I enjoyed reading many of the posts (well..."enjoyed" might not be the word to capture the experience. More like have been stimulated by the posts).

Here some thoughts. And also questions to Bill: Bill what do you think (based on your data) of the three possibilities I present below?

Three distinctions/possibilities I see coming out of many of the posts:

• The possibility that the oppositions Bill detects can tip into a kind of convergence


• The possibility that sorting does not necessarily imply/require socio-economic polarization


• The distinction between ideas (the ideational experience of life) vs. immediacy/concreteness of everyday life. I would think that sorting can have a foothold on both sides -the ideational and the concrete.

1. Several of you pointed to the possiiblity that as opposition grows, convergence can set it , in an almost geometric shift -you can visualize it.

   This makes me think of particular political shifts. For instance: when the Republicans started impeachment proceedings against Clinton, polls showed that at some point, American moralism tipped and became a kind of pragmatism: enough of this moralizing, you are all corrupt, sex stuff is not enough to impeach a prez.

   Or take the shift on Bush: time one, he had some of the highest approval rankings for a sitting prez (Sept 11 2001-04); time 2, he has some of the lowest. Are highest and lowest mutually reinforcing: did he sink sooo low because at one point he stood soooo high in the polls. (Given that the administration was performing dismally on several fronts at both time one and time two).

   There is an interesting dynamic here, where excess becomes the source of its opposite (including, possibly, an excess in the opposite direction).

   Bill's Sorting, now experienced as a sharpened political polarization compared to 20 years ago, could in fact tip into a pragmatism keen on overriding the ideas that now feed division/partisanship.

   I am not American, so I may have this wrong, but it seems to me that what polls present as the "American public" has a rather developed capacity for a kind of self-correction. In many European countries, where political parties have a far stronger ideological/political grip on the citizenry, this is rarer.

2. Another set of comments contributed to develop an important distinction: sorting may or may not indicate socio-ec polarization.

   So, I ask: are there challenges we face as a country that are big enough that they can override our political divisions.

   What I want to capture here is the practical consequences of the possibility of having sorting without necessarily having socio-ec polarization. It would suggest that there can be issues that will override the kind of sorting captured by 20% landslide victories at the subnational level. Among these issues are, possibly: rising waters as in the recent mid-west floods; a Republican governor in California passing environmental measures that the national Rep leadership does not necessarily ask/want; the 800 bridges that have the same design flaw than the Minneapolis bridge that fell, and so many other infrastructural deficits that our government seems unable to get a handle on; etc... ).

   The point is that, no matter how sorted we are (as in Bill's analysis), sorting does not correspond to all kinds of other polarizations, then the big challenges that we face as a country have a chance of bringing us together around the kind of issues that Bill finds in his Sorting.