514. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Drue Emerson
Author: Bill Bishop
Genre: Non Fiction, History, Politics, Public Policy
384 pages, published May 7, 2008
Reading Format: E-Book on Hoopla
Summary
The Big Sort is a social science look at the reasons why America has become so culturally and politically divided. In the past several decades, we have sorted ourselves by neighborhood, religion, political beliefs and culture to the point where many of us now live in echo chambers.
Quotes
“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”
“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.”
“Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”
“Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.”
“The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.”
My Take
While I found The Big Sort to make some interesting points and got me thinking a bit more about our country’s polarization, it was a bit dense and at times a slog to get through. It would have benefited from more personal anecdotes.
