The Big Sort (6 page)

Thomas Frank recently bemoaned the failure of Great Plains residents to vote in their economic interests and asked, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
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Frank's answer was that manipulative Republicans who offered intelligent design rather than a living wage had duped working-class voters in his home state. In addition, thin-blooded liberals who had gotten above their populist raisings had abandoned Democratic principles. When John Fenton asked a similar question more than forty years ago—What's the matter with Ohio?—he arrived at an explanation that didn't depend on either gullibility or duplicity. Fenton found that the way people lived—and the communities they lived in—shaped their political lives.

Unlike Ohio of the early 1960s, political divisions today are as much a result of values and lifestyle as they are of income and occupation. And with those divisions has come a pervasive and growing separation. Americans segregate themselves into their own political worlds, blocking out discordant voices and surrounding themselves with reassuring news and companions. For example, it's not surprising that supporters are more likely to watch a president's speech, whereas opponents tend to change the channel. But the spread between viewers and channel changers has been expanding. The Gallup organization found that during the Clinton administration, the television audience for the yearly State of the Union address was on average 9 percentage points more Democratic than Republican. Under George W. Bush, however, the audience from 2001 to 2005 averaged 21 percentage points more Republican than Democratic. In 1995, the viewing audience for Clinton's State of the Union address was evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. By the time Bush addressed the nation in 2005, 52 percent of the audience was Republican, 25 percent was Democratic, and 22 percent was independent.
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More and more, Americans watch and read the news that fits their political proclivities and ignore the other side. And should the choice between Fox News (on the right) and National Public Radio (on the left) seem impersonal, discriminating liberals can bob about the Caribbean on a cruise with writers from the
Nation,
while conservatives can board a different ship for a trip hosted by William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the
Weekly Standard.

Is the United States polarized? Maybe that's the wrong term. What's happening runs deeper than quantifiable differences in a grocery list of values. Despite the undeniable sameness of places across America—is a PetSmart in a Democratic county different from a PetSmart in a Republican county?—communities vary widely in how residents think, look, and live. And many of those differences are increasing. There are even increasing differences in the way we speak.
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Over the past thirty years, communities have been busy creating new and different societies, almost in the way isolated islands foster distinct forms of life, but without a plan or an understanding of the consequences.

The first half of the twentieth century was an experiment in economic specialization, as craft production gave way to assembly lines; cabinetmakers became lathe operators or door assemblers. The second half of the century brought social specialization, the displacement of mass culture by media, organizations, and associations that were both more segmented and more homogeneous. We now worship in churches among like-minded parishioners, or we change churches, maybe even denominations, to find such persons. We join volunteer groups with like-minded companions. We read and watch news that confirms our existing opinions. Politics, markets, economies, culture, and religion have all moved along the same trajectory, from fragmentation in the nineteenth century to conglomeration in the twentieth century to segmentation today. Just as counties have grown more distant from one another politically, regional economies are also separating—some booming and vibrant, others weak and dissipating. Mainline religious denominations gained parishioners through the first half of the twentieth century, the age of mass markets, but lost members beginning in the mid-1960s to independent churches designed for homogeneous communities. Media, advertising, city economies—they've all segmented, specialized, and segregated.

In the mid-1970s, when counties were becoming politically integrated, most other measures of public life showed low levels of political separatism. The differences that we take for granted today were muted. For instance, how often a person went to church didn't mark him or her as a Democrat or a Republican. Women voted slightly more Republican than Democratic. The Democratic vote was slightly more rural than the Republican. Less than half the population saw important differences between the parties. The proportion of people describing themselves as true independent voters reached post-World War II highs. Fewer than half of Republicans described themselves as conservative. People often split their vote between Republicans and Democrats. Votes in the U.S. Congress were more bipartisan than at any time since World War II.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the movement toward political mixing slammed to a halt and headed in the opposite direction. Women became more allied with the Democratic Party.
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Rural areas and frequent churchgoers became more Republican. The percentage of independents and ticket splitters declined. People grew more ideological. Democrats were increasingly liberal; Republicans were increasingly conservative. Voters saw greater differences between the parties.
Congressional Quarterly
reported that 2005 was the most partisan year in Congress in the half century that the venerable publication had been keeping count.

The tale we've been told and have come to tell ourselves is that society cracked in 1968 as a result of protests, assassinations, and the melee in the streets of Chicago. Informed by the Big Sort, we can now see 1968 more as a consequence of gradual change than as a cause of the changes that followed. Old political, social, religious, and cultural relationships had begun to crumble years earlier. American culture had slowly shifted as people simultaneously grew richer and lost faith in the old institutions that had helped create that wealth: the Democratic Party, the Elks, the daily newspaper, the federal government, the institution of marriage, the Presbyterian Church. Party membership, newspaper circulation, trust in government, and the number of people in the pews of mainline churches all declined at the same time.

The old systems of order—around land, family, class, tradition, and religious denomination—gave way. They were replaced over the next thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment. As we will see later in this book, like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.

