The Big Sort (31 page)

We have come to expect living arrangements that don't challenge our cultural expectations. Responding to the demands of students, colleges offer "thematic housing." Two residence halls at Brandeis University are set aside for those interested in "Justice, Service & Change." Colgate has a foreign film dorm. Union College has a residence based on recycling and the environment. Wesleyan University has twenty-eight thematic dorms, including one for "eclectic" students. Kids have grown up in neighborhoods of like-mindedness, so homogeneous groups are considered normal. "The guys on my floor were respectful, but they weren't the kind of people I hang around with—they were jocks," one Brandeis student told the
Boston Globe.
Then he added, "It was hard to find balance. "
^†
21

It's not just lifestyle that differs by subdivision. There's now a geography of family structures and mores as the meaning of family changes from place to place. Beginning in the 1960s, there was a shift in how some people formed households and raised families. Women married when they were older, and if they had children, they had them later. The link between marriage and procreation shattered as more people lived together without getting married and more children were born out of wedlock. Reproduction fell well below the level of replacement. An increasing number of people lived as singles, and when a spouse died or a couple divorced, fewer people married again. The Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe saw that this new demographic combination was tied to changing attitudes about life.
^*
The people in these changing, more fluid families were less concerned with traditional institutions, such as old-line church denominations (Episcopalian, Catholic) and civic clubs (Masons, Rotary). Gender roles were getting squishy, and people forgot to get married. They were less interested in material success and more interested in experiences and individual freedoms.
²²

Lesthaeghe and his colleagues discovered Ronald Inglehart's post-materialism manifested in how people formed families (or not) and had children (or not). Moreover, this new kind of family had a geography. Lesthaeghe could see that nontraditional families were most prevalent in western Europe, particularly in the Low Countries. (The Dutch had the largest percentage of people in this demographic group.)

When Lesthaeghe mapped these trends in the United States, he saw that by 2000, white women in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey were marrying and having children in ways that matched their cohort in western Europe. White women in New York, Rhode Island, California, Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Delaware weren't far behind. In these states, a greater proportion of people were living together without marrying than in the rest of the United States. Women had babies later, if they had children at all. People married later, and if they divorced, they often didn't remarry. It struck Lesthaeghe that the states that were the most like western Europe in terms of family formation were also the most Democratic in recent U.S. presidential elections. Comparing his measures of family formation and the 2004 presidential results, Lesthaeghe said that he "could find no better way to predict the vote for Bush" in 2004 than these demographic measures. Then Lesthaeghe checked at the county level. The effect lessened slightly, but again western European, Dutch-like family styles essentially predicted a hefty Democratic vote. In counties where people voted in waves for Bush, fewer couples had ever lived together before marriage, and women married and had children at a younger age.

By 2004, Americans had divided into communities with different family structures and, even more basic, with different understandings of the phases of life: At what age did people marry, if they married at all? How old were they when they had children, if they bore children at all? Family types had segregated in the same way the country's politics had segregated. Lesthaeghe would say in
exactly
the same way.

One of the fundamental questions of sociology asks how societies are held together. Émile Durkheim, a founder of modern sociology, wrote near the end of the nineteenth century about a change in the way societies were glued together. Preindustrial peoples were united in "mechanical solidarity," according to Durkheim. Everyone did the same work and had the same beliefs. They were interchangeable. Durkheim described the members of these traditional societies as "repetitions ... rather like the rings of an earthworm," and called this grouping a "horde."
²³
In television parlance, these societies were somewhat like the Borg, the race flying about in cube-shaped spacecraft in the series
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Borg's power is that every individual member contains all the knowledge, skills, and morality of the whole. New members are "assimilated" into the Borg collective with brutal and total efficacy. (As the Borg say, "Resistance is futile.")

Mechanical solidarity is complete with the Borg in a way that could never be found outside television. But recall that Americans lived on Borg-like "islands" in the nineteenth century, the isolated towns circumscribed by shared work, a common church, and traditional families. Industrial society flooded these islands, and the division of labor in modern mass production systems separated people. They no longer lived according to tradition or lineage, but by their place in the labor market. According to Durkheim, industrial society was held together through "organic solidarity," the interdependence of people through an economic system based on the division of labor. The glue that would bond society, he predicted, would be an industrial economy built on workplace specialization that demanded connection and cooperation among occupations.
²⁴

The new system uprooted a way of life that had existed for centuries. Industrial society stripped away old boundaries and gave people unprecedented freedom from tradition. The problem with this new mode of life, Durkheim wrote, was that "unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity."
²⁵
Durkheim called the sense of emptiness and disorientation brought on by industrial life "anomie" and he traced its effects in rising rates of suicide. Durkheim believed that anomie would be quelled as modern workplace structures took the place of the Borg-like village. The corporation would be the institutional structure that would provide people with a common purpose, what Daniel Bell described as a "sense of kindredness" through work.
²⁶
The interdependence required in the modern workplace would replace the sense of place and belonging found in the totality of the village.

The past half century tells a different story. As we've lost trust in traditional institutions, the tenuous bonds of the workplace have proved insufficient to satisfy people's need for belonging. In response, we have found ways to re-create Durkheim's "mechanical solidarity" in increasingly like-minded neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, and voluntary organizations. "People want to associate or form communities with others who share the same values," J. Walker Smith, president of the market research firm Yankelovich Partners, told me. "The reassurance that people find in more homogeneous, like-minded communities may be one sort of psychological response to the anxiety of living in a broader social and political environment that is increasingly riven with scandals and betrayals of faith." Americans lost their sense of a nation by accident in the sweeping economic and cultural shifts that took place after the mid-1960s. And by instinct they have sought out modern-day recreations of the nineteenth-century "island communities" in where and how they live. "Do people fundamentally end up going to live where people who look like them live?" asked G. Evans Witt, CEO of Princeton Survey Research Associates. "Yes, pretty much. But it's not look, it's act like them, think like them."

