In the XXIst century, the United States of America is a country not only politically but also geographically divided. Red and blue states are no longer just political labels that pop up in the run-up to elections. They are a real map of cultural and ideological segregation, where supporters of the Democratic and Republican parties literally live in different worlds. One of the first to systematically describe this process was journalist and analyst Bill Bishop in his book The Great Sorting: Why a Cluster of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart (2008).
Bishop drew attention to a phenomenon that had long been overlooked – the voluntary geographic segregation of Americans by political persuasion. He showed how liberals and conservatives not only vote, but live in different spaces. He showed that liberals and conservatives not only vote but also live in different places. This is especially true after the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when American society witnessed a tidal wave of social change, from the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution. That is when an idea began to gain ground that ‘living next to a political enemy’ was not just become inconvenient, but psychologically unbearable. Since then, more and more liberals began to move to cities and states that matched their views. Those who had resources travelled to San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. The rest sought refuge in more affordable but still liberal places like Oregon, Vermont or Colorado. Conservatives, in turn, took root in the suburbs, small towns and rural areas of ‘deep America,’ maintaining their cultural and political homogeneity.
Thus began the ‘great sorting’ – a process in which not just the opinions but also the bodies of citizens were divided along ideological lines. Political and cultural echo chambers thereby were formed: liberals with liberals, conservatives with conservatives. Americans were increasingly unlikely to encounter other points of view and, therefore, increasingly unlikely to learn how to hear and coexist with one another.
Bishop stressed that this not only threatened democracy, but also made American society increasingly polarised and intolerant. Geographic separation became a kind of release valve – a way to escape the daily conflict with ideological “others.” Instead of dialogue – flight. Instead of coexistence, there is separation into ideological “reservations”. And the further this process goes, the more difficult it becomes to return the country to a state of at least minimal social consensus.
