Also in today’s Economist, a fascinating article about how Americans are increasingly choosing to live near people who have similar political views. Note that this is not an accident of economics. It is not a case of rich people voting Republican and poor people voting Democrat. It is people from all works of life making a positive decision to live in parts of the country where the prevailing political orthodoxy is comfortable for them. The article even talks about a planned Libertarian township (to be called “Paulville”). And the effect of all this?
America, says Mr Bishop, is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.†He has a point. Republicans who never meet Democrats tend to assume that Democrats believe more extreme things than they really do, and vice versa. This contributes to the nasty tone of many political campaigns.
I want to know where the Independents are congregating, please.
All of the political parties give me the willies. People are fine when they’re being people instead of political animals.
So the credibility you assign to this article is based on … what?
Kerry:
In my opinion, the only way to stop humans from being political is to isolate them from each other. We’re political animals by nature.
Indubitab-lee!
Mike:
The article has credibility simply by being in The Economist, which is one of the few media outlets I have much respect for. I’m also reasonably impressed by their numbers about the percentage of counties that produced “landslide” results in Presidential elections (rising from 26.8% in Jimmy Carter’s election to 48.3% in the second Dubya win). Some of that will be a result of gerrymandering, but it is hard to gerrymander an entire county.
Ultimately, however, the test of the veracity of the article is to expose it to real Americans, which is what I did by blogging about it here.
Kevin:
No one is suggesting that Americans are becoming unpolitical. Within any given community politics will still exist. (Especially, I suspect, in Paulville.) However, the nature of that politics can be very different. There’s a huge gulf between a community in which you debate whether or not gay marriage should be allowed, and a community where the debate is over which method of capital punishment is appropriate for homosexuals.
As an aside: I live in a country where democracy of any kind (and universal access to free education to secondary level) is relatively new (freedom from colonial Britain only came in 1957).
And the most depressing thing about that is that I see very little difference between the nastier extremes of the Malaysian political animal and the nastier extremes of the political animal in any of the much older democracies with not just a longer history of universal suffrage, but also of literacy and education.
Yep, the article is right. We all like to live where the people around us “get” where we are coming from. I certainly prefer to…. If we don’t have that freedom, then we tend not to interact with our neighbours and choose instead to select friends from further afield.