Is unsorting America even possible? Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” considered Americans’ tendency to self-segregate into communities “with people who live, think, and vote like we do.” There are also economic consequences to that. Inequality follows. American society has “become less random” as it has “become more unequal,” observes Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley. He offers a quirky thought experiment in The New Yorker on how, had we the will, we might tackle inequality resulting from geography and the birth lottery. His answer to the problem that “when rich people are asked to pay more in taxes, or to send their children to school with poorer kids, they tend to move,” is a lottery of another sort. But is inequality a problem for most Americans? Or do they see inequality as “the way things are.” Meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and royalist sentiment argue vigorously for the status quo. Whatever. Conley’s is a thought experiment: The core issue is that our social contract is based on place: we make decisions and fund our government in a fundamentally local way. This means that, the more we live in separate clusters, the less incentive we have to help one another, and that creates a feedback loop that worsens with time. Meanwhile, our political divisions deepen. We are more geographically polarized by social attitudes and partisanship than at any time since the Civil War. This is true across regions, within states, and even among neighborhoods. Political scientists argue about why this is happening—but nobody disputes…