The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart | 
| Author: Bill Bishop
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 1647
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0618689354
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN: 9780618689354
ASIN: 0618689354
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 4 more reviews...
 Sub-Board-Book Superficial July 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My fourteen-month-old daughter has a board book that tells the life story of Rosa Parks in under sixty words. Obviously, there are some gross omissions and stunning oversimplifications, but whatever--it's a board book. I'm just glad she's reading about Rosa Parks. And maybe when she's old enough to turn the pages without tearing them, she can tackle The Big Sort. The gross omissions and stunning oversimplifications will still be there, but at least she'll be reading about politics. And it does have a neat picture on the cover.
It's not that Bishop's main premise is misplaced. Indeed, if you live in the USA and have left the house anytime in, say, the past decade, then you've probably perceived Bishop's "big sort:" the steady division of the country along cultural and lifestyle lines. The book is a well-organized marshaling of prodigious statistical and anecdotal support for this what-else-is-new premise, with samples cut mostly from churches, restaurant franchises, and social scientists in fly-over America. Nor is Bishop totally lacking in thought-provoking insights. His contention that groups of like-minded individuals tend to become more extreme in their like-mindedness is well argued and not altogether obvious, and Bishop displays keen perception in noting similarities in the marketing of commercial products, religion, and ultimately political campaigns.
Bishop's problem, rather, is that he overreaches his evidence and has virtually no grasp of his historical context. Bishop writes as though the USA was once a harmonious land of brotherly neighbors standing in unshakable solidarity, whose occasional disagreements were nothing that couldn't be settled over a couple Budweisers and a handshake. Then out of nowhere fissures start to open in the mid-1960s, to then amplified in a nouveau "big sort." It might pass for board book history-- if you only count the white people.
Having announced that America was all like peas & carrots until 1965 fell from the sky, the balance of Bishop's text rings nostalgic for a return to those good `ole days, before political issues were anything to really get worked-up about, back when everyone just got along. As if. Bishop's big sort is happening, for sure, and its importance cannot be discounted. But his analysis is riddled with errors, and none bigger than a fictional point of origin. Sorting being nothing so new to America, Bishop really ought to brush up if he's going to write about politics. Maybe he can start by reading some board books.
 brilliant, dense, excellent research July 16, 2008
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!
A tale of two Americas July 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bishop's "Big Sort" comes at an interesting time - when Obama promises to reunite America, to stress what we have in common instead of what differentiates us. Bishop makes it clear that may no longer be possible. We have willfully segregated ourselves into political/lifestyle groupings that allow for little diversion from their mean. Liberals listen only to other liberals and conservatives listen only to other conservatives - both harden their beliefs and wonder angrilly why the other side just "doesn't get it." Whether you're red or blue, this book rings true (oh, that's bad...). What will solve this divided national connundrum? The internet? No, that just allows us to self-select even more. This is why I try to read 3-4 newspapers a day, from all over the political spectrum.
The big sort that starts at home July 13, 2008
6 out of 6 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.
Fine article, but not a book June 17, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The central thesis of this book, that this country's population is segregating itself into political and life-style enclaves, is interesting and important, with a variety of consequential social and political implications. Bishop provides convincing statistical documentation to support his contention.
His argument would have made a first rate article. Unfortunately, he has turned it into a full length book by padding it with a lot of familiar and often barely relevant material from earlier academic studies and news articles.
"The Big Sort" is nonetheless a worthwhile read, even if much of it can be skipped or skimmed without losing the main thrust of its argument.
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