While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even c…
We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation. Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'bar…
Depends on your value of "we."
There is certainly lower solidarity/interest in public life among the straight white landowning Christian men from good families who used to participate in things like freemasonry and Rotary.
On the other hand, both the left and right have been adding previously marginalized demographics to their constituencies and platforms.
I don't think there's any less solidarity going around. My intuition is that more people than ever have their voices heard and interests represented in public life. But rather than one line of solidarity across the center of the political spectrum, we now have two disjoint lines reaching from each party's center to what used to be its marginalized fringes. (Not just in ideology, but in identity).
We also just aren't in this together so much anymore. The rise of coastal cities means the country is increasingly split between (at least) two totally distinct patterns of geography, economics, culture, built environment, and lifestyle. The correlation between population density and vote share on the latest electoral map is staggering.