The Silent Revolution
A demographer at the University of Michigan measured family formation patterns in the U.S. and noticed an interesting correlation. The states with the largest percentage of people who had cohabitated before marriage voted for John Kerry in '04. The higher the shacking rate, Ron Lestheghe found, the bluer the state.
We've had a lot of discussion this week about how lifestyle links up with political choice. We ought to explore what's behind this relationship.
So, we turn to Ronald Inglehart, who has been conducting his World Values Survey since the 1970s. Inglehart theorized that as people grew up in relative security, their social values -- what they wanted out of life -- changed. People who knew their basic needs were satisfied would have different values from those who grew up in scarcity. Those who lived in times of depression or joblessness esteemed economic growth. But those who grew up in "post-materialist" societies, Inglehart argued, would value the environment, self-expression and individual rights.
There would be a culture shift, a "silent revolution," Inglehart predicted three decades ago. Traditional religious denominations would lose members as "post materialists" rolled their own spiritual lives. People would reject centralized authority. Class politics would diminish. Traditional political institutions would decline as people found more individualistic ways to bring about political change. Material goods would lose cachet as people would seek to fill their lives with unique experiences. Hierarchical institutions were out, self-expression was in. And, people would lose trust in all institutions -- government, science, business, the church.
Oh, and post materialists would be prone to shack.
Americans prefer to explain their politics with nouns: Watergate, Falwell, Watts, Vietnam, Nixon, Clinton, assassinations, Rove. The problem with American nouns, however, is that they fail to explain the universality of the trends Inglehart and others were discovering. After World War II, trust in government soared in Japan, Italy and the United States -- and then trust in government plummeted across the globe. Divorce rates rose in Japan, just as they did in the U.S. Inglehart and Harvard's Pippa Norris found that in every industrialized country, those who attended church once a week or more supported the party on the right. The United States isn't unique in having a Religious Right. It's not something that was concocted or cooked up in a bunker under the Goldwater headquarters. The United States is unusual only in the number of churchgoers, not in how they vote.
When I looked for causes of the big sort, I kept coming back to Inglehart. His description of a post materialist culture shift explained the political terrain in a way that nothing else did. And his findings -- polls taken across the globe over the last three decades -- buttressed our findings. Bob Cushing and I could see that cities that were growing more Democratic were filling with people who had post-materialist attitudes. Using marketing polls, we could see that people in these cities were less likely to obey centralized authorities. They were less likely to attend church, join civic clubs or spend time with their families. They were post materialists.
People in cities that were becoming more Republican were more likely to go to church, join clubs and volunteer. They were more family oriented. And they had a greater sense of economic vulnerability.
Marc Hetherington at Vanderbilt found that Republicans and Democrats differed in their styles of child rearing. Yes, Republicans were the "strict fathers." Post materialist Democrats, on the other hand, were far more likely to value independence over respect for elders, curiosity over good manners. "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds," Hetherington wrote. "We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
Just as Walker Smith has been writing, the differences between Republican places and Democratic places are all about ways of life. And the difference is being driven by a post materialist culture shift.
(Republicans are ultimately on the short end of the culture shift stick. Just as Inglehart predicted, succeeding generations growing up in relative abundance are increasingly aligned with post materialist notions of environmental protection, gay rights, individual freedom and racial and ethnic diversity. Democrats, meanwhile, should realize that post materialists are also distrustful of all large institutions, including government.)
The big sort is, in part, about the clustering of these lifestyles and the linking of lifestyle to political party. Post-materialist "shackers" and nurturant parents live in one place and vote Democratic. Post-materialist laggards live in another county and vote Republican.
Comments (13)
Post-materialist laggards live in another county and vote Republican.
ID, MT, ND, SD, NE and KS = 12 Senatorial votes!
July 23, 2008 9:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Heh, he said "nurturant".
July 23, 2008 10:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
btw, I totally endorse the project of torching the Electoral College in terms of small red state Senators. But it might be better to just capture and hold them. I think that's the whole reason why Markos has this obsession with Montana. The ad budgets are so cheap. You should be able to conquer these states, you just have to turn libertarianism into progressivism (a nice trick)
July 23, 2008 10:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK, so, I'll respond to Mr. Bishop's post. At the paper where you once worked, there are now reporters who "blog". But it seems that someone warned them about the fever swamp and all that, because they all have these restrictive guidelines up. Nobody is allowed, for example, to call Dudley Webb a fish-footed cocksucker on (this one reporter's) blog!
As you see, they don't have that kind of function here (at least not yet). Maybe you are used to it.
