Alone, Suburban & Sorted: Part 4, The Big Sort

In the first three posts of this series we discussed declines in American social engagement, focusing on the word "alone." We now move to the second adjective describing trends in American society:

Sorted.

In their book The Big Sort Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing discuss a trend they discovered in American migration patterns, a trend that they call "The Big Sort."

Bishop and Cushing stumbled upon The Big Sort after having examined national election trends at both the national and county levels. The striking trend they uncovered was this (p. 6):

"In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties."

Think about that. At the national level presidential races are as tight as ever. Yet half of the American population experiences landslides at the local level. Over thirty years ago less than one out of four Americans experienced landslides at the local level. (To see this shift you can look at the election maps at The Big Sort website.)

The explanation for this trend is that over the last 30 years Americans have been sorting themselves into communities of sameness. Four to five percent of the American population moves each year. That is 100 million over the last ten years. And as Americans have migrated across the country they have located themselves among the like-minded. Choosing neighbors that look and think like they do. The consequence has been that, rather than Democrats and Republicans living among each other, they have been moving away from each other. Creating local pockets of partisanship and ideology at the neighborhood level which are offset at the national level. As Bishop and Cushing summarize (p. 11), "Americans were engaged in a thirty year movement toward more homogeneous ways of living."

And The Big Sort isn't only about political affiliation. "[T]he Big Sort isn't primarily a political phenomenon. It is the way Americans have chosen to live, an unconscious decision to cluster in communities of likemindedness. " (p. 15) Bishop and Cushing go on to describe how The Big Sort is affecting all facets of American life (p. 6):

"[U]noticed, people had been reshaping the way they lived. Americans were forming tribes, not only in their neighborhoods but also in churches and volunteer groups. That's not the way people would describe what they were doing, but in every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations. Churches were filled with people who looked alike and, more important, thought alike. So were clubs, civic organizations, and volunteer groups...What had happened over three decades wasn't a simple increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division. The like-minded neighborhood supported the like-minded church and both confirmed the image and beliefs of the tribe that lived and worshiped there. Americans were busy creating social resonators, and the hum that filled the air was the reverberated and amplified sound of their own voices and beliefs."

Next Post: Sameness and Shouting