The Big Sort Read Online Free

surprising, perhaps, that people in marketing picked up on these shifts long before political analysts did. Political writers prefer to look at demographic groupings when interpreting elections. How did young white women vote? What happened with union workers? Marketing specialists learned that these kinds of demographic features have less and less meaning. Increasingly, they see the United States sorting itself into communities of interest—enclaves defined more by similar beliefs or ways of life than by age, employment, or income. Chris Riley is a Portland, Oregon, marketing expert who has worked with Nike, Microsoft, and now Apple. At Nike and Apple, Riley said, marketing departments are giving up on traditional demographic designations because they don't fit the way people live. "I'm not allowed to use market research information, by dictate of [Apple founder] Steve Jobs," Riley told me. "They don't trust it." They don't trust it because simple demography doesn't get at the way people live today. "There is no [demographic] category for somebody who shapes his entire life around his concern for the environment," Riley explained.
    Marketing analyst J. Walker Smith described the same phenomenon as extreme and widespread "self-invention," a desire to shape and control our identities and surroundings. Technology, migration, and material abundance all allow people to "wrap themselves into cocoons entirely of their own making," Smith wrote. 9 People are unwilling to live with trade-offs, he said. So they are "re-creating their environments to fit what they want in all kinds of ways, and one of the ways is they are finding communities that fit their values—where they don't have to live with neighbors or community groups that might force them to compromise their principles or their tastes."
    It would be a dull country, of course, if every place were like every other. It's a joy that I can go to the Elks lodge pool in Austin to see the H2H0S, a feminist synchronized swimming troupe accompanied by a punkish band, or that I can visit the Zapalac Arena outside my old hometown of Smithville, Texas, to watch a team calf roping. Those sorts of differences are not only vital for the nation's democratic health, but they also are essential for economic growth. Monocultures die.
    What's happened, however, is that ways of life now have a distinct politics and a distinct geography. Feminist synchronized swimmers belong to one political party and live over here, and calf ropers belong to another party and live over there. As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups. We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life.
    There are no easy-as-pie remedies for this dark side of the Big Sort. Time brings change, of course. Issues will arise that cut across political divisions. Providing health care for all Americans is one of those problems with solutions that don't fit within the ideological fields fenced off by either party. A particular politician may be able to bring the country together for a time. But the Big Sort isn't primarily a political phenomenon. It is the way Americans have chosen to live, an unconscious decision to cluster in communities of like-mindedness. Maybe another generation will construct communities that look very different from these. Indeed, a generational shift is already taking place. But this fractured, discordant country