The Big Sort (62 page)
Authors: Bill Bishop
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â Piereson argued in the
Wall Street Journal
that the left's interest in the "supposedly nefarious strategies and tactics" used by foundations on the right ignores the ideas and policies that came out of the effort. A "particularly sinister role is ascribed to those conservative philanthropies that have helped fund thinkers, magazines and research institutionsâon the assumption that no one would advance such self-evidently meretricious ideas unless paid to do so."
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*Linguist William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the authors of
The Atlas of North American English,
told National Public Radio in February 2006 that "the regional dialects of this country are getting more and more different. So that people in Buffalo, St. Louis and Los Angeles are now speaking much more differently from each other than they ever did" (Interview,
All Things Considered,
National Public Radio, February 16, 2006,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090)
.
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*Pollster Anna Greenberg reports that the gender gap, which grew to a 16-percentage point Democratic advantage in the 1996 and 2000 elections, shrank to only 3 percentage points in 2004 ("Mind the Gender Gap. Why Democrats Are Losing Women at an Alarming Rate,"
American Prospect,
December 2004, p. 28)
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*Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote about "unequal polarization" in their 2005 book
Off Center The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy
They contended that the primary cause of polarization in the United States was a move to the right by Republican officeholders.
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*Every test of the data we devised showed increasing political segregation. For example, we measured the proportion of voters who lived in counties won by the opposing party in various presidential elections. In the elections after World War II, about half of all voters lived in places won by the opposing party From 1976 on, however, the percentage of voters living in counties won by the other party dropped, sinking to under 40 percent by 2004. That year, when George W Bush defeated John Kerry, only 34 percent of Democratic voters lived in counties won by Bush.
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*In 2005, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranked cities from the most liberal to the most conservative. Lubbock was ranked the second most conservative U.S city behind Provo, Utah. Cambridge was merely the ninth most liberal city behind, among others, Detroit, Oakland, and Berkeley.
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*Given the unchanging nature of U.S politics, most of these counties fell into the same categories in the 2000 election. Third-party candidates were excluded in these calculations Including third parties changes the statistical details but not the substantive results.
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*As a U.S. senator, Santorum bought his own house in northern Virginia. That house became an issue in his 2006 reelection campaign against Democrat Bob Casey Jr., a race Santorum lost
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*Stanley Milgram conducted the most extremeâand most famousâconformity experiments. He asked subjects to apply electric shocks to a victim As the charge was increased, the victim (unseen by the subjects) would moan, howl, and eventually scream The subjects were ordered to increase the power of the charge and to administer another shock. The subjects in the tests all administered shocks well beyond the level Milgram expected. No subject stopped prior to the level where the "victim kick[ed] the wall" and could not answer questions. Of forty subjects, twenty-six administered the strongest level of shock. One of the more interesting findings was that subjects were more apt to administer higher voltages when instructed to do so by someone in person. They were less likely to do so if the instructions were phoned in. See Stanley Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience,"
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (yj,
no. 4 (1963): 371â78; Stanley Milgram, "Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority,"
Human Relations
18 (1965): 57â76.
Face-to-face contact is powerful. The George W Bush campaign, especially in 2004, used face-to-face contact among culturally similar people to increase voter turnout.
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*For example, women claiming sex discrimination won 75 percent of the time in front of an all-Democratic panel; they won only 31 percent of the time in front of an all-Republican panel. The same pattern was found in environmental and labor law cases as well.
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â Gratuitous comparisons with the Nazi Party are a staple of our current political discourse I hope not to add to that rhetorical excess by noting here that studies of the Nazi ascendance found that the party was not homogeneous across Germany, but rather was concentrated in like-minded regions. John O'Loughlin, Colin Flint, and Luc Anselin, "The Geography of the Nazi Vote Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930,"
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
(1994). 351â80.
Two geographers studying the 2004 U.S. presidential election said that they were "motivated by the striking similarity between U.S. electoral polarization and [O'Loughlin's] finding of significant geographic variations of local populations' effects on the outcome of the critical Nazi vote " Ian Sue Wing and Joan Walker, "The 2004 Presidential Election from a Spatial Perspective" (unpublished paper, 2005)
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*Another example of this is a 1951 experiment in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth watched a film of a football game between the two schools. The students were asked to take note of foul play. "Dartmouth students saw mostly Princeton's offenses; Princeton students saw mostly Dartmouth's," reported the
Wall Street journal
(Cynthia Crossen, '"Cognitive Dissonance' Became a Milestone in 1950s Psychology,"
Wall Street Journal,
December 4, 2006, p. B1)
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*In early 2007, when the Pew Research Center charted views of "traditional values" championed by the Republican Party, the polls showed an increasing number of Americans holding more liberal views on abortion and sexual orientation, for example. If Republicans have found their traditional base to be eroding, it may have something to do with the failures of George W Bush or the war in Iraq But the change is also the result of a post-materialist shift in American culture.
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*Mainline Protestant denominations would include, among others, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ members, Disciples of Christ, and American Baptists.
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*Converse considered the rapid increase in U S involvement in Vietnam a potential cause of the sudden disaffection with political parties. He noted, however, that public support for the war didn't decline during 1965 "Public enthusiasm about the war actually increased in tune with the mobilization, and reached its all-time peak late in the fall of 1965," Converse wrote (
The Dynamics of Party Support,
p 108). The real shocks to the American system, he concluded, had to do with race.
