Sorting people politically 101

. . . short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved and were loved . . ..

If you click HERE, the website of Conservative Move will open for you. Here you'll find help if you're fed up with living in a progressive/Democratic area and want to move to a more conservative/Republican state to be with people who think like you. It's been called “sorting,” a movement that homogenizes communities, thereby providing peace from the stress of conflicting opinions, ideals. (Naturally, real estate opportunities have presented themselves as the website attests.)

“Sorting” after this fashion isn't new to us. Refugees tend to be attracted to places in a receiving country where language and culture are familiar; faith communities splinter into pools of theologically-homogenous groupings; suburbs evolve into enclaves of like-mannered; similar-stratum populations; cliques and gangs arise wherever people from a mix of demographics occupy the same space: schools, neighbourhoods, etc.

A caution being raised is that the chasm opening up between progressive and conservative elements can only become more and more pronounced as a result of people hearing only their preferred point of view day after day.

Can a democracy survive such deliberate, escalating segregation of opinion. Will it function if there's no longer the possibility of genuine, thoughtful debate? What will governance look like in future if politics is expressed primarily in emotional, angry rallies and/or placard-waving demonstrations?

In his essay, “Freedom as a Characteristic of Man in a Democratic Society”¹ American philosopher J.W. Miller writes “Man is indeed a social animal, but it would, I believe, be a mistake to interpret his primary sociability as political. When that mistake gets made, there is nothing for it but to treat man as an object, and then he is devoured by the managers who, one hears, know best how to establish community.” Miller sees functioning democracy as having no future where citizens give up their independent, self-directed persona or where truth is seen to be static and immutable rather than evolving and dynamic. “Sorting,” in Miller's scenario, then, would be tantamount to handing one's autonomy over to a manager whose version of reality will be lived out as an uncontested blueprint for whatever happiness is wanted.

The “mistake” Miller is pointing out has been demonstrated so often historically that it shouldn't come as an epiphany today. When churches, for instance, sort themselves into liberal or conservative, homogenous groups, they routinely skew the gospel in a direction that will justify the leaning that precipitated a split. Furthermore, the real community that once was—the non-political, social one—generally shatters into pieces paralleling the ideological disagreements. Friends, neighbours become dispensable. Conversation, let alone dialogue, difficult at best.

Political sorting that disrupts basic, humanitarian sociability is something democracy simply can't afford. When we begin to hear ourselves resorting to personal-attack mode to bolster our ideological allegiances, we should sense that we are hacking at the very foundation and meaning of democracy itself, a form of governance that we had hoped would ensure peace and cooperation, that would end and then prevent tyranny, that would preserve the dignity and independence of the individual, that would provide justice and fairness for all.

It may be that in America, the democracy canoe has already gone over the waterfall.

1In Miller, John William, The Paradox of Cause & Other Essays. New York: W.W. Norton. 1978