more established citizens who move around the country. People move to where they can have the jobs and lifestyles that they want.
July 21, 2008 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
@ destor23
You're right. When I think of myself and my college friends we chose our preferred habitats if we could (beach, hip, free spirits), otherwise we followed the money.
July 21, 2008 7:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, and I should add here that although it's widely stated that Sen. Obama did well in a cross section of American communities, that's not what the numbers show. (This is something we tracked week by week at dailyyonder.com.) Obama won the cities. He lost exurban and rural communities except in the northwest. The redder the county, the worse he performed. That's why the vote in the Democratic primary was as segregated between Obama and Clinton supporters as it was in 2004 between Bush and Kerry voters.
July 21, 2008 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is at least something that can be tested. Surely Bishop admits SOME difference between the Bush-Kerry matchup and Clinton-Obama! When we have McCain-Obama to look at, we'll have a pretty good panel of data. But we still won't know exactly what we're looking at, for a very simple reason: there are not only shifts between 65-35 left and right, and 50-50 in counties, but within individual persons. People don't just vote against Obama because of racism. Furthermore, while people may have some understanding of how they ended up living where they live and voting the way they voted, they don't understand how their micro-narratives get taken up into macro-narratives. My problem here is that the macro-narrative is precisely what is being taken for granted. As Schopenhauer said of Kant: everything is sacrificed to a rage for symmetry. Everything has to be in binary oppositions: white vs black, red vs blue, rural vs urbal, etc., etc.
This is what newspaper columnists always do. They don't give an interpretation of these oppositions. They let your hidden prejudices float to the top. We are expected to agree that The Big Sort must mean something because (it is claimed) the phenomenon is so widespread, so pronounced, so unmistakable. But even if we assume that, the interpretation is not automatic. Now, As far as I can see, Bishop's claim, that these statistics are very important, rests almost entirely on the absence of a unitary interpretation for them!
Apart from the canons of punditry, if such exist, this should be enough to lift Bishop's work out of the realm of "social science" altogether. Adn as far as the general tenor of TPM Café discussions is concerned: where is the thought process? Listening to Destor bloviate, I might as well be back on the campaign threads, hoping gotalife doesn't show up.
Perhaps the Café should just hire Ivo Daalder as a permanent blogger. People seem to think he is worth listening to, and so they try harder to make sense...
July 22, 2008 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd like to add two points:
That "Ellen" spent a good deal of time here recently ridiculing low wage workers who didn't vote her preferred politics, and that American academics live even more than most Americans of a bubble of their own construction.
More an more academics talk to non-academics only to study them. Socially there's less and less engagement. The humanities now foster a technocratic pseudo-intellectualism of "technical" specialties that are the mirror image of the supposed anti-intellectualism of the country at large. Academics are not much less prone to the prejudices of American exceptionalism than truck drivers and cops, but they add to that the exceptionalism of the graduate degree. The liberal defense of science as often as not segues into a neoliberal defense of Platonism and the rule of "reason," the rule of experts. But the rule of experts is not the rule of law. The brittle scholastic rationalism of the academy leads the way. More Bloomsbury and Weimar than democracy.
July 21, 2008 5:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, my stars!
Seth Edenbaum appears on a thread which doesn't mention Israel. It's positively mind blowing.
July 21, 2008 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
He tossed in a few Jewish names to make up the deficit.
July 22, 2008 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Academics have zero influence anymore on Main Street. A Malcolm Gladwell pops up every now and then with a non-fiction best-seller, but he succeeded because his books applied academic ideas to practical reality.
I can relate to social networks driving consumerism; I can't relate to a volumunous theory on suburban racism written by someone who hasn't set foot in a Wal Mart in 10 years.
July 22, 2008 9:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a little bit taken aback that no one is making the rather obvious counterargument to this theory. There is a much easier way to explain what's happened politically between the Ford-Carter election and today. What you are measuring is the effectiveness of a deliberate political strategy by the Republican party. Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was aimed at this very goal, to remake the political divide along the racial and cultural divide in America. The Republican party has been fairly consistent in this, mostly because they've been more successful when they've been the most extreme (Nixon, Reagan, Bush II vs. Ford, Dole, Bush I). In the short-term, it was brilliant. In the long-term, it will be a disaster because the Republicans picked the declining demographic groups and underestimated the waning effects of racial and cultural prejudice on younger generations.
