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THE RED-STATE/BLUE-STATE divide in America is real, and chances are, you're part of the problem. In his new book, "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart," former journalist Bill Bishop examines the polarization of U.S. politics and concludes that the American people — not politicians, the media or religious leaders — are the primary cause of the country's unyielding political stalemate. "Everybody thinks the political process is screwed up, but no one thinks they're part of the reason for the screw-up," Bishop says. The main cause of the red/blue divide, Bishop argues, is prosperity, which has given the American people the ability to reorder their lives around their tastes and values by moving to like-minded communities. The result is a country sliced and rearranged into red and blue communities — like children dividing on a playground. In the D.C. region, this phenomenon can readily be seen in Northern Virginia, where an influx of new residents and immigrants has nearly transformed "Old Dominion" into a blue state. (Virginia hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.) "It's been an almost substitution of Republicans for Democrats [in Northern Virginia]," said Dr. Robert Lang, an associate professor in urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. All across the country, millions of Americans have moved away from people with different political outlooks in the past 30 years, Bishop argues, congregating instead in communities where lifestyles and political views are tightly intertwined. Latte liberals and soccer moms may seem like crude stereotypes, but Bishop says the relationship between lifestyles and voting beliefs is impossible to ignore. "The more we looked, the more it became clear that migration itself wasn't driving the country's political segregation," Bishop writes. "We were seeing something more basic — a cultural shift powered by prosperity and economic security. Freed from want and worry, people were reordering their lives around their values, their tastes, and their beliefs." As Americans have segregated themselves politically, the influence of groupthink has made them more extreme politically, according to Bishop, creating a polarized electorate that is unprecedented in the country's history. Bishop talked with Express about America's new mass migration, the influence of the 1960s and how The Big Sort played out in the Clinton/Obama primaries.