General Cluster: Bill Bishop on 'The Big Sort'

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THE RED-STATE/BLUE-STATE divide in America is real, and chances are, you're part of the problem.

In his new book, "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart," former journalist Bill Bishop examines the polarization of U.S. politics and concludes that the American people — not politicians, the media or religious leaders — are the primary cause of the country's unyielding political stalemate.

"Everybody thinks the political process is screwed up, but no one thinks they're part of the reason for the screw-up," Bishop says.

The main cause of the red/blue divide, Bishop argues, is prosperity, which has given the American people the ability to reorder their lives around their tastes and values by moving to like-minded communities. The result is a country sliced and rearranged into red and blue communities — like children dividing on a playground.

In the D.C. region, this phenomenon can readily be seen in Northern Virginia, where an influx of new residents and immigrants has nearly transformed "Old Dominion" into a blue state. (Virginia hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.)

"It's been an almost substitution of Republicans for Democrats [in Northern Virginia]," said Dr. Robert Lang, an associate professor in urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech.

All across the country, millions of Americans have moved away from people with different political outlooks in the past 30 years, Bishop argues, congregating instead in communities where lifestyles and political views are tightly intertwined.

Latte liberals and soccer moms may seem like crude stereotypes, but Bishop says the relationship between lifestyles and voting beliefs is impossible to ignore.

"The more we looked, the more it became clear that migration itself wasn't driving the country's political segregation," Bishop writes. "We were seeing something more basic — a cultural shift powered by prosperity and economic security. Freed from want and worry, people were reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs."

As Americans have segregated themselves politically, the influence of groupthink has made them more extreme politically, according to Bishop, creating a polarized electorate that is unprecedented in the country's history.

Bishop talked with Express about America's new mass migration, the influence of the 1960s and how The Big Sort played out in the Clinton/Obama primaries.

» EXPRESS: A lot of people say the American electorate is polarized because politicians and the media have split the country in half. Is it fair to say that the central premise of your book is that this explanation for our [political] polarization is wrong?
» BISHOP: It's correct to say that it's incomplete. People in Washington like to think that everything emanates from Washington, and that people respond simply to what they see on TV or what politicians say. The premise of this book is that ... if you look at [political polarization] from the bottom up, you'll see that actually politicians and the media are responding to things that have been happening among people for the past 30 to 40 years.

» EXPRESS: What is The Big Sort?
» BISHOP: The Big Sort is really a social phenomenon. We came at it first from looking at the economies of tech cities. And we could see that, beginning in the 1970s, economies were being created and decimated largely as a result of how people were migrating around the country. For example, Austin, [Texas], my hometown, was collecting people with BA degrees at exactly the same time that regional returns to education were increasing. So Austin slurps up all these people with BA degrees, Cleveland doesn't, and so Austin's economy booms and Cleveland is among the leaders in home foreclosures now.

So over a 30-year process, there was a clustering. ... In 1970, people with BA degrees were relatively evenly distributed around the country. Over the next 30 years, they became clustered in particular places. And so, what was true for people with education was true across the board. White people left particular cities — not inner city to suburb, but they left entire city regions in the 1990s and moved to others. And blacks moved here, and young people went disproportionately to some cities rather than others. And those cities with tech economies gradually developed different kinds of cultures, and also different kinds of politics.

» EXPRESS: You describe this shockingly large mass migration in your book that's happened in the United States in the past 30 years or so. Why do you think that's gone unrecognized, to a certain extent, and why are so many people moving?
» BISHOP: More people move from county to county [in the U.S.] each year than are born. People have always moved, and they've moved largely for economic reasons. ... This is more of a lifestyle movement. People are moving to find places where they're comfortable. ... You see it in Austin, and you see it in D.C. all the time.

» EXPRESS: Some people may hear your argument and say: ‘So what if Americans are segregating themselves politically? What's the harm in living among people similar to you?'
» BISHOP: It's the most natural thing in the world. ... When you're first dropped from the womb, you look to find comfort around people who are like yourself. And that's what people are doing. But what's changed is that politics now aligns with lifestyle in a way that it hasn't before. I don't think people are moving to be around others who agree with them about national health insurance, or negotiating policies with Iran. People don't define themselves that way. But what's happened is that lifestyle choices now align with policy choices and with political party to an astounding degree. And that has led to this kind of ideological segregation. So, locally, everybody feels a lot more comfortable together, but nationally, you have this Balkanization of communities, and therefore of politicians. It's not surprising that, from the time The Big Sort started until now, you've had some of the least productive years in Congress. They represent us, and they represent a people who don't know and don't understand those who live just a couple of miles away.

» EXPRESS: You have a quote to start off the book from Arthur Miller, from 2004: "How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?" That's such a new phenomenon, right? With people being in a situation where they literally cannot see the other side?
» BISHOP: Someone said something similar to that in '72, when Nixon was running, so some of that has always been the case. What has surprised us is that is has been increasing. So it wasn't the fact that parts of Manhattan are ideologically isolated — everybody knows that, right? What surprised us was that now all parts of the country have that in common with parts of Manhattan, and that it was really beginning to affect our politics. The other thing is that we've adopted this consumerist attitude toward Democratic life. You talk to marketers, and they'll tell you that people are less willing to accept compromise now about anything. They don't want to compromise about the kind of car they get, or the food that they eat, and so they're totally unwilling to compromise in terms of the kind of political results that come out. They don't like leaders who compromise.

» EXPRESS: How do you think the 1960s has influenced today's politics?
» BISHOP: The 1960s are Americans' explanation for everything. When you go back and look, you can see that 1965 was this pivotal year in American society. But the mid-1960s were also a pivotal year in Japanese society, and in New Zealand's society, and in Scandinavian societies. Underlying the collapse of national institutions was a growing national distrust in all large institutions. What you find is that the Japanese and the Italians and the Germans also began to lose trust in their national institutions and in national governments at about the same time. I think there's a good argument that it had more to do with general social changes among people who grew up in relative prosperity, rather than anything having to do with the 1960s.

» EXPRESS: I have to ask you about the current election, just because so many of the things that are going on seem relevant to what you wrote about.
» BISHOP: When you look at the results of the Obama/Clinton [primary] race, they look exactly like the Kerry/Bush race. One of our markers was that half of the people in the Kerry/Bush contest in '04 lived in places where one candidate or the other won by 20 percentage points or more. That is also true in the race between Obama and Clinton. Half the people lived in a county where either Clinton or Obama won by 20 percentage points or more, and this in a race that was absolutely 50/50. If you look at a map of Missouri from the '04 presidential race and [this year's Democratic primary], you can't tell the difference.

» EXPRESS: A lot of the political talk these days is about the so-called "millennial generation" and their differences with their parents. Do you think this group is resistant to political polarization?
» BISHOP: People will always sort, but will it always align with politics? It might not, as that generation becomes involved. The interesting thing to me is, OK, we have this system where we have two parties, this binary deal. What happens when a generation comes along that's resistant to binary solutions or choices? How are they going to reshape the system? That's an exciting thing to watch.

Written by Dustin Weaver (Express)
Photo by Lauren Jaben