The Big Sort—sort of

Americans have a long history of clustering into groups | Marvin Olasky

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Peter Piper picks a peck of potential problems, then peppers his ponderings with pessimistic points. That's the formula for many sky-is-falling non-fiction books, and one of them is Bill Bishop's The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). The subtitle displays Bishop's dire prediction: Americans are hunkering down in enclaves only with people like themselves, so the center will not hold.

Sounds bad, but journalists do best when they know some history, and Bishop does not seem aware that the U.S. melting pot has always produced whole-berry rather than jellied cranberry sauce. A century ago races of a feather flocked together by law, and we also had more ethnicsegregation by custom than we do today. Voting by religion is also nothing new: The Democratic-Catholic connection a century ago was as strong as the Republican-evangelical connection of recent years.