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*The question of individual competence seems a permanent part of our political critique and an ever-ready explanation for our politicsâfrom the sweater-wearing (and supposedly incompetent) Jimmy Carter to the bumbling Ronald Reagan to the dallying Bill Clinton to the Katnna- and WMD-surpnsed George W. Bush.
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*For the record, Carter never used the word "malaise" in his July 15, 1979, speech.
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*In a 1997 paper, political scientists Geoffrey C. Layman and Edward G. Carmines ("Cultural Conflict in American Politics: Religious Traditionalism, Postmaterialism, and U.S. Political Behavior,"
Journal of Politics
59, no 3 [August 1997]. 751â77) noted that even as "recent trends indicate that American politics is becoming more 'cultural' or 'Value-based' . . . the leading account of cultural conflict in advanced industrial democraciesâRonald Inglehart's theory of Postmaterialismâhas received little attention from students of American politics" (p. 751). It appears that explanations for political change that don't depend on leaders or political elites sell as poorly in the academy as they do in the press.
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*This "new political culture" is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, Clark wrote. It rejects centralized authority and seeks personal freedom. "The main conflicts today are not about socialism versus capitalism or more versus less government, but about hierarchy versus egahtan-anism," Clark wrote in his 1998 book
The New Political Culture
(p. ix).
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* In 2004, unmarried women voted for John Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent), according to a report issued by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research ("Unmarried Women in 2004 Presidential Election," January 2005, p. 3,
http://www.wvwv.org/docs/WVWV_2004_post-election_memo.pdf
). Married women, meanwhile, voted for Bush 55 to 44 percent, leading the polling firm to conclude that the "marriage gap is one of the most important cleavages in electoral politics."
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*In 1956, 41 percent of the population counted themselves as political "centrists," based on answers to questions about five issues The shape of public opinion looked like the classic bell curve, a steep plurality in the center that quickly fell off as ideology became more extreme By 1973, however, only 27 percent had opinions that placed them in the ideological middle. The bell curve turned into more of a flat concrete block Only 25 percent of the public was either "leftist" or "rightist" in 1956. By 1973, 44 percent of the public had migrated to the extremes. ("Leftists" increased from 12 percent to 21 percent, "rightists" increased from 13 percent to 23 percent.)
The Changing American Voter
was later criticized for failing to take into account changes in the way some questions were asked.
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*They used a survey that asked people to rank as national goals maintaining order, giving people more say in decisions, fighting inflation, or protecting free speech.
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*James Davison Hunter made this same distinction in two insightful books,
American Evangelism
and
Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America
In the former, Hunter wrote that the advocates of the Social Gospel "repudiated an individuated conception of moral and social ills in favor of an interpretation of such phenomena as resulting from social, political, and economic realities over which the individual had little or no control." Reform wasn't a revival, but "the modification of the structural conditions precipitating these social maladies" (
American Evangelism
[New Brunswick, NJ Rutgers University Press, 1983], p. 28).
Culture Wars
portrays the current political divisions in light of these earlier disputes
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* Readers may note the similarity here with the approach conservatives took after their defeat in 1964. Much has been made of the separate foundations, professional organizations, radio stations, publishing houses, think tanks, and schools that conservatives have established since the mid-1960s. The history of American fundamentalism shows there is nothing unusual in these tactics. It's what groups do when they lose control of society's established institutions
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*Liberals, as is their wont, were dismissive of the Orange County conservative movement. One explanation for the emerging New Right was that the movement was a reaction against modernization Another was that the people were "paranoid " Even
Fortune
magazine described Orange County in 1968 as "nut country" (McGirr,
Suburban Warriors,
p. 6).
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â America has a tradition of using the schools to work out its religious, ethnic, and class conflicts. One of the early school wars broke out in New York City in the 1840s. Catholic leaders saw the school system as one designed to socialize children into a Protestant world They asked why the schools used the King James Version for Bible readings instead of the Catholic Douay Version. When officials refused to include the Douay Version, the church established a separate system of Catholic schools.
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*
The Late Great Planet Earth
wasn't just a book for the rural or the uneducated. Orson Welles made a movie based on Lindsey's book in 1979
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â Miller had defeated Tony Boyle for the UMWA presidency in 1972. Boyle was later convicted of the 1969 murders of union activist Jock Yablonski and his wife and daughter. I worked for UMWA secretary-treasurer Harry Patrick when he ran to replace Miller as union president in 1977.
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*The Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University reported similar findings in a poll re-leased in October 2006. Bible literalists were less likely to want government to end the death penalty, for example Evangelicals and Bible literalists also were against the redistribution of wealth, further regulation of business, and increased protection of the environment. "American Piety in the 21st Century New Insight to the Depth and Complexity of Religion in the U.S." (selected findings, Baylor Religion Survey, September 2006), p. 24,
http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/33304.pdf
.
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â The relationship between church attendance and ideology is reversed in agrarian societies: the parties on the left are supported by the most religious citizens, a relationship we can see in American history (see Norris and Inglehart,
Sacred and Secular Religion and Politics Worldwide,
p 207) In
What's the Matter with Kansas?
Thomas Frank wonders what became of this combination of faith and politics. The social science answer would be, simply, time It's no longer the 1890s, and Kansas is no longer an agrarian state.
