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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. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood—and church 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.—From publisher description.

Haidt, Chapter 12 — lifestyle enclaves change the intuitions that precede argument

Haidt reports that 27 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties”—won by at least twenty points—in 1976, compared with 48 percent in 2008. He adds source-era ecological correlations: a Whole Foods location strongly tracked an Obama county, while a Cracker Barrel location tracked a McCain county. These are county patterns, not individual classifiers, and they do not show that shopping preference caused a vote or that residential sorting has one cause.

The psychological mechanism is the useful addition to The Big Sort. When neighborhood, worship, leisure, work, friends, and media repeat the same grand narrative, a rival view arrives without a trusted human carrier. It is heard as an attack on a sacred victim, liberty, group, authority, or institution, and the rider immediately supplies arguments for the elephant’s alarm. Haidt therefore recommends more than exposure to contrary content: recurring friendly contact and shared work across political boundaries, joined to changes in primaries, districts, campaign finance, and legislative routines that make cross-party cooperation rational. The aim is not ideological mixture for its own sake or a presumption that both sides are equally correct; it is an environment in which an opponent can become intelligible before claims are tested on their merits. Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Chapter 12 source audit

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Chapter 1 – The Power of Place

Main Idea: Americans are increasingly choosing to live among people who share their values, beliefs, and lifestyles, creating politically and culturally homogenous communities.
Examples/Studies: Migration patterns since the 1970s show people clustering in like-minded neighborhoods; county-level voting data illustrates growing partisan segregation; personal anecdotes of people moving for cultural fit rather than job necessity.

Chapter 2 – The Beginning of the Big Sort

Main Idea: The sorting process began in the 1970s, driven by cultural shifts, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of the service economy.
Examples/Studies: Census data revealing increased internal migration; studies showing cultural and political alignment influencing moving decisions; the decline of cross-class, cross-belief community institutions.

Chapter 3 – The 1976 Realignment

Main Idea: The 1976 presidential election marked the first significant break in historical voting patterns, signaling a shift toward ideological polarization.
Examples/Studies: Analysis of electoral maps from 1976 compared to earlier elections; political science studies on partisan identity consolidation.

Chapter 4 – Culture Shift and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics

Main Idea: Politics began reflecting lifestyle choices rather than solely economic class interests, with cultural preferences deeply linked to political identity.
Examples/Studies: Survey data linking leisure activities, consumer habits, and neighborhood characteristics to political leanings; marketing research showing companies targeting by political identity.

Chapter 5 – Religion and the Clustering of Belief

Main Idea: Religious communities mirrored the sorting trend, with churches attracting congregations of similar political and social views, reinforcing ideological divides.
Examples/Studies: Case studies of megachurch growth; surveys of denominational political alignments; geographic concentration of particular religious traditions.

Chapter 6 – The Decline of the Middle

Main Idea: Moderate voices in politics and civic life diminished as extremes gained influence, partly due to like-minded communities reinforcing their own views.
Examples/Studies: Longitudinal studies showing loss of centrist elected officials; analysis of congressional voting records over decades.

Chapter 7 – Information Bubbles

Main Idea: The sorting extended into media consumption, with people selecting news sources that affirm their beliefs, reducing exposure to opposing viewpoints.
Examples/Studies: Media audience research on cable news and talk radio; psychological studies on confirmation bias and selective exposure.

Chapter 8 – Polarized Politics

Main Idea: Geographic and cultural sorting intensified political polarization, making compromise more difficult and increasing partisan hostility.
Examples/Studies: Data on party-line voting in Congress; county-level analysis showing widening partisan gaps.

Chapter 9 – Communities of Consensus

Main Idea: Homogenous communities foster stronger local consensus but weaken national unity, as local norms become insulated from outside perspectives.
Examples/Studies: Local policy case studies where consensus is strong but conflicts with national priorities; sociological research on groupthink.

Chapter 10 – The Psychology of the Big Sort

Main Idea: Human cognitive tendencies drive people toward like-minded groups, and once there, group polarization pushes opinions toward extremes.
Examples/Studies: Social psychology experiments on group polarization; behavioral studies on in-group/out-group bias.

Chapter 11 – Consequences for Democracy

Main Idea: The Big Sort undermines democratic deliberation, making it harder to solve national problems that require broad consensus.
Examples/Studies: Historical comparisons with earlier eras of political division; analysis of gridlock in federal governance.

Chapter 12 – Can We Live Together Again?

Main Idea: Reversing the trend is difficult but possible; it requires intentional efforts to rebuild cross-cutting institutions and foster diverse communities.
Examples/Studies: Examples of bipartisan local initiatives; historical cases where national unity was rebuilt after polarization.

Highlights

Introduction (Page 9)

Most of us make at least three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. —DANIEL GILBERT, Stumbling on Happiness (Page 9)

There were dissenting views. “I really don’t want political or other uncomfortable subjects segregated into some kind of opinion ghetto where only proselytizing activists and ideologues would venture,” wrote one South Austinite. Another: “I’m going to stick my neck out here. I DO want to have political discussion … It is a tragedy that this country is becoming more and more polarized. Neighborhoods are becoming more and more homogeneous, either Democrat or Republican. Talk about segregation!” But Mason got the picture: he was a Republican Crusoe on this Democratic island, and so he withdrew, promising never to talk politics again with his neighbors. (Page 12)

The experience had changed the way he saw himself in the neighborhood. Knowing he was a minority, he wondered what people thought of him as he walked Hotard. “In some way after that exchange, I think I’m viewed with suspicion by my neighbors because of an act of political expression, which is a little on the bizarre side,” he said. “I’m just a guy who has a dog and works a job.” (Page 13)

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. Little, if any, of this political migration was by design, a conscious effort by people to live among like-voting neighbors. (Page 13)

Americans were forming tribes, not only in their neighborhoods but also in churches and volunteer groups. That’s not the way people would describe what they were doing, but in every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations. Churches were ﬁlled with people who looked alike and, more important, thought alike. So were clubs, civic organizations, and volunteer groups. Social psychologists had studied like-minded groups and could predict how people living and worshiping in homogeneous groups would react: as people heard their beliefs reﬂected and ampliﬁed, they would become more extreme in their thinking. What had happened over three decades wasn’t a simple increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, selfreinforcing social division. The like-minded neighborhood supported the like-minded church, and both conﬁrmed the image and beliefs of the tribe that lived and worshiped there. Americans were busy creating social resonators, and the hum that ﬁlled the air was the reverberated and ampliﬁed sound of their own voices and beliefs. (Page 14)

There have always been patterns to migration and development. Southern blacks moved to Chicago in the 1950s. White Appalachians took the “hillbilly highway” north to booming Cleveland and Detroit after World War II. These were migrations in response to economic hardship and opportunity. The movements we saw from 1970 to 2000 were different. The ﬂows were selective, and they varied by personal characteristics, not broad demographic descriptions. People were sorting, and the movements themselves were changing economies. Young people left old industrial towns and rural America for urban life, moving to a small group of cities. People earning higher incomes went to Austin or San Francisco. Those with lower incomes moved out of those towns. Las Vegas attracted people with less education than those who went to Seattle. Portland slurped up people with college degrees. Blacks went to Atlanta and Washington, D.C.; whites went to Austin and Orlando. (Page 15)

After 1976, the trend was for Republicans and Democrats to grow more geographically segregated. (Page 17)

The 1976 election between President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter took place at the time after World War II when Americans were most likely to live, work, or worship with people who supported a different political party. Just over 26 percent of the nation’s voters lived in landslide counties. (Page 17)

Then the country began segregating. In 1992, 37.7 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that number had risen to 45.3 percent. There was a difference between the elections prior to 1976 and those that came after. In the polarizing, and close, 1968 election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, 37.2 percent of voters lived in landslide counties. The last ﬁve presidential elections have all had a higher percentage of voters living in landslide counties than in 1968. Beginning in 1992, the percentage of people living in landslide counties began an upward, stairstep progression. And by 2004, in one of the closest (Page 17)

presidential contests in history, 48.3 percent of voters lived in communities where the election wasn’t close at all. (Page 18)

measure the segregation of blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000 in all U.S. (Page 18)

counties. In those twenty years, counties had become slightly less racially segregated. Using the same formula, however, from 1980 to 2000 the segregation of Republicans and Democrats increased by about 26 percent The trend didn’t appear to be connected to the seesawing fortunes of the national parties. (Page 19)

What nobody had seen, however, was that most of America and most Americans were engaged in a thirty-year movement toward more homogeneous ways of living—that the polarization so apparent in the way political leaders talked was reﬂected in the way Americans lived. (Page 19)

Americans now had unprecedented choice about where and how they wanted to live. They had incredible physical and economic mobility—but these freedoms seemed only to have increased segregation, not lessened it. Why? (Page 20)

For example, we discovered that people who left counties with large numbers of Evangelicals rarely moved to counties dominated by Democrats. People who left counties with a high proportion of Evangelicals largely moved to counties of like faith. Similarly, we found that when people moved from Republican counties, they were very likely to settle in other Republican counties. (Page 20)

The more we looked, the more it became clear that migration itself wasn’t driving the country’s political segregation. We were seeing something more basic—a cultural shift powered by prosperity and economic security. Freed from want and worry, people were reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs. They were clustering in communities of like-mindedness, and not just geographically. Churches grew more politically homogeneous during this time, and so did civic clubs, volunteer organizations, and, dramatically, political parties. People weren’t simply moving. The whole society was changing. Prosperity had altered what people wanted out of life and what they expected from their government, their churches, and their neighborhoods. The Big Sort was big because it constituted a social and economic reordering around values, ways of life, and communities of interest. That’s why when we looked back over the thirty-year period when communities had become increasingly Democratic or Republican, we found an uncanny conﬂuence of events. The (Page 20)

Freed from want and worry, people were reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs. (Page 20)

political segregation of communities from the mid-1970s through the 2004 election coincided with a number of other social and economic transformations. Political leaders were growing more extreme during this period, as Democrats and Republicans in Congress became more ideological, less moderate, and more partisan. Churches, clubs, and the economy were all going through a very similar kind of ideological reorganization. Also, after decades when prosperity had spread more evenly throughout the nation, the U.S. economy had begun to diverge into regions of winners and losers. (Page 21)

Political leaders were growing more extreme during this period, as Democrats and Republicans in Congress became more ideological, less moderate, and more partisan. (Page 21)

