The Big Sort
by Bill Bishop (Houghton Mifflin, $25)
First there was The Tipping Point. Then Blink. Then Nudge. Then, just before the recent US elections and in good time to influence strategists ahead of Britain’s next general election, came The Big Sort. What these books have in common is that they are American, easy to read, take a fresh look at today’s politics and society, and have become fashionable and influential—The Big Sort has received friendly reviews from, among others, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. I can’t join the chorus. The Big Sort is intellectually shoddy. Its central message is also wrong. Why should we care? The reason is that The Big Sort belongs to a trend: one which consists of journalists playing professor, and purporting to say large and important things, but without applying the levels of rigour that any professor would demand. They inhabit an enticing, undemanding new world; let’s call it quackademia. Bluntly, on the evidence of The Big Sort, Bill Bishop is a quackademic.
Bishop’s thesis is simply stated. American communities are becoming more polarised. In the past three decades, Americans have tended increasingly to buy homes where other like-minded people already live. Instead of rubbing shoulders daily with neighbours who have a different outlook, they now mix with people who tend to share their attitudes. This process contains two specific dangers. The first is that Democratic and Republican America know and understand each other less and less. The second is that, by talking mainly to themselves, both sides of this widening divide whip themselves up into increasingly extremist frenzies. On the normal, lazy assumption that social trends in America come to Britain a few years later, The Big Sort thus appears to offer a warning.
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