Sorting Ourselves Out

In The Big Sort author Bill Bishop writes about our tendency to live in evermore like-minded communities, worship in evermore homogeneous churches and vote in evermore polarized elections. The subtitle of his book is "Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart." People who associate with people just like themselves tend to become more extreme and lose their ability to compromise. The middle disappears. What you have left is a lot of people on the fringes, shouting at each other.

Demographic data show that people who live in the far suburbs or exurbs tend to be conservative, while people who live in cities tend to be liberal. As a walker in the suburbs, I pay attention to the cars in the driveways and the bumper stickers plastered on them. And I know that, while northern Virginia has trended Democratic in recent elections, our neighbors are a congenial mixture of political types. Gun-toting NRA folks happily loan their snow-blowers to environmentalists who only own shovels.

One of the things that slows or stops the Big Sort is devotion to place. When we don't vote with our feet, when we stay where we've landed — or (even rarer these days) where we're born — we deny the Big Sort the demographic movement it requires. Census data released earlier this month shows that the share of Americans who made a long-distance move dropped to a record low of 1.4 percent. It's the lowest level since the government began recording this statistic in 1948.

Maybe there's hope for us after all.