Marketing analyst J. Walker Smith described the same phenomenon as extreme and widespread “self-invention,” a desire to shape and control our (Page 21)

identities and surroundings. Technology, migration, and material abundance all allow people to “wrap themselves into cocoons entirely of their own making,” Smith wrote. (Page 22)

Technology, migration, and material abundance all allow people to “wrap themselves into cocoons entirely of their own making,” Smith wrote. (Page 22)

We all live with the results: 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. (Page 22)

growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible (Page 22)

Part I THE POWER OF PLACE (Page 24)

THE AGE OF POLITICAL SEGREGATION (Page 25)

How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter? —ARTHUR MILLER (Page 25)

People don’t need to check voting records to know the political ﬂavor of a community. They can smell it. (Page 29)

How do you know which neighborhood to live in? The same way: because it feels right. It looks like the kind of place with boys and girls you’d like your children to marry. (Page 29)

It looks like the kind of place with boys and girls you’d like your children to marry. (Page 29)

In the mid-1970s, moderates ﬁlled 37 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. By 2005, only 8 percent of the House could be found in the moderate middle (Page 30)

Americans are closely divided, but we are not deeply divided, and we are closely divided because many of us are ambivalent and uncertain, and consequently reluctant to make ﬁrm commitments to parties, politicians, or policies. We divide evenly in elections or sit them out entirely because we instinctively seek the center while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes.” (Page 31)

Fiorina announced that his book was needed to debunk what he described as the “new consensus” that Americans were deeply divided In the meantime, however, Fiorina’s view became the new truism. Jonathan Rauch wrote in the Atlantic that when scholars went to look for the red and blue division, “they couldn’t ﬁnd it.”16 Joe Klein in Time blamed the (Page 31)

“Anger-Industrial Complex” for ginning up a division that didn’t exist in real life Columnist Robert Kuttner scolded a “lazy press corps” for overplaying the red and blue division when “the reality is quite different.” Fiorina’s argument was even picked up in 2005 by the yellow pages of conventional wisdom, Reader’s Digest (Page 32)

abortion question was a favorite of those who contended that the middle was wide and the fringe narrow (Page 32)

Abramowitz collected national polling data to show that differences among Americans were deep and growing deeper, increasing between 1972 and 2004, just the period when the country was segregating geographically. People who identiﬁed themselves as Democrats thought differently about issues than those who considered themselves Republicans. And those differences—on issues such as abortion, living standards, and health insurance—were growing larger. People’s evaluation of George W. Bush in 2004 were more divided along party lines than at any time since the National Election Studies started asking questions about presidential approval in 1972. (Page 33)

differences among Americans were deep and growing deeper, increasing between 1972 and 2004, (Page 33)

two reasons are given to explain our polarized politics. The most popular is gerrymandering: through years of redistricting, politicians have packed their districts to produce overwhelming majorities, creating such (Page 33)

gerrymandering (Page 33)

partisan uniformity that there is no reason or call to compromise. (Page 34)

The second explanation—one favored by Democrats—holds that conservative activists built an interlocking structure of propaganda and money that moved the Republican Party, and the nation, to the right. (Page 34)

interlocking structure of propaganda and money (Page 34)

There are several arguments against the gerrymandering thesis. The ﬁrst is that political parties aren’t in the business of building supermajorities for incumbents. Parties exist to maximize their number of representatives. This imperative causes parties to spread votes around, creating more districts with, say, 10- to 15-point majorities and fewer with lopsided constituencies. Studies of redistricting have found that, indeed, “partisan redistricting often has the effect of reducing the safety of incumbents.” (Page 34)

Studies of redistricting have found that, indeed, “partisan redistricting often has the effect of reducing the safety of incumbents.” (Page 34)

if gerrymandering created landslide districts, you’d expect to see an increase in noncompetitive districts immediately after redistricting. Legislatures would draw new districts after the census and, bing-bang, there would be fewer competitive districts. That didn’t happen. After each of the last three redistricting cycles (1980, 1990, and 2000), there were no immediate jumps in lopsided districts. (Page 35)

number of supersafe House seats (those with presidential vote margins of more than 20 percent) had increased by two, from 201 to 203. That’s hardly a sign of much horseplay. (Page 35)

Democrats have argued that the elections of 2000 and 2004—and the concurrent polarization of the nation’s politics—were the culmination of a forty-year effort by Republicans. The story goes like this: In the wake of the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, Republicans devised a grand scheme. They built a tightly wound, highly coordinated movement from the top down. Corporations and foundations paid for think tanks and advocacy groups, which supplied the movement with ideas and leaders. The right created its own media—talk radio, Christian television networks, and conservative-minded college newspapers—in this centrally managed, ma-chinelike plot to split the country ideologically and then establish a permanent majority. The result of this multigenerational effort lay in the Republicans’ congressional victory in 1994 and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. (Page 36)

One piece of evidence used to support the existence of this far-sighted plan is a 1971 memo written by Lewis Powell, the soon-to-be-appointed Supreme Court justice. Powell, writing to a friend with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned of an “attack” on the “free enterprise system.” In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, liberals unearthed this obscure manuscript and gave it nearly mythic signiﬁcance. Former Democratic senator Bill Bradley described Powell’s note (in what surely is an oxymoron) as a “landmark memo.” The right had used the memo, Bradley wrote, as a “blueprint” to construct a “pyramid” of foundations, think tanks, and advocacy groups, all designed to support an interchangeable Republican leader. (Page 36)

1971 memo written by Lewis Powell (Page 36)

phenomenon the “legend of the Powell memo.” (Page 37)

Conspiracy was a more appealing theory than a simple lack of popular support. (Page 37)

What both gerrymandering and the forty-year conservative conspiracy arguments miss is that politics is a two-way street. It ﬂows both from the top down and from the bottom up. Most explanations for our current partisanship—gerrymandering and conspiracy are two good examples—are top-down only. They assume that public opinion follows the lead of presidents, politicians, and Capitol Hill journalists. In this worldview, elites (be they elected ofﬁcials, media barons, or a cabal of well-funded Republicans) use the power of money or position to push society in a particular direction. Voters are largely powerless in this process. They just choose one of the alternatives that legislative manipulation, media bias, and party propaganda provide. (Page 38)

Our politics are affected by our neighbors. (Page 39)

More and more, Americans watch and read the news that ﬁts their political proclivities and ignore the other side. (Page 40)

In the mid-1970s, when counties were becoming politically integrated, most other measures of public life showed low levels of political separatism. The differences that we take for granted today were muted. For instance, how often a person went to church didn’t mark him or her as a (Page 41)

Democrat or a Republican. Women voted slightly more Republican than Democratic. The Democratic vote was slightly more rural than the Republican. Less than half the population saw important differences between the parties. The proportion of people describing themselves as true independent voters reached post-World War II highs. Fewer than half of Republicans described themselves as conservative. People often split their vote between Republicans and Democrats. Votes in the U.S. Congress were more bipartisan than at any time since World War II. (Page 42)

The tale we’ve been told and have come to tell ourselves is that society cracked in 1968 as a result of protests, assassinations, and the melee in the streets of Chicago. Informed by the Big Sort, we can now see 1968 more as a consequence of gradual change than as a cause of the changes that followed. Old political, social, religious, and cultural relationships had begun to crumble years earlier. American culture had slowly shifted as people simultaneously grew richer and lost faith in the old institutions that had helped create that wealth: the Democratic Party, the Elks, the daily newspaper, the federal government, the institution of marriage, the Presbyterian Church. Party membership, newspaper circulation, trust in government, and the number of people in the pews of mainline churches all declined at the same time. (Page 42)

American culture had slowly shifted as people simultaneously grew richer and lost faith in the old institutions that had helped create that wealth: the Democratic Party, the Elks, the daily newspaper, the federal government, the institution of marriage, the Presbyterian Church. (Page 42)

Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment. As we will see later in this book, likeminded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. (Page 42)

giant feedback loop (Page 42)

THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION (Page 45)

OPPOSITES DON’T ATTRACT. Psychologists know that people seek out others like themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon could be taking place between people and communities isn’t all that surprising. “Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of assortative mating,’” explained social psychologist David Myers. Assortative mating—the tendency of similar types to pair up—has been studied as a cause of poverty and autism. But Myers was making a different point. Our wealth, education, and ability to move have allowed us to seek “those places and people that are comfortably akin to ourselves.” (Page 45)

People still moved to ﬁnd good jobs, excellent schools, and safe neighborhoods. But an expanding economy, rising levels of education, and the breakdown of older social groupings had injected more personal choice into the selection of where to move and how to live. (Page 45)

Americans could move to places that reinforced their identities, where they could ﬁnd comfort among others like themselves. These weren’t political choices, but they had political consequences. (Page 45)

We found that Republican counties tended to become more politically segregated than Democratic counties.* This happened in part because Republican migrants were unusually attracted to Republican communities. Between 1995 and 2000, 79 percent of the people who left Republican counties settled in counties that would vote Republican in 2004—and they were most likely to move to counties that would be Republican landslide counties. (Page 47)

South has become increasingly partisan since 1976 as it has become solidly Republican. But we found that every region in the country has become more segmented as it has tipped toward one party or the other. (Page 49)

From 1990 to 2000, Democratic counties lost churchgoers, while Republican counties continued gaining (Page 53)

those born outside the United States favored Democratic counties. (Page 54)

By 2000, 21 percent of the population in Democratic landslide counties was foreign-born, compared to just 5 percent in Republican landslide counties (Page 54)

Over the next thirty years, however, whites became more concentrated in Republican counties. Democratic counties—especially Democratic landslide counties—lost shares of white population. By the time of the 2000 census, only 18 percent of the nation’s white population lived in Democratic landslide counties. By contrast, in 2000, 30 percent of America’s white population lived in counties that provided Republican landslide margins in the 2004 presidential election (see Figure 2.6). The real “white ﬂight” of the past two generations has been whites moving to communities that were becoming staunchly Republican. (Page 55)

Over the next thirty years, however, whites became more concentrated in Republican counties. (Page 55)

real “white ﬂight” of the past two generations has been whites moving to communities that were becoming staunchly Republican. (Page 55)

almost all of the Republican county population jackpot was because of domestic migration. In absolute numbers, Republican counties were the winners in the Big Sort. In fact, we found that the Republican counties with the strongest majorities were the most attractive to those who moved. Meanwhile, from 1990 to 2006 alone, 13 million people moved from Democratic to Republican counties. (Page 59)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRIBE (Page 61)