You've turned back from anecdote to American social science. Probably the best. Nonetheless, this post could be subtitled, "Guess what? Stereotypes are true! (and they're what's for dinner!)"
I hate to deconstruct your me-hip-too use of "shacking" (I think they just call it "living" now). But the idea that the Dem side of the big sort can be reliably associated with unmarried cohabitation is weak, precisely because we all know that in red states there are more divorces, more wives beaten, more abortions, more high school dropouts, and on and on.
It is extraordinarily imprudent to resurrect any but the most thoroughly discussed sociology from the 1970s (for God's sake).
First off, the US population has doubled since then, skewing South, and a lot of people during that time have not grown up in relative security.
Your "culture shift" paragraph sounds like pure hippyism. Did you use the phrase "rolled their own spiritual lives" in that sense? Eek.
I don't think people lost trust in all institutions. I don't understand what you mean about people in cities ceasing to obey centralized authorities. We still bought our bus passes, didn't we? American culture came alive in cities beginning in the 1920s, and this movement continued up into the 1960s, where I think we would want to say a page turned. The authorities you claim were abandoned simply became able to take culture off life support. The US had a wave of affluence, sure.
But I think you'll get a tsunami's worth of argument from blue-staters if you keep suggesting, for example, that they spend less time with their children. Creativity and inquiry were promoted as values in the East earlier than in the South because the schools were better sooner. Easterners knew that success wasn't just a matter of obedience, and they focused earlier on child development.
I also think it is highly questionable to say that Southerners and the like value good manners more than Easterners. I think a lot of Easterners would say that a lot of Southerners don't know what good manners really are, that Southern manners are a mere simulacrum of the social graces that once constituted the soul of education.
This part of your post:
"...succeeding generations growing up in relative abundance are increasingly aligned with post materialist notions of environmental protection, gay rights, individual freedom and racial and ethnic diversity. Democrats, meanwhile, should realize that post materialists are also distrustful of all large institutions, including government."
...is just confusing.
Look, there are red staters and blue staters, red counties and blue, in which succeeding generations grow up in relative affluence. Some of them are aligned with environmental protection, gay rights, and diversity, etc. Some of them are not. This just doesn't appear to cut either way. No point is being made. (Not surprising you refer to Walker Smith just about here.)
I think the real problem here is your assumption about affluence. If red state Americans could be wooed by marketers forever, if they never ran out of disposable income, they'd eventually all turn into Stepford people, "clap louder" people. And if the same were true about blue staters, they'd probably eventually end up with less population and more science knowledge than the South, and they'd exploit that gap all over again. But it isn't going to happen that way. There is going to be pressure to re-industrialize the South in order to produce for export. It looks like global capitalists will get a big wage squeeze in America, and they'll move to exploit that. Foreign companies will copy Toyota and move into more sectors, organizing and training Americans, including more and more Hispanics.
I understand that Red China actually owns about a trillion dollars worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wouldn't it be funny if they just all came over here and took their debt out in kind?
I'm sorry, but the introduction of "post-materialism" into the conceptual mix at this point just makes hash of the whole thing. Materialism has changed, but Americans on both sides of the big sort are materialistic.
The phenomenon you have been trying to describe appears to me to be rather an epiphenomenon. It is not an operation or development of culture, but a movement away from culture, toward a sort of maximum of commercial de-culturalization. Resistance to this is not exclusively "urban". I imagine it has something to do with Eastern traditions and the connection to Europe. In the West, this is represented by the Asian and Hispanic influence. These are cultural matrices that resist commercial reinterpretation.
Immigration and economic depression (or recession if you like) will undo the big sort. The model of Republican politics since Nixon will fall apart. But the Great Society will not return. In effect, the result of such a long time spent acting as if other countries had no real power over us, will be a period during which they will have a lot of very public power over us.
When Communism fell, the life expectancy for men in some Eastern European countries dropped below 60. How much of this was due to the switch from believing that your country was part of a powerful bloc, I don't know.
It is as if this redstate ubermensch were composed almost exclusively of commercial products. As we begin to remove them one by one, the "sorted" individual disappears. First we take away the SUV; the red-sort has to stand next to people on public transportation. Then we take away the suburban home; certain apartment complexes restrict gun ownership or require gun locks, and the red-sort loses some of the props of his posse comitatus fantasy. Next to go, the credit card: the banking crisis and credit crunch will soon encompass a rise in charge-offs, and that will lead to higher fees, lower limits, and cancellation of some cards (and of course some banks will fail). The red-sort individual must negotiate personally, give his word, enter into more complicated ethical transactions, like Arabs do when they borrow money on a handshake.
