illustration courtesy of ed mullen at purplestates.orgI don't care much for the color purple, with apologies to Oprah. The image above illustrates rather nicely, if slightly misleadingly, the problem with political dialogue and the way we approach elections. Lately I have been thinking that those are the things I care most about in politics: not the substance of the debate but the manner in which it is conducted.
There's a book I want to read very soon called The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. My inspiration for this is a great little piece in The Economist, which I make no claims on reading regularly. The idea: Americans, for some time now, have been choosing to live among like-minded neighbors. The exchange in the Economist article is telling: the blue Marylanders don't know any conservatives; the red Virginians have no understanding of liberals. It's a choice they made, either consciously or unconsciously.
So let's look at that purple state map at the top again, and compare it to these. Nearly the entire American West is self-segregating, and look at Indiana and Pennsylvania in particular. I don't think these maps really tell the whole story (better told in anecdotes, unfortunately for the argument's sake), but the point that hits home for me is, we don't seem interested in different viewpoints anymore. What fun is a political discussion if everyone spouts the same opinions in different ways? In some ways, this is why I'm glad I live in a town with plenty of conservative old folks, and plenty of liberal younger folks: it gives me something to push against. America has never been about homogeneity; why start now?
At the end of all this, I ask myself two questions: one, are Americans on the whole more alike, or are we more different? Two, are we already at the point when we give up on compromise and retreat to our respective corners? Nationally, are we going to be minglers or wallflowers?