During Washington’s ﬁrst three decades, nearly one in ﬁve U.S. senators resigned every two years. Better to give up public ofﬁce than to live in a “cosmos of evil and immorality.” (Page 61)

Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city. (Page 61)

Congressmen lived in boarding houses. (Page 61)

Washington had been created as the common ground of the nation, an intentionally heterogeneous society consisting of men gathered from across the new country. Without plan or foresight, however, the city had been transformed into an archipelago of culturally homogeneous and politically insular fraternity houses. (Page 62)

The cultural segregation in early America was enforced by the lack of mobility, whereas today it’s the ease with which Americans are able to move that has created political segregation. (Page 62)

Young tracked the votes in the early meetings of Congress, he found that the boarding houses and eating clubs became voting blocks. (Page 62)

The block voting of the boarding houses thwarted compromise or even debate. President Thomas Jefferson observed that legislators “are not yet sufﬁciently aware of the necessity of accommodation & mutual sacriﬁce of opinion for conducting a numerous assembly.” Legislators came to work “in a spirit of avowed misunderstanding, without the smallest wish to agree,” Jefferson wrote Far from achieving the ideal of deliberation and debate—a mixing of representatives sent by diverse communities—these legislators lived, and voted, in a segregated fashion. (Page 63)

The experiments conducted by the German teacher and Sherif disclosed quite a bit about the fragility of human integrity. They also showed something important in understanding politics: what we think of what we hear or see or read depends largely on who said it, did it, or wrote it, and we are likely to ﬁnd evidence that conﬁrms our preconceptions. (Page 66)

what we think of what we hear or see or read depends largely on who said it, did it, or wrote it, and we are likely to ﬁnd evidence that conﬁrms our preconceptions. (Page 66)

There was nothing sinister in the reactions these early experiments uncovered. People were responding to an innate need: to ﬁnd safety in groups. “From our earliest moments on earth, we come to associate a wide array of positive outcomes with acceptance and love from others,” psychologist Robert Baron, a professor at the University of Iowa, told me. “Right from day one, you form this very generalized belief that it is always bad to disagree with others.” Beginning in the 1960s, however, social psychologists came to understand that like-minded groups not only enforced conformity but also tended to grow more extreme. (Page 68)

People were responding to an innate need: to ﬁnd safety in groups. (Page 68)

Beginning in the 1960s, however, social psychologists came to understand that like-minded groups not only enforced conformity but also tended to grow more extreme. (Page 68)

The consistent ﬁnding in this experiment became known as the “risky shift phenomenon,” and as a piece of social psychological research, it was both provocative and deceptive. When the experiment was repeated in different ways and in different countries, researchers noticed a kink in the risky shift. In the chess game situation, most people thought the overmatched George should take a risk. But what if the hypothetical game was played from the point of view of the chess champion? In this scenario, (Page 68)

“risky shift phenomenon,” (Page 68)

individuals in the group leaned toward a restrained approach, and the group decision was more conservative than the average of the individual answers. Although the group decision still shifted from the average, in this case it became more risk averse. (Page 69)

Social psychologists concluded by the end of the 1960s that what Stoner had discovered in his chess tournament experiment was the phenomenon of group polarization—that groups over time become more extreme in the direction of the average opinion of individual group members. Stoner’s chess tournament advisers were inclined as individuals toward a risky play, and so their group decision was even riskier. In a different setting, where individuals were cautious, the group arrived at an even more cautious decision. Either way, the effect of discussion was to push the group and the individuals toward the extreme. (Page 69)

phenomenon of group polarization—that groups over time become more extreme in the direction of the average opinion of individual group members. (Page 69)

Conventional wisdom is that group discussion balances out different points of view, but these researchers found that “society not only moderates ideas [but] it radicalizes them as well.”21 (Page 69)

people who were racially prejudiced became more prejudiced as they talked about race relations. (Page 69)

intervention programs that clumped delinquents with other delinquents increased the group rate of law breaking (Page 69)

All-Republican panels were far more likely to side with companies in labor or environmental cases. All-Democratic panels were far more likely to ﬁnd against companies in environmental, labor, and sex discrimination cases. (Page 70)

Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes. (Page 70)

Social psychologists have proposed several theories to explain group polarization. Two have survived scientiﬁc scrutiny. The ﬁrst holds that people in single-minded groups are privy to a large pool of ideas and arguments supporting the dominant position of the group. If there are good arguments in favor of the group’s inclination, everyone hears them, and hears them often. Moreover, as the group talks about these ideas and arguments, individuals feel more strongly about them. People are more committed to a position once they voice it. The second theory holds that people are constantly comparing their beliefs and actions to those of the group. When a person learns that others in the group share his or her general beliefs, he or she ﬁnds it socially advantageous to adopt a position slightly more extreme than the group average. It’s a safe way to stand out from the crowd. It brings notice and even approbation. (Page 70)

theories to explain group polarization. (Page 70)

“It’s hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words, because you’re afraid that other people will call you whatever. In racial terms, you’d be called an Oreo if you [were] black [but went along with whites].” (Page 71)

“Cato,” the pseudonym of an antifederalist writer, thought that people hailing from the far reaches of the thirteen former colonies could not possibly have enough in common to bind a nation together. The “strongest principle of union” was found within the four walls of a home, Cato reasoned. He wrote that as relationships extended beyond the family to the community and then the new nation, they weakened, until “we lose the ties of acquaintance, habits, and fortunes, and thus, by degrees, we lessen in our attachments, till, at length, we no more than acknowledge a sameness of species.” (Page 71)

The “strongest principle of union” was found within the four walls of a home (Page 71)

Cato and his allies were opposed by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the federalists who sought to unite the new nation. The two sides debated qualities of human nature and the limits of democratic government. At the root of their discussions, however, was an attempt to tame the inevitable effects of group polarization and intergroup discord. In the parlance of the times, the problem was the rise of “factions,” the division of people into political interest groups. Madison wrote that the “history of almost all the great councils and consultations held among mankind for reconciling their discordant opinions, assuaging their mutual jealousies and adjusting their respective interests, is a history of factions, contentions, and disappointments, and may be classed among the most dark and degrading pictures which display the inﬁrmities and depravities of the human character.”28 Cato and his antifederalist comrades believed that the differences between the new country’s isolated communities would eventually tear the nation apart. They argued that only small, like-thinking territories could be self-governing. “Brutus,” the pseudonym of another antifederalist writer, explained, “In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar. If this is not the case, there will be constant clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.” (Page 72)

You could split the country into smaller, homogeneous enclaves, geographies of similar “manners, sentiments, and interests.” That was the antifederalists’ position. Madison and Hamilton made the opposite argument —that heterogeneity was a source of strength. They argued that the mixture of differing people in a large republic would both protect the new nation from factions and provide a better government. Hamilton wrote that economic diversity would “help control the problem of majority faction by diminishing the most powerful engine of faction in America—interests grounded in geographic/occupational distinctions.” He predicted that as the economy expanded, it would generate a larger educated elite free from particular economic interests Madison proposed that enlarging the nation would water down local passions. The Virginian felt that a nation should be of sufﬁcient size to contain multiple interests, large enough that no single group could gain a majority Insulation from different ideas was a danger to democracy, he wrote. Isolated groups were seedbeds of extremism—just as the law of group polarization would conﬁrm two hundred years later. The federalists believed that the best antidote to factions was to see that (Page 72)

Madison and Hamilton made the opposite argument —that heterogeneity was a source of strength. (Page 72)

communities weren’t cut off from new and sometimes conﬂicting ideas. And the best hedge against extremism was the constant mixture of opposing opinion. (Page 73)

The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights rejected the “right to instruct” and adopted instead a government of deliberation and compromise within a heterogeneous legislature. (Page 73)

Cass Sunstein sees the rejection of the “right to instruct” as an explicit example of the framers’ realization that like-minded communities could produce extreme politics, a tendency that would be weakened by debate and understanding. (Page 73)

The words [of the right to instruct amendment] are calculated to mislead the people, by conveying an idea that they have a right to control the debates of the Legislature. This cannot be admitted to be just, because it would destroy the object of their meeting. I think, when the people have chosen a representative, it is his duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult, and agree with them on such acts as are for the general beneﬁt of the whole community. If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation. (Page 73)

The “constant clashing of opinions” that Brutus feared wasn’t to (Page 73)

be avoided, according to the federalists. It was to be sought after. (Page 74)

Sunstein told me that the most profound insight of the men who framed the Constitution “was to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue. I think that was the most important theoretical contribution the framers made. And at the best moments in our history, that’s what’s happened.” (Page 74)

heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. (Page 74)

Over the past ﬁfty years, political scientists have proved that homogeneous communities become self-propelled engines of partisanship, squelching dissent and emboldening majorities. (Page 74)

In landslide counties, however, there is an entirely different social dynamic Political minorities in these places vote less. Minorities in heavily majority counties not only avoid the voting booth, but (Page 74)

they also withdraw from all forms of public life, including volunteering. (Page 75)

as Democrats and Republicans separate geographically, they become more distrustful of one another. (Page 75)

The phenomenon uncovered in the news study is more insidious than readers or viewers just seeking to be soothed or reassured by a familiar point of view. People simply don’t believe what they see or hear if it runs counter to their existing beliefs. “It’s basic social psychology lab research,” Robert Baron told me. “You show people who favor Israel and those who favor Palestine the same news coverage of the intifada. Both groups think the news media is biased against them. There is a differential evaluation. (Page 76)

They both see the same stuff, but they draw very different conclusions.”* Even if both sides of an issue are presented, people don’t hear or don’t remember arguments that counter their initial opinions. University of Kansas professor Diana Carlin has studied how Americans listen to presidential debates. She has found that voters watch debates in order to reinforce what they already believe. They listen for the parts of the debate that favor their candidate, she told me, and tune out the parts where their candidate does a poor job. This is especially true when people watch debates with like-minded companions. (Page 77)

conﬁrmation bias (Page 77)

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” psychologist Drew Westen said. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up … Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and [the] activation of positive ones.”41 (Page 77)

There is nothing new in these tendencies. “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it,” Francis Bacon wrote in Novum Organum (1620). (Page 77)

Nearly sixty years of social psychological research conﬁrms that as political majorities grow within communities, minorities retreat from public life. Majorities have their beliefs reinforced by seeing and hearing their inclinations locally repeated and enhanced. Self-reinforcing majorities grow larger, while isolated and dispirited minorities shrink. Majorities gain conﬁdence in their opinions, which grow more extreme over time. As a result, misunderstanding between Republicans and Democrats grows as they seclude themselves. (Page 78)