The ultimate prop of "sorted" society might be insurance. I say this because insurance in almost every aspect of the American economy seems to be in crisis. Health insurance has become a contradictory concept, since insurance companies try to prevent sick people from being insured. Global warming has battered fire and casualty insurance so hard via disasters that it has become prohibitively expensive in many areas. To complete the picture, the credit-default swaps that many mutual funds require as a hedge against the default of certain bond obligations today appear worthless because of the massive under-capitalization of the monoline insurers, the "re-insurers." At this point the very concept of insurance is close to collapse.
And at this point we perhaps begin to see just how much of the big sort depends upon the illusion of controlling one's destiny - or in a blue-state mode, the illusion that science can solve the country's problems if we can just get the cast of Deliverance out of the way (ups to Ellen!)
I hate stereotypes, but I think the reason why we keep running up against stereotypical interpretations of a period of American history is because we are stuck with them. We cannot change them. Americans went through a period where they did not encounter any resistance. It didn't matter if red-staters were indoctrinated with ludicrous caricatures of the truth regarding foreign countries, etc., because those countries were powerless to threaten America in anyway. It didn't matter if red-staters fell more and more captive to a caricature of Christianity, because God didn't seem to have any big projects for them; manifest destiny had no visible frontier left. And it didn't matter if the native industry and thrift of red-staters was undermined by imports and HELOCs, because imported goods would always get cheaper and house prices would always go up.
If you take juvenile behavior into account, then the big sort begins to look like a continuum. I guess the key to this observation is that "shacking" isn't, I don't believe, as blue-statish as you think. A lot of red state people have sex for the first time at church camp. You take a red state teenager. If he is affluent, then he probably listens to rap music. The more solidly entrenched in his society he is, the more likely it is that he walks around with his pants sagging, etc.
The cutting edge in all this is job availability and salary. Year after year, the attraction of a good job and a good salary cause the majority of young people to cut, so to speak, their hair.
The big sort can be seen as a temporary adaptation, characterized moreover by the subtraction of part of the dominant population from "blue" areas, such that the barrier to be crossed separated rural and suburban areas from urban areas. Rural and suburban areas tended to become "red"; urban areas allowed higher percentages of racial minorities and Hispanics to occupy neighborhoods that were once white.
But all this new development requires now more people in order for it to acquire more than a Potemkin culture based on acquisition of certain possessions. The United States' population needs to grow so that its economy can grow, and so that its culture can grow (in a quite other sense of growth).
July 23, 2008 11:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll take your word for this, but I just don't see it. We have always been polarized as a nation, in fact at one point in our history we were so polarized that we fought a civil war, so claiming that we are now more polarized than ever before in our history seems exaggerated. It seems that the city slickers still disdain the country hayseeds, the brahmins still have contempt for the Irish catholics, while the rich still are reliably republican and the poor democrats.
We are still at an almost 50/50 split as we have been in almost all national elections, landslides being an abberation, not a norm, so while red states may be redder and blue states bluer, the results are still the same nationally.
If people are self-sorting politically, they must not be aware of it because most people claim they buy houses or live in certain areas because of 1., affordability, 2., the school district and 3., the proximity to their work. I have yet to hear of anyone who moved to a district or county because they liked the political representation that it offered, in fact, I doubt that most people even know who their state and congressional representatives are. Frankly I doubt that they can even name their federal senators, much less their state senators, so the political alliances of their neighbors may not be quite the factor in choosing a place to live as much as the resale value of their houses might be in choosing a certain neighborhood.
You say, "the rancor of the presidential campaign (2004) is blamed on the personality of the candidates, the barbarity of political consultants and on the demands of political contributors. The one cause of this civic bitterness that has not be fingered is the one that should be the most obvious, the one that is manifest in our communities." There is one cause that is even more obvious and that is the bitterness, the cynicism, the barbarity and bias of the press corp whose endless rank speculation and conspiracy theories fuel this notion of polarization.
What I would like to know is how this sorting is taking place - is it subconscious, is it a conscious choice, how is it that people go about it? You claim it is a "lifestyle" choice, but when hasn't our choice of neighborhood been a "lifestyle" choice? I simply don't know what that means. I chose a rural lifestyle because I like gardening, not because of any political views I might have, my neighbor chose to live in the country because she enjoys the peace and quiet, so how does that fit into the equation? How can we know why people choose to live in one area over another?
