The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart
By Bill Bishop
ISBN-13: 9780618689264

The premise of Bill Bishop’s book is that the United States, through the formation of small, homogenous units, is being torn apart, as the book’s subtitle informs us. So, naturally, the author focuses on describing and giving examples of how the nation is more clustered now than it has been in recent decades. And while the scope as described is broad, the actual contents of the book were found surprisingly to be substantially more narrowly-focused.


For anyone interested in how this clustering applies to political science, this book is for you. The author spends the majority of the book describing the Big Sort from a political perspective, with plenty of examples based on data gathered and analyzed by well-known and admired statistician Robert Cushing. However, once you move beyond the discussion of the Big Sort in reference to political science, the book falls short.


There is some discussion of the Sort in relation to religion, which is interesting. But beyond that, the references to the Sort from perspectives such as wealth/income, ideas, education, race, etc. were considerably lacking. They were mentioned and discussed briefly (to give credit where credit is due) but the pages allocated to them pale in comparison to the allocation give to politics. The book reads almost as though it was initially written solely from a political perspective, and the addition of non-political justifications for his Sort theory was more of an afterthought.


In addition, near the end of the book, Bishop mentions that we have been sorted, or polarized, before and that these divisions have been temporary and ultimately resolved. However, he spends almost no time discussing the history past sorts and how they arose, what they were like, or how they dissipated. Nor does he spend much time considering the implications of the current sort or expectations of how or when it will resolve itself. I found myself waiting for this at the conclusion of the book, but instead the final chapter was reserved for further examples of political sorting from the 2008 election data (as if there wasn’t enough of that in the preceding chapters of the book)


Overall, I found the book lacking, and as a result unconvincing as to why the reader should care about any polarization we are undergoing as a country. Our cultural waxes and wanes along the spectrum of a variety of societal norms, seemingly and simply enough just due to human nature. I can’t help but think that if the book were written by someone with more a scientific background (such as in anthropology or sociology) or by an author like a Jared Diamond, rather than a pure journalist, that we may have found ourselves reading a more insightful and engaging book.