Part II THE SILENT REVOLUTION (Page 80)

CULTURE SHIFT (Page 81)

“By the end of the 1950s,” wrote cultural historian Thomas Frank, “there could have been very few literate Americans indeed who were not familiar with the term with which these problems were summarized: ‘conformity.’” (Page 81)

Only 11.5 percent of the population in 1960 had political beliefs that could be deﬁned as ideological. (Page 81)

The American ideal was to get along. The national goal was moderation and consensus. Given the trauma of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II, these were reasonable objectives. “The dream of American consensus was conceived against a backdrop of dictatorships and death camps, paralyzing internal divisions and the devastations of war,” wrote Wiebe. (Page 82)

Although the events of the sixties appeared to have knocked the country out of its heterogeneous complacency, underneath these events —the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy—a slower, deeper, and largely invisible shift was changing how people went about their lives. The lasting imprint of the ﬁfties wasn’t the conformity of men in gray ﬂannel suits, but a new and widespread economic prosperity. Abundance changed the culture in ways less evident than the upheaval of the sixties, but in a manner more profound. (Page 83)

The lasting imprint of the ﬁfties wasn’t the conformity of men in gray ﬂannel suits, but a new and widespread economic prosperity. Abundance changed the culture in ways less evident than the upheaval of the sixties, but in a manner more profound. (Page 83)

Inglehart hypothesized that when people grew up in relative abundance, their social values—what they wanted out of life—changed. People who knew that (Page 83)

that when people grew up in relative abundance, their social values—what they wanted out of life—changed. People who knew that (Page 83)

their basic needs were satisﬁed would gradually adopt different values from those who lived with scarcity. Hungry people cared about survival, Inglehart said. But those who grew up in abundance would be more concerned with self-expression Those who lived in times of depression or joblessness esteemed economic growth. Those who knew plenty were more concerned about the environment and individual choice. (Page 84)

their basic needs were satisﬁed would gradually adopt different values from those who lived with scarcity. (Page 84)

those who grew up in abundance would be more concerned with self-expression. (Page 84)

And all that material progress, he found, “brings unforeseen changes—change in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics.” (Page 84)

Inglehart predicted one more aspect of this post-materialist phenomenon: since the cultural transformation would happen at a generational pace, it would be in a sense a “silent revolution.”16 People would assume that the “erosion of conﬁdence” in government, religion, and social institutions was because these institutions were singularly corrupt or inefﬁcient. But the decline of trust wouldn’t be peculiar to a place or government, Inglehart wrote. “We are witnessing a downward trend in trust in government and conﬁdence in leaders across most industrial societies.”17 (Page 85)

Inglehart’s post-materialist trend has been true for every country: the higher the level of economic development, the more widespread the values of self-expression. In 2005, Inglehart wrote, “One rarely ﬁnds such a consistent pattern in social science data: there are no exceptions to this pattern among the eighty societies for which we have data.” (Page 85)

The politics of industrialized countries demonstrate Inglehart’s postmaterialist shift. For American voters, concerns over economic growth have been equaled (sometimes surpassed) by issues of self-expression, such as abortion, gay rights, and a personal concern for the environment. People have sought to take control of political systems directly, through recalls and ballot initiatives. Abortion, divorce, and gay relationships are more accepted, especially among younger people In 2007, fewer than half of Americans under age thirty believed it was their “duty as a citizen” always (Page 85)

to vote In the United States, participation in traditional religious denominations declined even as nondenominational churches boomed and people explored every back road to individual spirituality. And, as Inglehart predicted more than thirty years ago, trust in government has continued to decline Inglehart contended that the change to a post-materialist culture would become more entrenched with each generation. Just as he predicted in the 1970s, each succeeding generation of Americans has been more accepting of homosexuality, more secular, and less likely to want women to play traditional roles.*22 But the post-materialist culture shift has also been ﬁltered through America’s unusually strong religious traditions. So while some Americans have adopted more European styles of self-expression, others have found new meaning—what has eventually become political meaning—in fundamentalist or Evangelical Christianity. Once free from the discipline demanded by economic scarcity, people began to deﬁne themselves by their values, and that altered what it meant to be either a Democrat or a Republican. (Page 86)

Inglehart contended that the change to a post-materialist culture would become more entrenched with each generation. Just as he predicted in the 1970s, each succeeding generation of Americans has been more accepting of homosexuality, more secular, and less likely to want women to play traditional roles (Page 86)

Harvard University’s Robert Putnam wrote about the shrinking of longtime civic organizations in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Putnam averaged the membership in thirty-two national groups, from the Moose to the League of Women Voters. He determined that the “two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history.” Then society swerved. The rates of membership in these groups “peaked in the early 1960s, and began the period of sustained decline by 1969.” Putnam’s iconic example of civic engagement was the bowling league, the communal beer and tenpin (Page 87)

contests that mixed people from different neighborhoods and of different political leanings. In 1964, 8 percent of all American men and 5 percent of women were bowling league members. After the mid-1960s, people began to bowl alone A daily newspaper was the most common source of information for eight out of ten households in 1964, a degree of market penetration that newspapers would never see again At the same time, crime rates and divorce rates started to rise. “Beginning in about 1965,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in The Great Disruption, “a large number of indicators that can serve as negative measures of social capital all started moving upward rapidly at the same time.” (Page 88)

After 1965, the mainline denominations stopped growing or began to shrink as people turned to independent or Evangelical congregations. The six largest Protestant denominations together lost 5.6 million members between 1965 and 1990.29 “At least ten of the largest (and theologically more liberal) denominations have had membership losses in every year after 1966,” religious historians David Roozen and Jackson Carroll wrote in 1979. (Page 88)

Nobody led Americans out of mainline churches. They left on their own, and they began their decampment in 1965. (Page 88)

Americans were abandoning traditional institutions. (Page 89)

In the late 1950s, eight out of ten Americans said that they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time, a level of faith maintained through 1964.33 By 1966, however, Americans’ faith in government had been replaced with doubt. “From 1964 to 1970, there was a virtual explosion of anti-government feeling,” Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider wrote. The 80 percent of Americans who had approved of government in the late 1950s had dropped to 33 percent by 1976.34 The lack of conﬁdence spread beyond government. Faith in universities, medicine, major companies, and journalism all dropped during this period. People came to believe that government was run by the few. The percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time dropped from 75 percent of the population in 1964 to 25 percent just a few years later The sense that government had gotten out of hand was entirely bipartisan. In 1964, a quarter of self-described liberals and three-quarters of conservatives said that government was too large. By 1972, however, a majority of both liberals and conservatives said that government was overgrown. They may have disagreed about other things, but on the question of whether government was thick and stupid, left and right found common ground (Page 89)

The 80 percent of Americans who had approved of government in the late 1950s had dropped to 33 percent by 1976. (Page 89)

1965, he turned to the historical causes. (Page 89)

Nineteen sixty-ﬁve was a hell of a year, and Vietnam and race relations were just part of it. The front pages chronicle a year that began with incredible ambition and triumph, only to end with riots, war, and the beginnings of deep cultural discord. At the movies, people could see both The Sound of Music and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. In short, the year held all the good that government could achieve as well as all the ways that American society had sundered. (Page 90)

Vietnam and race relations (Page 90)

Medicare and Medicaid passed (Page 90)

1965 Voting Rights Act (Page 90)

schools to desegregate, (Page 90)

“biggest expansion of domestic welfare and educational programs since the New Deal of the nineteen thirties.” (Page 90)

National Endowment for the Arts (Page 91)

National Endowment for the Humanities (Page 91)

civil rights movement (Page 91)

Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the Watts riots were powerful enough shocks to Americans’ sense of themselves that they could well explain the decline in trust that began in the mid-1960s—a decline that political scientist Walter Dean Burnham described as “among the largest ever recorded in opinion surveys.”53 But there’s a post-materialist catch. Measures of trust declined for almost all professions and institutions, not just politicians and government. And such a widespread, near universal change in attitude raises some questions. Why would a riot in Watts cause trust in doctors to decline? And how would a war in Southeast Asia lead to increasing distrust in educators? And why would a bloody confrontation between police and demonstrators at the end of a bridge in Selma, Alabama, lead to a decline in trust in businessmen among the Japanese? (Page 93)

The loss of faith in public institutions has been the “key change in American public opinion over the last 40 years,” Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington concludes. The decline in trust placed Democrats at a permanent disadvantage, one that both diminished their chances for winning elections and hogtied their efforts to govern. (Page 95)

loss of faith in public institutions has been the “key change in American public opinion over the last 40 years,” (Page 95)

After 1965, however, Democrats were forced to become ideological contortionists. In the new political climate, they proposed solutions to public problems that were to be carried out by a government that most people—even Democrats—no longer trusted to act in society’s best interest. (Page 95)

Democrats’ dilemma. In 1964, 41 percent of Americans wanted the federal government to integrate schools. The demand for integrated schools was nearly universal by the early 1990s—95 percent of Americans wanted their schools integrated—but the support for federal intervention to enforce desegregation laws had dropped to 34 percent. (Page 95)

Democrats’ dilemma (Page 95)

Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, for example, have an answer for that common question among young, single women: “Where are all the ‘good’ men?” Ray’s polling has shown that his “cultural creatives” are seeking new experiences and deep relationships. The issues that are most important to them come straight from the post-materialist grocery list: individual rights, alternative medicine, and the environment. Ray and Anderson also have found that among the core group of “creatives,” two-thirds are women So where are all the “good” men? Well, there are as many men as there have always been, just fewer “cultural creatives” and more guys dropping out of college, watching mixed martial arts cage matches on television, and voting Republican.* (Page 97)

Ray and Anderson also have found that among the core group of “creatives,” two-thirds are women So where are all the “good” men? Well, there are as many men as there have always been, just fewer “cultural creatives” and more guys dropping out of college, watching mixed martial arts cage matches on television, and voting Republican. (Page 97)

Good times weren’t enough, though. People who were doing well grew distrustful of government, as did those who were earning the least and working the most thankless jobs. In fact, those at the bottom of the economic ladder were more distrustful, even as government programs for the poor and for minorities greatly expanded. In polls taken in 1964, at the beginning of the Great Society, blacks were more trusting than whites, manual workers were more trusting than businesspeople, and poor people were more trusting than those who were better off. By 1970, all of these relationships had reversed The “negative swings against government power and away from trust in government [were] particularly concentrated among just those elements in society that could have been expected to beneﬁt from and support government the most,” wrote Walter Dean Burnham. (Page 99)

those at the bottom of the economic ladder were more distrustful, even as government programs for the poor and for minorities greatly expanded. (Page 99)

