The Wall Street Journal has a not-bad article on how our political identities have become more tribal. While the observation is not new, it does an interesting job of buttressing that assertion with some social science research. Better still, it is not behind their paywall.
It also reminds me of the extent to which I am a contrarian, a not religious, white PhD, who lines up with tribe Red, the GOP.
Demographic characteristics are now major indicators of party preference, with noncollege white and more religious Americans increasingly identifying as Republicans, while Democrats now win most nonwhite voters and a majority of white people with a college degree.
I have been part of the big “sort” the article mentions since the later 1980s, when I moved 16 miles from a suburban city street to rural acreage outside that town. In retirement, I moved my legal residence from CA to WY, which is seriously rural.
Though I never thought of it as it happened, in hindsight I was returning to rural roots. I grew up in our Sunkist® Assn. orange orchard in SoCal and rode a yellow bus 3 miles to a high school with a graduating class of 100.
Gophers kill orange trees by gnawing on their apparently tasty roots. I earned the money for my first car trapping gophers out of the orchards. Not many CA kids lived in an orchard or ran a trapline. Ag work is dangerous, too. I blew out the rotator cuff in my left shoulder in a fall while irrigating our orchard, and have lived with the limitation ever since.
