Everyone Lives in a Ghetto

Or so says this week's edition of The Economist. In "The Big Sort" (June 19th 2008, The Economist), the authors observe that Americans tend to surround themselves with like-minded people. Conservatives with conservatives; liberals with liberals.

Check out these stats:

In 1976 Jimmy Carter won the presidency with 50.1% of the popular vote. Though the race was close, some 26.8% of Americans were in "landslide counties" that year, where Mr. Carter either won or lost by 20 percentage points or more. The proportion of Americans who live in such landslide counties has nearly doubled since then. In the dead-heat election of 2000, it was 45.3%. When George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004, it was a whopping 48.3%.

This isn't just gerrymandering, either. Americans are very mobile. While we usually move for practical reasons (e.g., new job), once we decide to move we normally have lots of choices on neighborhoods. And house income (itself a poor predictor of political affiliation in America) is not the only factor -- in most cities, there are several neighborhoods that share the same price range but are culturally very different.

How does this affect the national conversation? Basically, it eliminates it altogether.

Because Americans are so mobile, even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbors leads over time to severe segregation. An accountant in Texas, for example, can live anywhere she wants, so the liberal ones move to the funky bits of Austin while the more conservative ones prefer the exurbs of Dallas... Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called "Hearing the Other Side," Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them. Intriguingly, the more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile.

This doesn't bode well for a healthy democracy. Democracies depend on more than just majority-rule. They hope for national consensus through freedom of thought and speech and civil discourse. The lack of a national conversation makes such discourse highly unlikely.

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme... Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems. America, says Mr. [Bill] Bishop [author of "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart"], is splitting into "balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible."

These dangers are intensified by trends beside residential segregation: for instance, cable channels which only reinforce prejudices (right or wrong) and home-schooling movements which are motivated by sheltering rather than equipping the next generation of Americans. "We now live in a giant feedback loop," says Mr. Bishop, "hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapaers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in."

People within and without conservative American evangelicalism criticize the existence of a Christian subculture, rightfully so. Christians avoid non-Christian books, music, artists, pundits. They workout at their church's gym. They watch Fox News and listen to Janet Parshall or James Dobson or Rush Limbaugh exclusively.

This article shows that such "clustering" might be a natural tendency. But Christians must resist this temptation. Circling the wagons (physically or mentally) and refusing to engage alternate ideas is hazardous. Some may call it wise and safe, but it's lazy and dangerous.