Over the past forty years, there have been ups and downs in Americans’ attitudes toward public institutions, but trust in government has never come close to its pre-1965 highs. Even after the attacks on September 11, 2001, trust in government rebounded only to the levels during the Nixon administration. (Page 100)

The collapse of social institutions, the dropping levels of trust, and the abandonment of political parties beginning in 1965 all contributed to a decline in partisan political behavior. White people continued to leave both the Republican and Democratic parties. Ambivalent, they split their vote. In 1960, 73 percent of voters cast a straight ticket, voting for the same party in all elections. By 1966, the percentage of straight-ticket voters had dropped to 50 percent, and by 1972 it was 42 percent. In 1904, only 2 percent of the country’s congressional districts voted for a House candidate from one party and a presidential candidate from the other. By 1968, a third of the districts did so. Walter Dean Burnham wrote of a “secular trend toward the gradual disappearance of the political party in the United States.” (Page 101)

With few people’s knowledge and with nobody’s permission, a new kind of politics was forming. Society had shattered in the mid-1960s, and the forces that pulled it together again, piece by piece, created the world we know today. The new politics was molded by post-materialist realities. Tradition, economic class and occupation, religious denomination, civic structures, and party politics—the ways of life that had molded the country over the previous century—were losing signiﬁcance. The new society was (Page 101)

The new society was (Page 101)

more about personal taste and worldview than public policy. It was as much or more concerned with self-expression and belief as with social class and economics. And it appeared suddenly, with a ﬂash of anger and violence, in the coalﬁelds of West Virginia in the summer of 1974. (Page 102)

more about personal taste and worldview than public policy. It was as much or more concerned with self-expression and belief as with social class and economics. (Page 102)

THE BEGINNING OF DIVISION (Page 103)

anti-textbook group strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision to ban teacher-led school prayer. (Page 104)

Goode found a “wide schism” between the groups when he asked about education. The textbook opponents favored prayer in schools, discipline, and the teaching of “traditional Christian and American values.” They also thought that extracurricular activities didn’t provide “valuable learning experiences” and that schools shouldn’t provide “special services (such as hot meals and daycare centers) that some families can’t provide” for themselves. The textbook supporters were generally in favor of afterschool activities and the use of schools to provide social services; this group was signiﬁcantly less enthusiastic about a curriculum that emphasized discipline, school prayer, and the teaching of Christian values. (Page 105)

Finally, Goode prepared a list of eighteen values—such as equality, self respect, and national security—and asked that individuals rank them in order of importance. The two sides judged many of the values similarly. Both pro- and anti-textbook activists placed a “comfortable life” relatively low on the scale; both sides thought that health and “freedom” were important. The anti-textbook group ranked “national security” signiﬁcantly higher than the pro-textbook group and “equality” (deﬁned as “brotherhood, equal opportunity for all”) signiﬁcantly lower. The pro-textbook group ranked a “world of beauty in nature and the arts” signiﬁcantly higher than the anti-textbook group. (Page 105)

Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx all predicted that ascendant industrialism would eventually render religion meaningless. (Page 106)

The promise that religion would fall victim to modernization “has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry,” one of the “key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations,” wrote political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart Which means, of course, that a central tenet of the social sciences over the past three hundred years has been proved spectacularly wrong. (Berger had the good sense to recant in 1997.) But a modernizing, industrial society did have an impact on faith in America. The economic panics of the late nineteenth century, the inﬂux of immigrants, and the contradictions between scientiﬁc discoveries (say, evolution) and religious faith led to a split in the Protestant church. The division that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century was not so much between denominations; it was more about how people viewed the world. On one side was what Martin Marty has called “Private Protestantism.”8 Private Protestants promoted individual salvation and promised that personal morality would be rewarded in the next life. On the other side of that great divide was “Public Protestantism,” a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society. The latter laid the foundation for Democratic liberalism. The former provided the moral footing and rationale for Republican conservatism. (Page 107)

Private Protestantism (Page 107)

Public Protestantism (Page 107)

Private Protestantism considered the consumption of alcohol a personal failing; Public Protestantism looked at drunkenness as a social ill. Private Protestants supported “blue laws” (closing places of business on Sundays); Public Protestants promoted the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Dwight Moody, a Private Protestant revivalist, witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either “these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and inﬁdelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.” Public Protestants, Marty wrote, saw the Chicago labor strife and reasoned, “either the people were to be evangelized and their needs were to be met and their rights faced, or the Kingdom of God would not come.” At the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, both a session on the Social Gospel (the name given to Public Protestantism) and (Page 107)

a revival conducted by Reverend Moody were held. While the Social Gospel ministers confronted industrial life and sought human perfection through political reform, Moody deﬁned his task differently: “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’” (Page 108)

Josiah Strong, a turn-of-the-century Congregationalist minister, described “two types of Christianity” alive in the country. The division was “not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage,” Strong wrote in 1913. “Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social.” The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world. (Page 108)

In the mid-twentieth century, the strands of what we would recognize as modern conservatism were mostly unconnected. There were libertarians, business conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and conservative intellectuals. But they didn’t have a party, and they didn’t have each other. After World War II, there occurred what historian Sara Diamond has called a “conservative transformation.” The various threads of conservative thought and faith began to intertwine, and social, religious, and ideological movements slowly braided together. (Page 110)

Historian Lisa McGirr has described the shift in conservative politics in the 1960s from stiff anticommunism to a tossed salad of libertarianism, racial homogeneity, social conservatism, and fundamentalist Christianity. She found the formation of the “New Right” a continent away from Kanawha County, in Orange County, California. (Page 111)

The New Right was starting to coalesce. Religious traditionalists melded with anticommunists. Advocates of traditional morality and personal responsibility found themselves in sympathy with laissez-faire capitalists and Private Protestants. They all had a common enemy in government Free markets, small government, anticommunism, and traditional values, Martin Marty wrote, were all deemed by Private Protestants to be part of “the mission of Christ to the world.”27 The “enemy of my enemy” connections could be bizarre. Intellectual conservatives and religious conservatives, for example, found common cause in their distrust of international law and the United Nations. The hardheaded neoconservatives who emerged from New York University thought that the UN was a “charade kept alive by liberal piety about international (Page 111)

cooperation and world peace.” (Page 112)

The divide in West Virginia wasn’t between Republicans and Democrats or rich and poor. While Ladd was ﬁnding a new division in the broad numbers of the electorate—a New Deal turned upside down—Egerton was seeing the same divide on the ground in West Virginia. That division—of rural and urban, college-educated and working-class, Public and Private Protestant—deﬁnes our politics today. (Page 118)

Heritage Foundation (Page 120)

Conservative activists in Washington hadn’t created the movement in West Virginia; Horan and the people in the coal camps of Kanawha County had done that themselves. But the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups recognized within the uprising a potent and, as it turned out, enduring combination of Private Protestant values, distrust of an intrusive government, racial insecurity, and a millennialist belief that America was losing its moral authority and world standing. While liberals either romanticized the textbook strike as “class warfare” or labeled strikers “religious fanatics,” conservatives got busy channeling Horan and others into the New Right coalition and the Republican Party. The New Right movement wasn’t created as a result of a conspiracy. It was emerging from places like Campbells Creek. The ingredients of conservative ideology were scattered across the country. They just needed to be gathered, organized, and put together using the right recipe. In 1975, the Heritage Foundation formed a group to help coordinate some two hundred textbook protests that had cropped up nationwide It asked donors to “help Heritage stop forcing pornography and other objectionable subjects into schools all over America.” (Page 120)

The New Right movement wasn’t created as a result of a conspiracy. It was emerging from places like Campbells Creek. The ingredients of conservative ideology were scattered across the country. (Page 120)

The West Virginia textbook strike ﬂipped a switch and illuminated the way the Republican Party could form a coalition of working-class voters; religious conservatives; and small-government, free-market capitalists. (Page 120)

What someone believed about religion, national defense, and the importance of beauty lined up with what he or she thought about the content (Page 122)

of school textbooks. (Page 123)

Democrats tend to blame the division on Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove. Republicans tend to blame it on the 1960s, welfare, drugs, Jimmy Carter, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Looking back at the split between Public and Private Protestants and the Kanawha County textbook strike, one can see that the divide Francia uncovered wasn’t foisted on Americans in a conspiracy of the right or the left. The conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s was successful because it orchestrated— and then ampliﬁed—the politics emerging from communities as different as Orange County, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Polarization did not come from politicians or the media. Indeed, according to Francia, “elites may be responding to the polarization that exists within the electorate rather than the other way around.”*70 It’s just that in the past three decades, Republicans responded better than Democrats. (Page 123)

The conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s was successful because it orchestrated— and then ampliﬁed—the politics emerging from communities as different as Orange County, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Polarization did not come from politicians or the media. Indeed, according to Francia, “elites may be responding to the polarization that exists within the electorate rather than the other way around.”*70 It’s just that in the past three decades, Republicans responded better than Democrats. (Page 123)

Over time, the ties between churchgoers and the party on the right have weakened in most industrialized countries, but not in the United States. The unusual thing about this country has been the stubborn and quite strong connection between religious belief and political party—a cultural peculiarity that, in the post-materialist politics of values, has allowed computer technicians in Orange County to ﬁnd common cause with West Virginia coal miners and truck drivers. (Page 124)

ties between churchgoers and the party on the right have weakened in most industrialized countries, but not in the United States. (Page 124)

THE ECONOMICS OF THE BIG SORT (Page 125)

The migration of people and money throughout the United States in the 1990s created a stark pattern. Some cities were sucking up people and income. Others were ﬂinging them out with what appeared to be centrifugal force. Portland (I’m talking about Oregon throughout this chapter), Seattle, Dallas, and Austin gained at the same time the Cleveland Plain Dealer described the depopulation of its city as a “quiet crisis” and the Baton Rouge Advocate published its series. Dave Eggers, in his 2000 autobiographical book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, called the movement of his educated and young midwestern friends to San Francisco “an inexplicable sort of mass migration.”1 Actually, it was perfectly explicable. Eggers and his heartland buddies weren’t the only ones switching addresses. As many as 100 million Americans resettled across a (Page 125)

