THE BIG SORT (Houghton
Mifflin, May 7, 2008) is the landmark story of how America came to be
a country of swelling cultural division, economic separation, and political
Going far beyond the simplistic
red state/blue state divide, journalist Bill Bishop (in collaboration
with sociologist and statistician Robert Cushing) marshals original
data and incisive reporting to show how Americans have sorted themselves
geographically, economically, and politically into like-minded communities
over the last three decades.
Homogeneity may be a perk of
the unprecedented choice our society offers—but it also breeds economic
inequality, cultural misunderstanding, political extremism, and legislative
gridlock. This is the story of our times, and its reality poses a profound
threat to democracy, but no one before now has seemed to notice, let
alone been able to describe, its causes and consequences.
The nation we live in—our
culture, economy, neighborhoods, and churches—has been sculpted by
the Big Sort over the past thirty years:
with college degrees were relatively evenly spread across the nation's
cities in 1970. Thirty years later, college graduates had congregated
in particular cities, a phenomenon that decimated the economies in some
places and caused other regions to flourish.
The generation of ministers who built sprawling mega-churches in the
new suburbs learned to attract their stadium-sized congregations through
the "homogenous unit principle." The new churches were designed
for cookie-cutter parishioners, what one church-growth proponent described
as "people like us."
In 1976, only about a quarter of America's voters lived in a county
a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was
Businesses learned to target their marketing to like-minded "image
tribes," a technique used by Republicans in the 2004 campaign.
Living in politically like-minded
groups has had its consequences. People living in homogenous communities
grow both more extreme and more certain in their beliefs. Locally, therefore,
governments backed by large majorities are tackling every conceivable
issue. Nationally, however, Congress has lost most of its moderate members
and is mired in conflict.
Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, Richard Florida's The Rise
of the Creative Class, and Thomas Frank's What's the Matter
with Kansas?, THE BIG SORT
explores the connection between cultural evolution, economic change,
and the power of place. THE BIG SORT, however, is the
first account that systematically ties cultural and economic evolution
to the changing political landscape of America.
And when you have finished reading,
the country—its conflicts and turmoil—makes a new kind of sense.