The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
Author: Bill Bishop
In the tradition of The Affluent Society and Bowling Alone, a book that will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.
America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do.We've built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood—and church and news show—most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this groundbreaking work.
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop made national news in a series of articles when he coined the phrase "the big sort." Armed with original and startling demographic data, he showed how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not at the regional level, or the red-state/bluestate level, but at the micro level of city and neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop takes his analysis to a new level in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today, and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.
The New York Times - Scott Stossel
Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they've clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where The Big Sort, which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original…Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does.
Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Bishop offers a one-idea grab bag with a thesis more provocative than its elaboration. Bishop contends that "as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics." There are endless variations of this clustering-what Bishop dubs the Big Sort-as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities-even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: "balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life." Bishop's argument is meticulously researched-surveys and polls proliferate-and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our "post materialistic" society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that "like does attract like" becomes an exercise in redundancy. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Ellen D. Gilbert Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information - School Library Journal
Birds of a feather flock together, and that's not always a good thing, according to journalist and blogger Bishop in this timely, highly readable discussion of American neighborhoods and the implications of who lives in them. Writing with sociologist and statistician Cushing, Bishop looks at the "geodemographic segmentation" of America: like-minded people clumping together by age, income, education, religion, ethnicity, occupation, housing types, and family status in communities across the nation (e.g., Lubbock, TX, as opposed to Cambridge, MA), listening to and discussing only the news that suits them. This circumstance, Bishop says, accounts for the "landslide" effect (think Blue and Red states), by which candidates from either party win by enormous margins within counties owing to the "us vs. them" mentality that has taken over American politics in the last 30 years. This social polarization is, of course, only too evident in both houses of Congress; it is hard to imagine, from today's vantage point, that in 1965 half the Republicans in the Senate voted for President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare bill. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Forget bowling alone: We're barely talking with anyone who doesn't share our views, habits, dress and bumper stickers. Journalist Bishop is a Texan. But, he hastens to note, he lives in an Austin suburb that gave more votes to Nader than Bush in the last election and where the lone "out" Republican is a very lonely man. The mores of the neighborhood encourage political discussion, though only of a like-minded kind. The watershed year was 1965, before which Americans were used to the thought that people of different races, incomes, religions and voting habits might live more or less side by side. Afterward, Bishop observes, through white flight and minority migration, whole cities were remade to be monoethnic, with even income distributions and similar levels of education, some higher and some lower. Thus the fact that in 1970 only 17 percent of the residents of Austin were college-educated, a number that had risen to 45 percent in 2004, whereas in Cleveland "the change was only from 4 percent to 14 percent." All other things being equal, a liberally inclined college-educated person chose Austin, Portland or San Francisco over any of the old Rust Belt cities, even if the cost of living were substantially lower in the latter. Just so, in those few surviving mixed cities where red- and blue-state types come together, they're likely to do so only tangentially but live in neighborhoods that are more alike than unlike. The loss of diversity is of interest to more than just marketers, who have a lot of rethinking to do about demographics and target audiences, since "there is no longer national 'brand loyalty' in regard to religion," much less sandwich spread or laundry soap. Instead, by Bishop'saccount, this sorting tendency is of concern: We've cleansed our personal spaces of heretics but removed all the grit and tumult that make for debate and democracy, which spells trouble ahead for the republic. Essential reading for activists, poli-sci types, journalists and trend-watchers. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn/Sagalyn Agency
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
The Power of Place
The Age of Political Segregation 19
The Politics of Migration 41
The Psychology of the Tribe 58
The Silent Revolution
Culture Shift: The 1965 Unraveling 81
The Beginning of Division: Beauty and Salvation in 1974 105
The Economics of the Big Sort: Culture and Growth in the 1990s 129
The Way We Live Today
Religion: The Missionary and the Megachurch 159
Advertising: Grace Slick, Tricia Nixon, and You 182
Lifestyle: "Books, Beer, Bikes, and Birkenstocks" 196
The Politics of People Like Us
Choosing a Side 221
The Big Sort Campaign 249
To Marry Your Enemies 276
Acknowledgments 307
Notes 310
Selected Bibliography 337
Index 350
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
Author: Robert Dallek
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