As many as 100 million Americans resettled across a (Page 125)

county border in the 1990s. People didn’t scatter like ants from a kickedover hill. There was an order and a ﬂow to the movement—more like the migration of different species of birds. Eggers and his ﬂock landed in San Francisco. A larger group of people—with a very different view of the promised land—migrated to Las Vegas. Economies, lifestyles, and politics merged in the Big Sort. Choices about lifestyle changed regional economies. And those differences in local development were reﬂected in a place’s politics. The Big Sort wasn’t happening at the state level. Rather, communities within the same state showed entirely different patterns of development and growth. The U.S. economy, its culture, and its politics were changing town to town, city to city. (Page 126)

county border in the 1990s. (Page 126)

The picture the United States had of itself in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was of a nation that was increasingly becoming one—religiously, racially, politically, and economically. From the 1950s through the mid1970s, communities did grow more politically integrated. There was an economic convergence, too. The South—once “the nation’s number one economic problem,” according to Franklin D. Roosevelt—had become the beaming Sun Belt. Wages in different parts of the country began to converge. People with college degrees were “remarkably evenly distributed” among America’s cities, according to Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser. (Page 126)

The picture the United States had of itself in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was of a nation that was increasingly becoming one—religiously, racially, politically, and economically. (Page 126)

The country got particularly spiky after 1980 as Americans segregated by education. In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, education levels surged nationally. In 1970, 11.2 percent of the population had at least a college degree. That ﬁgure increased to 16.4 percent in 1980, nearly 19 percent in 1990, and 27 percent in 2004. But as the national totals of college-educated people grew, education differentials between cities widened with each decade. The variance among cities was astounding. The percentage of adults with a college education increased in Austin from 17 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2004. (Page 126)

The country got particularly spiky after 1980 as Americans segregated by education. (Page 126)

Education had always predicted city growth, but beginning in the 1970s, that relationship strengthened The cities that grew the fastest and the richest were the ones where people with college degrees congregated. (Fastgrowing Las Vegas was obviously an exception.) As people with different levels of education sorted themselves into particular cities, the migration pattern set off segregation by income. Average city wages, which were converging in the 1970s, grew more unequal throughout the 1990s.*8 The per capita income of the ten metro areas with the best-educated residents rose 1.8 percent a year in the 1990s. The per capita income of the ten cities with the least educated population grew only 0.8 percent a year Segregation by education was particularly apparent in rural areas. By 2000, the percentage of young adults with a college degree in rural areas was only half that of the average city (Page 127)

The cities that grew the fastest and the richest were the ones where people with college degrees congregated. (Page 127)

This was the Big Sort of the 1990s. Every action produced a selfreinforcing reaction: educated people congregated, creating regional wage disparities, which attracted more educated people to the richer cities— which further increased the disparity in regional economies.* The Big Sort was just beginning with education. Or was it ending with education? It was hard to tell. By the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable. (Page 127)

educated people congregated, creating regional wage disparities, which attracted more educated people to the richer cities— which further increased the disparity in regional economies. (Page 127)

An astounding 40 percent of the country’s 320 metropolitan areas lost white population in the 1990s. (Page 127)

Whites ﬂed two kinds of cities. They abandoned older factory towns in the North and Midwest. Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo, Hartford, Providence, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Jersey City, and Newark all lost tens of thousands of white residents. Whites also left the nation’s largest (Page 127)

Whites ﬂed two kinds of cities. They abandoned older factory towns (Page 127)

nation’s largest (Page 127)

cities, some of which were growing increasingly expensive: Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Chicago, and Philadelphia (as well as Orange County, California). (Page 128)

cities, (Page 128)

Whites went to high-tech cities (Page 128)

Blacks, meanwhile, moved to cities with strong black communities (Page 128)

In 1990, young people were evenly distributed among the nation’s 320 cities. By 2000, twenty- to thirty-four-year-olds were concentrated in just a score of cities (Page 128)

According to one longitudinal study covering most of the 1980s and 1990s, only 19 percent of young people with only a high school degree moved between states, but 45 percent of those with more than a college education migrated to a new state. (Page 128)

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the average number of patents granted each year rose nearly 50 percent. But the distribution of those patents was vastly unequal, and that lopsidedness contributed to the growing regional wage inequality. In the 1990s, people who lived in the places that produced the most patents earned higher wages than those who lived in the places that produced the fewest patents—not so surprising. Harvard University’s Michael Porter calculated that 30 percent of the variation in wages across regions could be statistically related to differences in patent production. (Page 129)

patent production (Page 129)

Growing wage inequality tracked increasing political polarization, according to political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. The nation’s income distribution grew more unequal in parallel with the rising partisanship in Congress. (Page 129)

Growing wage inequality tracked increasing political polarization (Page 129)

Creative-class workers were sorting themselves into the same cities that, according to our analysis, were also producing most of the country’s patents. (Page 130)

The bigger the city, the smaller the percentage of its young people were likely to die in the war. By late 2006, rural counties had casualty rates 60 percent higher than cities and suburbs. (Page 132)

Putnam asked how often people socialized and how much they trusted others. People living in different places gave widely varying responses. Those living in places such as Bismarck, North Dakota; Birmingham, Alabama; and Kalamazoo, Michigan, exhibited strong social ties; they volunteered, went to church, stayed close to their families, and voted. Based on his earlier research in both the United States and Italy, Putnam assumed that the stronger the social connections, the healthier the community. (Page 136)

Cities such as San Diego, Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta (as well as Silicon Valley) all had bottom-of-the-barrel social connections but high rates of innovation and growth and high incomes. (Page 136)

The calculations that Bob Cushing’s computer was churning out backed up Richard Florida’s argument that there was a link between talent, technology, and tolerance—that educated young people in the “creative (Page 138)

class” would ﬂock to places where they would not be bound by old ideas or tight social ties. (Florida used our analysis in his book The Rise of the Creative Class.)29 Certainly, none of the old explanations seemed to apply to these socially fragmented but economically thriving cities. Indeed, this wasn’t the way economies were supposed to work at all. (Page 139)

Romer’s point isn’t just to show the power of exponential multiplication. The chemistry set is a metaphor for the story he has to tell about the sources of economic growth. If one looks at each possible formula from a child’s (Page 139)

simple chemistry set as the equivalent of a new idea—a potentially economy-changing compound—it becomes clear that the stock of potentially valuable knowledge in the world is quite literally inﬁnite. Only a small percentage of those “ideas” have economic value, but a small percentage of such a large number means that the potential for growth and wealth from those new ideas is still limitless. (Page 140)

potentially valuable knowledge in the world is quite literally inﬁnite. (Page 140)

Cities were essential in the work of innovation not because they were efﬁcient or practical, because they certainly were neither. They were essential because economic development was the social process of problem solving, discovery, and innovation. Henry Ford failed twice in his singlehanded attempts to manufacture an entire automobile. He succeeded when he pieced together parts from other small businesses around Detroit. This process of making connections and sharing ideas worked best when people involved in related kinds of work could meet face-to-face and share new ideas Almost twenty years after Jacobs wrote The Economy of Cities, academic economists developing new growth theory adopted her observations. If cities were simply accumulated sets of production factors (capital, people, and land), economist Robert Lucas wrote, they would “ﬂy apart.” Land was always cheaper outside cities. Cities were crowded and inefﬁcient, crazily so. By any ration of common sense, everyone should move out. But they didn’t. In fact, the opposite happened. Firms paid higher rents to be in cities than elsewhere. What could these businesses be paying for, Lucas reasoned, “if not for being near other people?” (Page 142)

After the disastrous 1970s, when the future of cities seemed bleak, people returned. In the 1980s, housing prices began to rise in the same cities that had experienced drops in the previous decade. New York City gained population. Personal income in cities increased, too, reversing declines in the 1970s. Not all cities added people and income. Edward Glaeser discovered that there was a complete switch in the types of cities that grew. In 1950, seven of the eight largest cities had a higher percentage of people employed in manufacturing than the nation as a whole. By 1990, six of the eight largest cities had proportionally less manufacturing than the country as a whole. The urban revival wasn’t led by places that made things, but by cities that produced ideas. (Page 144)

People migrate to maximize their economic returns. At least that’s been the most common explanation for why people move. They pull up stakes to (Page 145)

make or save money. Economic utility seemed to be motivating both employers and workers in the 1970s; then, big-city businesses were paying higher wages to keep and attract workers. But by 1990, there was no wage advantage to living in one of the twenty-six largest metro areas. By 2000, it cost more to live in those places than any premium received in wages According to traditional economics, when this kind of imbalance occurs, either wages rise or people stop moving to such overpriced areas. But the opposite was happening. People were moving to places that cost more and where, in comparison to other cities, they would be earning less. Additionally, defying every economic precept, six out of ten well-educated young adults moved to places with slower job growth than the cities they left Weird things were going on in urban America. Cities were no longer places whites ﬂed. Instead of people jamming the roads from homes in the suburbs to jobs in the central city, people were reversing the direction, commuting from downtown homes to workplaces outside the city. By 2007, the number of whites living in Washington, D.C., was increasing, while the number of blacks was decreasing There was a surge of people who wanted to live in cities for what could only be social—or even aesthetic— reasons (Page 146)

People were moving to places that cost more and where, in comparison to other cities, they would be earning less. (Page 146)

six out of ten well-educated young adults moved to places with slower job growth than the cities they left. (Page 146)

Economist Joseph Gyourko compiled a list of metro areas so attractive, so in demand over the past two decades, that housing prices had far outstripped any wage advantages the cities might offer. (Page 146)

People paid for the privilege of being in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham because they wanted to live there, not because they expected an economic return. (Page 146)

Just as not everyone could own a MercedesBenz, Gyourko wrote, Americans no longer had the right to live in San Francisco, central Austin, or northwest Washington, D.C. Both the car and the cities were extravagances. (Page 147)

The hightech group tilted increasingly Democratic, so that by 2000, these twentyone cities were voting Democratic at a rate 17 percent above the national average. (Page 148)

An economic/social/political chain reaction was taking place. Over three decades, people separated by education, income, race, and way of life. The best-educated abandoned old manufacturing cities such as Cleveland— and rural communities such as Harlan—and moved to new high-tech cities. Regions such as southern West Virginia and northern Virginia diverged according to income. Blacks favored some cities (Atlanta, Houston, Dallas), while whites preferred others (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Austin). Finally, people segregated by the way they wanted to live. Young college graduates moved to a select group of urban “entertainment machines,” such as Chicago and San Francisco, willing to pay a premium for the lifestyle found there; others thought of a city as someplace best to ﬂee. Prospects for prosperity deviated wildly, as innovations sprang from some cities but not others. (Page 149)

Part III THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY (Page 150)

