What Sean Hannity’s Move From New York To Florida Says About America

Sean Hannity on Sept. 13 at Fox News in New York City. He's now saying goodbye, Big Apple; hello, Sunshine State.

It’s funny how people will turn anything into a political cudgel, no matter how petty or childish. Earlier this month, Sean Hannity announced he was leaving New York and moving to Florida. Several of my conservative friends — yes, I have them; I keep them around as a barren source of amusement (I kid, of course) — cheered the news because, well, you know: New York = blue = bad. Florida = red = good.

It would be easy to disassemble that viewpoint, the myth that red states are better or cheaper to live in than blue ones. But Hannity’s move speaks to an issue that deserves far more attention, something that’s been endemic in America for 40 years, a threat far greater than any single policy, program or platform: our population’s continual sorting of itself into communities of conformity.

It’s readily visible in our election cycles. In the quarter-century after World War II, election results in most counties became more closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. Throughout America, friends, neighbors and co-workers of different stripes and values could engage in vigorous, ongoing dialogue (the operative word being “ongoing”). Together they talked about forging some sense of national unity out of their genuine concerns. By 1976, the average margin of victory in the 50 states was 10 percentage points; in 27 states, it was less than 7 percentage points. In that presidential election year, Gerald Ford, a Republican, won the entire West Coast and most of New England, and he almost won New York.

But in the quarter-century that followed, a cultural and political migration ensued, balkanizing the nation into little more than political ghettos. The number of counties where one party or another enjoyed landslide majorities doubled. By the 2008 presidential election, with the nascent, toxic tea party looming in the wings, the average margin of victory topped 17 percentage points, with blowouts in 29 states; just seven states had margins of less than 5 percentage points. By 2020, more than 20% of the nation’s counties had given more than 80% of their vote to either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Today nearly three-quarters of us live in counties like that — politically homogeneous, solidly Democratic or Republican, overwhelmingly liberal or conservative. The co-mingling of ideas, compromise and common ground virtually disappeared.

One can imagine why. In the post-WWII era, we were more conjoined as a nation, galvanized by the cause of freedom versus Nazi tyranny and by a booming economy. Over the next quarter-century, Western Europe and much of the United States had produced societies with relatively equal income, relatively little poverty — relatively, mind you — and numerous opportunities for upward financial mobility. It was hardly perfect, hardly utopian, but you could take a bird’s-eye view of Western democracies and say, “These are among the most decent societies the world has ever seen.”

But a string of events — a generation gap, political assassinations, a bitter defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, capped by a crushing recession that sent interest rates as high as 20% — finally took its toll, and the winds of change began to take their course. America’s astounding postwar productivity hit a wall as three linchpins of the nation’s economy — oil, automobiles and steel — found themselves facing unparalleled competition: OPEC seemingly discovered capitalism, resulting in gas lines and rising prices; Japan began flexing its economic muscle with less-expensive steel and more fuel-efficient cars. American workers who, as a result, had lost their livelihoods in the industrial Midwest began moving to what they hoped would be greener pastures of economic opportunity.

These may have been the reasons why about 100 million Americans beganmigrating. The reasons why they moved to where they moved may be more primal: an innate need for tribal consonance wired into our DNA since humans first crawled out of the slime. Without a common cause around which to rally — World War II, for example — we reflexively seek the comfort of familiar ideological or cultural cocoons, creating increasingly homogeneous communities until we reach a point where we live only in places with people more like ourselves. Unlike past migration waves motivated by the quest for economic opportunity (such as African Americans moving from the South to Chicago in the 1950s or Appalachian residents moving to the Midwest after World War II), the American migration of the past half-century has been animated as much by lifestyle and cultural choices as by economic ones. 

These divisions were further exacerbated by a growing inequality of wealth between urban dwellers and rural residents. That gap had been shrinking throughout the century after the Civil War, but after 1980 it changed. The wage gap began to widen, not between CEOs and the working class — that is hardly a secret — but between college-educated people moving to urban centers and rural America whose residents were not only less likely to have a college degree but who lived in regions that America’s business boom has shown little interest in. Throughout the twenty-teens, only 1% of all new businesses started in the U.S. were in rural counties.

Thus, in barely a generation’s time, as society became more mobile, a cocktail of migratory political, cultural and technological trends converged to make us less agile and more hostile. We sorted ourselves into communities politically segregated and ideologically insulated, and, despite access to more information than ever before, we’ve sought only the sources that confirm what we already believe, doing so in the safe spaces of the communities to which we have clustered because “everybody is just like me!”

That’s why today, every little thing, every hiccup, any development, whether of consequence or no value at all, becomes just another log on the fire for someone’s political agenda. Hannity is moving to Florida? Who the hell cares? It sometimes reminds me of that defensive lineman who sacks the quarterback and does his little sack dance. Dude, there are three minutes left in the fourth quarter and your team is about to lose this game by 30 points. Your sack doesn’t mean shit. Why are you celebrating?

