Saskia has posed some questions below. She asks about how all this sorting business will play out. Lemme give a scattershot, Friday afternoon response:

• Walker Smith has it right: this is sorting by lifestyle, not by demography. I've talked to a lot of people since this book came out and not one described herself the way political writers talk about voters. Think about it. To guess how a person might vote, would you rather know a voter is a "white, college-educated woman, upper class, age 35-45" or an "ocean oriented person" (as one San Diego woman described herself to me)?

  Political writers use demographic categories because that's what they can get. But when I talked to marketing people, they use demographic data only as a last resort. The fellow who did marketing for Apple told me that Steve Jobs had banned demographic breakdowns. Apple tries to find connections to lifestyles, to tastes and ways of living that aren't related to class or age, but are often linked to geography. So, my Apple friend was taking his marketing team to Marfa, Texas, to see why a cowtown in the middle of West Texas could suddenly become the hippest place on earth. This is the kind of marketing that Bush brought to the political world in '04.

• Political scientists tell us that polarization ends when issues begin to cross-cut existing alliances. New issues arise, new coalitions form and they break across old party divisions.

  I keep waiting for this to happen. Immigration seemed a good place for a cross-cutting issue. So does health care. After all, you have Wal-Mart and SEIU and GM working together on a national health care plan. Those are some walls coming down. These are the kind of pragmatic problems Saskia says could depolarize our politics. I agree, but so far, it's hard to see that these issues have mixed up the R and D divide.

  Yes, everybody hates Bush. At the same time, everybody hates Congress. And Obama and McCain are about 50-50.

• I don't know about the geometry of everyone coming around to meet each other ... maybe, with the Apple boys, in Marfa. I do know that anthropologists realize that the most stable societies are built on conflicted relationships. Things work better when people are friends one day on one issue; enemies the next. Max Gluckman in the '50s wrote about African tribes where it was against custom to marry within the tribe. Intermarriage made societies more stable.

  The saying was, "They are our enemies. We marry them."

  Today, we've lost those cross-cutting relationships -- in our neighborhoods, churches, clubs, neighborhoods, even our marriages. (Opposites don't attract and match.com uses political similarity to put likely couples together.)

Meanwhile, problems pile up nationally. Saskia's list is a good one. Compromise would seem to be easy when bridges are collapsing, but when Pew asked last year, Republicans said compromise was a good thing -- and the compromising should begin with Democrats. And Democrats agreed that compromise would be a good thing, if only the Rs would start.

Welcome to America!!