The Big Sort (11 page)

You could split the country into smaller, homogeneous enclaves, geographies of similar "manners, sentiments, and interests." That was the antifederalists' position. Madison and Hamilton made the opposite argument—that heterogeneity was a source of strength. They argued that the mixture of differing people in a large republic would both protect the new nation from factions and provide a better government. Hamilton wrote that economic diversity would "help control the problem of majority faction by diminishing the most powerful engine of faction in America—interests grounded in geographic/occupational distinctions." He predicted that as the economy expanded, it would generate a larger educated elite free from particular economic interests.
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Madison proposed that enlarging the nation would water down local passions. The Virginian felt that a nation should be of sufficient size to contain multiple interests, large enough that no single group could gain a majority.
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Insulation from different ideas was a danger to democracy, he wrote. Isolated groups were seedbeds of extremism—just as the law of group polarization would confirm two hundred years later. The federalists believed that the best antidote to factions was to see that communities weren't cut off from new and sometimes conflicting ideas. And the best hedge against extremism was the constant mixture of opposing opinion.
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Early in the constitutional debate, the framers discussed whether citizens should be guaranteed a "right to instruct" their representatives. It was a fundamental question of democracy: Should representatives be required to reflect, or "channel," the opinions of their constituents, or should elected officials vote their best judgment for the good of the country? Should legislators be a "mirror" of the people they represented, as the antifederalists urged, or should Congress be a place where representatives deliberated before they decided, as the federalists argued?
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The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights rejected the "right to instruct" and adopted instead a government of deliberation and compromise within a heterogeneous legislature. Cass Sunstein sees the rejection of the "right to instruct" as an explicit example of the framers' realization that like-minded communities could produce extreme politics, a tendency that would be weakened by debate and understanding. Sunstein quotes founder Roger Sherman's argument:

 

The words [of the right to instruct amendment] are calculated to mislead the people, by conveying an idea that they have a right to control the debates of the Legislature. This cannot be admitted to be just, because it would destroy the object of their meeting. I think, when the people have chosen a representative, it is his duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult, and agree with them on such acts as are for the general benefit of the whole community. If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation.
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Quick action by a legislature is "oftener an evil than a benefit," Hamilton claimed. It is the "jarring of parties" that "often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority."
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The "constant clashing of opinions" that Brutus feared wasn't to be avoided, according to the federalists. It was to be sought after. Sunstein told me that the most profound insight of the men who framed the Constitution "was to see heterogeneity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue. I think that was the most important theoretical contribution the framers made. And at the best moments in our history, that's what's happened."

The federalists were able to impose their cooperative ideal on the new nation's government, but they couldn't repeal the laws of group polarization or the power that majorities wield over minorities. Over the past fifty years, political scientists have proved that homogeneous communities become self-propelled engines of partisanship, squelching dissent and emboldening majorities. Warren Miller used survey data to examine the 1952 presidential vote (Dwight Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson) in counties with overwhelming party majorities. He found that the presence of large partisan majorities had the effect of dampening turnout among citizens in the political minority. Rather than buck the majority and risk social sanction, citizens in the minority simply stayed away from the polls. They didn't vote. The minority party suffered in lopsided counties while the majority party increased its turnout—a self-reinforcing social mechanism that Miller feared could damage the country's two-party system.
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In communities with large political majorities, people tend to give up battling over ideas. As with the boarding houses of the early nineteenth century, a vote becomes more an affirmation of the group than an expression of a civic opinion.

A nearly even mix of Republicans and Democrats increases voter turnout, according to Notre Dame political scientist David Campbell. People are more interested in the election. They are motivated to campaign for their candidates. In landslide counties, however, there is an entirely different social dynamic.
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Political minorities in these places vote less. Minorities in heavily majority counties not only avoid the voting booth, but they also withdraw from all forms of public life, including volunteering. People in the majority vote in large numbers—but not because they feel that their votes are important to the outcome. Instead, they want to support the community, to show allegiance to the majority. "In places where people share opinions, you are more likely to find tighter norms," Campbell told me. "And that's because, to put it bluntly, in these communities people can enforce norms. So if you haven't voted, you feel a little bit ashamed."

Furthermore, as Democrats and Republicans separate geographically, they become more distrustful of one another. Robert Huckfeldt, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, has found that as communication between members of the parties diminishes, the two sides come to see each other as more extreme or radical. Republicans describe Democrats as more liberal than Democrats see themselves; and Democrats paint Republicans as more conservative than Republicans would describe their political preferences. "Polarized politics is not simply a matter of the actual positions adopted by Democrats and Republicans," Huckfeldt wrote in 2005. "It is also a direct consequence of the perceptions each side holds of the other, and these perceptions depend in important ways on the patterns of communication among and between citizens holding various political preferences."
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Not knowing many real Democrats, Republicans come to believe that all Democrats are more radical than they really are. And Democrats living in homogeneous communities come to believe that all Republicans are fiendishly right-wing. Knowing a real-life Republican might settle the nerves of a Democrat. In fact, exposure to a wide array of views increases tolerance.
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But Americans are increasingly unlikely to find themselves in mixed political company.

