The Man Who Wrote the Book on Political Tribalism Says the Problem Is Getting Worse

The statistics backed him up. In 1976, 26.8 p.c of voters lived in “landslide” counties — counties, that’s, during which the winner in the presidential election received by greater than 20 p.c. In 1996, it was 42.1, and by 2004, it was nearing half. “Americans are increasingly unlikely to find themselves in mixed political company,” Bishop wrote — “pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred,” as he put it, “that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’” who lived in another way, thought in another way, voted in another way. People weren’t selecting presidents — they had been selecting sides.

At a second when the nation is contending with its bitterest and most intractable points — reproductive rights and gun management — I referred to as Bishop for his perspective on whether or not Americans are in any higher form to beat the crippling tribalism he documented 14 years in the past. He was not encouraging.

Bishop is 68 now and retired from a journalism profession that took him from Kentucky to Texas, the place he helped discovered and nonetheless is a contributing editor for The Daily Yonder, which covers rural points. Five or so years after his guide got here out, he moved from blue, cosmopolitan Austin to crimson, rural La Grange — a acutely aware effort to comply with his personal recommendation (“Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes,” he wrote in The Big Sort) and re-sort himself onto the different aspect of the divide. That choice is a part of the purpose he managed to finish our dialog on a considerably hopeful be aware about the skill of communities to transcend nationwide politics and act cooperatively on powerful issues.

This interview has been edited for size and readability.