July 21, 2008 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Bishop, for the record, is not an "academic" but a reporter who lives among "the people."
I don't think the Southern Strategy is really a counterargument to Bishop's, but a complementary one. Bishop's argument is really something of a different sort: that people are moving to areas based on a desire to be near people of like-mindedness that may embody but definitely transcends race. My neighborhood, in SE Portland, is very white and very liberal; one will find greater political and racial diversity 10 miles east or 15 miles west.
At any rate, the point is that people are sorting themselves, independent of anyone's master strategy, and this is intensifying the divisiveness of American political culture.
July 21, 2008 9:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is not "the point". It is "the hypothesis". And you are uncritically translating "landslide county" into "intensified divisiveness". That is methodologically unsound. Think about it.
July 22, 2008 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Mr. Bishop, for the record... lives among 'the people.' "
So you say.
The issue is one of self-segregation and/or atomization, and individualism vs community (or even social democracy).
I have more respect for conservatives I disagree with than with libertarians with whom I side, in limited ways regarding very specific policies, but who otherwise fill me with disgust.
As for the liberal elite, my response stands.
And Ellen dear, blogs are no better on the Palestinians then they are on labor issues.
July 21, 2008 11:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll add one more thing, since the author of this post is married to the author of The Craftsman.
The Humanities were once populated by critics of craftsmanship, who saw themselves as working in a reciprocal relation with those those whose works -and lives- they studied. They were humanists and connoisseurs. The sciences are opposed to such things: sophistication is sophistry and truth is absolute. The sciences are now the model for the humanities. Rationalism battles "unreason." Not a healthy recipe for politics.
The "reality based community" is more or less Clintonite in origin and philosophy. Compared to the republicans they have their instrumentalism down, but reality is something else. Clinton when he was elected was to the right of the conservative Prime Minister of Canada. In the words of a former prime minister he was "a republican."
This isn't reality, this is social construction. And it's something the academy, and academic liberals don't understand.
"So happens that most of the people who share my enthusiasm for New York are politically liberal."
Many of the people born there are less liberal, and become angry when out of towners who call themselves liberals take over their neighborhoods. In my neighborhood however it's the immigrants who like the diversity- they like each other- and it's the americans who ruin it for all of them.
A little fucking self-awareness would go a long, long, way.
But expertise has replaced self-awareness as a goal.
July 22, 2008 12:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have to speak in approval of part of what this poster says.
What has happened to "the humanities" is something that is very hard to describe with exactness, because the decline of "American letters" is something that was essentially accomplished over 50 years ago.
What is true is that American newspapers long ago decided that anything that could masquerade as "science" was good enough to be presented uncritically on the pages of daily newspapers. The motto of the period since 1950 could be "Studies Show".
However, I will offer a more precise definition of social constructionism, which the poster may consider. Social constructionism has been the dominant philosophy in US academic circles since the collapse of deconstruction more than 15 years ago. Social constructionism is just this: if I know what goes into your head - TV shows, movies, religious programming, political discourse, newspapers, the social dialogue of your home area, and even products you purchased, etc. - then I know who you are and what you think.
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut: this is so untrue that it makes me want to cry.
In terms of some of my earlier attempts to get Bishop to respond: he falls easily into the trap of accepting only economic terms of reference on the way to offhandedly condemning (or providing support for same) the "sorted ones". Poster S.E. is right to call for a literary and anecdotal comprehension - a cultural comprehension. But such comprehension is beyond the limited education and the addiction to fake social science that characterizes such as Bishop, and most poll geeks.
July 22, 2008 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
...Or, it may not. The fact remains that homogenous communities, or nation (Japan, and pre-"diversity" Europe, as examples) tend to be less violent than "multicultural" environs. Instead of pre-judging the situation, and in our all-knowing moral providence proclaiming it immoral and "racist" (whatever that means), maybe we should be studying why this most desirable trait is so manifest in these communities. If the favorable reality doesn't jibe with the dogma, dump the dogma. Don't assail the reality. It's unlikely we'll be seeing drive-by killings by soccer moms anytime soon.
July 22, 2008 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink