Bill Bishop
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But here’s the thing—many of these same large-scale social changes took place around the same time in every industrialized country. Trust in major social institutions dropped in every economically advanced country. The Germans lost trust in their government and allegiance to their political parties roughly at the same time we did in the States. We like to think that “the ‘60s” destroyed American faith in government. Well, sure, the Watts riots had a powerful effect on the nation’s psyche. But New Zealanders lost their trust in government at roughly the same time. Americans like to explain things with nouns: Watergate, the ‘60s, Vietnam, assassination, Reagan, Clinton, the religious right. We could see that a lot of what was creating the big sort in the United States was happening at the same time in most other industrialized countries.
We get into this phenomenon in the book. The short explanation for why there is this uniform culture shift is that people who grow up in times when their survival is assured—when there’s plenty of food and people feel safe—develop different attitudes about politics and culture. They are less supportive of centralized authority and more concerned with individual freedom. They are less formally religious but increasingly concerned with individual spirituality. Economic security declines as an issue and environmental protection rises. This is true in the U.S., and it’s true in Japan, France and Sweden. Now the U.S. is an outlier. We remain more religious than most other industrialized countries. But the political pattern is the same. Ron Inglehart at the University of Michigan and Pippa Norris at Harvard report that in every advanced country, the majority of those who attend church at least once a week vote for the party on the right. The voting patterns of the faithful in the U.S. are, in fact, typical of those in other industrialized countries. The only unusual thing about America is that we have such a large number of churchgoers.
What cluster does Bill Bishop belong to?
When I went to the polls in 2006, I took pictures for a Web site that was collecting photos of American precincts. I snapped some shots of a brown Lab with voters in the background, then asked the owner the dog’s name. “Che,” she said. When a dog chosen at random at a polling place is named for a Marxist revolutionary, odds are that precinct skew blue.
Do you anticipate this trend changing course down the road?
We have lots of trends. Let’s think about two. The first trend is that of people seeking more likeminded company. All I see is for that to be accelerating. It’s now taken as a given that all Web sites will be tightly focused on homogenous groups. The New York Times recently wrote about problems with MySpace and Facebook. These sites looked dated to new software developers. The trouble with these massive social networks, according to the newspaper, was that “big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.” That, by the way, is considered a bad thing. Getting people together who have “dissimilar interests” is seen as a sure way to sink a new Web venture. Great!!
Meanwhile, the returns to living around those with similar interests are so great. Kids in Portland, Oregon, told me that one of the reasons they live there is that all the stuff they want—movies, books, bands, speakers—comes to their town. There is an advantage for consumers to live around those who are like themselves. It’s a way to insure that you can easily get your stuff—so that the music you want is played on the radio or at bars, the movies you’ve been wanting to see are screened, the authors who write the books you want to read come to the local bookstore. Moreover, the world isn’t getting any friendlier or easier to comprehend. “When people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community,” observed sociologist Manuel Castells. That’s what we’re doing—and that’s what we’ll continue to do.
The second trend is that lifestyle is aligning so closely with political party and political beliefs—that the way a person thinks about, say, an automobile purchase, is a good predictor of how that person feels about the war in Iraq. And what that person feels about the war in Iraq is a good predictor for what he or she thinks about tax cuts or mass transport or foreign aid. History tells us those alignments won’t last. What breaks up these rigid connections are issues that cut across existing political divisions. There will be a new issue that doesn’t easily fit within the boundaries of what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. I thought for a time that illegal immigration would be one of those crosscutting issues—where some Republicans found they had something in common with some Democrats. Or health care. Here you have the Service Employees union working with Wal-Mart and GM on producing a national health insurance plan. That’s a crosscutting relationship, which is something our country is missing right now. Democracy works best when people are friends one day on one issue and then opponents the next on another problem.
Today, our friends are our friends and our enemies are our enemies every day of the week. That’s why Congress is stymied and our political conversations are so unproductive. We don’t ever experience what it feels like to find agreement with our enemies. So we await the next crosscutting issue, knowing that one will arrive some time even if we don’t know when.
Which social groups are most hurt or disenfranchised by this clustering effect?
Lots of ways to think about this. First, economically, there are large portions of the country that are falling behind because they are losing their educated people. There’s a trade, in fact. Educated people move to a select group of cities (Dallas, Austin, and Houston in Texas) and those areas thrive while other communities are drained of their best talent. Meanwhile, as housing prices rise in these cities, poorer (and less educated) people move out. They move to where housing is cheaper. So some communities lose twice: they give up the people they educated with their tax dollars and then they become the homes for people who don’t have the skills to afford big city rents. In this sorting, lots of communities are losers.
In other ways, the nation is better off, because we have thousands of experiments going on locally in how to live and govern. This kind of diversity is healthy. But the nation comes up short because we don’t talk to one another. There’s no common ground between these vastly different communities, and so the country doesn’t gain the benefit of seeing those differences rub up against one another in a way that creates compromise and, perhaps, a better solution to our problems. I guess if I were to pick one group that is most disadvantaged, it would be those with graduate degrees. Diana Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has written a great book, Hearing the Other Side, tells us that Americans with the least education have the most diverse group of people with whom they discuss politics. Meanwhile, educated people like to think their lives are filled with diversity and worldly sophistication. But it turns out that those with the most homogenous political lives are Americans who have suffered through graduate school. The best-educated citizens are the least likely to have a political discussion with someone with a different opinion.
Have the political parties expressed any interest in your work?
I’ve had some back and forth with the [Hillary] Clinton campaign. They clearly see these differences in their contests with Senator [Barack] Obama. The maps of the primary results in Missouri, Ohio, and Texas look exactly like the Bush/Kerry election in ’04—only in this case, Clinton took all the “red” counties and Obama carried the “blue” communities. (I think this is something Bill Clinton knew instinctively. He campaigned in the Republican areas of Ohio and Texas—and these were the communities where Sen. Clinton won the two primaries.) The Clinton people seemed particularly interested in our finding that place overwhelmed other standard ways of measuring ideology. Self-described liberals who live in lopsidedly Republican counties are considerably more conservative than self-described liberals who live in, say, Austin.
Read an excerpt from The Big Sort.
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