Provocative New Book Challenges Us to Really Ask "Why?"

The following is an excerpt from The Death of "Why?": The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy by Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Copyright 2009 Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Reprinted with permission by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Ideological Segregation by Click and by Clique

When was the last time you changed your mind on something important? I’ve changed my mind a few times. One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve never changed it while surrounded by people who agree with me. But we are insulating ourselves from more and more opposing viewpoints—through the places we live, the way we vote, and who we turn to for news and information—and finding fewer and fewer catalysts to question our beliefs.

Bill Bishop has lived and worked for newspapers in Kentucky and Texas, on both the writing and the publishing sides. Today, he and his wife publish The Daily Yonder, an online publication covering rural America, including places that much of the mainstream media has abandoned. Bishop argues that our country has become increasingly segregated by ideology. Americans are moving to towns and cities to live with people like themselves, who believe similar things. We are clustering “in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics.” One way to see this trend in action is to look at our elections.

The increasing incidence of “landslide counties” (counties in which a candidate wins by 20 percentage points or more) exemplifies how Americans are becoming more homogeneous on a community level. Between 1976 and 2004, the number of counties in which the presidential election was a landslide doubled, from a quarter of the population to half. It is conventional wisdom, for example, that the 2004 presidential election was one of the closest presidential campaigns in history. Yet, as Bishop points out, nearly half of American voters lived in places where a single candidate won definitively. On a macro level, America is closely divided. But these elections aren’t close calls in our communities, because we’ve moved to places with neighbors who believe what we believe and vote the same way.

Our changing demography isn’t the result of mass migratory patterns such as those we have seen in our nation’s history, but of people who are sorting themselves one by one. We are concentrating ourselves by belief, and the result is localities that are becoming “politically monogamous.” Bishop calls this phenomenon the Big Sort.

It was in his capacity as a columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, while trying to understand how certain cities like his were thriving economically while others remained stagnant, that Bishop came across the Big Sort. Despite an admission that his decision to locate to Austin was based on the same kinds of decisions that Americans are making throughout the country—to be in places that serve the food we like, offer the church services we prefer, and so on—Bishop believes that “democracy was not meant to be operating in an atmosphere where people don’t meet or discuss or come across those who disagree with them.” If that were the case, would we even have a democracy? When we read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we aren’t exactly seeing first drafts. The Founders didn’t share the same outlook on all matters, but through debate and discussion they were able to come to consensus.

There is little that will hasten the death of why in our country more effectively than raising our children in ideological homogeneity. There just aren’t many incentives to question when everyone around us shares our views. And it is in our neighborhoods, where we spend so much time, that we could most easily encounter those with whom we disagree, those whose lives and experiences might lead us to question our values and beliefs.