Author Explains How Political “Clustering” Leads to Divisive Politics

In 2008, author Bill Bishop published a book called The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. It’s as relevant now as it was fourteen years ago– if not more so. The book digs into the data showing an increasing trend of Americans sorting themselves into likeminded groups, which, Bishop contends, is creating the divisiveness that defines our current status quo.

“Americans are increasingly unlikely to find themselves in mixed political company,” Bishop wrote — “pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred,” as he put it, “that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’” who lived differently, thought differently, voted differently. People weren’t picking presidents — they were choosing sides.

In a recent interview with Politico, Bishop stated that this process has only escalated. The entire interview is illuminating, but particularly insightful is Bishop’s discussion of identity and how one’s understanding of who one is contributes to this political tribalism.

It’s just the way people organize themselves. It’s just another example of how in the big picture identity has become — I mean, politics now isn’t about dividing stuff up. It’s not about, as it was in the old days, getting roads in Kentucky. Now it’s about identity. All the other ways that people develop their identity or have developed their identity since time began in groups and in communities and in families and at work — all those have lost meaning. People are given the task of creating their own identities every day, which is what Facebook and Twitter are all about. A bunch of European sociologists describe this breakdown of community and how the individual has become the artist of his own or her own life and is given this daily task of creating a self. And so politics now plays that role. People use politics to create identity, not to divide up stuff. The policy that is in place under Trump is hated by Democrats. If the same policy remains under a Democratic president, then Democrats like it.

It’s a bleak outlook, for sure, and it’s easy to look at the state of modern discourse and despair (believe me, I’m a pro). But Bishop offers a ray of hope and a prescription for fixing this divide, and it’s really quite simple:

We help one another.

When you’re working on a problem that’s right in front of you and it’s not abstracted and it’s not about identity, it’s about somebody’s hungry and doesn’t have any clothes, then all those other issues begin to go away. They go away and you deal with people as they are and not as an ideologue. And it’s a great feeling. It is the greatest there is. You solve this problem not by talking about it, but by doing stuff. So don’t talk about it — do something. We’re not going to become good people and get over this modern problem because of a great leader. We’re going to get over it because we work with others who aren’t like ourselves.

Read the whole interview here.