Posted: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:00 am
Bill Clinton is worried about the diverging factions of the country growing even further apart. The rest of us should worry too.
Clinton was speaking to a meeting of governors the other day. He had read "The Big Sort," a book by Bill Bishop. The author argues that for a variety of reasons, like-minded Americans tend to cluster together to the point where they rarely hear any ideas other than the ones they already have.
He notes, for example, that the percentage of "landslide counties" increased sharply from the time of the Carter election in 1976 to the second Bush election in 2004, even though both elections were close. He concludes that in the last 30 years, more Americans have moved where their own political leanings are dominant. The result is that political debate becomes increasingly shrill.
This isn't true everywhere or all the time. But even in the mid-valley, you may have noticed in some situations - in the letters to the editor, for example - that people often are immediately outraged and enraged by something rather than merely disagreeing.
What's to be done? Maybe nothing. But if we want to do something, we can try harder to seek out other views. We can watch TV channels and read books and magazines, even newspaper editorials, where we encounter points of view we dislike.
If we support McCain or Obama, for example, we can seek out information on the one we don't support. We might be surprised that what he says, when read directly, without the reflection of having been reported on one cable station or the other, doesn't sound half bad.
As for moving into a neighborhood of people with an outlook different from yours, that might be more than anyone would do. But you can do the next best thing: Meet the neighbors and talk to them, and discover that it's perfectly possible to like someone even if you disagree. (hh)