Even if Americans don't live among those from another party as much as they did a generation ago, they certainly have increasing access through the media and the Internet to all manner of opinions and points of view. The choice is there, but there is a media corollary to the phenomenon of assortative mating. Given unprecedented media choices, people self-segregate into their own gated media communities. In cities (most outside the United States) where a variety of newspapers reflect an array of political points of view, people don't buy several newspapers to learn what others are thinking. Instead, they buy the one that best fits their political proclivities. "They read one newspaper or the other based on what they agree with," University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz told me. "It's one of the main problems with choice; we choose to be with people similar to ourselves."

A Stanford University professor and a
Washington Post
reporter conducted an experiment to test how Republicans and Democrats viewed news from a variety of broadcast news outlets. Professor Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin took news stories reported by MSNBC and randomly labeled them as coming from Fox News, CNN, National Public Radio (NPR), or the BBC. Participants in the study were given a list of headlines marked by the corporate logo of the four news organizations, and then they were asked to choose which stories they would like to read. Democrats preferred CNN and NPR. Republicans flocked to the stories they thought came from Fox (even though these stories were no different from those purportedly produced by NPR, the BBC, or CNN). Having a Fox label on a story tripled the hits from Republican readers. Meanwhile, the chances that a Republican would pick a story labeled NPR or CNN were only one in ten. The polarized reading habits of American partisans were strongest when they were asked to choose stories about national politics or the war in Iraq, but Republicans even preferred to read Fox's stories about possible vacation destinations.
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The exercise with Fox and the other news organizations is almost an exact replica of Muzafer Sherif's old experiment that asked Harvard students to judge the literary worth of passages that were labeled as being written by a variety of great authors. In this updated version, however, the test wasn't of the subjects' attachment to these literary greats but to political points of view.

The phenomenon uncovered in the news study is more insidious than readers or viewers just seeking to be soothed or reassured by a familiar point of view. People simply don't believe what they see or hear if it runs counter to their existing beliefs. "It's basic social psychology lab research," Robert Baron told me. "You show people who favor Israel and those who favor Palestine the same news coverage of the intifada. Both groups think the news media is biased against them. There is a differential evaluation. They both see the same stuff, but they draw very different conclusions."
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Even if both sides of an issue are presented, people don't hear or don't remember arguments that counter their initial opinions. University of Kansas professor Diana Carlin has studied how Americans listen to presidential debates. She has found that voters watch debates in order to reinforce what they already believe. They listen for the parts of the debate that favor their candidate, she told me, and tune out the parts where their candidate does a poor job. This is especially true when people watch debates with like-minded companions.

The human inclination to find overwhelming support for an existing opinion within a speech or a news article is known as confirmation bias. Two people with opposite opinions listen to the same report, and both hear confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. The reaction seems almost automatic, and in a sense it may be. Psychologists at Emory University tested thirty men in the months before the 2004 presidential election. Half were strong Democrats, and half were strong Republicans. The men were hooked to MRI machines and then asked to listen to and assess clearly contradictory statements from George W. Bush and John Kerry. The brain scans showed that as the subjects processed what the candidates said, they essentially turned off the sections of the brain associated with reasoning. Meanwhile, the scans revealed lots of activity in the parts of the brain associated with emotions, pleasure, and judgments about morality. "We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," psychologist Drew Westen said. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up ... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and [the] activation of positive ones."
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There is nothing new in these tendencies. "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it," Francis Bacon wrote in
Novum Organum
(1620). When Paul Lazarsfeld studied Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940 presidential election, he encountered all these same proclivities. Voters "somehow contrive to select out of the passing stream of stimuli those by which they are more inclined to be persuaded," he wrote. "So it is that the more they read and listen, the more convinced they become of the Tightness of their own position." The more partisan the citizen, the less likely he or she was to listen to contrary arguments. Then as today, there was much public huffing and puffing about the need for free and open channels of discussion in a democracy. But, Lazarsfeld noted, "we find that consumers of ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls against alien notions."
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In 1940, Lazarsfeld was disturbed that half of all citizens had decided how they would vote in the fall election as soon as the candidates had been chosen in the party conventions that summer. In January 2004, however, even before the first Democratic primary, the Bush campaign figured that 92 percent of the American electorate had decided how it would vote in November.
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(As late as 2006, true uncommitted voters hovered between 6 and 10 percent, according to University of California, San Diego, professor Gary Jacobson.)
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Meanwhile, communities have grown more politically segregated since Lazarsfeld conducted his studies. And as people are less likely to get their news from a common source, the tremendous choice of information offered by cable television and the Internet has separated people further.

Nearly sixty years of social psychological research confirms that as political majorities grow within communities, minorities retreat from public life. Majorities have their beliefs reinforced by seeing and hearing their inclinations locally repeated and enhanced. Self-reinforcing majorities grow larger, while isolated and dispirited minorities shrink. Majorities gain confidence in their opinions, which grow more extreme over time. As a result, misunderstanding between Republicans and Democrats grows as they seclude themselves.