When Does Sorting Become Politically Meaningful?
In 1972, when I was a kid, I remember hearing that 98% of U.S. Saab owners voted for George McGovern. That statistical nugget seems plausible, and it illustrates how the idea of matching cultural and consumer preferences to political ones isn't new. Thomas Edsall, in 2003, found that a community's rate of porn rentals correlate with opinions on abortion and gun control. These patterns can be truly entertaining, but not always insightful or predictive.
Sorting, as several comments have noted, need not have political implications. In fact, non-political sorting can lead to the opposite of political sorting (a phenomenon we can label convergence). This leads to one of the most important themes in Bill's book, which hasn't yet been mentioned: modern political sorting seems to have a relationship to the phenomenon of post-industrialization.
I grew up near Seattle in an area with a few rich kids, a lot of middling to poor kids, bound together by one common experience: parents employed by the Boeing Corporation, or something related to it. Some parents were engineers, others managers, and others factory workers bolting planes together by hand. But almost all seemed to be Boeing employees. In this respect, we were very completely sorted; Seattle was a homogeneous town of Boeing people. The interests of Boeing were everyone's interests. Seattle was a safe town for Democrats and Republicans alike. These days, not so much.
Seattle emerged as a big city because of Boeing, and for a considerable number of people, Boeing was the reason for living there. Old school thinking about migration argues that migrants, attracted to various places to find industrial jobs, would tend to make every part of the country look like the mix found everywhere else. Regarding the south, the suggestion from political scientists dating back to Philip Converse in the 1960's is that migrants from the northeast tended to replicate the class/party alignment, including the mix of Republicans and Democrats found there. Migration was a dispersing force, not a clustering one.
This is the context that makes The Big Sort seem like a surprise. A central idea in the book is that in a post-industrial economy, people settle for reasons other than old fashioned industrial employment, or in large numbers for a single employer. In the case of Seattle, consider that Microsoft, which is an employment behemoth, employs fewer than 40,000 people in the Seattle area. Boeing still employs 76,000, and has employed over 100,000 in Washington State at different points in time, including the 1960's, when the Seattle area had many fewer people.
The post-industrialization thesis implies that migration, even when motivated for economic reasons, tends to align places with tastes and skills. This rationale fits with the Richard Florida thesis (Richard will chime in if I speak falsely). Combine this reality with the more simple fact that a lot of people will head toward places they like, when they can. A critical point (and this point conforms to the work of Thomas Schelling, mentioned in another comment) is that sorting effects will be significant even if only a few people act this way.
And there's even one more factor to consider: many more places in the U.S. now maintain a significant population. This fact isn't just a consequence of growth. The country may be less rural but it has also decentralized. You may already know that Nevada's population has doubled since 1990, and Arizona isn't far behind. The increase in the menu of possible destinations has, in my view, contributed to The Big Sort and its political fallout.
How might we know? One way to test this premise is to look at the political behavior of rapidly growing places. If you look at the 435 U.S. Congressional districts, compare the 2006 American Community Survey to the 2000 Census. The variation in growth is astonishing. The 6th District of Arizona, outside Phoenix (represented by conservative Republican Jeff Flake) has more than 40% growth since 2000.
Among the 25 districts with the most growth in this decade, you will find only one from the northeast (Illinois's 14th outside of Chicago that was once Denny Hastert's). Twenty-one of the 25 districts are from California, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Voters in 24 of these 25 districts went for Bush in 2004; the only exception was the Arizona 7th, which includes Tucson. Twenty-three of the 25 districts gave Bush at least 57% of their support. Overall, the mean average population growth from 2000 to 2006, for Bush districts in the 2004 election, was 8.9%. For Kerry districts, the average was 2.7%.
As in other places, Democrats will do better in 2008 in many of these districts; the Illinois 14th famously chose a Democrat in the by-election to replace Hastert when he resigned. But for at least two decades, rapid population growth and Republican political strength have coincided. Why?
. . . 98% of U.S. Saab owners voted for George McGovern.
But then they turned into Volvo-driving elitists, and everything went downhill thereafter.
July 22, 2008 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
But for at least two decades, rapid population growth and Republican political strength have coincided. Why?
Because the deracinated are suckers for the old verities -- nationalism, nativism, providential religions, patriarchal families -- and the GOP is the keeper of those flames.
July 22, 2008 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
You might appreciate this factoid.
The one element all the 9/11 hijackers had in common was that they were deracinated from their families and local community.
I wonder if deep down they were republicans too.
July 22, 2008 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was afraid that Mr. McDonald was going to turn out to be a smart guy. I'm sort of relieved that someone else saw his second post boil down to a very humdrum sociological rumination. More people have wanted to go to the South and Southwest for a long time. A long time ago, the infrastructure in these areas was lacking, and that kept people away; I've heard people from the North argue that Federal actions to equalize things like schools and hospitals across the country have in effect benefited the people of the South - and therefore conservatism. (I think this is a short-sighted view.) But now you have cheaper houses, better weather, up to now plentiful jobs without the complication of unions, which at least demand more sociological solidarity, and a sort of tabula rasa of culture, in which people with funny names can do just fine as long as they talk like everybody else.