RELIGION (Page 151)

AMERICAN CHURCHES TODAY are more culturally and politically segregated than our neighborhoods. (Page 151)

megachurches (Page 151)

And the same power of building communities with “people like us” is used in subdivision development, advertising, college dormitories, volunteer groups, and political campaigns. (Page 151)

Donald McGavran (Page 152)

Rick Warren’s generation of ministers snatched McGavran from obscurity. Two decades earlier, McGavran had concluded that his life’s work had been passed over. In 1955, McGavran believed that he had learned why churches grow, and he wrote a book that laid out a new vision of missionary work and evangelism. That book, The Bridges of God, was a ﬂop. It gained little notice in the missionary community and was shunned by mainline church leaders in the United States. If anything, those leaders considered McGavran a “dangerous man.” In 1959, when McGavran and his wife were traveling through the Eola Hills just west of Salem, Oregon, he later recalled, “I said to my wife, … ‘Mary, let’s settle down here. Nobody’s been listening to what I’ve been saying. My life is ended. There’s nothing more that I can do.”’ (Page 152)

The strategy at the time was built around the central “mission station.” White Christians would establish a foreign mission that simulated Western ways of life. Missionaries would construct schools, hospitals, orphanages, and leprosy homes, all in Western style and affect. The mission station became a Christian colony, a transplanted white world from which missionaries would set off for surrounding villages. (Page 153)

As an institutional feat, the missions were marvels of will and faith. But McGavran realized that they didn’t save many souls. The stations stood isolated from the people they were built to save. “Separated by colour, standard of living, prestige, literacy, mode of travel, place of residence, and many other factors, the missionary was, indeed, isolated from those to whom he brought the message of salvation,” McGavran concluded. How could missionaries save people when they didn’t eat the same food as the men and women they were trying to convert? Meanwhile, the costs and effort of providing medicine, teachers, doctors, and orphanages dominated the missionary board’s concerns. Inevitably, McGavran wrote, “the mission station becomes an end in itself, instead of a means to the discipling of peoples.” (Page 153)

Pickett found in his research that the soul-saving church beneﬁted most from a “mass movement” of people. Converts didn’t come to the church one by one, he discovered. They came in groups. And those groups were socially and culturally coherent. They were tribes, castes, or villages. Yet the practice of missionaries at the time was exactly contrary to the strategy. Rather than stimulating mass movements into the church, missionaries took individual Christian converts from their villages and sequestered them within the central mission. Separated from their people, few of the new converts prospered. (Page 154)

“The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufﬁcient unit, but as a part of the group,” McGavran wrote in The Bridges of God. “His business deals, his children’s marriages, his personal problems, or the difﬁculties he has with his wife are properly settled by group thinking. Peoples become Christian as this group-mind is brought into a life-giving relationship to Jesus as Lord.” Missionaries needed to build bridges between the culture of the village and Christianity. The bridges were anthropological—language, culture, music, even the food offered at a service. Ditt was successful because he knew what to cook. He was a Chuhra. People would come to Christ, McGavran wrote, when they saw that “the messenger of the Christian religion is one of my own family, my own people, one of us.” (Page 155)

His visits with Bishop Pickett and his study of successful church movements around the world led McGavran to conclude that a church grows when it is based within a “homogeneous unit.” People live in groups, and they develop group solidarity and awareness, a “people consciousness,” as “members think of themselves as a separate tribe, caste or class.” (Page 156)

Nine out of ten megachurches establish a cell structure of small groups Malcolm Gladwell, writing for The New Yorker, described Warren’s Saddleback Church as “the cellular church.”19 Gladwell attributed Saddleback’s success to the “stickiness” of small groups. Cells have a tendency to bind people together within a larger institution. But church “shepherd groups” weren’t a 1970s innovation devised in the American suburbs. They came from a Korean minister named David Yonggi Cho. Pastor Cho created the largest church in the history of Christianity in Seoul. His Yoido Full Gospel Church (a Pentecostal congregation) grew to more (Page 158)

Nine out of ten megachurches establish a cell structure of small groups. (Page 158)

than 8,000 members in the 1960s. As Pastor Cho tried to care for such a massive ﬂock, he was hospitalized for exhaustion. To save himself and his church, he began the cell system. He trained mostly women (men were reluctant to make home visits to organize the cells) to link groups of ten to sixteen parishioners to the larger church. The cells met weekly and still do. They minister to the day-to-day needs of cell members and recruit converts to the church. The Yoido Full Gospel Church now has more than 800,000 members, a congregation knit together by tens of thousands of cell groups. Pastor Cho believes that the cell groups are the primary reason his church has grown so large. The idea of the cell group, he has said, was a revelation from God. For American ministers, the “cellular church” was certainly a revelation from Pastor Cho. (Page 159)

“cellular church” (Page 159)

By the early 1970s, church leaders and scholars noticed two distinct trends: (i) people were leaving mainline Protestantism— Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and (2) people were joining Evangelical and conservative churches that were often independent of any denomination. (Page 159)

Dean Kelley, author of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, argued that mainline denominations had gotten ﬂabby. They no longer provided much leadership or discipline. Liberal churches were declining, wrote Kelley, because they had lost, or abandoned, their ancient purpose “to respond to the basic human search for meaning.” (Page 159)

The mistake made by the mainline denominations, said the conservatives, was that they had placed their concerns for society—civil rights, the environment, women’s rights, the Vietnam War—ahead of saving souls. Mainline church leaders in the 1960s had preached that the “purpose of church is mission.” Evangelicals were saying that the purpose of church was to fulﬁll the Great Commission. (Page 160)

“Due to the social upheavals of the decade, church leaders who were deeply involved caused their denominations to put a ministry of social concern in a higher priority position than evangelism,” wrote C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary and one of McGavran’s colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary. “This produced a wave of dissatisﬁed customers, so to speak, who deserted their churches in droves.” (Page 160)

“targeted evangelism.” (Page 163)

Nobody tricked millions of people into attending churches like Saddleback and Second Baptist in Houston. The genius of Rick Warren and Edwin Young was in understanding the people ﬁlling the new neighborhoods being created by the Big Sort and in designing a church just for them. (Page 164)

In Marty’s view, the hugely successful church growth movement had undermined the church’s older purpose—that of building community. Churches were once built around a geographic community, Marty said. Now they are constructed around similar lifestyles. ” (Page 164)

As Americans have sorted themselves geographically, they’ve sorted themselves religiously, too—and just as unconsciously. “People don’t say, ‘What’s the most Republican church in town?’” Green explained to me. “They say, ‘Where is the church that is most like me?’ Which means that nine out of ten people in the church are going to be Republican. And it happens with liberals as well.” The large churches, most of which follow McGavran’s church growth techniques, are almost invariably traditionalist. Only 7 percent of the 1,210 megachurches counted in 2005 described themselves as “moderate.” (That’s as far to the left as the designations (Page 168)

Only 7 percent of the 1,210 megachurches counted in 2005 described themselves as “moderate.” (Page 168)

went.) Eight out of ten fell into traditionalist categories—charismatic, Pentecostal, fundamentalist By Rick Warren’s estimation, 85 percent of the Saddleback Sams and Samanthas in his church voted for Bush in 2004 (Page 169)

45 percent of the population in heavily Republican counties attends regular Bible study or group prayer meetings. By contrast, only 28.7 percent of the population in heavily Democratic counties participates in such activities. (Page 169)

“The church needed to be birthed within … indigenous cultures and take on that indigenous expression,” Eddie Gibbs told me. “It was a missional principle, and when it came to the U.S., it became a marketing principle: how to gather more people like us. [Churches] picked up the tactical parts, but I’m not too sure they understood the deeper mission implications. And they didn’t really address the cultural implications, because mission morphed into marketing.” (Page 171)

ADVERTISING (Page 172)

One year after Donald McGavran’s The Bridges of God appeared in 1955, adman Wendell Smith introduced the idea of “market segmentation.” Smith described the old mass-marketing strategy as “bending… demand to the will of supply.” In this model, Smith wrote, manufacturers looked upon the national market as a large cake and worked to take a full layer. Smith suggested that ﬁrms slice in a different direction. Manufacturers should consider tailoring products to the speciﬁc needs of a smaller number of consumers. Companies could charge higher prices to more loyal customers (Page 175)

“market segmentation.” (Page 175)

if they gave fewer people exactly what they wanted. Instead of taking a thin horizontal layer of the national market, business should consider taking a deep, vertical, wedge-shaped slice. (Page 176)

By the early 1960s, market segmentation was the norm. In 1966, the Journal of Marketing quoted an advertising executive as saying, “It has become practically impossible to enter the national market on a broad, undifferentiated basis with any real hope of success.”15 The business of marketing became the science of deﬁning market segments, the art of division. For this purpose, Daniel Yankelovich announced in 1964, quantiﬁable traits such as age and income were useless. More crucial were qualitative characteristics such as “attitudes, motivations, [and] values.”16 (Page 177)

“Marketing and media executives are sure that people gravitate to materials that most closely zero in on their likes and dislikes, their sense of themselves,” wrote historian Joseph Turow. “But marketers also believe the converse: that people prefer not to confront materials that cause them discomfort.”21 People had grown intolerant of advertising’s intrusiveness,* but that impatience was just part of a deeper distress. Americans were developing a generalized discomfort with differing points of view. It was a deepening anger that encompassed politics, culture, entertainment, religion, and commerce. (Page 178)

People became “increasingly uncomfortable with tolerating trade-offs,” Smith said. “So it makes it difﬁcult for people to compromise or to listen to other people’s opinions.”† Smith ran a poll asking whether people identiﬁed more with integrity or success. It was a false choice, in theory, since the two aren’t mutually exclusive. But Smith ﬁgured that the question was a way of determining which term resonated more with people—whether means mattered more than ends. Beginning in the 1990s, Smith said, he found a big jump in the salience of means (integrity) over ends (success). Principles were paramount. “Nobody is willing to live with trade-offs anymore,” Smith said. “We’re in this no-compromise world.” (Page 179)

The whole concept of markets was changing as business came to understand the social psychology of groups. “People speak about the ‘mass market,’” William H. Whyte wrote in Fortune magazine in 1954. In reality, the market “breaks down into a series of groups,” and these groups “exert a great power, sometimes of frightening intensity, over their members.” (Page 180)

