The Big Sort
Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning journalist reveals the untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided in this groundbreaking book.
Armed with startling demographic data, Bill Bishop demonstrates how Americans have spent decades sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not by region or by state, but by city and neighborhood. With ever-increasing specificity, we choose the communities and media that are compatible with our lifestyles and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away.
In The Big Sort, Bishop explores how this phenomenon came to be, and its dire implications for our country. He begins with stories about how we live today and then draws on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize finalist Bishop offers a one-idea grab bag with a thesis more provocative than its elaboration. Bishop contends that "as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics." There are endless variations of this clustering what Bishop dubs the Big Sort as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: "balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life." Bishop's argument is meticulously researched surveys and polls proliferate and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our "post materialistic" society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that "like does attract like" becomes an exercise in redundancy.
