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

By Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. Posted July 15, 2009.

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.

Ideological segregation in America is perhaps a natural outgrowth of the increasing ideological polarization gripping our nation. Although some dispute the idea that all Americans are more ideological, the evidence is convincing that, at the very least, American voters surely are. Our ideological identification determines how we vote, up and down the ticket, and how we feel about the issues. In a study of the 2006 midterm elections, ideology was identified as a strong predictor of the party a voter would support. If we are more ideological, and our ideology predicts our party, then we vote by party. No need to ask many questions there.

Despite Barack Obama’s impressive 2008 electoral victory, the electorate remained just as divided in 2008, segregated not only by politics but also by income, education, and geography. After the election, Bishop calculated that 48.1 percent of the population lived in landslide counties in 2008, almost exactly the same as the 48.3 percent who lived in them in 2004. In fact, in 2008 there were thirty-six “landslide states” where a candidate won by 10 percentage points or more, an increase from twenty-nine states in 2004 (including Washington, D.C., in both cases). Writing a week after the election, Bishop concluded, “The country is split in much the same way it was divided four and eight years ago. People continue to sort by age and by way of life. As a result, our communities (and states) are growing more like-minded . . . It is easy to ignore people on the other side when they aren’t your neighbors. But that doesn’t mean the country is less polarized—because it isn’t.” Obama’s election victory might have brought change to Washington, but it certainly did not reflect a less divided electorate.

See more stories tagged with: elections, democracy, voting, ideology, political media

Andrea Batista Schlesinger is the executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.

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