The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Bishop
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 5348
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0618689354
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN: 9780618689354
Publication Date: May 7, 2008
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Product Description
The untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided
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. This social transformation didn't happed by accident. We've built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion 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, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis 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 Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 The big sort that starts at home July 13, 2008
John L. Borden (New York)
24 out of 25 found this review helpful
Now that Bill Clinton is using Bill Bishop's book "The Big Sort" as the basis for his current speeches, I should finally post a review. I read this book as soon as it was published and liked it, but not being one who regularly picks up social science books on political culture I procrastinated. Now it's time, and here are a few observations.
"The Big Sort" refers to the fact that lifestyle choices are leading like-minded folks to live together in communities where they feel comfortable and perhaps unchallenged. That has significant ramifications for our country's political and social development. To quote the book, "The lesson for politics and culture is pretty clear. It doesn't matter if you're a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward extremes."
The fact that Republican strategists understood this well before the Democrats is detailed in a discussion with Matthew Dowd, George Bush's pollster in the 2000 election and chief strategist for the Bush campaign in 2004. According to Bishop's account, Dowd understood that "American communities were 'becoming very homogeneous'. He believed that to a large degree, this clustering was defensive, the general reaction to a society, a country, and a world that were largely beyond an individual's control or understanding. For generations, people had used their clubs, their trust in a national government, and long-established religious denominations to make sense of the world. But those old institutions no longer provided a safe harbor. 'What I think has happened,' Dowd told me early in 2005, 'is the general anxiety the country feels is building. We're no longer anchored'." Bishop decodes this further, saying "Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans---and it had loosened long established social moorings. Americans were scrambling to find a secure place, to make a secure place...Most Americans have done that by seeking out(or perhaps gravitating toward)those who share their lifeworlds---made up of old, fundamental differences such as race, class, gender, and age, but also, now more than ever, personal tastes, beliefs, styles, opinions, and values."
"The Big Sort" identifies 1965 as the beginning of the major shift in American political and social demographics. The result today, in a political sense, is underscored by the findings of Bishop and his sociologist/demographer contributor Robert Cushing. Statistics showed that in the 1976 presidential election only 20% or Americans lived in counties that voted for one candidate or the other by more than a 20% margin. By 2004, 48% of America's counties were this type of landslide county with 20% plus margins for one of the candidates. Big change.
Bishop's book manages to deal with this subject comprehensively while being fluidly written, informative, insightful, and even entertaining. Somehow he pulls off the trick of letting us know of his participation in the "clustering" by living in a liberal Austin neighborhood where he fits in, without upsetting the balanced analytical perspective of the book. At least that's my take on it. It's an important book that seems to be gaining deserved recognition as we move toward November 4.
Deeper than Skin May 16, 2008
J. Yonder (Austin, TX)
36 out of 39 found this review helpful
This book is intriguing, convincing, also sad and scary for anybody who hopes to be living in a democracy.
After reading it, I look around and see the uniformity (amid the Benetton ethnic mix and DIY style-diversity) of my own social networks in the city. All I did was exercise "free" choice about where to live. I've wound up in this cool 'hood, so cool I have to whisper that I voted for Clinton, not Obama.
Bishop and Cushing have done mighty work. They track back the origins of the mega-churches (would you believe in India and Korea?) and pull together decades of bizarre social psychology research. They prove what's happened by following the votes, the money, and the feet of Americans on the move.
Stories are good reading -- the comic book "tribe" in Portland, emergent church kids, moderates squeezed out of Congress, the textbook wars of the 1960s in particular blew my mind. Anybody who thinks Karl Rove masterminded the state we're in is going to be stunned. We're living a new segregationist era, and it goes a whole lot deeper than skin.
Author Does Claim To Understand Why May 29, 2008
Michael S. Watkins (NYC)
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
As I understand the author, the big sort is a process that feeds on itself: As people surround themselves with people who are like themselves, they are less exposed to people with different opinions with whom they share some common ground. Consequently, they are more likely to judge people who are different from themselves as simply strange or wrong instead of as people like themselves with whom they can reasonably disagree.
brilliant, dense, excellent research July 16, 2008
Daniel E. Nelson
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Wonderful and informative. VERY well researched; conclusions are sound but not preachy. Also very informative about the world we live in and that we have lived in for the past decades. Absolutely recommended!
I've be noticing it for years June 8, 2008
Zelie Nic (Pittsburgh)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I remember back in high school, I was talking to a teacher about his growing up in Pittsburgh in the twenties and thirtiesand how, back then, people seemed to live in communities. For example, his father working in the steel industry, as did a few other neighbours. The guy next door, however, was a doctor. Today you don't see that as much... That's because we live in class enclaves.
Bishop pinpoints 1965 as the epicenter. Myself, I'd place it at the end of World War II, when housing plans were popping up. Housing plans ensure that the residents living within the confines are, to a degree, very similar.
But enough with my ideas.
Bishops recognizes that the political division that the country is going through has a physical aspect as well, which is something I've not before considered. This is an important book that describes the further radicalisation of American politics. One must wonder what the ramifications will yeild a decade from now...
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