The Big Sort: Where you live, how you vote.

It's Time Now To Allow Politicians To Do Their Jobs

Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys.

Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage.  Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.

The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.

The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.

A man of the earth was a politician.

John McCain and Barack Obama began this campaign running as men of the earth—post partisans who promised to race between the red and the blue, hoeing a line in the turf that would bring the bickering to an end. That's not how these races ended, of course, not just because McCain or Obama changed but because the country didn't.

Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.

Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.

The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.

Republicans, perhaps, first realized how the country was changing and catered to the division that Americans were creating. By 2008, however, it didn't matter who started it. This was the way we lived. A Guardian reporter in deep-blue Brooklyn found a checkout clerk who wondered, as a "social experiment," what would happen if he donned a McCain button. A nearby shopper admitted she was still concerned about what might transpire on Election Day. "I'm worried about all the ignorant people—I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean uninformed people—who are out there and who will swing it away from Obama," Tamara said.

At McCain rallies, Obama is a "socialist," and a member of the Texas State Board of Education wrote that the Democrat "truly sympathizes" with terrorists and intends to declare martial law if elected. At one East Coast public university, a dean of undergraduate studies sent an e-mail to faculty reporting that there had been "an increase in complaints by students who believe a chilly climate exists for conservative view points. ..." Americans appear ready to end a culture of racism with this election—symbolically, at least—but prejudices based on what others think and where they live run wild.

The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."

What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.

The danger the next president faces comes from his single-minded friends as much as his political opponents. Politicians need room to do their jobs. They need the authority to make deals with the other side. This isn't a power that's won on Election Day. It can come only from a people who come to realize that their well-being depends as much on the "ignorant people ... out there" as their like-minded and righteous neighbors.

This Campaign Has Gone Positively 19th Century

This election is getting out of hand. For one rally, I read, the locals rigged up six horses to a wagon big enough to carry a pipe organ and a glee club with 40 singers.

Was this a prop for another Barack Obama mega-rally? Or maybe a Sarah Palin revival? Nope. The six white horses were put to the service of Republican William McKinley in 1896. A two-score political singing group was nothing special back then. Campaigns were exercises in organizing large groups of marching partisans. In Sullivan County, Ind., that year, both parties organized glee clubs for their candidates—although only the Republicans thought of the wagon.

The parties discarded the mass rally as a political device before the turn of the last century, replacing the energy of the throng with a more isolated, individualistic kind of campaign advertising. The grand political rallies went missing for more than a century, but now they're back, and the raw expressions of political anger and feeling produced at these massive gatherings have shocked both candidates and the press. We're simply not accustomed to having people play such an active part in presidential political campaigns.

Just after the Civil War, campaigns were based on these mass movements. The war shaped both the language and the tactics of political campaigns. "Elections were treated like battles in which the two main armies (parties) concentrated on fielding the maximum number of troops (voters) on the battlefield (the polls) on election day," wrote historian Richard Jensen. Party organizers had been in the military and so that organized their parties like Civil War armies. The language we still use in politics came straight from the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam: the "opening gun," party "standard bearers," "last ditch stands," "war horses," "precinct captains," "rank and file" voters and "spoils of victory." Voters would chant battle cries, wave signs and flags, and they would march.

Voters (only men had the franchise) were extraordinarily loyal to their parties then. "Men spoke of political attachments in the same breath as loyalty to religion," Jensen wrote, "for as one Presbyterian historian explained, 'Every man ... is expected to stand up for the creed of his church as he does for the platform of his party.'" Nine out of 10 Americans were firmly committed to one party or the other. Local elections became proxies for the national battle between the parties.

All this roughly describes politics today, a time of intense party loyalty, increased straight-ticket voting, and stark political divisions directed, in part, by theology.

And, of course, the most visible sign that we have developed a 19th-century attitude toward politics is the return of the mass rally.

We should keep following this parallel between the 19th century and today because, as I said, the parties found reason to abandon the mass rally as a political device. The change began after Benjamin Harrison won with a military-style campaign in 1888. Harrison appointed John Wanamaker as his postmaster general, and Wanamaker set out to change the way Americans ran their elections.

John Wanamaker opened in Philadelphia what was considered the nation's first department store, and he brought his sales skills to Harrison's White House when he introduced the merchandizing style to politics. Wanamaker, by the way, is the guy who first said, "The customer is always right" and that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted but that he didn't know which half.

The military approach to political campaigns was unpredictable, Wanamaker realized. The problem with mass marches and parades led by horse-drawn wagons, according to one Wisconsin Democrat, was that the events "stir up the other side almost as much as their own. The trumpet that sounds the note of battle not only inspirits its friends but awakes its enemies."

The alternative was a campaign of "education" and isolation—that is advertising. Instead of relying on torch-lit parades, the merchandizing style printed pamphlets and newspaper ads. War cries were replaced with reasoned arguments. Instead of inspiring dependable supporters, the merchandizing campaign concentrated on identifying and then appealing to independents and waverers.

