The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  It doesn't appear that redistricting caused much, if any, of the increase in homogeneous districts. After all, if gerrymandering created landslide districts, you'd expect to see an increase in noncompetitive districts immediately after redistricting. Legislatures would draw new districts after the census and, bing-bang, there would be fewer competitive districts. That didn't happen. After each of the last three redistricting cycles (1980, 1990, and 2000), there were no immediate jumps in lopsided districts. When Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz examined the effects of redistricting in 2000, he found that the number of supersafe House seats (those with presidential vote margins of more than 20 percent) had increased by two, from 201 to 203. That's hardly a sign of much horseplay. Abramowitz found similar small effects after redistricting in the 1980s and 1990s. (After redistricting in 1980, in fact, the number of noncompetitive districts slightly decreased.) If legislative gerrymandering had caused the lopsided House, its effects certainly had been subtle, or perhaps one should say "prescient." For the districts hadn't grown more partisan at the time of redistricting, Abramowitz found. They had grown more partisan later, in the years between redistricting, when the districts' boundaries remained unchanged. From the first post-redistricting election in 1992 until 2000, the number of ideologically lopsided districts jumped from 156 to 201, but not a single district changed shape in those years.*26

  Vanderbilt University's Bruce Oppenheimer looked at this phenomenon in another way. There are seven states with only one member of Congress. Five are red (Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming), and two are blue (Delaware and Vermont). But none have had their legislative boundaries gerrymandered. Oppenheimer cobbled these seven districts into a single, hypothetical "state." He compared this seven-district "state-of-states" with twenty-six actual states with a similar number of districts in three very close presidential elections: 1960, 1976, and 2000. Oppenheimer checked to see which had become more lopsided, the made-up state-of-states with the static borders or the real states where politicians and their infernal computers had gerrymandered to their hearts' content.

  Between 1960 and 2000, no real-life state saw partisan vote margins in its congressional districts increase more than in Oppenheimer's hypothetical state-of-states. Manipulative politicians in the twenty-six states had four chances to make their congressional districts less competitive, but even so the districts didn't match the lopsidedness that appeared naturally in the state-of-states.* "These data raise doubts about the ability of redistricting schemes to explain the decline in the underlying party competitiveness of congressional districts," Oppenheimer wrote.†27

  If not gerrymandering, then how about conspiracy? Democrats have argued that the elections of 2000 and 2004—and the concurrent polarization of the nation's politics—were the culmination of a forty-year effort by Republicans. The story goes like this: In the wake of the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, Republicans devised a grand scheme. They built a tightly wound, highly coordinated movement from the top down. Corporations and foundations paid for think tanks and advocacy groups, which supplied the movement with ideas and leaders. The right created its own media—talk radio, Christian television networks, and conservative-minded college newspapers—in this centrally managed, ma-chinelike plot to split the country ideologically and then establish a permanent majority. The result of this multigenerational effort lay in the Republicans' congressional victory in 1994 and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

  Certainly, the conservatives wanted to take over. Winning, after all, is one goal in politics. But a conspiracy? One piece of evidence used to support the existence of this far-sighted plan is a 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, the soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court justice. Powell, writing to a friend with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned of an "attack" on the "free enterprise system." In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, liberals unearthed this obscure manuscript and gave it nearly mythic significance. Former Democratic senator Bill Bradley described Powell's note (in what surely is an oxymoron) as a "landmark memo." The right had used the memo, Bradley wrote, as a "blueprint" to construct a "pyramid" of foundations, think tanks, and advocacy groups, all designed to support an interchangeable Republican leader.28 Pick—or mix!—your metaphor of all-embracing power. Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham described the "Republican propaganda mill" as "tentacles of rage." He transformed Powell's memo into a "manifesto" that held for the political right the "hope of their salvation." According to Lapham, Powell's "heavy word of warning fell upon the legions of reaction with the force of Holy Scripture."*29 Skipping several generations, the bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga wrote in 2006 that the Powell memo "eventually helped fuel nascent efforts to create the most sophisticated, well-funded political propaganda machine in world history," Joseph Goebbels notwithstanding.30

  The belief on the left is that the machine (or mill or pyramid or giant squid) built of foundations, radio programs, and organizations powered the Republican comeback. The right-wing mechanism paid for scholars' sharp pencils and book contracts. Young leaders were fledged through summer camps, internships, and jobs with Republican congressional representatives until they could become self-supporting members of the movement. The right established a shadow society that built, grew, and eventually took over in the name of religion and free enterprise. And the entire operation was funded by the businesses that had suffered at the hands of Democratic government.

