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http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p..._article/5507/

A fascinating new book argues that Americans are forming separatist ‘lifestyle tribes’, cut-off pockets of like-mindedness within towns and cities. How did this happen – and how can it be challenged?
Sean Collins

Almost everyone has heard of the Republican Party ‘red states’ and the Democratic Party ‘blue states’ in America. But the meaning of these labels has changed over time. ‘Red’ and ‘blue’ no longer refer just to states (as in whether a majority in any one of the 50 states will vote for one party or another), but also to groups of people: for example, we now speak of ‘blue pockets’ within red states, and vice versa.

Moreover, ‘red’ and ‘blue’ have evolved beyond party identification per se, to a whole array of associated characteristics and views – liberal/conservative, urban/rural, atheist/church-going, pro-gun-control/gun-owning, and so on.

At the same time, marketing firms and pollsters have been telling us that people within traditional demographic groupings – such as gender, race or age – display less uniformity in behaviour, and so these categories are less helpful ways of understanding trends. These categories have been overtaken by a proliferation of micro-groups based on lifestyles: for example, the city of Portland, Oregon is said to be based on ‘books, beer, bikes and Birkenstocks’ (and no prizes for guessing which side of the red/blue divide they fall on).

Now comes along a fascinating book that contends that these types of divisions in America have become more entrenched than ever. In The Big Sort, journalist Bill Bishop argues that Americans are increasingly clustering into enclaves of the like-minded – with people who share the same ways of life, beliefs and political views. In other words, the same lifestyles. This leads to a splintering of the country, as those whose lifestyles are different are likely to live in another area, which itself is likely to consist mainly of the like-minded.

So much for red/blue states, or even counties: Bishop finds that Americans are forming separate tribes in their neighborhoods, churches and volunteer groups. He describes how, after the invasion of Iraq, his neighbors in a section of Austin, Texas got together and decided to print anti-war t-shirts and bumper stickers. The agreed-upon slogan was simply ‘78704 PEACE’. ‘In Austin, zip codes have political meaning’, writes Bishop.

Bishop’s distinctive contribution is to highlight that Americans are increasingly seeking out the like-minded, and picking up and moving to live with them.

He first began his research on city growth dynamics in a series of articles for the Austin American-Statesman in 2002. With the assistance of Robert Cushing, a retired professor of sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, Bishop analysed migration patterns within the country. Historically, the US has witnessed greater internal movement than other developed countries, but the extent of that movement has increased even more in recent years. Bishop cites a statistic which shows that, over the past three decades, ‘more people moved from one county to another in a single year than new population was added nationally in four years’.

Bishop was surprised to find that the reasons people were moving had changed. Previously, most moves were related to income, such as relocating to take a better-paying job. He discovered that money still matters, but ‘culture, faith and politics’ had become more important than economics in determining the exact location. People seek out those with similar lifestyles: ‘The flows were selective, and they varied by personal characteristics, not broad demographic descriptions.’

The trend has gone so far that developers are now building ‘lifestyle communities’. A developer in Orange County, California, surveyed likely residents about their beliefs and values, asking how strongly people agreed with statements such as ‘we need to treat the planet as a living system’ and ‘I have been born again in Jesus Christ’. The result was different ‘communities’: ‘Covenant Hills’ for the faithful (big family rooms and traditional suburban architecture) and ‘Terramor’ for the ‘cultural creatives’ (bamboo floors and a ‘culture room’ instead of a family room). Bishop writes: ‘More than 16,000 people live in the subdivision now, and what’s vaguely creepy (well, maybe not so vaguely) is that people drive in the same entrance and then split off into neighborhoods designed for different lifestyles and values.’

A key indicator that Bishop uses to ascertain the degree of like-mindedness is voting patterns in presidential elections. In particular he analyses ‘landslide counties’ – counties where one party won by 20 percentage points or more. In the 1976 election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, just over 26 per cent of the nation’s voters lived in landslide counties; by 2004, nearly half (48.3 per cent) lived in communities where the election wasn’t close at all (even though, if you looked only at the overall result, the 2004 election was one of the closest in history).

But voting patterns are not the only indicator of cultural similarity, and as Bishop notes, the ‘Big Sort’ is not ‘about how Americans vote every couple of years. It is a division in what they value, in how they worship, and in what they expect out of life.’

Bishop also argues that the clustering is not an entirely conscious decision-making process. He tells the story of when he and his wife first moved to Austin and were driving around house-hunting. They sought a neighbourhood that ‘felt comfortable, seemed right’. Sure enough, the one they picked (Travis Heights) turned out to be the most liberal area in town, perfectly in line with their political views, even though that wasn’t one of their criteria.

People don’t need to check voting records before deciding where to live, says Bishop, because ‘it’s simple enough to tell a place’s politics just by looking’. As marketing firms found when researching voters during the 2006 mid-term elections, being a Democrat or Republican today indicates a complete lifestyle package:

‘Democrats want to live by their own rules. They hang out with friends at parks or other public places. They think religion and politics shouldn’t mix. Democrats watch Sunday morning news shows and late-night television. They listen to morning radio, read weekly news-magazines, watch network television, read music and lifestyle publications, and are inclined to belong to a DVD rental service. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to own cats.

‘Republicans go to church. They spend more time with family, get their news from Fox News or the radio, and own guns. Republicans read sports and home magazines, attend Bible study, frequently visit relatives, and talk about politics with people at church. They believe that people should take more responsibility for their lives, and they think that overwhelming force is the best way to defeat terrorists. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to own dogs.’

‘None of this is particularly shocking’, says Bishop (well, I for one hadn’t heard about the cats and dogs). But, he adds, ‘what is new is that some of us appear to be acting on this knowledge’ – that is, people are moving to escape Republicans and join towns with more Democrats, and vice versa.
What is also interesting is that, as residential segregation according to lifestyle increases, other forms of segregation are lessening. Racial segregation, in particular, has declined.

So, does it matter that communities are becoming more homogeneous? Yes, Bishop argues, because the process of clustering has very negative consequences for civic relations and political life. As the subtitle of his book puts it, ‘the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart’.
Due to clustering, Americans are less likely to encounter someone with different views in their town, and this contributes to a distorted view of the nation overall. As the playwright Arthur Miller put it during the 2004 general election, ‘How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter?’ For a long time it’s been said that Miller’s Manhattan is an ideological as well as physical island; Bishop’s point is that now the entire country is made up of such islands.

Bishop says that, with less exposure to, and interaction with, those who don’t share the same cultural activities or views, ‘others’ are less well-known and people assume the worst about them. Republicans in clustered communities are more likely to think that all Democrats are extreme liberals, and isolated Democrats seem to think Republicans are gun-toting rednecks. Americans are forming ‘balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible’, says Bishop.