The Big Sort (41 page)

Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn't. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view, Mutz wrote. Americans who are poor and nonwhite are more likely than those who are rich and white to be exposed to political disagreement. In the United States today, people who haven't graduated from high school have the most diverse groups of political discussion mates. Those who have suffered through graduate school have the most homogeneous political lives.
¹¹

Many Americans have choices in how they live, where they settle, what news they read, and whom they associate with. But that increasing opportunity to choose has had the perverse effect of decreasing contrary political discussion. There have been attempts to reintroduce debate and deliberation into American politics, to revive the face-to-face democracy of the town meeting. Political scientist James Fishkin has been tireless in running "deliberative polls," where groups of citizens are brought together for a day to learn about and discuss a public issue. He and his colleague Bruce Ackerman have even proposed a national holiday called Deliberation Day, a time before each national election when every citizen would receive a small stipend for attending a political discussion led by trained volunteers within a neighborhood. In the best tradition of American democracy, Deliberation Day would make voting truly an informed choice, as citizens would learn about the issues of the day and then debate with others across boundaries of social and political division.
¹²

But what would happen on a real Deliberation Day in the segmented, isolated, and like-minded communities created by the Big Sort? In 2005, David Schkade and Cass Sunstein recruited sixty-three Colorado citizens ages twenty to seventy-five, half from Boulder and half from Colorado Springs.
¹³
In 2004, 67 percent of the people in Boulder County had voted for John Kerry. In the same election, 67 percent of the people in El Paso County (Colorado Springs) had voted for George W. Bush. Schkade and Sunstein screened participants—in order to pick liberals from Boulder and conservatives from Colorado Springs—and then measured the individual opinions of these citizens about three issues: global warming, gay marriage, and affirmative action. True to form, the Boulder citizens were initially more liberal on these issues than the participants from Colorado Springs. Schkade and Sunstein then divided the citizens from the two cities into batches of six—making ten groups, five from each city. The groups were then asked to discuss the three issues, to deliberate, and then to come to a consensus on the same questions each participant had been asked individually.

The results were not encouraging for those who look to rational community discussion as an antidote to polarization. The ten groups discussed the three issues and came to a consensus in twenty-five out of thirty cases. In nineteen of these twenty-five cases, however, the consensus opinion of the group was more extreme than the prediscussion opinions of the individuals in the group. The Boulder groups' consensus opinions were more liberal than the opinions they had expressed as individuals. The Colorado Springs groups' opinions were more conservative.
^*
As the law of group polarization would predict, each like-minded collection of people became extreme after discussion. Moreover, the differences
within
the groups narrowed. Discussion didn't spark freethinking. Instead, each homogeneous community concluded its deliberations with greater conformity. People who were already like-minded grew more alike.

Before the discussion, Schkade and Sunstein wrote, "there was considerable overlap between many individuals in the two different cities. After deliberation, the overlap was much smaller." The participants' initial beliefs had been amplified by their exposure to like-minded others, and they had grown more polarized after only two hours of discussion.
¹⁴

Back at Bluer, John Musick and I left the church basement and walked past a hall where a Hispanic Pentecostal congregation was holding a service. The preacher was romping, stomping, and praising the Lord. "They really throw down, don't they?" Musick said with a smile. We went to a room upstairs and began talking about the church and politics with a dozen or so members of the Bluer congregation. Many of Bluer's members are refugees from strict fundamentalist congregations, and they relish the open, apolitical atmosphere of their basement services. "I grew up in an Assemblies of God church, and it was rigid," said Anna. "People were telling me how to think, how to dress, how to vote. Here I can state my opinion and not have people jump down my throat." Jason has long blond hair and a beard. He grew up as a Baptist, but, he said, "they wouldn't have me now; I'm a rocker." (His band is Fastest Turbo Fire Engine.) The Baptists were good at telling him a lot of "thou shalts and thou shalt nots," Jason said, "but I was never taught how to have a relationship." You hear that word, "relationship," quite a bit from emerging church members. "A lot of our core people have been ruined to just going to church and listening to a message, having a shallow relationship with other people in the congregation, believing what they are told," Musick explained. "They are ruined to that sort of thing. The relationship trumps all."

The "Bible says" certainty of the megachurch and the stale rituals of traditional denominations have bred a deep questioning among emerging church members. "They are highly suspicious of institutional religion," said Eddie Gibbs, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of a book about the emerging church. "They don't want celebrities or performers. They want engagement, involvement. They want participation. They see church not as a weekly gathering, but as a community to which you belong."
¹⁵
And they don't expect the church to be the source of answers about life, politics, or even faith. Church is a place to ask questions and explore. "I think there are people who just don't think like moderns think," Musick said. "A typical modern thing would be, 'You be good and you pray, and God will answer your prayers.' Now, people who have a more postmodern leaning say, 'Sometimes that may work, but you cannot say that is a rule.' We are no longer taking a formulaic approach to faith. The king has no clothes."

The emerging church has traded in the locked-down certainty of the conservative church—the modern church—for doubt. And that doubt extends to civic life. Mike Cosper at Sojourn in Louisville talked about how ambivalent his congregation feels about questions of politics and public policy—and about the century-old division between Public and Private Protestantism. "To be honest, we're in a place where we are struggling with how to do that," Cosper answered when I asked him about politics. "The whole thing with politics anymore is that it is so polarized. And it's extremely polarized within the church. It seems to me the two streams that exist are the socially conscious stream that says the Gospel is the good news to the poor and the downhearted. The political slant becomes liberal, to support welfare and all the programs. The other slant is more fundamentalist Christian that interprets everything through the lens of morality and family values and the world's going to hell in a handbasket and we need to hold on to these values as long as we can. And what bothers us is, when we look at it, the issues seem way more gray. When it comes to politics, they seem
extremely
gray and extremely complicated. And we're not at a place where we feel comfortable as pastors saying you need to think this or that, vote for this person or support that. Because the issues seem so complicated."

People who think that religion is far too certain and that it plays too much of a leading role in politics will no doubt be heartened by Musick's questioning and Cosper's caution. But neutrality has its own price. Cosper told me that Louisville had been roiled by a police shooting that killed a young man. Civil rights leaders planned a march through the city, and the religious community was asked to join the gathering. "We wrestled with marching," Cosper said. "But the choice we made was we didn't advocate it institutionally." There were people on both sides of the issue at Sojourn, Cosper said. More fundamentally, he added, on these kinds of political questions, "you can't come down on one side or another often because you don't have Scriptural warrant to ... I'm exhausted by how complex it seems. I feel exhausted by the tendency toward polarization, by things getting heated and out of control. I personally feel like I lack the wisdom." One hundred years after the split between Public and Private Protestantism, there's a third option: questioning, watching, and waiting.

There is nothing meek or apathetic about Cosper, Musick, or the people who attend Sojourn and Bluer. But one consequence of seeing both sides of an issue is hesitancy. The price of moderation in politics can be passivity. This response runs counter to our ninth-grade civics version of American democracy: as citizens come to understand both sides of an issue, they're emboldened by knowledge and set off to engage in the exciting work of self-government. That's not the way it works. Cosper had it right: hearing both sides of an issue—and seeing the gray in most questions—is the ticket to withdrawal. Paul Lazarsfeld was one of the first to notice the connection between partisanship and participation when he studied two presidential elections in the 1940s from the vantage points of small towns in New York and Ohio.
¹⁶
He discovered that partisans voted with certainty and with enthusiasm, while those who were tugged by both sides were less likely to cast ballots. Political scientists have since found again and again that partisanship increases participation. Partisans are the ones who vote and who donate to and work on campaigns. Indeed, the "relationship between voter turnout and political partisanship is among the most robust findings in social science."
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Although high voter turnout had always been considered consummately good, Lazarsfeld discovered that the rigid partisanship that spurred more people to the polls was in truth a mixed blessing. "Extreme interest goes with extreme partisanship and might culminate in rigid fanaticism that could destroy democratic processes if generalized throughout the community," Lazarsfeld wrote. The political system required flexibility. It demanded both partisans to invigorate politics and moderates to heal the nation after a divisive struggle. The civics texts were right: the system needed those who felt strongly about politics. But Lazarsfeld believed that a "lack of interest by some people is not without its benefits, too." Having a good number of people who didn't care much about politics was just as vital to democratic government as having the voting booths filled with eager supporters of both sides. Indifferent citizens leavened the system, gave it suppleness, just what the partisan personality lacked. Apathy gave politicians room to maneuver, compromise, make deals, smother grease on the gears of representative democracy. Having people who didn't give a flip about politics helped hold society together and cushioned the nation from the shock of disagreement and change. A democratic government needed a variety of political appetites, Lazarsfeld concluded, a "balance between total political war between segments of the society and total political indifference to group interests of that society."
¹⁸

Diana Mutz has described this standoff as the paradox of democracy. We want citizens who are both active and deliberative. We want voters who are partisan and a society that allows compromise and conciliation. Simply put, we want what doesn't exist: reasonable citizens who are willing to listen to the other side but who are also excited about politics. Mutz has weighed the relative benefits of participation and deliberation and come down firmly on the side of indifference. There is no discernible benefit to increasing the percentage of people who vote, she wrote. Despite the commonplace admonition that low levels of voting threaten democratic government, there has been no measurable good associated with high levels of voting. But there are clear benefits to increasing conversation across ideological divides. The good produced when people stop to hear the other side is tolerance.
¹⁹

Lazarsfeld realized that the attributes of partisanship and indifference didn't coexist within the same person. For that reason it was politically healthy for a society to foster a mix of people. Nothing could be more destructive than a society filled with knowledgeable, active, and opinionated "ideal citizens," Lazarsfeld warned. "We need some people who are active in a certain respect, others in the middle, and still others passive."
²⁰
The old sociologist was writing long before the Big Sort. Since the 1970s, we have been busy creating exactly the society Lazarsfeld cautioned against. More of us are partisan, and more of us are living in ever-smaller communities of interest, places that nurture our certainty and feed our extremism. Tolerance—and its progeny in the political world, compromise—were the victims of late-twentieth-century politics.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with reporters who had served time in Kentucky. We were all older, white, and male—of an age that we knew the same politicians who plied their trade in the state capital of Frankfort. We swapped stories, and when it was Bill Greider's turn, he began talking about Bert Combs. At one time, Greider was the assistant managing editor of the
Washington Post
and then became an author (
Secrets of the Temple
), but in the 1960s, he covered Frankfort for a now-defunct daily newspaper, the
Louisville Times.
Combs is a colossal figure in Kentucky political history. He was a squeaky-voiced lawyer born in the Kentucky mountains who was elected governor and, later, appointed by Lyndon Johnson to be a federal appeals court judge. Combs was an idealist, and he was a fixer. He built the first modern road into his beloved mountains, and he represented a coal company that ran a mine so recklessly that it exploded twice and killed twenty-six men. He shilled for industry, and he represented a group of poor schools, a case that ended with the state supreme court ordering the largest increase in spending on public education in Kentucky history. He was the classic mountain attorney, said one acquaintance: "He wants to make you cry from both eyes. One eye for the pain and the other eye on the merits."