  Mark Schmitt, the former director of policy at the liberal Open Society Institute, called this phenomenon the "legend of the Powell memo."31 He found few historians of the conservative movement who even mention the memo. For example, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's chronicle The Right Nation gives the Powell memo exactly three sentences.*32 Moreover, Schmitt wrote, Powell was "far out of touch" with what would become the New Right.33 The memo was given an iconic status by liberals searching for some explanation of their minority standing in national politics. (Conspiracy was a more appealing theory than a simple lack of popular support.) Best of all, this explanation was duplicable: the left could write its own Powell memo and create its own matrix of foundations, think tanks, and leadership programs. (James Piereson, executive director of the conservative, and now defunct, Olin Foundation, observed that the left had a "near-obsessive interest in conservative philanthropies."†34) Schmitt contended that the "reality of the right is that there was no plan, just a lot of people writing their own memos and starting their own organizations—some succeeding, some failing, false starts, mergers, lots of money well spent, and lots of money wasted."35

  There is some truth to the conspiracy stories. Republicans schemed and conservatives talked of creating a "shadow society"; they set up alternative foundations, research groups, and media outlets. Of course, Democrats schemed, too, and the left had its own support in the foundation world. But conservatives better understood the changes taking place in the country, and that is why, for a time, Republicans were more successful politically. Republicans didn't create a movement. They recognized the cultural shifts taking place across the country—the Big Sort—and then channeled what was happening into politics, to their advantage.

  What both gerrymandering and the forty-year conservative conspiracy arguments miss is that politics is a two-way street. It flows both from the top down and from the bottom up. Most explanations for our current partisanship—gerrymandering and conspiracy are two good examples—are top-down only. They assume that public opinion follows the lead of presidents, politicians, and Capitol Hill journalists. In this worldview, elites (be they elected officials, media barons, or a cabal of well-funded Republicans) use the power of money or position to push society in a particular direction. Voters are largely powerless in this process. They just choose one of the alternatives that legislative manipulation, media bias, and party propaganda provide.

  But politics is bottom-up as well. Society changes and politicians follow. The Big Sort is the story
of real differences in the way people think, in what they value, in how they worship, and finally in where they live. The divisions in Congress aren't simply the consequence of manipulations by left-wing interest groups or the outcome of plots hatched in a bunker deep under the Heritage Foundation. The divisions are the reflection of how—and where—people have come to reside.

  A less conspiratorial explanation for why national politics has grown more partisan over the past thirty years can be found in the studies of congressional redistricting. Alan Abramowitz and Bruce Oppenheimer looked at the evidence of increasing geographic polarization we first presented in the Austin American-Statesman in 2002 and 2004, and they came to the same conclusion: people have been sorting. Abramowitz: "Americans are increasingly living in communities and neighborhoods whose residents share their values and they are increasingly voting for candidates who reflect those values."36 Oppenheimer: "A final theory that I offer to explain the decline in partisan competitiveness at the congressional district level rests on the increased mobility of Americans and the corresponding growth in the freedom to select where they will reside."37

  The Politics of Place: What's the Matter with Ohio?

  The overwhelming attention given to political celebrity—and political conspiracy—in our time has obscured the politics of place. If people simply respond to the faults, successes, and foibles of political elites, then it really doesn't matter that people are taking up residence in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods. But politically like-minded regions practice a different kind of politics than do places with a greater mix of allegiances. Our politics are affected by our neighbors. Following is one example.

  In the early 1960s, political scientist John Fenton wondered why working-class voters in Ohio supported Republicans, a political act that was against their economic interests. Fenton explained this phenomenon by looking at the shape of the state's neighborhoods. Upper-class voters lived in tightly knit, geographically compact communities. Physical proximity made it easier for them to maintain political cohesion, to move and vote in an ideological herd. In Ohio's large number of midsize cities, however, there was no corresponding critical mass of workers. Working-class voters were dispersed. "In Ohio you had a fairly even distribution of these working-class voters across the state," explained the University of Maryland's James Gimpel. "And because they lived among farmers and clerks and ditch diggers, they were not as inclined to vote so monolithically."38 In nearby Michigan, Gimpel said, working-class voters lived close to one another, and their geographic proximity powered their ideological and political intensity. In Ohio, however, workers were spread out, and the effect of this diffusion, Fenton wrote more than forty years ago, was "profound ... The postman did not talk the same language as his accountant neighbor, and the accountant was in a different world from the skilled workman at Timken Roller Bearing who lived across the street. Thus, conversation between them usually took the form of monosyllabic grunts about the weather ... The disunity of unions and the Democratic party in Ohio was a faithful reflection of the social disorganization of their members."39

  Thomas Frank recently bemoaned the failure of Great Plains residents to vote in their economic interests and asked, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"40 Frank's answer was that manipulative Republicans who offered intelligent design rather than a living wage had duped working-class voters in his home state. In addition, thin-blooded liberals who had gotten above their populist raisings had abandoned Democratic principles. When John Fenton asked a similar question more than forty years ago—What's the matter with Ohio?—he arrived at an explanation that didn't depend on either gullibility or duplicity. Fenton found that the way people lived—and the communities they lived in—shaped their political lives.

