Reddit reviews The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart

An insightful read. It is a short abstract, it seems, from the recent book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, presumably also the author of the article.

A two-party system is really bad. Proportional representation leads to a richer exchange of ideas, and more emphasis on consensus. Election reform could undo the political segregation.

I've said it before but it definitely bears repeating; "The Big Sort; Why the clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart," by Bill Bishop should be required reading for all Americans. It is a book-length study of this subject and will convince all but the most determined skeptic. While the urban/rural divide is a huge component, it is not all of the story and the reality is a bit more complicated which is what you'd expect.

It has been like this before- it's just that in the post-WWII era, there were two things which no longer hold true:

A fundamental agreement about the social contract- even Eisenhower and Nixon were, by today's standards, New-Deal liberals. Look back at the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and you see that they agreed on much more than they disagreed on.


Second, the party dividing lines and the social dividing lines were much more mis-matched than today. Democrats had to appeal to Northern intellectuals, Texans, Chicago machine politicians while Republicans had to get both Wall Street and rural Blacks. This led to much less doctrinaire policys and more compromise and horse-trading.

More about this here.

> I've heard the argument that people are actually more isolated on the internet - so atheists will only read r/atheism, Christians will only read Christian blogs, both will only have friends on Facebook of the same religious orientation as themselves, etc.

There's a well-regarded book (that I haven't read) about this sort of demographic self-segregation called The Big Sort.

> I don't think the internet will bring down the Ultra-Orthodox (I think that economic pressures will force the Ultra-Orthodox to evolve or revolt, especially in Israel), but I do believe it does present a threat to their walled garden.

I was very intrigued by what you say about the haredim in Israel. My impression--which I have gleaned almost entirely by reading Haaretz in English, Ynet, Jpost, and longer form journalism--is that their vice-like grip on privileges extracted from the body-politic (e.g., no military service, no work) shows no sign of loosening. There used to be a party Shinui and a politician Tommy Lapid but when he was vanquished both Shas and United Torah Judaism metaphorically pissed on his metaphorical grave. (Isn't UTJ part of Bibi's coalition?)