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.
Plainly, one can point to specific examples of polarisation, in Britain as in the US—such as gated housing estates where rich homeowners keep others out. But examples and anecdotes do not amount to proof. More substantial evidence is needed. Working with Robert Cushing, a retired statistician from the University of Texas, Bishop sets out to provide this for the US. At the core of his argument is an analysis of county-by-county voting patterns. Back in 1976, he says, just 26.8 per cent of Americans lived in "landslide" counties (where the gap between the Democratic and Republican vote in the presidential election was 20 per cent or more). By 2004, this had almost doubled to 48.3 per cent. "Look around," says Bishop: "our own streets are filled with people who live alike, think a like, and vote alike… pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of 'those people' who live just a few miles away." The whole of Bishop's thesis depends on his interpretation of those county voting figures.
Meanwhile, there is other evidence, not cited by Bishop, that we can inspect. In 2005, an analysis of county voting patterns conducted by two academics, Philip Klinkner and Ann Hapanowicz, looked at presidential elections back to 1840. What they showed is that the proportion of landslide counties has oscillated wildly over the past 168 years, falling below 10 per cent in 1912 and rising above 60 per cent eight years later. Over any longish period, however, the average is always 30-40 per cent. In historical terms, the 21-point rise between 1976 and 2004 is far from unusual. And if that is the case, Bishop most likely has the direction of causality precisely the wrong way round. It is politics that has been polarising people, not people who have been polarising politics.
In fact, Alan Berube and Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution have shown that in one important respect, American communities are becoming more, not less, mixed. A generation ago, most urban neighbourhoods were overwhelmingly either black or white. Now they are far more mixed. In America's ten largest cities, fewer than one in four neighbourhoods were more than 80 per cent white. And, no, this is not all the result of "white flight." (The analysis includes the major suburbs.) It is overwhelmingly the result of local integration.
Can we in Britain sleep more easily, then, knowing that Bishop is wrong about America? I am not so sure. Bishop may be a poor academic but he is a decent journalist. As with Blink and Nudge, there are some telling anecdotes. Also, I suspect that the proliferation of television channels and the growth of the internet are having a culturally polarising effect. Only a generation ago, news was largely a shared experience: most people watched either BBC or ITV news, and both were crafted to public service standards. Today, far fewer people watch mainstream bulletins; and increasing numbers of us are able to find "news" that fits our outlook online.
So Bishop may be onto something. But, in Britain at least, it has nothing to do with where we live and everything to do with the impact of technology. Bishop's analysis is about geography—at the very moment in the evolution of society when geography is rapidly losing its relevance. Like quackademia, polarisation is something you can't fully grasp by looking at a map.
