The Big Sort by Bill Bishop

Author:Bill Bishop [Bishop, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Living on Islands

Political scientist Daniel Elazar traced the political development of the United States by the early flows of migrants moving east to west. As people migrated, they brought their politics with them, setting down their beliefs with their trunks and suitcases. In the early days of the frontier, like-minded people traveled together, and when they settled, they created political cultures that spread across regions of the country. A few years before his death in 1999, however, Elazar noticed the emergence of "lifestyle" communities. He suspected that these communities heralded a "new sectionalism." The aging political scientist optimistically believed that the emergence of like-minded communities would "encourage recrudescence of the kind of territorial democracy that potentially allows different lifestyles to flourish in different places without clashing."16 Elazar was referring to life in nineteenth-century America, when communities were narrowly defined and isolated. At that time, the rich in one city intermarried, according to historian Robert Wiebe, never knowing, or caring to know, their contemporaries in other urban areas. "Within the city limits yet detached from its core, neighborhoods provided fairly cloistered way stations between urban and rural living," Wiebe wrote. Farm communities were "usually homogeneous, usually Protestant ... In all, it was a nation of loosely connected islands, similar in kind, whose restless natives often moved only to settle down again as part of another island."17

The physical barriers of frontier life may have helped create these nineteenth-century islands, but the segmentation of community life in the last quarter of the twentieth-century was manmade, a reaction, perhaps, to the fast-paced, wild, and woolly changes taking place in the nation and the world. "When people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community," observed sociologist Manuel Castells.18 Sociologist Craig Calhoun described the growth of "enclaves of people who have made similar life-style choices. These life-style enclaves—especially suburban and exurban ones—are characterized by an extraordinary homophilia (primarily in non-sexual senses)."19

There is a market demand now for "lifestyle" communities. Before developers built the Ladera Ranch subdivision in Orange County, California, they surveyed likely residents about their beliefs and values. The surveys asked how strongly people agreed with statements such as "We need to treat the planet as a living system" and "I have been born again in Jesus Christ." People fell into distinct groups—and that's the way the development was built. There is "Covenant Hills" for the faithful (big family rooms and traditional suburban architecture) and "Terramor" for what the developers call the "cultural creatives" (bamboo floors and instead of a family room, a "culture room").*20 (Cultural creatives? Yes, Paul Ray, one of the authors of the 2000 book The Cultural Creatives, was a consultant for Ladera Ranch.) There is a Christian school for the believers in Covenant Hills and a Montessori school for the "cultural creatives" in Terramor. More than 16,000 people live in the subdivision now, and what's vaguely creepy (well, maybe not so vaguely) is that people drive in the same entrance

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