We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

Very interesting discussion this week at TPMCafe Book Club (and if you read that and didn't immediately click to another page, I commend you), regarding Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. The book is about how American communities are getting more and more politically homogenous; people are sorting themselves into one-party towns.

Some excerpts from the discussion...

Bill Bishop claims that political minorities get intimidated in homogenous communities:

What happens to political minorities in communities with large political majorities? They shut up. At book club or in church, they cut short any conversation bordering on politics. A woman in Washington State, a Democrat, told me that as her county grew increasingly Republican, she began to feel "like a second-class citizen, not entitled to have opinions."...

When a Republican in my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood ventured on to the community listserve to recommend a Republican for the board of the community college, he was shouted down and told keep his opinions to himself. The lonely Republican said he began feeling a bit paranoid when he walked his dog around the neighborhood. A Republican county commissioner in Austin left his Democratic neighborhood after his car (sporting Republican stickers) was keyed and egged. (The attack was politically motivated. The stickers were ground zero for the egg salvo.) "You really do recognize when you aren't in step with the community you live in," he told me...

Notre Dame's David Campbell found that minorities in landslide counties not only vote less, they are less likely to volunteer or engage in civic activities. Minorities find it healthful to simply withdraw from public life...

Elizabeth Theiss-Morse held focus groups with citizens in Republican Omaha. "People said, many times, 'Eighty percent of us agree," she told me. "'We all want the same thing...It's those 20 percent who are just a bunch of extremists out there.' It didn't matter what their political views were. They really saw it as us against this fringe. The American people versus them, the fringe."

Oh, and the "fringe" had a geography. Theiss-Morse said the Nebraskans all agreed: "Those people in California are really weird."

He also claimed (a little dubiously, perhaps) that people who succeed in the "new economy" are primarily Democrats, while people who fail to adjust tend to be Republicans:

Bob Cushing and I could see that cities that were growing more Democratic were filling with people who had post-materialist attitudes. Using marketing polls, we could see that people in these cities were less likely to obey centralized authorities. They were less likely to attend church, join civic clubs or spend time with their families. They were post materialists.

People in cities that were becoming more Republican were more likely to go to church, join clubs and volunteer. They were more family oriented. And they had a greater sense of economic vulnerability.

Marc Hetherington at Vanderbilt found that Republicans and Democrats differed in their styles of child rearing. Yes, Republicans were the "strict fathers." Post materialist Democrats, on the other hand, were far more likely to value independence over respect for elders, curiosity over good manners. "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds," Hetherington wrote. "We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."

Richard Florida thinks that the division of America into two blocs with very different economic interests is going to make it hard to address our problems as a nation:

[I]t seems to me this split Bill Bishop so correctly identifies has made it nearly impossible to build broad political consensus required for the kind of policy shift needed to ensure the US stays a competitive, innovative economy and can begin to develop a shared economic framework that can build economic strength and provide a reality of more broad based and inclusive economic participation by a wide cross section of American workers...

The US economy faces huge issues from its financial sector to its real economy to real estate globalization, never mind rising inequality and sinking living standards which are not being addressed or even talked about. It is in effect running down its long run prosperity. It is incredibly difficult to make the investments required for the future in an era of political polarization...

In the end, the clock of history is always ticking. Sooner or later some other place will come along, just like America did a century or so ago, and put together the framework required to marshall its assets broadly to succeed in the new global economic framework. The big sort makes it more and more likely that the United States with its long track of responding nimbly and remaking itself to meet the needs of technological and economic challenges will for the first time in quite awhile be less and less able to respond.

I agree with Richard Florida. We're in a very dangerous and difficult time right now, and the last thing we need is to be divided into two echo chambers full of people who think everyone who lives somewhere else is "un-American." My hope is that high gas prices will once again force people to mix and mingle in the great social melting pots of cities, so that people will be absolutely forced to hear one another out.