Americans still depend on organic solidarity in their economic lives, in their mixed and mixed-up workplaces. But in their social, religious, and political lives, they are seeking ways to rejoin the horde.

T
HE RIGHT WING
may or may not be conspiratorial, but it is certainly vast. The ballroom at the Gaylord Texan hotel, a continent-size resort near the Dallas airport, holds just over 7,000, and in the summer of 2005, it was packed with mostly Republican state legislators, staff, lobbyists, and representatives from the Fortune 500, the Russell 1000, and, it seemed, half the businesses found in the Dallas yellow pages, all trampling over the gold and maroon carpet decorated with massive woven belt buckles, Stetsons as big as Pontiacs, and longhorns that stretched twenty yards tip to tip—a rug clearly ordered from the J. R. Ewing Collection.

At that time, there were about 7,500 state legislators in the United States. Some 2,000 of them were there for the thirty-second annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). President George W. Bush addressed the crowd from a riser set between jumbo screens that later listed the event's sponsors: Boone Pickens, Exxon, Peabody Energy, Pfizer, R. J. Reynolds, and the National Association of Home Builders. Nothing is really hidden about this joint venture of legislators and industry. The organization's budget ($6 million in 2003) is funded primarily by corporations who "pay to play" on ALEC's committees. And the committees, made up of legislators and representatives of business, write "model" legislation for state governments.
¹
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was a featured speaker at this convention, and so was a representative of the association of shopping mall owners.

ALEC might be considered a trade association for conservative state legislators. There was a more nonideological association of state legislators before ALEC was formed in 1973, but a small number of conservatives thought the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL, that organization's name today) was a prop for big government, an association for "bureaucrats" rather than lawmakers and their partners in business. Representative Harold Brubaker, former Speaker of the North Carolina assembly, said that he attended one NCSL meeting in 1980 but never went back. "I just felt more at home at ALEC," Brubaker told me. "I was around legislators who had the same philosophy as I had on running government." There may have been Democrats there at the Gaylord, but they were scarce. Tax-cutting conservative activist Grover Norquist asked during his talk if anyone in the crowd was from Massachusetts. The question elicited some chuckles but no raised hands. (In contrast, forty-six of forty-nine members of the Nebraska legislature were ALEC members in 2003.)
²

ALEC is the new way of doing politics—new, at least, in the past three decades. It's the politics of people like us, of segmentation, of the Big Sort, and it's changed the nature of American public life. In homogeneous voting districts, politicians have drifted to extremes, changing the nature of elections and even the type of person who will run for office. With a dwindling number of moderates, Congress has balkanized, enduring nearly four decades of what one legislative scholar described as "stalemate," with little new in policy or government action.
³
Meanwhile, in states and cities where the Big Sort has resulted in increasingly large majorities, there has been an explosion of innovation and legislation. Federal leadership has been replaced by a wild display of federalism, as like-minded communities put their beliefs into law.

An ALEC convention is conservatism presented with the variety of the dessert table at a chamber of commerce banquet. In one room at the 2005 convention, delegates discussed how American conservatives can work with flat-tax, small-government activists in the states emerging from the old Soviet Union. In another, a Wal-Mart representative spoke about the union-funded campaign against his company. One PowerPoint slide advised the assembled legislators, "The target is WMT [Wal-Mart] for now. The real target is you." Representative Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican, warned of U.S. Supreme Court justices who were "importing foreign laws and social mores" by citing statutes from other countries. These judges "fancy themselves as participants in some kind of international elite," Feeney said. Elsewhere, Thomas Borelli of Action Fund Management announced "the left has begun to take over corporations." It was, in fact, a "liberal dream" to sever the corporation from policy debates, Borelli said, and to "have a company lobby for [their] social agenda."

ALEC is a character in the story liberals tell about the synchronized, centrally planned effort to bring conservatives to power. A Democratic-leaning report called ALEC corporate America's "Trojan horse," referring to the way business has bought its way into fifty statehouses.
⁴
Right-wing impresario Paul Weyrich (the man who came up with the "moral majority") founded ALEC, according to investigations by the People for the American Way, the Defenders of Wildlife, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. That Weyrich had conceived ALEC was further proof of the alleged conspiracy's encompassing genius. By the 1990s, ALEC had become the "voice of corporate America in the states."
⁵

The story ALEC members tell of the organization's founding is somewhat less awe-inspiring. Mark Rhoads was working for a member of the Illinois senate in 1973 when he proposed a "caucus for conservative lawmakers with a conservative staff." Rhoads called this new outfit the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, switching to the American Legislative Exchange Council after consulting with other activists. "Times were different in 1973," Rhoads told me. The word "conservative" wasn't a particularly good draw. Conservatives at the time felt powerless. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, every institution appeared to be under the dominion of big-government types—the foundations, the mainline denominations, Congress, the existing organization of state legislators. Even a Republican president seemed against them. Much of the impetus to create ALEC came from the right's disappointment with Richard Nixon. The size of the federal government had exploded under Johnson, and then it continued to expand under Nixon, said Duane Parde, ALEC's executive director. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and instituted wage and price controls. "ALEC was really started to counter that, at least on the state level," Parde told me during the 2005 convention. The original founders weren't movement conservatives based in Washington, D.C. Weyrich provided a room for an early meeting, Rhoads and Parde said, but not much more. ALEC was the creation of a patched-together cadre of midwestern state legislators who discovered their mutual distrust of Washington.