After taking a few days off from blogging in order to write a self-indulgent, self-referential, and entirely “meta” piece of short fiction, I sifted through my list of draft entries and found some thoughts which I thought I’d already published but haven’t. I wrote the first half of the following in November 2018. Enjoy.

As much as it seems like a cliche these days, I want to revisit the idea of “liberal bubbles” and “conservative bubbles”. In the news media I consume, the talk is entirely about liberal bubbles and how people need to “connect” or “learn to understand” everyone else, often referred to as “mainstream America”.

Living where I do, and growing up the way I did, I admit I have a difficult time picturing groups of people who are entirely liberal. I’m not saying they don’t exist — I’m convinced they do. I’m saying it’s difficult for me to imagine, because I’ve never been in such a group and in fact have never even seen one. I don’t know what it would be like for all my friends to be liberals or progressives, for my entire family to vote for Democratic and/or Green Party candidates, for my co-workers to all (or even mostly) fall on that side of the spectrum.

But I know such groups exist because I’ve seen evidence of them. Liberal writers in the media keep talking about it, for example. Also, I’ve read several columns that seem to have originated deep inside such bubbles.

This column in Wired, for example, speaks of “my liberal New York friends” and “as a liberal New Yorker”, and the writer mentions that his social media newsfeed was filled with #ImWithHer and #FeelTheBern posts during the 2016 election cycle. The writer complains that, despite preferring Clinton over TAINTUS, he was never “challenged” by content from the other side. When I see articles like that, I often want to reply: “Be grateful, you inconsiderate f**k.”

When I read columns like this one (November 2018) from Alexandra Petri, a tongue-in-cheek barb at liberal voters who hypocritcally claim to want more women in power but always find a reason to dismiss the current woman candidate, I could tell that the writer has only talked to liberals about it. Because conservatives aren’t giving the reasons she listed. “Elizabeth Warren is too old; we need a younger, more vibrant candidate”, for example. Conservatives are saying Warren is a “far-left demagogue” with “open-border zealotry”. Conservatives didn’t vote against Hillary Clinton because of vague “baggage”; they openly stated Clinton was a “criminal”, a “dangerous leftist”, and corrupt as the day is long. (One of my relatives repeatedly asserted to me that Clinton was a murderer and would order the deaths of anyone who opposed her.) Forty percent of Dump voters believe Clinton is an “actual demon”.

(Note: I’m not arguing against Petri’s primary point; I agree with her. I’m arguing that she and the people she talks to are completely ensconced in a liberal bubble.)

When Washington Post columnist Clifford Thompson wrote “Dear White People: Stop Using The Term ‘Uncle Tom’ ”, I again saw evidence of the bubble. Because living here in the Center Coast, we don’t hear white people use the term “Uncle Tom” (except perhaps, to refer to the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but even that is rare). Thompson’s column is a well-written plea to common sense and decency, but it is clearly aimed at people so deep into liberal ideology that they’ve lost track of the other side.

So, yes, those people need to get out of their liberal bubbles more often. What they argue about would make a lot more sense to much of the country if they had any idea how many non-liberals are out here.

Following is a short list of articles and op-eds I easily came up with about liberals needing to listen to conservatives:

• The Guardian: suggests that if you want out of your bubble, you could read the conservative websites listed here
• Quartz: advocates using an RSS-feed reader to follow conservative sites
• New York Times: claims “liberals need to take their fingers out of their ears” and listen to conservative and liberal ideologies
• Boston University: relates “How a liberal learned to respect conservative thinking”
• The Washington Post: asserts “liberals need to understand nationalist impulses”
• Time: says “The more I got out of my own liberal bubble, the more I met other conservatives who were neither stupid nor hateful — or at least no more deliberately hateful than I was. Those experiences really challenged my biases and assumptions.”

But what I more often see is a need for conservatives to get out of their conservative bubbles.

As I argued in 2016, there are clearly conservative bubbles too, even if they’re never mentioned on the news. In many of the places I have lived, if liberals even exist they tend to keep very quiet. I met two at the small-town newspaper where I worked for some time, but one of them died and the other retired. I met a handful of politically progressive people when I lived in Arkansas, but each was an outlier: the transplant from California, a gay black man, the daughter of a college professor, etc. Each was typically in the company of people who disagreed vehemently.

But there aren’t calls in the conservative press to “get out of your bubble”. I can’t find a single op-ed on Fox News, Brietbart, or The Daily Caller asking for conservatives to engage more with liberals, or listing liberal news sites to read, or suggesting getting to know more progressives.

Maybe a bigger question is: What would actually be accomplished by anyone breaking out of these bubbles?

Common wisdom holds that we’ll all embrace and sing Kumbayah together if only we’ll try to see things from the other side. I don’t think this is true at all.

First, it looks like we’re actually talking about two different things when we say “get out of the bubble”. By this, some people mean “consume news and opinion writing from the other side”. But other people actually mean “develop friendships with people on the other side”. I’m not convinced that both should be conflated by using a joint phrase, because they clearly entail different things.

It also looks like the news media might be hanging too much importance on all of this; an awful lot of Americans don’t think about politics at all on a daily basis. As anecdotal evidence, I cite a random sampling of Facebook feeds (for which I briefly broke my Facebook fast). A great number of people on Facebook only post about pets, kids, illnesses, sporting events, pop culture icons, and so on. And a bunch of people in my circles often post about God “moving” in their lives.

Another odd observation in my circles: people all across the political spectrum feel they’re outnumbered by other “sides”. Clearly, this is true — because no political ideology in the U.S. holds a majority), but it seems sadly like a ripe opportunity for radicalization of sorts. Libertarians are clearly outnumbered by everyone else. Independents are a growing demographic but are still outnumbered by people who belong to major parties. Middle-of-the-road people are common enough but are outnumbered by non-moderates. Republicans are very common, but they’re outnumbered by people who aren’t Republicans — and the same is true for Democrats.

If everyone is running around thinking they’re in a shrinking ideological minority, feeling pressured and increasingly frustrated, it’s no wonder we begin to develop demagogues at the fringes and that we elect people with more style than substance, more bluster than basic decency, and more of what made us all cynical in the first place: politicians lying to us.

I don’t have a suggestion for a solution, but I know this is something we need to pick at. It’s a scab that shouldn’t be allowed to heal over until we can find a way to disinfect it.