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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

My thanks to Bill, TPM, and all the book club contributors and readers this week. This weekend, share a copy of Bill's book with your favorite political opponent. It's readable, funny, and enlightening, and you will feel smarter, not angrier.

Bill's last post is a great summary. You can make a strong case that sorting has coincided with much growing inability to resolve conflict in the political culture.

Does it follow that consensus, especially a national consensus, has become harder to achieve because of sorting? I'm not yet convinced. Consensus is hard to achieve, with or without sorting. Here are three problems I would need to address, before I would argue that sorting is one of the causes.

Read more »

"We don't need more diverse communities, maybe, we just need to let communities be themselves, without interference beyond making sure that the basics of human rights and health are respected and cared for."

Read more »

I have been following along with great interest. I think The Big Sort is one of the most important books to come along in a while, not just because of its analysis of American politics but for its implications for American society and the US economy.

My main worry is that the big sort poses huge implications for US economic competitiveness and a wide range of domestic economic and social issues.

Most commentators see the big sort as a lens into American politics - a window into an increasingly polarized America - red vs. blue, Republican vs. Democrat, McCain vs. Obama, Al Franken vs. Rush Limbaugh.

Read more »

Three major trends are driving the consumer marketplace, and, indeed, society at large. Purpose. Well-being. And empowerment. It is the latter that is most important for "the big sort" described by Bill Bishop.

People now have access to information that they have never had access to before. The Internet is the chief reason, but education, income and time make it possible for people to engage the Internet in this fashion. Couple all of that with the steadily eroding trust that people have in institutions and authorities - something Bill Bishop discusses in detail in The Big Sort - and you have a perfect storm of individual empowerment.

But just to be clear, this empowerment is not rooted in trivial things like the ability to PhotoShop pictures or upload videos to YouTube. Empowerment is fundamentally driven by access to information.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Years ago, Frank Sinatra sang a song essentially in tribute to the sense of loss created by the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to Los Angeles. It was about sense of community, sense of being part of a group.

Bill Bishop's Big Sort powerfully and persuasively points out that now our ballparks, our communities, are filled with fans from one team or the other. He makes the case that like-minded individuals are grouping themselves together in increasingly high percentages. There may some sort of "diversity" of demography, but diversity of opinion is too often going by the wayside.

All of this is more than unfortunate. Many of us of a certain generation were taught Political Science 101 in college using the Robert Dahl book that celebrated pluralism--the competition between points of view that resulted in the best of possible outcomes in our American democracy.

Read more »

Here's another potentially big problem with the Big Sort (again, the phenomenon, not the book). Sorting can make the electorate, as a whole, look more radicalized and polarized than it really is.

Is the public more politically polarized, across the board, than it used to be? Could be, and I wish I knew. That question is at the center of a big and unsettled debate within political science. But this much is certain: just because you and I are sorted into more homogeneous communities, it doesn't mean that you and I, as individuals, are more likely to disagree, or that we disagree more strongly. Maybe these things are true, but sorting, by itself, doesn't make them so.

Read more »

The political segregation of America has nothing to do with politics. This is the paradox of "the big sort" that has been so thoroughly, so convincingly and so unnervingly documented by Bill Bishop in his book The Big Sort. The political divide in our country is not, at root, a divide over politics or political issues. It is a divide over lifestyles.

As income, education and technology have grown, so have mobility and self-determination, particularly when it comes to where to live. Geographic roots no longer hold us fast in place; instead, we are freer than ever to decide for ourselves where to live. But we don't choose where to live because of politics. We make those decisions because of lifestyle preferences.

We settle down where we feel comfortable, where we like the people, the neighborhoods, the amenities, the schools, and the proximity to shopping, entertainment and work. We don't ask the realtor how the county voted. We ask ourselves whether the neighborhood feels right.

Read more »

Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort frames a fairly simple question:

What happens to political minorities in communities with large political majorities?

In many part of the traditional church in the West, what has happened is something called the "emerging church" phenomenon. As large church majorities grew in power, many people on the edges experienced a sense of conflict between what was moving in their soul & the institutional containers that were built all around them. Some of these folks left the church setting, following faith paths outside the traditional constructs. Some have tried to renew or even reform their institutions - as an example, look at the recent election of Bruce Reyes Chow as the moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a model of traditional faith institutions in the U.S.

Read more »

What happens to political minorities in communities with large political majorities?