It's terribly mean to call these people "the deracinated". This is a fundamental error and here Ellen is playing into the hands of Republicans. I call this "Armando's mistake." The people of the SOuth who don't vote the way you want are not culturally or morally evil. Rather, forces aligned with the Republican Party have prevented them from understanding their own cultural interest. They would be happier as Democrats! But they are prevented from realizing this by institutions and the media (that's most of what power there is).
Preferring to speak simply of "rootedness" or its lack, I say this: is it better to be rooted or not? The uprooted seek to put down roots for a host of reasons. Those who are rooted in a place may resist them; or they may wish to uproot themselves and go to cities, where a completely different kind of "rootedness" exists...
And it should be obvious that I can multiply the number of these variations at will, without being able to show that either condition is "good" as such. Rather, both are always possible. If we choose one over the other as part of a herd, then we simply lose the ability to see either our own choices or the alternative.
Ellen talks about "nationalism, nativism, providential religions and patriarchal families" as "old verities" that Republicans manage to sell to the uprooted. OK: that which I "am a sucker for" has to be bad. So Ellen thinks these things are bad. But she also calls them "old verities" when she clearly means "old lies".
So there is confusion here. We must be careful not to accuse individuals of faults that lie rather with institutions, or with economic forces. Let's say: we must remember that the bad ideas these people are influenced by (when they vote) are not so deeply rooted as that! We must prepare to pardon the individuals even as we prepare to eradicate the abusive use of institutions.
Nationalism can be a bad thing if it prevents people from taking an open attitude toward foreign countries (for example). But it could be a good thing if a country that needed more people presented itself in a sort of romantic way in order to get people to move there and work hard.
And that is the case. In order to relaunch American industry, we need another 200 million people in the next 50 years. (Sorry about Mr. McDonald's contention that we hate newbies.)
Nativism can be a bad thing if it is used as an instrument of unfair competition (economic) by "natives" who resist immigrants (I thought it was so odd that Bishop kept talking about "migrants", never immigrants). But nativism is a good thing, if by this we mean the progressive constitution of a historical culture in a place that has not been inhabited for more than a few centuries, such that no period is "rejected", and such that the natural beauty of the area is married to a cultural beauty (caution, it takes quite a few generations to breed a beauty), then "nativism" can become synonymous with the real existence of a durable culture in an area - something which is a good thing.
A providential religion is a bad thing, if we are only referring to a breed of hucksters who induce credulous uneducated people to give them money in exchange for inbred attitudes and the promise of heaven. However, I don't think our blogger progressives really understand just how NOT new the idea of liberating the hoi polloi from their religious illusion is.
If you could really promise all those who cherish a providential religion that if they give it up, you will not only guarantee them a more efficient place in an economic system but a more beautiful place in a cultural system, I would advise them to follow your advice. But the first thing you would do is to say that the guarantee will only be redeemed by some future generation.
You think that your secular culture is healthier and more beautiful than their (newly-rooted?) religious one. Perhaps so. Still, the greatest minds throughout history have either learned from religion, or at least accepted its social value. As for the hucksters, only a very poor scholar would hang them around the neck of the great religions. In a very real sense, the people you are suspicious of are not so much "uprooted" ( a sophisticated concept) as they are illiterate, uneducated about the world, and completely ignorant of the wonderful rights they received as democratic citizens, that is, citizens of the secular regime designed by Christian philosophers of the 18th century.
As for patriarchal families - here the left-wing attacks actually cancel each other out. We know that there are more broken homes and abortions in the South - therefore perforce there are more households headed up by single mothers or by grandmothers. The true Southern patriarch - or should we call him a pariah, since Ellen feels herself licensed to hate and disdain him without limit or restriction - is crying in his beer, unwilling to compete culturally for his part of the nation, or his native soil, or for his God, or for his woman. As a mediatized figure, it is perfectly apparent that he is attempting to do what the mediatized culture wants him to do - die.
July 22, 2008 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, this post has me wondering what we're all getting worked up about. As you say, there's political fallout to all of this sorting but that's all it is -- fallout. It's a byproduct.
In the end you have people moving to where they want to live, to where they think they'll be happiest. That's a good thing. If there's political fallout I guess we want to know what it is, but we can't really do anything about it because its secondary to a greater need -- people need to be able to live where they're happy.
July 22, 2008 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't realize you were so prolific. I describe political in a broader cultural sense than party affiliation. Peaches and I would never move south - cheap housing and warm humid weather not withstanding - it's another planet. We have been politically occupied by bi-pedal humanoids whose political culture we do not share.
July 29, 2008 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink