The Big Sort (61 page)
Authors: Bill Bishop
Tnbe.net,
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Trillin, Calvin,
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Tnplett, Norman,
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Trust-and crisis of competence,
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,
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n
, decline in public trust in industrialized world,
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â
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; decline in public trust in U.S.,
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â
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,
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â
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,
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,
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â
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, and political scandals,
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Tully, Carl,
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Twenty-minute rule of venture capital firms,
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TXU,
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UMWA. See United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)
Uncommitted voters,
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Understanding Church Growth
(McGavran),
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Unemployment,
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,
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.
See also
Employment; Poverty
Union College,
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United Methodist Women,
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,
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United Mine Workers of America (UMWA),
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n
,
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University of Michigan,
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â
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,
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â
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Urban Archipelago,
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Urban areas. See Cities
USA Patriot Act,
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Van Rensselaer, Stephen,
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Vanden Heuvel, Katrina,
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Venture capital firms,
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Verba, Sidney,
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Vermont,
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Vietnam War,
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â
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n
,
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Viguerie, Richard,
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Virginia lifestyle communities in,
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n
, and midterm election (2006),
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, political parties in,
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,
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; and presidential election (2004),
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, voting law violations in Wise County,
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Voltaire,
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Voter turnout-and partisanship,
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, and polarization,
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â
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, and presidential elections,
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â
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,
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. See
also
Midterm elections (2006), Presidential elections
Voting Rights Act (1965),
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Wages.
See
Employment, Income
Walgren, Doug,
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Wallis, Jim,
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Wanamaker, John,
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War on Poverty,
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Warren, Rick McGavran's influence on,
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,
The Purpose-Driven Church
by,
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The Purpose-Driven Life
by,
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,
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, and Saddleback Church in Orange County,
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â
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Warren, Robert Penn,
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Washington, D C. black migration to,
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,
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; creative-class workers in,
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, as high-tech city,
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n
; political segregation of,
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â
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,
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, racial makeup of population of,
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, softball league for congressional staff members in,
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.
See also
Congress
The Washington Community
(Young),
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â
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Washington County, Ore.,
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Washington Post,
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n
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â
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â
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n
,
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Washington state,
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â
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,
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. See
also
Seattle, Wash.
Watergate scandal,
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,
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,
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,
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Webb, Jim,
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Weber, Max,
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Weissman, Jonathan,
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Welles, Orson,
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n
Wesleyan University,
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West Germany,
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West Palm Beach, Fla.,
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West Virginia. Horan in,
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â
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,
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â
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,
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â
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, independent churches in,
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â
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,
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, Kanawha County textbook controversy in,
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â
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,
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â
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,
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; McDowell County in,
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; and presidential election (2000),
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n
, wages in,
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Westen, Drew,
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What's the Matter with Kansas?
(Frank),
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n
White flight,
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,
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,
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â
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Why Conservative Churches Are Growing
(Kelley),
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Whyte, William H,
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,
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â
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,
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Wikipedia,
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Williams College,
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n
Wisconsin,
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n
Wise County, Va.,
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Witt, G. Evans,
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Wohlgemuth, Arlene,
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â
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Women, in Congress,
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n
, and gender gap,
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n
,
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, and marriage gap,
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n
,
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â
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, and presidential election (2004),
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Women's rights,
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See also
Abortion
Woodfill, Jared,
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Woolston, Thomas,
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Working class. See Class; Employment, Labor unions and strikes
World Council of Churches,
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,
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,
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Wuthnow, Robert,
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Xerox,
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n
Yablonski, Jock,
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n
Yankelovich, Daniel,
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Yankelovich Partners,
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,
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n
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â
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Yoga,
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Young, James Sterling,
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Zuniga, Markos Moulitsas,
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,
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* Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, working in the 1940s, saw the same kind of policy-free connection between parties and people. In his book
Voting A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), Lazarsfeld wrote: "The preference for one party rather than another must be highly similar to the preference for one kind of literature or music rather than another, and the choice of the same political party every four years may be parallel to the choice of the same old standards of conduct in new social situations. In short, it appears that a sense of fitness is a more striking feature of political preference than reason and calculation" (p. 311).
***
* Dionne saw a much larger division in June 2007 after reviewing a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The Pew poll revealed that Republicans and Democrats had entirely different concerns and opinions about foreign and domestic policy The
Washington Post
columnist wrote- "Our two political parties and their candidates are living in parallel universes It's as if the candidates were running for president in two separate countries" (June 1, 2007, p. A15).
***
*The
Washington Post
editorial page has assured us that "American elections are growing ever less competitive while squeezing out moderates from both parties and polarizing politics. This is in part because politicians get to choose their voters, rather than the reverse, and so they draw districts that are reliably Republican or Democratic. The system corrodes democracy" (November 15, 2005). Juliet Eilpenn, who wrote
Fight Club Politics
, a fine book on Congress, claimed in the
Washington Post
that by "segregating voters according to party loyalty, redistricting has insulated incumbents of both parties and dulled competition" (November 13, 2005). Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in
The New Yorker
about the "difficulty of unseating incumbents, especially in congressional districts that, over the years, have been gerrymandered into single-party redoubts" (May 29, 2006). Elizabeth Drew, in the
New York Review of Books
, wrote that one reason for the ideological intransigence in Congress is the redistricting of the House, "in which both parties collude, and which has put more and more House seats out of contention" (February 12, 2004). And this is what I wrote in the
Austin American-Statesman
on October 24, 2004, before I fully understood the Big Sort "State legislatures have drawn representative districts that are increasingly one-sided. Because so many districts are dominated by a single party, primary elections determine who will sit in most legislatures, and primaries are usually won by the most ideologically strident candidate." After not one California congressional or state legislative district changed parties in 2004, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed an end to legislative redistricting, asking, "What kind of democracy is that?" (
San Diego Union-Tribune
, January 12, 2005).
***
* This is exactly what former House majority leader Tom DeLay did in the infamous 2003 redistricting escapade in Texas. Confident of reelection, DeLay reduced the Republican majority in his district to bolster the fortunes of a neighbor. Jeffrey Toobin in
The New Yorker
("The Great Election Grab," December 8, 2003) predicted that this redistricting decision could cost DeLay his seat, but we'll never know whether he was right. DeLay decided not to seek reelection in 2006. A Democrat won that seat, but only by 10 percentage points.
***
*Redistricting may not have had much to do with why incumbents did so well in the 1990s, but money certainly did. Even in districts where Democrats and Republicans lived in near equality, incumbents had a big advantage in fundraismg Abramowitz found that from the early 1990s to 2002, median spending by incumbents in competitive districts increased from $596,000 to $910,000. Median spending by challengers in those same districts fell from $229,000 to $198,000.
***
*In 1960, twenty-four of twenty-six real-life states had less competitive districts than Oppenheimer's state-of-states. By 2000, however, only four of the twenty-six similar-size states (Alabama, Maryland, Indiana, and Massachusetts) had less competitive districts on average than Oppenheimer's state-of-states.
***
â Others have come to similar conclusions. Keiko Ono at the University of Oklahoma found that there was little evidence that gerrymandering was responsible for the increase in noncompetitive districts. Ono wrote that there was a trend toward more like-minded districts, but it was part of a "longer, secular decline in the underlying competitiveness of House districts since the mid 1980s" ("Electoral Origins of Partisan Polarization in Congress: Debunking the Myth,"
Extensions. A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center
[Fall 2005]).
***
*Lapham quoted Powell's warning "Survival of what we call the free enterprise system lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations."
***
*In explaining why beer maker Joseph Coors put up $250,000 in seed money for the Heritage Foundation in 1973, Micklethwait and Wooldridge wrote: "Coors was prodded into action in 1971 by a 5,000-word memorandum from Lewis Powell, an old-style Southern Democratic attorney (and later Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court). Powell argued that capitalism was under broad attack from some of its most pampered productsâthe liberal intelligentsia. He accused the business class not just of appeasing its critics, but also of financing their anticapitalist activities, and urged them to stand up more vigorously for their interests" (pp. 77â78).
