The Big Sort (34 page)

In the past, when the nation had failed to reach a consensus, the custom was for local governments to strike out on their own. In the early part of the twentieth century, Progressive majorities in the Midwest by-passed a polarized Congress and enacted laws governing railroad rates, limiting corruption, and promoting conservation.
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The same thing is happening now. With Congress more polarized than at any time since the end of World War II, people see no sense waiting for the national fifty-fifty division to resolve itself. After all, one of the advantages of living in a like-minded community is that you can live under the laws you and your neighbors want. The federal stalemate has touched off an eruption of activity by state and local governments—federalism that doesn't sleep.

Abortion
. South Dakota's legislature made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion for any reason except to save the life of a pregnant woman. (This stark law was defeated in a 2006 statewide referendum; 56 percent of South Dakota's voters cast ballots against the bill.)

Birth Control
. In early 2006, while the federal Food and Drug Administration dithered over the legality of the "morning-after" birth control pill, more than sixty bills were filed in state legislatures to settle the issue locally. "The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of 'red states' and 'blue states' in the past two presidential elections," reported Marc Kaufman in the
Washington Post,
"with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones."
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Gay Unions
. Very blue Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, and (also blue) Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and California allow some form of same-sex unions. Meanwhile, half of the states have banned them.

Guns
. Florida passed the "Stand Your Ground" act in 2005, which allows citizens of that red state to kill in self-defense without first attempting to flee. By mid-2006, fifteen states had enacted similar laws. Nearly all were Republican-leaning states in the South and Midwest.
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Education
.

• California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the California legislature that would have prohibited textbooks or school instruction that "reflect adversely" on gays and lesbians.
  
• After 6,000 people signed a petition asking for an elective high school course on the Bible, the Odessa, Texas, board of education added the course to the curriculum.
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• Meanwhile, students in Philadelphia's public schools are required to take a course in black history.
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• In 2007, the Federal Way school district in exurban Seattle banned the showing of Al Gore's global warming documentary,
  An Inconvenient Truth.
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The Environment
. After the Bush administration decided it had no authority to regulate greenhouse gases, blue America sued. A coalition of twelve states—all but one of which voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections—two bright blue cities, and thirteen environmental groups asked the courts to intervene. In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the states and ordered the federal government to begin regulating the gases that are warming the planet. Meanwhile, in mid-2006, ten northeastern states were negotiating caps for greenhouse gases. California, Oregon, and Washington were setting up similar ceilings on the Democratic Pacific Coast.
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And cities—the urban voters who largely supported Al Gore and John Kerry—are "racing ahead of the federal government in setting carbon emission targets and developing strategies to deal with climate change," according to a story in the
Washington Post.
By June 2007, 522 U.S. mayors had agreed to meet the goals set out in the Kyoto Protocol, including those from deeply Democratic Boston, New York, Boulder (Colorado), Seattle, Portland (Oregon), and Austin.
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The most popular tactic in the age of political segregation is to start locally, with overwhelming majorities, and work your way up. Andrew McDonald, the Connecticut state senator who sponsored a successful gay union bill, said that the state's action sent "a powerful message to the rest of the country ... Everybody understood that this was not just a Connecticut issue, that this was going to serve as a platform for many other discussions and debates around the country." One of the ironies of political segregation is that it's turned Democrats into the party of states' rights, while Republicans, when they still had their congressional majorities, were more inclined toward federal mandates. "State sovereignty, once the discredited viewpoint of segregationists, is now becoming the battle cry of mainstream liberals," wrote political scientist James Gimpel. "Conservatives, for their part, are now citing the constitutional views of government centralizers they once despised."
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After the federal government allowed only limited kinds of stem cell research and Congress was unable to resolve the dispute between researchers and the religious right, the states stepped in. California voted $3 billion for stem cell research, and other blue states—Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut—provided funding, too. Stem cell research is now clearly a Democratic cause, but that seems more a consequence of divided politics than of either ideology or biomedical research. After all, the first town to place limits on DNA research was Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the most liberal cities in the United States nearly outlawed genetic research in 1977. "Originally, you evaluated recombinant DNA technology the same way you would evaluate a new kind of pesticide or a large dam," Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in San Francisco, told me in 2005. When the religious right came out against embryonic stem cell research, however, it created "this reflexive response to that religious point of view. What's happened is fascinating."

The opposition of the religious right and President George W. Bush turned stem cell research into a Democratic bugle call, but the sides could have been reversed. After all, without the opposition of the religious right, isn't it possible that the $3 billion California stem cell initiative would have been couched as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and Frankenstein research? Instead, the stem cell initiative became a surrogate for the presidential contest between Bush and Kerry. In August 2004, a Field poll found that two-thirds of the people who supported Kerry also supported the stem cell initiative. Two-thirds of those who said they favored Bush said they would vote against the proposition.
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California's position on stem cell research also sent a broader signal about the state's culture and the kind of people who would find comfort within its borders. It said that California is not dominated by Bush Republicans or the religious right. Those kinds of signals affect decisions about migration, which in turn increase social homogeneity. People want to live in places where their work and their point of view are respected.

In 2005, the Texas legislature was considering a bill to limit stem cell research in the state. One medical school dean told legislators that if they passed the bill, Texas would hear a "giant sucking sound" as scientists from Houston decamped to California. I drove to the huge medical research complex that fills blocks of downtown Houston, and the researchers I talked with there were naturally worried that Texas would outlaw their work. But that wasn't their greatest concern. More than the money or the law was a sense that the scientists didn't want to live where they weren't wanted. "If your state is going to make it miserable for you not just in the absence of support but in the presence of political disdain, people are going to leave," said Michael Mancini, a research scientist at the Baylor College of Medicine. "If science is seen as evil, with monsters, it means we'll have to go elsewhere."

In 2002, researchers at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan surveyed scientists about constraints on their work. The scientists were concerned, of course, that new laws could end entire lines of research. But the survey found that they were most affected by "informal constraints," the sense that society disapproved of what they were doing. The researchers realized there was such a thing as "forbidden knowledge" in some societies. They were less concerned about laws and more worried about what the press would say about them or how the community where they lived would react to their research. They were much more concerned about social sanctions than legal ones. "I would like to lunatic-proof my life as much as possible," one scientist said.
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So would we all. But these days, one town's lunatic is another town's civic leader.

Sheila Kiscaden took me to an Italian restaurant across from the Mayo Clinic where we had an unusual lunch for the year 2005. We ate in mixed company. There were two Republican politicians, one Democrat turned independent, and Kiscaden, who by this time was a Republican turned independent thinking about turning Democrat. They had all lived through the transition from a more congenial kind of Minnesota politics to what they had in 2005—and none was pleased with the change. Tim Penny was a pro-life Democratic congressman who eventually ran for governor as an independent and lost. Duane Benson and Dave Bishop were Republican legislators, both more moderate than the current party average. (Benson was pro-choice, which earned him the Kiscaden treatment; his local party refused to endorse him in 1988.) The four poked at a spaghetti bar lunch and listed the ways they thought they had been shunted out of the political process.

Tim Penny summed up the situation this way: "Here's what's happening. You have districts that are self-selecting. More and more liberal-leaning and Democratic-leaning people want to live in this neighborhood or this city, and similarly the suburbs are being populated by people who are leaning more conservative. But a small percentage of these people are dominating the party and determining the candidates in these districts. The nature of the town is that they still vote for the Republican candidate, but it's not the Republican who broadly represents the more moderate constituency. As long as you keep the red-hot base happy, everybody thinks everything is fine."

"And if you want to buck that red-hot base," chimed in Duane Benson, "you've got work. It's much easier to vote your way back in by taking care of that red-hot base and then work [to the middle] from there."

Piece by piece, what the four described didn't sound so bad. What's wrong with living around people you like? And isn't the essence of democracy to be involved, to be passionate about politics and policy? But it was the cumulative effect that was so sinister. They portrayed a self-reinforcing cycle that squeezed people out of politics—people like themselves. The Big Sort was making places more ideologically homogeneous, and in the process, it was making people more extreme. There were fewer voters with mixed, nonpartisan relationships. Organizations with membership based on fellowship and community had been disappearing since the mid-1960s, replaced by those angry good old boys rounded up by the NRA who had greeted Kiscaden at her party caucus. And not only were communities more like-minded, but Republicans and Democrats also were more internally aligned: to be a member of a party meant agreeing up and down the line on a grocery list of issues. Politics had become so tribal that people were changing their minds about fundamental issues in order to conform to what it meant to be a Republican or a Democrat. So politicians found that if they didn't satisfy one "red-hot" portion of the party, they risked losing the votes of all who considered themselves good and true Democrats or loyal Republicans.

These four politicians looked tired, survivors whose talents for politics had become obsolete. They found themselves living in a political ice age. Benson recalled how he and a Democratic legislator had put together the rarest of laws, a compromise on abortion. "The bill would have reduced the number of abortions, but it would have also guaranteed rights," Benson said. "We thought naively that we had the formula. It was a wonderful experience, and we went through the whole process and we got two votes. His and mine. Because everybody else was pushed to their base." Penny, suddenly excited, said, "Now
get
this. Their proposal would have measurably decreased the number of abortions in Minnesota,
and
it would have not made abortion illegal. But they couldn't get support from either extreme." There was a bit of silence, and then Benson said, "What we have today is idea segregation."

Dave Bishop said that he used to get much of his best work done at receptions, where he could talk with Democrats and form cross-party coalitions. But legislators don't mix much anymore, he said. Ethics laws have cut down on the number of social gatherings, and besides, the two sides don't have much to talk about. They don't like each other. Kiscaden agreed. "The legislative system was designed for deliberation, to take people away from their homes and put them in one place to talk to each other and work it out," she said. "But that only works as long as people really trust their representatives." And people don't trust anymore, said Bishop. Legislation in St. Paul is "just pounded through" by the majority, he said. "It's a perversion of the strength of the legislative process."

Kiscaden and I walked across the street and into the Mayo Clinic. Massive swirling blue and gold glass constellations by artist Dale Chihuly dangled over one staircase. We roamed about the clinic, and Kiscaden told me about the "coffee and conversation" meetings she had organized in Rochester. More than one hundred people would turn out on a Saturday morning just to talk about their town and state. One January, she held a "Beyond Bickering" seminar for state legislators. About 75 out of 201 showed up.

Kiscaden eventually joined the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and in early 2006 agreed to run for lieutenant governor on a ticket with a moderate Democrat, Kelly Doran. The campaign never gained traction; Doran and Kiscaden dropped out before the primary. Kiscaden said that she wouldn't run for her old seat in the state senate, and so, for the time being, she is out of politics—not because she wanted out, but because she really doesn't have a place. Her situation isn't that unusual.