The Big Sort
I had been meaning to read The Big Sort for quite a while. The book made some rather large promises, promises that intrigued me. It wanted to explain, for example, why explanations about one’s political motives were recieved with blank stares from the other side so often. It claimed to explain how a land of such cultural richness had so little cultural mobility. Most importantly, it promised–it seemed to me at least–to reveal the truth behind the dominant cultural narratives that I’ve suspected were patently false for quite some time now.
In these areas, the book is successful. The Big Sort draws on the fact that confidence in all institutions, from political parties to Churches to bowling leagues, began to drop in 1965 and hasn’t stopped since then. Bill Bishop, the book’s author, attributes this to a “postmaterialist” attitude: As people’s material needs (food, clothing, etc) are comfortably provided they inherently begin to mistrust institutions. Rather than participate in institutions, post materialists have began to sort themselves into like-minded clusters grouped around common beliefs. This fact is argued persuasively, and Bishop’s exigesis on how this change has affected the American people is an important work anybody interested in politics should take the time to read.
The book itself is a bit uneven. The first two chapter are a bit bland, but necessary to establish Bishop’s interpretation. His chapters on advertising and lifestyle also leave something wanting, which is unfortunate because the lifestyle chapter is one of the longest in the book. The rest of the book is captivating though, especially when Bishop recounts experiments preformed by social psychologists.
One problem I did have with the books is that, since the book claims a more hidden situation at work in modern America, it is unfitting that Bishop should apply so little scrutiny to his sources. This is most evident in his appropriation of “postmaterialist.” After pages of explanation of what exactly being a postmaterialist, and how it has been measured in the developed world, the reader is only given a short paragraph detailing some of the problems that have been pointed out in the research. This caused me to question the reliability of the postmaterialist moniker and whether it was an accurate description. A second issue I had is that Bishop is too indebted to the idea that America is “postindustrial.” The United States is rather “supraindustrial,” and is just as dependent of the manufacturing of goods as it ever has been. It merely produces these goods overseas. I suspect that this has skewed some of his explanations a little bit. Finally, Bishop spends too much time focusing on the clustering of middle class white Americans. With other ethnicities combined now reaching over 50% of the US population, this is an unforgivable omission.
Just the same, I do recommend The Big Sort to readers of every stripe and background.