Politicians and parties have exploited this social evolution, and in doing so, they have exacerbated partisanship and division. Elites have always been more partisan, more extreme, and more ideological than regular voters. But today moderates on all sides are rebuffed, and those who seek consensus or compromise are squeezed out. Paul Maslin, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean's pollster in 2004, explained it this way:

 

If I had to say one true statement about the entire process you are describing, I think that at the national or state level, it's making life increasingly difficult for people who are trying to thread the needle, to find the swing voter. In a way Karl Rove and Howard Dean and [Dean campaign manager] Joe Trippi were all right here. It's probably one of the things that's driving our politics into a more polarized situation. While the swing vote and the classic vote in the middle still matter, you are much more willing to say now that you ignore at your peril your own base. Because as everything spreads apart, the base becomes more important because they are demographically more together. You don't have a whole bunch of 51–49 communities out there. You have more and more 60–40, 65–35, 70–30 places. Well, you better damn well be sure you maximize your 70–30 votes, whether it's inner-city African Americans or liberal, educated Democrats or whether it's suburban, conservative Republicans or small-town, main-street, or Evangelical Republicans. We have to maximize our base, and they have to maximize their base. Ergo, polarization.

 

The country may be more diverse than ever coast to coast. But look around: our own streets are filled with people who live alike, think alike, and vote alike. This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighborhood (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life, pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of "those people" who live just a few miles away.

O
PPOSITES DON'T ATTRACT.
Psychologists know that people seek out others like themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon could be taking place between people and communities isn't all that surprising. "Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of assortative mating,'" explained social psychologist David Myers. Assortative mating—the tendency of similar types to pair up—has been studied as a cause of poverty and autism. But Myers was making a different point. Our wealth, education, and ability to move have allowed us to seek "those places and people that are comfortably akin to ourselves."
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The United States was shaped by migration. Explorers found their way on foot through the Cumberland Gap. Pioneers pushed west in wagon trains. Blacks left the dismal economy and deadly culture of the cotton South in the "great migration" of the first half of the twentieth century. Cubans fled to Florida after the overthrow of Batista in 1959. These mass displacements weren't what Myers was describing. He was identifying a different kind of movement, a migration of self-selection. The Big Sort included an element of personal discretion. People still moved to find good jobs, excellent schools, and safe neighborhoods. But an expanding economy, rising levels of education, and the breakdown of older social groupings had injected more personal choice into the selection of where to move and how to live. Amenities became more important as people sought out a particular kind of church or a special music or art scene. (For instance, Austin is brimming with baby boomers who moved here for the cosmic cowboy sound.) Americans could move to places that reinforced their identities, where they could find comfort among others like themselves. These weren't political choices, but they had political consequences.

After Bob Cushing and I discovered that Americans were segregating politically, we searched for corroborating evidence that this phenomenon was linked to larger social movements. We hoped not only to confirm the sorting we saw in elections but also to explore the nuances of what appeared to be a massive social and political reconfiguration. So we gathered what evidence was available and devised three tests of the Big Sort's influence. The first measured the voting patterns of communities over a number of presidential elections. If communities were collecting overwhelming numbers from one party or the other, majorities within communities should grow. The power of "assortative migration" would attract more Democrats to Democratic counties and more Republicans to Republican counties. By the same token, as Democrats left heavily Republican areas, those places would become even more Republican and vice versa. To be significant, this couldn't be a regional phenomenon. The sorting should be more than just the South switching from solidly Democratic to staunchly Republican. The whole nation ought to be undergoing the same kind of political separation.

Our second test would calculate the power of place. We wanted to see if geography trumped the measures normally used to designate political leanings. The most talked-about pattern of the past two presidential elections has been the overwhelming support churchgoers gave to the Republican candidate. If geography mattered, we should see a difference in churchgoers depending on the political cast of their home counties. Liberal churchgoers would live in one place and conservative churchgoers in another. If place had a special effect on people's politics, all union members wouldn't be the same either. Union members in Republican counties would have different beliefs from those in Democratic counties.

Finally, if sorting into like-minded communities had been taking place since the 1970s, we figured that we should be able to look back and see some corresponding demographic trends. We ought to be able to take advantage of the fact that hindsight is 20/20 and find the shifts in population that corresponded to the balkanized communities we live in today. Our third test searched for demographic movements that differentiated Republican places from Democratic ones over the past thirty-six years.

 

Test One: Does Like Attract Like?

For this test, we returned to the county-level presidential votes that had led us to our first story about political sorting and calculated how loyal each county had been to the two major political parties since World War II. Some counties (346, to be exact) had voted for the same party in every presidential election since 1948. In each election thereafter, another group of counties picked a side and stuck with it through the 2004 contest. Fifty-four more tipped in 1952; 536 tipped in 1968.

Before counties tipped, we found they were on average quite competitive. The difference between Republican and Democratic candidates over the years was just 2 or 3 percentage points in untipped counties. But here's the interesting part about the tipping phenomenon: once a county tipped, the spread kept growing. The average vote spread in presidential elections among tipped counties was huge—an overwhelming 20 percentage points in most elections. This was particularly true for Republican counties, which saw the margins for Republican presidential candidates increase over time. In addition, once these counties tipped, they grew more partisan. The trend was stronger in Republican than in Democratic counties. We surmised that this difference was caused by the tendency of Democratic counties to attract a more diverse population—more ethnic minorities, more people born outside the United States, more young people, and more people with college degrees. (I will discuss all of this later in the book.)