July 24, 2008 12:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey Bev,
I think that Bishop accepts that people are not purposefully, or consciously, sorting along political lines. His data show that people are sorting over lifestyle preferences and aesthetics but that politics goes along for the ride. The not very surprising result of people choosing to live in communities that afford certain lifestyles is that the people who choose to live there share political leanings. Bishop accepts that the political part is more effect than cause but he still finds it interesting and important (and I think he's right in that).
That said, you're right that the notion of a more polarized America right now is basically a sham. For one thing, we're not more polarized now than we were when we had a freaking Civil War. If that's reaching too far back into history, then it's safe to say that we're not more polarized now than we were during the most contentious civil rights decades, during the Viet Nam War or during the McCarthy years when Americans were spied on, detained, wrongly prosecuted and denied work just for expressing political views. I mean, sure, we have some debates these days but I'd rather live in "Red State/Blue State" years than the Red Scare years.
July 24, 2008 2:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I understand his theory of "lifestyle choice" and I know there is some truth in it, but I still can't see that it is much of a problem, nor do I think that is why counties are reliably tipping for one party over another. It may be that fine tuning districts, running incumbents with huge war chests and the voluntary withdrawal by the other party from the counties to concentrate resources on races they can win more easily is the more obvious answer. The parties will not compete.
July 24, 2008 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I find your warning to Democrats about post-materialists being distrustful of big government and centralized authority to be quite interesting.
During the FISA debate here I took some hits for describing myself as a "libertarian Democrat" but that's really what I am -- I want social security, universal healthcare and a decent welfare safety net but I also want total social freedom. I'm not alone (at least at TPM) in wanting those things. But the Democratic party, which is straddling the materialist and post-materialist ethos just isn't there yet.
I guess I have one more problem... hard to call myself "post-materialist" when I realized this afternoon that I REALLY, REALLY, want a nbig flat screen TV like... now. And... I really do.
July 24, 2008 2:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I know what you mean about the flat screen.
The trust thing is important. Hetherington makes the point that LBJ and Clinton were the same kind of people -- poor white kids who grew up in the rural South. The first created the Great Society (and some other things, of course); the second proclaimed that the era of big government is over. The difference, Hetherington contends, is that when LBJ was president, 8 out of ten Americans trusted government to do the right thing. When Clinton came into office, it was three.
Ds have the problem of proposing solutions to problems that require action from a government that even Ds don't trust to do the right thing. Meanwhile, liberal journalists denigrate government (I've done more than my share) and then are surprised when Rs win.
Oh, and can I get the theater speakers with the new flat screen??
July 24, 2008 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's what you watch on your 42" flat-screen with theater speakers that makes all the difference.
The red-state folks watch NASCAR, WCW wrestling, and FOX News.
Blue-staters watch re-runs of West Wing, Bravo Channel, and Bill Moyers on PBS.
July 25, 2008 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
A demographer at some University measured milk drinking patterns in the U.S. They discovered that all heroin addicts drank milk as children!
July 24, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bill, I for one do think that Dudley Webb is a fish-footed cocksucker, and say it regularly at Barefoot and Progressive (will, not in those exact words...)
The Herald Leader has been very good on the CentrePointe/Dudley Webb controversy, for whatever little good that did.
July 24, 2008 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
People start to sort if the organization they are in is very large like a school, college, church, club. They usually can't sort much at work. If the school is a one room school house, they can't sort. If the little brown church in the dale is where they worship, they don't sort.
I'd like to put forth the theory that a majority of people have a natural/psychological tendency to seek safety in numbers; to find like minded folks. A minority loves the unknown, adventure, exploration outside their comfort zone.
The more healthy thing to do (recommended by Carl Jung)is to understand your differences and to understand that we are stronger as a team than as individuals. But the Catch 22 is that we need simultaneously to become strong individuals by taking our natural preferences and strengthening them while acknowledging our least preferred functions and working on them by "seeing ourselves in others". "Love Thy Neighbor like Ourselves". "Being of one body with gifts differing."
Seeing "the other" and not being afraid.
Our media and Sigmund Freud and our political leaders have for a long time tried everything to keep us all apart. We need more Jung and Joseph Campbell, not more Freud and Friedman. We need to meet in that bar in Star Wars and get to know each other. Then some of us go out and explore and others go back and keep the Mother Ship maintained.
Smaller is better. Go see WALL-E. The Big and Large Corporation took over the world and trashed it.
Each of us can buck the big sort by making a habit of talking to a conservative every day if we are a liberal. And not just talk. Listen to them. Not just try and prove you are a smarty pants. I make this a daily habit. It's hard, but I have the luxury of not worrying where my next meal is coming from. So it's not that hard.
July 24, 2008 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink