The Big Sort (9 page)

Colorado has become more Democratic overall—but not
all
of Colorado: some parts of the state are just as Republican as at any time in the past half century. Over the past two decades, however, people from other states have flowed into Colorado. When we tracked these migrants, we learned that the Colorado counties with the highest inflows of people from other states were also the counties where support for Democratic presidential candidates was growing. The counties least affected by migration from other states had grown slightly more Republican since the 1980s. In addition, these politically opposite parts of Colorado were attracting people from entirely different places. The people moving to the fast-growing counties around Denver were three times more likely to have come from "blue" counties outside Colorado than the people moving to the slower-growing (and heavily Republican) counties along the Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska borders. The county that sent the most people to Colorado between 1981 and 2004 was deeply Democratic Los Angeles County, California.
⁸

The migration of people from Democratic counties elsewhere in the United States was turning Colorado into a tightly contested state. But because the Big Sort works at the community level, although the state as a whole grew more politically mixed, the divisions between Republican and Democratic areas within the state widened. Colorado's political story in the coming years will be one of expanding cultural and political division between the fast-growing Democratic counties of Denver and Boulder and the increasingly Republican counties in other parts of the state. In that sense, Colorado is a microcosm of the nation, where governments are being called on to reconcile the demands of communities that have less and less in common. It's a chore made harder by the peculiar psychology that is the special property of like-minded groups.

Can two walk together, except they be agreed?

—
AMOS
3.3

"A
NTOINE KILLED A
brownish snake, two feet long, in the house, at the foot of the staircase," Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary during the early days of Washington, D.C. Hogs nosed through trash discarded on the side of the road, and carcasses of animals putrefied in the stagnant water collecting in brickyard excavations. There were no lights and few roads that were little more than trampled-down cow paths. The city was hard to find. Abigail Adams lost her way on the trip from Baltimore back to the White House. She stumbled about Maryland for a few hours before hiring a vagrant "to extricate us out of our difficulty." Those who came to the newly built city were anxious to leave. During Washington's first three decades, nearly one in five U.S. senators resigned every two years. Better to give up public office than to live in a "cosmos of evil and immorality."
¹

Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city. In his forty-year-old study,
The Washington Community,
historian James Sterling Young mapped three Washingtons, one created for each of the three branches of government. The nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court lived in the same house until 1845. Executive branch workers gathered in one section of the city, near the White House, while congressmen were bunched together nearer the Capitol. "Men whom the Constitution merely separated into different work groups separated themselves into different societies," wrote Young.
²

Congressmen lived in boarding houses. They formed eating clubs around common tables, and they slept together, two to a room. Young tracked the membership of these new boarding house communities and found that the residential segregation that marked the entire city was repeated in the houses. Men from one state or region would board together, finding comfort in their similar cultural ties, political outlooks, and, no doubt, culinary proclivities. "Legislators had a decided aversion to sharing their mess table, their living quarters, and their leisure hours with colleagues from regions other than their own," Young wrote.
³
Washington had been created as the common ground of the nation, an intentionally heterogeneous society consisting of men gathered from across the new country. Without plan or foresight, however, the city had been transformed into an archipelago of culturally homogeneous and politically insular fraternity houses.

The homogeneity of the boarding houses crisply reflected the country, where communities were isolated by rivers, mountain ranges, and vast distances. The cultural segregation in early America was enforced by the lack of mobility, whereas today it's the ease with which Americans are able to move that has created political segregation. Even though we know much more now about the psychological effects of living in like-minded groups, the founders understood the dangers of self-segregation in ways we do not, and they sought to temper those influences. The research on the psychology of groups began more than one hundred years after the nation was formed. In scores of experiments, social psychologists learned about the power of groups to shape opinion and snuff out dissent. But without the benefit of science, the founders made an instinctual decision to embrace difference. It's not at all clear now that even with all of our knowledge, we are willing or able to make the same choice.

The residential segregation of the early-nineteenth-century boarding houses extended to the Capitol. The floor of Congress was intended to be the place where men with real cultural and regional diversity could meet, mingle, and come to a national consensus. But as Young tracked the votes in the early meetings of Congress, he found that the boarding houses and eating clubs became voting blocks. "For members who lived together, took their meals together, and spent most of their leisure hours together also voted together with a very high degree of regularity," Young discovered.
⁴
They were a nascent form of political parties—coalitions magnetized by regional interests and bound by residential solidarity. Young found that in three out of four House votes from 1807 to 1829, no more than one congressman would bolt from the boarding house or eating group caucuses. Members who lived in the same houses voted unanimously in just about half of the 116 roll call votes that Young analyzed over five sessions of Congress.
⁵
Young even found evidence that boarding house companions sat together on the floor of Congress. "They transformed a national institution into a series of sectional conclaves," he wrote.
⁶

A member who voted against his tablemates risked political retribution and, worse, social exile. Representative Stephen Van Rensselaer of New York initially agreed with his eating group to support William Crawford when the 1824 presidential election had to be decided in the House of Representatives. Van Rensselaer later crossed the boarding house, however, and voted for the eventual winner, John Quincy Adams. One of Van Rensselaer's boarding house fellows wrote that he avoided Van Rensselaer on the House floor after the vote and refused to shake his hand when the tearful legislator asked for understanding back at the boarding house. "Other gentlemen of the mess" also shunned the legislator after the vote. "We let him continue with us, sit at the same table with us, but we do not speak to him," the man wrote. "He is beneath anything but contempt ... He has betrayed those with whom he broke bread."
⁷

The block voting of the boarding houses thwarted compromise or even debate. President Thomas Jefferson observed that legislators "are not yet sufficiently aware of the necessity of accommodation & mutual sacrifice of opinion for conducting a numerous assembly." Legislators came to work "in a spirit of avowed misunderstanding, without the smallest wish to agree," Jefferson wrote.
⁸
Far from achieving the ideal of deliberation and debate—a mixing of representatives sent by diverse communities—these legislators lived, and voted, in a segregated fashion.

Was there something of the time that caused political segregation in the first Washington community? The cultural differences between nineteenth-century Bostonians and Kentucky frontiersmen were likely greater than the social gap today between San Franciscans and southern West Virginians. Or are there psychological effects common to like-minded groups regardless of the century? These aren't questions just for historians. They are real concerns today, and not only because we live in a country where nearly half the voters live in communities where presidential elections are preordained. Two hundred years after Washington, D.C., first emerged from the coastal marshes, the ideological boarding houses are back.

In 1990, a young conservative Republican from suburban Pittsburgh named Rick Santorum challenged a seven-term Democratic incumbent, Doug Walgren. Santorum wasn't given much of a chance to defeat Walgren. In an early October poll, Walgren led 41 to 25 percent. Over the last few weeks of the campaign, however, Santorum ran a simple television ad. It showed a large white house—Walgren's house. "There's something strange about this house," an announcer said. The house was "strange" because it was located in McLean, Virginia, "the wealthiest area of Virginia," and not suburban Pittsburgh. "Maybe that's why he voted for a pay raise seven times," Santorum's ad observed. Walgren countered that he had bought a house in Virginia to "keep the family together," but the damage had been done.
⁹
When Santorum unseated the Democrat, the social life of Washington, D.C., changed.
^*

Congress is keenly attuned to survival, and members learned a lesson from Santorum's victory. "Now you don't move your family to Washington," former Republican representative Vin Weber said in late 2004. "Now you live in sort of a dormitory with members of your own party." Former Democratic congressman David Skaggs said that Newt Gingrich advised his Republican colleagues in 1994 not to appear settled in the District, leading to the rise of what Skaggs described as "dormitory life" in the capital.
¹⁰
For example, California representative George Miller shares his house on Capitol Hill with New York senator Charles Schumer, Massachusetts representative Bill Delahunt, and Illinois senator Richard Durbin.
¹¹
In 2006, the combined household of Democrats scored higher than 90 percent on a voting ledger kept by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, a record more in lockstep than that of the messmates of the early 1800s. After midterm losses in 2006, the homes of former Republican House members went up for sale at 129, 131, 132, 135, and 137 D Street SE.
¹²

The new boarding house norms discourage social interaction among legislators, intensifying the city's growing ideological isolation. These days, "the interactions that occurred over many decades between members, after hours ... and on weekends and with their spouses, simply does not occur anymore," said Weber.
¹³
Fifty years ago, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat, served drinks at the end of the day to his Republican adversaries. Later, Republican leader Robert Michel, Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, and Republican Harold Collier shared a car on the long drive between Illinois and Washington, D.C.
¹⁴
Disputes were mediated by a culture that encouraged a kind of heterogeneous civility. Former University of Chicago Divinity School dean Martin Marty was an intern at a church in Washington in the late 1940s when a parishioner, a congressman from Illinois, scuffled with a congressman from Mississippi on the floor of the House. "The following Sunday, their two pastors had the two families together at some club," Marty told me. "Why? Because Monday they had to be talking to each other again. Well, now that doesn't happen."

Today, Weber noted, "they're on the last plane in before the first vote is cast on Tuesday, and the first plane out after the last vote on Thursday, and in between they sort of live in a dormitory, with people usually of the same party." Just as legislators brought the social segregation of their geographically isolated communities to the capital in 1800, many members of Congress today reflect the political segregation of American communities. "There is an analogue to road rage in the demeanor, the predispositions of newly elected members of Congress who are coming out of a society that is more self-isolating, more self-absorbed, less moderate in their day-to-day relationships," former congressman Skaggs said.
¹⁵

Social psychologists began studying the effects of groups on individuals more than one hundred years ago. That people living in homogeneous groups would be loath to compromise—or would even exhibit a bit of ideological "road rage"—would not surprise these researchers in the slightest.

It was Norman Triplett's enthusiasm for bicycle racing that, in 1897, led to the first experiment in social psychology. The Indiana University professor studied times compiled by the Racing Board of the League of American Wheelman for "over 2,000 racing wheelmen, all ambitious to make records." He found that riders racing against others posted faster times than when they pedaled only against the clock. Triplett gave all sorts of possible reasons why a group might have this effect on individual riders—suction, "brain worry," hypnotic suggestion—before settling on the Jules Verne—sounding theory of "dynamogenics." He proposed that the "bodily presence of another rider is a stimulus to the racer in arousing the competitive instinct." The presence of others on the racecourse freed up "nervous energy" that a solitary wheelman could not muster; the group served as an "inspiration to greater effort." To test his theory, Triplett rigged an experiment with fishing reels to determine whether children retrieved silk thread faster alone or in competition. As with the bicyclists, the ten- and eleven-year-old children worked the reels faster in the presence of others.
¹⁶

Triplett showed that groups change individuals in ways that individuals don't change on their own. And his results set off a century of experiments into the effects of group on individual, with results both surprising and disturbing. These studies found that people's opinions were deeply affected by groups, by notions of prestige, and by the opinions of majorities.