The goal wasn't to increase turnout. It was to control the vote. And it was effective. The merchandizing style replaced the mass marches and rallies within a few election cycles.

Voters were unimpressed. "The voters' reaction to the new style educational campaigns was lethargic," Jensen reported. Partisan loyalty declined, apathy increased, and voter turnout plummeted. Advertising was more expensive than torch lights, so fundraising became a political preoccupation. The parties had more control over the electorate, but voters were dispirited. Isolated by the merchandizing style, they stopped coming to the polls.

Now we have two candidates who began this campaign as leaders of a post-partisan future running in an election that has become partisan in the extreme. Nine out of 10 Republicans say they'll vote for McCain, and nine out of 10 Democrats say they'll vote for Obama—party loyalty that matches that of the military campaigns of the late 19th century. Local elections have become nationalized, and people show willingness to march and demonstrate in ways that have been missing for the past 100 years. Funny how things work out.

Extremism at McCain Rallies Comes Naturally

French students who disliked America (and loved Charles de Gaulle) were once asked to talk about the United States for an hour or two. At the end of the session, conducted as part of experiments in the 1960s, the students disliked America—and loved de Gaulle—even more.

College kids who join a conservative fraternity move to the right during their four years in college. Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the end of their discussion than before. Racists brought into a room to discuss race grow more intolerant.

Social psychologists have conducted scores of these "group polarization" experiments since the '60s, and they all come to the same finding: Like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded.

Homogeneity creates extremity—or, in the news of the day, a McCain rally.

Republican rallies this past weekend grew heated. The headlines tell the story: "Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally"; "Panic Attack: Voters Unload at GOP Rallies"; "McCain: Obama Not an Arab, Crowd Boos"; "Supporters Jeer as McCain Calls Obama 'A Decent Person.' "

What's going on? The talk-show talk has been that John McCain and Sarah Palin incite this kind of behavior. They certainly haven't helped, but blaming the candidates misses what's happening, and why.

Social scientists have proposed several reasons for why like-minded groups tend to polarize. Two have survived scrutiny. The first is that homogenous groups are privy to a large pool of ideas and arguments supporting the group's dominant position. Everybody hears the arguments in favor of the group's belief, and as they're discussed, people grow stouter in their beliefs.

The second reason like-minded groups polarize has more to do with how we see ourselves. We are constantly comparing our beliefs and opinions to those of the group. There are advantages to being slightly more extreme than the group average. It's a way to stand out, to ensure others will see us as righteous group members.

"It's an image-maintenance kind of thing," explained social psychologist Robert Baron. Everybody wants to be a member in good standing, and though it sounds counterintuitive, the safest way to conform is to be slightly more extreme than the average of the group.

"One way to make sure you aren't mistaken for one of those 'other people' is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your Republican-ness," Baron said. "It's hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words, because you're afraid that other people will call you whatever. In racial terms, you'd be called an Oreo if you were black." At a John McCain rally, if you say Barack Obama is a "decent family man," you are booed ... even if you're John McCain.

This is social psychology as old as the Bible. Recalling his days as a devout Jew, before his conversion to Christianity, Paul said, "Beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it." Paul realized that his extremity paid dividends, that he "profited in the Jews' religion above many of my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers." (Galatians 1:13-14)

Or, as Holly Golightly put it in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."

Experiments confirmed Paul's and Golightly's conclusions. "An extreme communicator on one's side of an issue tends to be perceived as more sincere and competent than a moderate," social psychologist David Myers wrote. Hello, talk radio.

Those at the McCain or Palin rallies who talk about "hooligans" and "treason," who call Barack Obama a "terrorist," "bum," or "socialist," aren't simply responding to speeches from the candidates. They are acting as members of a like-minded group exactly as social psychologists would predict, which is a less-than-comforting thought.

In his textbook on social psychology, David Myers writes, "Terrorism does not erupt suddenly. Rather, it arises among people whose shared grievances bring them together. As they interact in isolation from moderating influences, they become progressively more extreme. The social amplifier brings the signal in stronger. The result is violent acts that the individuals, apart from the group, would never have committed."

It's not just groups on the right that polarize, nor are Republicans the only people to gather in like-minded groups. For the past 30 years, Americans have been sorting themselves into politically like-minded neighborhoods, churches, and clubs. Matching like with like has been often been entirely intentional. Ministers have been taught to attract new members according to the "homogenous unit principle" of church growth. (One book in the church growth literature is titled Our Kind of People.) Subdivisions have designed for certain cultural types—a Christian school in one section, a Montessori school in another.

The antidote to group polarization is mixed company. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade reviewed the rulings from three panels from the U.S. Court of Appeals. They found that when the panels consisted of all Republican or all Democratic appointees, the rulings were more extreme than when the panels had members of both parties. Mixed panels produced more moderate judgments.

The lesson is pretty clear. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain individual excesses. Homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.