When politicians began to apply one-to-one marketing methods to elections, they abandoned the possibility of a common good. Breaking the country into tiny market segments resulted in the death of consensus—and the possibility that Americans could agree at times to split the difference. “I’ve been struck in this election,” marketer J. Walker Smith told me in the summer of 2004, “in the way that … this one-to-one business philosophy characterizes what the Democratic and Republican parties are doing.” The presidential campaign that year was both loud and omnipresent, but there (Page 183)

was little evidence of persuasion. There were no attempts to turn Republicans into Democrats, or Democrats into Republicans. Early on, it seemed, both parties determined that what they cared most about was loyalty. The campaigns cultivated the cocksureness that arises within all like-minded groups. This was going to be an election based on turnout, and conﬁdent people vote in higher percentages than do those who feel conﬂicted. Besides, in this world, who likes, wants, or needs conﬂict— especially conﬂicting ideas? (Page 184)

LIFESTYLE (Page 185)

Linguist George Lakoff described American society as divided between “two different forms of family-based morality”: the “strict father” and the “nurturant parent.”13 The strict father sets rules and exerts authority. Children obey, and by obeying they build character, gain respect for authority, and grow self-reliant. This is Chet Peterson’s and Ted Robinson’s vision of Crook County and the Scott County Republicans’ conception of their almost-rural community. The other moral system, the “nurturant parent,” sees love and empathy as paramount in raising a child. Children are to be supported and protected; obedience stems from love and respect, not from fear. The goal of children is to be happy and fulﬁlled. Welcome to Portland and Austin (Travis Heights). Lakoff argued that these two moral systems essentially distinguished political conservatives (strict fathers) from liberals (nurturant parents). (Page 197)

Hetherington and Weiler constructed a scale based on the answers to these four questions. Those who picked respect, obedience, good manners, and being well behaved were the most authoritarian, and the researchers counted them as strict fathers. Those who favored independence, selfreliance, curiosity, and being considerate were nurturant parents. Then Hetherington and Weiler tested to see if opinions about child rearing were correlated with political beliefs. They were, and to a striking degree. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners, and being well behaved. They were strict fathers. Democrats were nurturant parents. (Page 198)

This splitting of moral perspectives, and its connection to political afﬁliations, seemed to be something new. Hetherington and Weiler pointed out that before the 1960s, there was little real difference in how Americans raised their children. During the cold war, the political scientists wrote, authoritarian types could be found aplenty in both parties. In the 1960s, there were plenty of strict father Democrats. Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party afﬁliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. (Page 198)

Hetherington and Weiler found that the two parties differed on a cluster of issues revolving around “muscularity.” How tough should the nation be in battling terrorists? (When a foreign leader violates international law, Hetherington and Weiler asked, what is our response? Do we send him to “time-out” or do we spank?) Should laws be passed to protect the traditional family, to prosecute ﬂag burners, and to tap the phones of suspected (Page 198)

terrorists? The answers to these questions divided strict fathers from nurturant parents. The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the fourquestion survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.” (Page 199)

Part IV THE POLITICS OF PEOPLE LIKE US (Page 205)

CHOOSING A SIDE (Page 206)

ALEC is one of several conservative organizations that evolved in the early 1970s. The Heritage Foundation opened in 1973, supported by the John M. Olin Foundation Other foundations joined the fun—Scaife and Bradley. Associations sprang up: the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The only thing surprising about this growth of conservative organizations is that anyone would be surprised that it happened. The strategy followed by political conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s—after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, the Great Society, and Watergate—was the same as that adopted by Christian conservatives after the humiliation of the Scopes trial in 1925. Shut out of the mainline denominations and the established divinity schools, fundamentalists built their own social institutions: schools, printing presses, church organizations, and broadcasting outlets. Political conservatives felt that they were adrift, ignored by what they perceived as liberal foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie), by established think tanks (the Brookings Institution), and by their own president (Nixon) (Page 208)

The strategy followed by political conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s—after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, the Great Society, and Watergate—was the same as that adopted by Christian conservatives after the humiliation of the Scopes trial in 1925. Shut out of the mainline denominations and the established divinity schools, fundamentalists built their own social institutions: schools, printing presses, church organizations, and broadcasting outlets. Political conservatives felt that they were adrift, ignored by what they perceived as liberal foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie), by established think tanks (the Brookings Institution), and by their own president (Nixon). (Page 208)

Conservatives weren’t the ﬁrst to fund ideological organizations. Liberal foundations were “pioneers in social movement and advocacy funding” in the 1960s and 1970s, according to sociologist Theda Skocpol McGeorge Bundy at the Ford Foundation promoted philanthropy to support social activism, and grants from foundations helped create the infrastructure of the American left, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund In response to these initiatives from the left—and to the backsliding of Republican leaders in Washington—conservatives organized their own foundations and think tanks, and they nurtured their own organizations and leaders. Mark Rhoads said there was talk at the time of building a “shadow society.” But what else were they supposed to do? Conservatives were literally starting from scratch after World War II.* But conservatives were rebuilding just when America’s civic life was about to shift. (Page 209)

In traditional political science theory, as parties take opposing sides on new issues, older disagreements tend to disappear. Fresh conﬂicts take the place of older, staler divisions. According to this theory, the rise of cultural issues in the 1970s should have displaced the economic differences that divided the parties in the 1930s or the civil rights and social welfare divisions that emerged in the 1960s. But these long-standing issues didn’t go away. Republicans and Democrats still cling to the opposite sides of economic matters (such as the minimum wage) and civil rights, differences that have existed for generations. Instead of displacing the old issues, the new cultural issues were added on. The differences between the parties now include economics (tax cuts, health care), race (social welfare), the environment (global warming), and the array of issues that fall under the general heading of “culture”: abortion, gay rights, women’s rights, and school prayer. Layman and Carsey have shown through their analysis of survey data that the conﬂict between the parties has been extended. The differences between the parties are particularly acute among party activists. Carsey and Layman have found that Republican Party activists have grown more conservative than Democratic activists have grown more liberal, a discovery in line with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s ﬁndings in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. Hacker and (Page 213)

Pierson argued that while both parties have become less moderate, polarization has been “unequal,” that Republicans have moved more to the right than Democrats have edged to the left.*18 That advantage, if one can call it that, in Republican extremism may be temporary. Layman and Carsey have found that newer activists from both parties are more polarized than older party stalwarts. (Page 214)

Thomas Jefferson circumvented the boarding house factions during his presidency by inviting legislators to the White House for dinner, no more than a dozen at a time. He sat them at a large, round table, both to nullify questions of status in seating and to preclude private conversations. The wine was imported and plentiful. Jefferson’s French chef was “his best ally in conciliating political opponents.” Servants weren’t allowed in the room—the president served out of a dumbwaiter near his chair—so the legislators felt free to speak in conﬁdence. Jefferson wouldn’t mix Federalists and Republicans, but he would use the dinners to cross over the boarding house factions in both parties (Page 228)

THE BIG SORT CAMPAIGN (Page 230)
TO MARRY YOUR ENEMIES (Page 254)

One of the tenets of democratic faith has been that direct, face-to-face contact between groups on different sides of an issue deﬁnes a selfgoverning people. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a “jarring of parties” was essential for government. Deliberation among ideological opposites was what made a country democratic. “It’s hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar,” the democratic philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1848. “Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.” (Page 259)

Alexander Hamilton wrote that a “jarring of parties” was essential for government. Deliberation among ideological opposites was what made a country democratic. (Page 259)

Research conducted during World War II appeared to support the belief that understanding and tolerance stemmed from contact among groups that were otherwise isolated. The demands of battle would sometimes force an otherwise racially segregated U.S. Army to integrate on the ﬁeld. Researchers found that white soldiers who had fought alongside black troops held more positive racial attitudes than whites who hadn’t. Similarly, as white merchant marines took more voyages with black sailors, the racial attitudes of whites grew more tolerant These ﬁndings supported a belief that prejudice resulted from ignorance and ignorance was the result of a (Page 259)

Researchers found that white soldiers who had fought alongside black troops held more positive racial attitudes than whites who hadn’t. (Page 259)

lack of contact. If people could only get to know each other, went the theory, groups would see that they shared a common humanity. In the 1950s, followers of the “human relations movement” had an “almost mystical faith in ‘getting to know one another’as a solvent of racial tensions.”4 They believed that simple contact between groups would work to reduce racial prejudice. It was a way of thinking so prevalent at the time that it became part of the reasoning used by the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools in 1954 (Page 260)

Many Americans have choices in how they live, where they settle, what news they read, and whom they associate with. But that increasing opportunity to choose has had the perverse effect of decreasing contrary political discussion. There have been attempts to reintroduce debate and deliberation into American politics, to revive the face-to-face democracy of the town meeting. Political scientist James Fishkin has been tireless in running “deliberative polls,” where groups of citizens are brought together for a day to learn about and discuss a public issue. He and his colleague Bruce Ackerman have even proposed a national holiday called Deliberation Day, a time before each national election when every citizen would receive a small stipend for attending a political discussion led by trained volunteers within a neighborhood. In the best tradition of American democracy, Deliberation Day would make voting truly an informed choice, as citizens would learn about the issues of the day and then debate with others across boundaries of social and political division (Page 264)

Meanwhile, national institutions have splintered. The idea of community has been “miniaturized,” observed Francis Fukuyama. “Rather than seeking authoritative values in the national church that once shaped society’s culture, people are picking and choosing their values on an individual basis, in ways that link them with smaller communities of likeminded folk.”37 That ability is both liberating and exciting. In this new world, there will be greater differences nationally among communities but fewer differences within the smaller groups—schools, neighborhoods, clubs, college dormitories, churches—where we actually live. There will be both more diversity and more conformity. But missing will be any sense of the whole. “I think we’re going to see more isolation at the community or even [the] neighborhood level,” Yankelovich Partners’ J. Walker Smith told me. “We’re going to have a nation of self-focused collectives. And the only universally shared American value is going to be the willingness to let other people live in their collectives in the ways they want to live. I worry that the traditional democratic notion of accommodating differences through compromise in order to sustain a shared way of life is going to fade away.” (Page 278)

Beginning nearly thirty years ago, the people of this country unwittingly began a social experiment. Finding cultural comfort in “people like us,” we have migrated into ever-narrower communities and churches and political groups. We have created, and are creating, new institutions distinguished by their isolation and single-mindedness. We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings. And we have worked quietly and hard to remove any trace of the “constant clashing of opinions” from daily life. It was a social revolution, one that was both profound and, because it consisted of people simply going about their lives, entirely unnoticed In this time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives, cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life with the sensibility of customers who are always right. “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government, too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way. (Page 278)