It is a massive, worldview-changing social science phenomenon. Yet it is nothing new. Political factions have always been with us. What I’ve never understood is their value, let alone our attraction to them, either in the form of labels, such as liberal or conservative, or our two-party system of Republicans and Democrats. We were warned of their insidious nature by no less a figure than George Washington in 1796 in what came to be known as his Farewell Address.

“Political parties serve always to distract the public and enfeeble the public administration. They agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindle the animosity of one party against another, and are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

It would be difficult to find a document by one of the nation’s Founding Fathers that offers a more direct and acerbic assessment of political parties or the factions spawned under their banners. Washington was terrified of the foundation and formation of political parties. He believed individuals would become so enamored of their connection to parties and their ideological character, and so covetous of what parties could provide them, that they would put matters of party over matters of country.

Sound familiar? If you look at the current mess that is our political discourse today and the pernicious influence of political parties in the progress and life of our nation, you understand how prescient the first president of this country was. And, at the same time, how insignificant a television personality’s move from one state to another is.

People may say the media is to blame, but the media, whichever media these deflecting finger-pointers point to, wouldn’t do what it does if it didn’t have an audience demanding they did it. It’s called ratings, and far too much media is more about business than journalism. Clicks, hits, shares, viewers, readers and listeners.

A curious sidebar here. In 1976, as the three networks (remember when there were only three?) began broadcasting in color, NBC’s election night anchor John Chancellor explained how viewers could tell which states went for which candidate via the color of that state using a brand-new gimmick: an illuminated map. States that went for Jimmy Carter would be colored in red. States voting for Gerald Ford would be blue. That’s right: Republicans blue, Democrats red.

That was how texts and reference books of the time did it, using blue for Republicans in part because blue was the color of the Union in the Civil War. Blue, typically, is associated with the conservative political parties in Europe.

For a long time, the three networks didn’t agree on the color scheme. Finally, by the 2000 election, the maps had become a focal point for viewers. Thus, consistency across media outlets prevailed.

As we retreat from the kind of enlightenment that comes with routine exposure to different values, ideas and opinions, our choice to segregate is feeding the nation’s increasingly malevolent partisanship and political sclerosis. Can a house this divided stand, or will we quit on each other and ultimately resort to some sort of secession?

Some years ago, a woman called my radio program to describe what she and her husband were conducting at the business they owned. They had about 100 employees. They felt it important that people be engaged and aware citizens, so the woman would hold what she called “lunch ‘n’ learns” throughout the year about various issues of the day. She might lead the discussion; sometimes an employee might. Regardless of who moderated, the presentation was followed by a discussion among those in attendance. It got to where employees were pretty diligent in preparing their presentations. During elections, employees might bring in candidates to talk with co-workers attending the sessions. 

No one was required to attend, but the woman said her workers liked doing so. She said that what everyone realized was that talking about issues civilly — even divisive issues — got people feeling much better about discussing those issues and about the positions with which they disagreed. “It never became heated,” she said, “but people became educated and engaged.”

Wonderful, right? Well, an attorney called shortly after and warned that her idea faced one potential problem, even if it was done during non-work activities, such as lunchtime: If someone, perhaps a candidate, endorsed particular views that someone else found offensive to other employees, that could present a problem.

Welcome to America, where a lunchtime discussion of ideas among citizens with differing opinions “could present a problem.”

Unfortunately, if people don’t talk about politics at work, there are few places left where they might have a face-to-face discussion with those of a different opinion. Churches are now among the most politically segregated institutions in America. Neighborhoods have tipped either conservative or liberal and continue to do so, a pattern showing few signs of relenting. Even volunteer groups have grown more homogeneous.

In 1848, John Stuart Mill wrote, “It’s hardly possible to overstate the value ... of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”

It’s hardly possible to overstate the rarity with which this kind of exchange happens in America. 

The threat isn’t diversity; it’s the extremists demanding ideological purity and uniformity of thought while calling it patriotism.

History is filled with men who have tried to impose their brand of political conformity on society. Always, they said, the problem was the people who didn’t agree with them, and never did they see that their solution was always worse than the problem they claimed existed. They all failed. The seeds of their own destruction were never those who were different; it was those who thought being different was wrong. How can we not see that?

We don’t have to sit around, hold hands, drink out of juice boxes and sing “Kumbaya.” The Founding Fathers knew that differences were healthy and that debates over those differences should enrich our culture, not coarsen it. While herding is an understandably instinctive trait, our power to reason allows us to rise above our instincts. If we’re to make decisions that best benefit our national interest, we must engage each other in a way that allows us to see different-thinking people as human beings, not adversaries.

Surely we’re still capable, aren’t we? Or are we all just a bunch of snowflakes looking for the nearest safe space?

Hannity moving to Florida? Go ahead. It’s a free country. You move wherever you want. But by framing it as a political decision, all you’re doing is contributing to the problem, not the solution. 

And that goes for any of the rest of us. It’s a threat far greater than any single policy, program or platform: We just don’t seem interested in being a nation of differences anymore, and I wonder whether this will eventually end our great American experiment.