Sorted

I don't think I remember meeting more than one or two Americans who admitted voting for Bush the first time around. That's fair enough; the travelling Americans I see are likely to be more liberal minded (for a start, they have passports). What was odd in the last presidential election, is that many Democrats said they didn't even know any Republican voters.

This conundrum is explained by The Big Sort, whose premise is that Americans are choosing to move in order to live with others who share their views on life. Indeed, they will move out of one county and into another to be near the right flavour of church. This behaviour is apparently accelerating to create large echo chambers of similar thinking - and in American political terms large areas that are entirely red, or entirely blue. This is quite different from only a few decades ago.

Evangelical, small government, anti-abortion, rural, Republican go together to form one side of the tracks, with less religious, interventionist, pro-choice, urban Democrats make the other side. Politics of place and belief. Race is a divisional issue too, but the Big Sort is above and beyond that.

And the internet is gladly helping people to keep the separate together. Similar peer groups can meet in person, or in virtual space. Indeed it's now easier than ever to get to boundless sources of information that will never tell you anything you don't want to know.

While all this is understandable, as a Londoner (and I think for many city dwellers), some of this is odd. I don't know the political or spiritual leanings of my neighbours. And even if I thought I did, very few people's views all slot into one tidy party manifesto. As long as they belong to a similar class and are convivial, most English people don't care much about their neighbours beliefs. But inevitably trends in the US will find some reflection worldwide.

How much does the Big Sort matter?

The (fairly small) thinking part of the far right like to state that "kinship" groups are a natural societal boundary, so would find favour with Big Sort behaviour. One obvious problem with this is that kinship groups are a fixture from human evolution. Yet man uses his big brain to think beyond that. For example, it would be difficult to build a moon mission with just your extended family, and maybe a few mates from down the road.

Trying to devolve towards self similar groups probably does promote social cohesion. But it surely would arrest human progress as a result. The way Harry Lime put it in The Third man, peace and love will get you as far as the cuckoo clock. This is probably not an option for the Western world.