I’ve been redistricted again. I haven’t moved, but New York’s new congressional district boundaries have, and the new lines divide our little town between two districts – neither of them represented by our current member of Congress. And it makes me feel a bit, well, disempowered. It’s as though politicians chose whose constituent I will be, rather than me choosing the politician who will represent me.
But that’s the way of politics in America these days. The authoritative Cook Political Report considers only 22 House races, out of 435, to be toss-ups this year – either party could win – and it says there are only 20 more that even just lean one way or the other. So about 90 percent of the House races in the U.S.A. are locked up by the parties before a vote is cast. That’s generally blamed on gerrymandering – drawing district lines to assure one party or the other will win.
But it’s not only that. It turns out that the politics of places are prompting a lot of folks to pack up and leave. They’re voting with their feet, as the saying goes.
And that’s not a good thing. This geographic sorting of people into like-minded enclaves actually widens the ideological divide of the country. There was a book published a few years ago exploring this phenomenon, entitled “The Big Sort,” and it raises a real concern: Groups of like-minded people tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they’re like-minded – so the citizens’ political activity tends to become less about solving problems with their votes than showing up for their side.
If the increasing brutality of American politics and its visceral presence in our lives prompts too many of us decamp to places where we’ll find more people like us, we will further balkanize America and shatter the unity of purpose that undergirds the nation’s existence. (1:50)
Shortly before the last presidential election, researchers from Stanford and Brown Universities measured America’s political polarization over the last four decades, based on a “feeling thermometer” – which they said measured citizens’ opinions of people in the other political party. They found not only that the partisan divide has sharply widened, but also that it has occurred much more rapidly in the United States than in eight other advanced democracies. The professors explained the results by citing, first, the growing conformity within the nation’s two major political parties by ideology, race and religion, and, second, the influence of 24-hour partisan cable news in encouraging the divide between the two sides.1
Interestingly, by the way, the researchers found that in the countries where political polarization has fallen over the last 40 years, there’s much greater investment in public broadcasting. So maybe Big Bird is actually the canary in our democracy’s coal mine. If Big Bird isn’t healthy, is America about to choke on its own toxic political air? No wonder Donald Trump wants to defund public broadcasting: Radicals succeed only when people are polarized.
Imagine a generation or two from now, when children raised in partisan enclaves will have taken the reins of power, having known only sharp division across areas of the country, and having few opportunities to make friends with people whose views aren’t like their own. What will bind them to other Americans who don’t share those views? (3:15)
You cannot blame people for wanting to be comfortable in their surroundings. Where we might fix our gaze, though, is on the powerful voices in politics and media who, for their own interests, continue to sharpen the ideological blades that are slicing us apart.
At their hands, we have been encouraged to turn policy differences into mean gang rumbles, and we’ve gotten fixated on culture wars when we needed to be fighting a pandemic, wealth inequity and the inaccessibility of healthcare. It is those fights, often waged on a vicious personal level and with flagrant disregard for facts and civility, that have made our neighbors seem hostile to us, and our neighborhoods less welcoming. The producers of those fights — I’m thinking of Fox News producers and commentators, and right-wing pols, but you may have some villains of your own in mind — share blame for that.
The foot-voters may have good reasons to move, and I suppose we can’t second-guess folks who decide that they’ll be happier somewhere else. But I’m hoping that there are more solid ballot-casters in our communities — and, more than that, people who choose to fight for this democracy where they live, one issue at a time. Thankfully, they’re rejecting the divisiveness that suggests we can’t find common ground with our neighbors. I’d like to count myself in that group, wouldn’t you?
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.