  Unlike Ohio of the early 1960s, political divisions today are as much a result of values and lifestyle as they are of income and occupation. And with those divisions has come a pervasive and growing separation. Americans segregate themselves into their own political worlds, blocking out discordant voices and surrounding themselves with reassuring news and companions. For example, it's not surprising that supporters are more likely to watch a president's speech, whereas opponents tend to change the channel. But the spread between viewers and channel changers has been expanding. The Gallup organization found that during the Clinton administration, the television audience for the yearly State of the Union address was on average 9 percentage points more Democratic than Republican. Under George W. Bush, however, the audience from 2001 to 2005 averaged 21 percentage points more Republican than Democratic. In 1995, the viewing audience for Clinton's State of the Union address was evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. By the time Bush addressed the nation in 2005, 52 percent of the audience was Republican, 25 percent was Democratic, and 22 percent was independent.41 More and more, Americans watch and read the news that fits their political proclivities and ignore the other side. And should the choice between Fox News (on the right) and National Public Radio (on the left) seem impersonal, discriminating liberals can bob about the Caribbean on a cruise with writers from the Nation, while conservatives can board a different ship for a trip hosted by William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.

  The United States of "Those People"

  Is the United States polarized? Maybe that's the wrong term. What's happening runs deeper than quantifiable differences in a grocery list of values. Despite the undeniable sameness of places across America—is a PetSmart in a Democratic county different from a PetSmart in a Republican county?—communities vary widely in how residents think, look, and live. And many of those differences are increasing. There are even increasing differences in the way we speak. * Over the past thirty years, communities have been busy creating new and different societies, almost in the way isolated islands foster distinct forms of life, but without a plan or an understanding of the consequences.

  The first half of the twentieth century was an experiment in economic specialization, as craft production gave way to assembly lines; cabinetmakers became lathe operators or door assemblers. The second half of the century brought social specialization, the displacement of mass culture by media, organizations, and associations that were both more segmented and more homogeneous. We now worship in churches among like-minded parishioners, or we change churches, maybe even denominations, to find such persons. We join volunteer groups with like-minded companions. We read and watch news that confirms our existing opinions. Politics, markets, economies, culture, and religion have all moved along the same trajectory, from fragmentation in the nineteenth century to conglomeration in the twentieth century to segmentation today. Just as counties have grown more distant from one another politically, regional economies are also separating—some booming and vibrant, others weak and dissipating. Mainline religious denominations gained parishioners through the first half of the twentieth century, the age of mass markets, but lost members beginning in the mid-1960s to independent churches designed for homogeneous communities. Media, advertising, city economies—they've all segmented, specialized, and segregated.

  In the mid-1970s, when counties were becoming politically integrated, most other measures of public life showed low levels of political separatism. The differences that we take for granted today were muted. For instance, how often a person went to church didn't mark him or her as a Democrat or a Republican. Women voted slightly more Republican than Democratic. The Democratic vote was slightly more rural than the Republican. Less than half the population saw important differences between the parties. The proportion of people describing themselves as true independent voters reached post-World War II highs. Fewer than half of Republicans described themselves as conservative. People often split their vote between Republicans and Democrats. Votes in the U.S. Congress were more bipartisan than at any time since World War II.

  Beginning in the mid-1970s, the movement toward political mixing slammed to a halt and headed in the opposite direction. Women became more allied with the Demo
cratic Party.* Rural areas and frequent churchgoers became more Republican. The percentage of independents and ticket splitters declined. People grew more ideological. Democrats were increasingly liberal; Republicans were increasingly conservative. Voters saw greater differences between the parties. Congressional Quarterly reported that 2005 was the most partisan year in Congress in the half century that the venerable publication had been keeping count.

  The tale we've been told and have come to tell ourselves is that society cracked in 1968 as a result of protests, assassinations, and the melee in the streets of Chicago. Informed by the Big Sort, we can now see 1968 more as a consequence of gradual change than as a cause of the changes that followed. Old political, social, religious, and cultural relationships had begun to crumble years earlier. American culture had slowly shifted as people simultaneously grew richer and lost faith in the old institutions that had helped create that wealth: the Democratic Party, the Elks, the daily newspaper, the federal government, the institution of marriage, the Presbyterian Church. Party membership, newspaper circulation, trust in government, and the number of people in the pews of mainline churches all declined at the same time.

  The old systems of order—around land, family, class, tradition, and religious denomination—gave way. They were replaced over the next thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment. As we will see later in this book, like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.