I Feel My Pain: Bill Clinton Enjoys Another Fatuous Vision

Here’s what worries him:

He cited statistics compiled by Bishop that found that in the 1976 presidential election, only 20 percent of the nation’s counties voted for Jimmy Carter or President Ford by more than a 20 percent margin.

By contrast, 48 percent of the nation’s counties in 2004 voted for John Kerry or President Bush by more than 20 points, Clinton said.

“We were sorting ourselves out by choosing to live with people that we agree with,” Clinton said.

Maybe. But the New Englanders and the Southerners who voted Democratic and Republican in 1976 haven’t moved around much since then. In fact, they’ve been diligently training their children to be even more partisan versions of their Nixon-era selves, which is sort of hard to imagine but apparently true. Who’s really been moving around? Rust Belters fleeing to the Sun Belt; urban whites fleeing to the ‘burbs; Mexicans streaming into border states; Asians into California? Have I missed any major movements? Oh yes: liberals into conservative mountain states like Colorado, New Mexico, and even Montana. Even, if I dare say so, Virginia and North Carolina. If Clinton is right, where are these purple states coming from? Polar partisanship is growing within states, not across large-scale regional encampments.

One can, and should, make the case that in fact large parts of the country that were radical or reactionary in the mid-’70s have chilled out today by quite striking degrees. San Francisco and New York City are vastly less insane than in those horrible years. And unquestionably the flat-out racism and Buchananite pitchforkism that moved through the South along George Wallace’s career trajectory has been modulated, dispersed, sold off, or caved in.

Bill Clinton, in short, is projecting, again, something he’s very good at doing very convincingly. But do not believe him. Self-sorting in America produces a gentler, not a more savage, nation. It is fluid and constant, always reassessing itself and creating gray areas, and it must not be confused with deepening and entrenching partisan attitudes among people and groups with longstanding political and cultural allegiances that travel wherever they go. This polarization is less a matter of population-sorting than it is politician-sorting: ritualistic disagreement on issues that should fall under the ambit of reason and common sense, and grotesque, animatronic agreement on issues about which Americans should once again have some kind of actual choice.