They shut up. At book club or in church, they cut short any conversation bordering on politics. A woman in Washington State, a Democrat, told me that as her county grew increasingly Republican, she began to feel "like a second-class citizen, not entitled to have opinions." I interviewed Democrats in one Texas Hill Country town (80% Republican) about a float they built for a July 4th parade. "We got it all ready," said the county Democratic chair, "but nobody wanted to ride." Nobody wanted to be identified as a Democrat in a staunchly Republican community.

Who could blame them? When a Republican in my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood ventured on to the community listserve to recommend a Republican for the board of the community college, he was shouted down and told keep his opinions to himself. The lonely Republican said he began feeling a bit paranoid when he walked his dog around the neighborhood. A Republican county commissioner in Austin left his Democratic neighborhood after his car (sporting Republican stickers) was keyed and egged. (The attack was politically motivated. The stickers were ground zero for the egg salvo.) "You really do recognize when you aren't in step with the community you live in," he told me.

Read more »

Here below, let me bring in a few trends that come out of my work that tend to support the bifurcations described int he Big Sort. But they do not go as far as what Bill is getting at.

1) While all the presidential elections of the last few decades have been very close --2% or so advantage of the winner-- The Big Sort shows us that at the local level, half of the elections were won by landslides on both the Republican and the Democratic sides. We are not as balanced politically as we look at the presidential level. We are far more virulent than that. (which may explain a few things that seem so "un-American" ...)

Read more »

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.

Read more »

If you doubt the possibility or the relevance of geographic self-segregation in America, consider two easily forgotten realities.

First, the U.S. is enormous, even in a world shrunk by technology. The distance from Seattle to Miami equals, within six miles, the distance from London to Tehran. You already know that the population keeps growing; in 1965 (an apocryphal year in Bill Bishop's The Big Sort), the U.S. population was less than 200 million, and now it's over 300 million. You may have noticed that many of these people are insufferable, either because of their ideas, priorities, or decision making. Even if they just comprise 1% of the population, you'll find three million insufferables. Living with these people is a pain. Governing with them is even worse. Compromising with them eats away at your self esteem.

Read more »

In my adult life, I have lived in parts of the U.S. that might be considered on the far ends of the diversity continuum. When people imagine a lack of diversity, it is easy to think of the northern suburbs of Dallas, TX or Plano, TX or Texas A&M. These places have a lot in common with Agrestic, the fictional setting for the Showtime series Weeds. When people imagine a diverse community, it is easy to think of the San Francisco area or of New York or even South Austin - all areas that fit the "cultural creative" arch-type to a tee.

I must say that I've learned & unlearned a lot about diversity over the last 30 years. As a white male, diversity is not a theoretical issue or even something to be sensitive to. It is the air I breathe, that I inhale, it is the seats at MY table that I spread across. Building & maintaining an echo chamber of people like me takes planning & hard work - it is vigilant work to foster homophily, the mortal enemy of diversity. But the truth that I found on both ends of the continuum is captured in this simple statement from Global Voices Online founder Ethan Zuckerman:

Homophily makes you stupid.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

The quickest way to describe The Big Sort is with a simple calculation. In 1976, about a quarter of the voters lived in a county where either Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford won by 20 percentage points or more. The number of people living in landslide communities increased steadily over the next seven presidential elections. And by 2004, in another very close vote, nearly half of all voters lived in one of these landslide communities.

Places were becoming more politically homogeneous. You could see it in the data pieced together by statistician Robert Cushing. Counties would tip Republican or Democratic in presidential elections, and then the majorities would grow larger. (Seven out of ten people leaving red counties move to other red counties.) The red and blue state maps were meaningless to how we lived. In ink blue California, for example, 17 counties were growing more Democratic, 30 were becoming more Republican and the parties were getting more competitive in only 11 counties. Sixty percent of the nation's voters today live in communities that haven't changed their presidential party choice since 1988.

Read more »

This week at Cafe we'll be discussing Bill Bishop's The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. It's a timely topic, as the conventions loom near, and we've got a great-- and widely differing-- group. Joining us: Rich Florida, Author of The Rise of the Creative Class, blogger Bob Carlton, Bill Greener, Program Coordinator for the RNC, Ian McDonald, PhD candidate at Duke University, Saskia Sassen of Columbia University, Walker Smith, President of Yankelovich Partners, and Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic (and former TPMer!). Bill's first post will be up in a few minutes. Should be an exciting week.