The Big Sort
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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 politics—from 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]. 751–77) 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 democracies—Ronald Inglehart's theory of Postmaterialism—has 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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†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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†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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†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.
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*"City" here and elsewhere in this book refers to a metr
opolitan area Technically, "city" is a political designation. Washington, D.C., for example, is limited to the District of Columbia. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, however, determines regions that effectively work as one economic unit. The "city" of Austin falls almost entirely within one county. The Austin metropolitan area includes five counties—a far more accurate description of the Austin economy than the antiquated and more arbitrary political designation.
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*Income inequality increased not only regionally but also among individuals. Beginning in 1969, the most common measure of family income inequality increased steadily. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2006), p. 6.
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*There are wheels within wheels in the Big Sort. Dora Costa, an MIT economist, argues that since college-educated people increasingly marry others with similar levels of education, they tend to congregate in larger cities where both husband and wife have a better chance of finding fulfilling work. In 1970, 29 percent of what Costa calls "power couples" lived in cities of more than 2 million people. By 1990, 50 percent of these highly educated pairs lived in large cities. The "bundling" of educated people has further exacerbated regional disparities in income. See Dora Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, "Power Couples- Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940–1990," Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000) 1287–1315. Also available at http://web.mit.edu/costa/www/bindqje8 pdf.
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*We compared the number of people who were ten to twenty-four years of age in 1990 with the number of those twenty to thirty-four years of age in 2000
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†In 2003, twenty-one cities had above-average output in technology-related industries and produced patents at above the national per capita rate. They were San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Jose, Phoenix, Denver, Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Washington, Rochester (Minnesota), Boise, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas.
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*For details, see Florida's 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class. From the middle of 2001 through the middle of 2002, Florida, Gary Gates, and Kevin Stolarick worked with Robert Cushing on a series of studies. Those studies resulted in a series of newspaper articles I wrote with Mark Lisheron for the Austin American-Statesman in 2002. See Bill Bishop and Mark Lisheron, "Cities of Ideas," Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/ content/specialreports/citiesofideas/.
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*In Making Democracy Work Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), Putnam explored the differences between thriving northern Italy and the dragging south. He concluded that the stronger economy and more efficient government in the north were results of the region's strong civic traditions. In speeches, I heard Putnam say that the number of choral societies in a city predicted how quickly the local government would answer the phone. The greater number of civic organizations (such as choral societies) made northern Italy's economy more vibrant and its government more efficient than those in the less connected south
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*Solow's paper "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function" led to his being awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics.
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*Jane Jacobs is best known for her book on urban design, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a work that undergirds today's New Urbanist movement. But most of Jacobs's time was spent producing her trilogy about economic growth The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and The Nature of Economies (2000).
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*More recently, MIT president Susan Hockfield noted that in semiconductor electronics, "the applied work transformed the fundamental research—not just the other way around" (speech, Brookings Institution, April 28, 2006).
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*Smart companies realized the need for face-to-face contact among workers. Businesses feared becoming the next Xerox, whose scientists developed pieces of the personal computer in the 1970s at the company's Palo Alto Research Center but failed to transmit that knowledge to the developmental engineers in Dallas or Xerox management in Stamford, Connecticut As a result, BMW opened its Research and Engineering Centre north of Munich, where it commingled its research, design, development, and production engineering staffs—and designed the office so that nobody would have to walk more than 50 meters (164 feet) to meet a coworker. So much for the triumph of technology over distance
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*We compared the twenty-one metropolitan areas with the most technology to the nation as a whole, using surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago The center's General Social Survey asked people whether they thought of themselves as liberal or conservative.
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* In Mark 16.15–18,the Great Commission supplies the basis for a more fundamentalist Christianity In this Gospel, Jesus orders his disciples to "proclaim the Good News to all creation." And then, "He who believes and is baptized will be saved, he who does not believe will be condemned." How will believers be identified? Jesus says that they will "cast out devils; they will have the gift of tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands and be unharmed."
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*Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine,
Flooding my soul with glory divine.
Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine,
Hallelujah' Jesus is mine
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*Race trumped religion in Green's polling Black Protestants were the most Democratic of the groups, followed closely by Jews and Latino Catholics.
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*Warren explained the overwhelming support for Bush at Saddleback by saying, "It's Orange County." But Bush received only 60 percent of the vote in that county in 2004
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*Disney shared many tricks of the trade in training sessions held for church leaders, Second Baptist Church minister Gary Moore told me. For instance, the entertainment company talked to trainees from megachurches about how popcorn and cotton candy smells are pumped onto Disney's "main streets" as a way to attract people into stores. Ministers have adopted this technique to lure people into church dinners or religious dinner theaters.
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* Martineau's article definitely fails any twenty-first-century measure of political correctness But the adman foresaw that the market was getting more complicated. Although all classes of people liked accumulating things, Martineau wrote, the growing middle class was most interested in buying experiences, "spending where one is left typically with only a memory" ("Social Class and Spending Behavior," p. 129). Forty-one years later, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore would write The Experience Economy. Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage.
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* In 2004, 34 percent of those buying Toyota Prius hybrid cars said that they purchased the vehicle because it "makes a statement about me." By 2007, that number had risen to 57 percent. Micheline Maynard, "Say 'Hybrid' and Many People Will Hear 'Prius,'" New York Times, July 4, 2007, p. A1.
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*Eight out of ten Americans told Yankelovich Partners in 2003 that they felt inundated by advertisements and, when given a chance, they reacted against unwanted commercial messages. Ten million Americans signed up for a national no-call list in the first four days the service was offered in 2003. See ]. Walker Smith, Ann Clurman, and Craig Wood, Coming to Concurrence. Addressable Attitudes and the New Model for Marketing Productivity (Evanston, IL Racom Communi
cations, 2005), pp. 17—18.
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† A Public Agenda poll released in January 2005 found sharp decreases in the percentage of Americans who said that "deeply religious" public officials might at times need to "make compromises" in their convictions in order to "get results while in government " "Religion and Public Life, 2000–2004. Survey Shows Religious Americans Less Likely to Support Compromise," January 23, 2005, http://www.publicagenda.org/research/research_reports_details.cfm?list=1.
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* The fear that people could use psychological techniques to gain control of the political system was described in Eugene Burdick's cold and eerie 1956 novel The Ninth Wave
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* There are product equivalents to the research on insurance sales Emanuel Rosen wrote in The Anatomy of Buzz that Birkenstocks made such a strong political statement that it "took the company years to convince mainstream customers to wear the sandals" (p. 64).
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*Similarly, Jewish migrants were attracted to the small village of Bethlehem in northern New Hampshire. The old resort town now has a Jewish film festival in the summer, and two of the five members of the town's board of selectmen are Jewish. See Sarah Schweitzer, "In N H. Town, a Cultural Widening," Boston Globe, June n, 2007, p. A1.
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*In Portland, according to Cortright, young people living within three miles of the center of town are more than twice as likely to have a college degree as those living in the suburbs. The same is true in Chicago and New York. In Phoenix, San Antonio, and Las Vegas, the distribution is reversed, with suburban young people being twice as likely to be college educated as their peers in the central city.
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†journalist Chris Anderson described this phenomenon, which he called "the long tail," from the producer's point of view in an article he wrote for Wired magazine in 2004. Anderson's metaphor was based on the statistical bell curve. His point was that digital technology, cheap transportation, and the Internet have made it possible and profitable to sell to the smaller markets found on the long tails of the bell curve. Anderson contended that there are huge volumes of sales within these smaller markets. From a consumer's point of view, however, it still makes sense to live around those with similar tastes. See Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail," Wired, October 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.