What’s the “contrary opinion” here? That it’s ok to be a bigot vs transgendered people because they don’t fit into a narrow middle-American view of “normal”?
It is true that urbanites are going to be exposed to more diversity than than rural dwellers. But the issue being discussed when saying that urban liberals are in a bubble is their lack of exposure to rural dwellers. The people saying it are basically saying “You have a lack of exposure to us and how we think.”
In theory, rural people have exposure to more liberal ideas through the media. In practice, though, everyone gravitates towards people who are like them. Literally every conservative I know in my town watches Fox News if they watch any Cable TV news.
Right now, I would definitely say that rural conservatives are in a bubble. They do not understand the protestors–not just disagreeing with them, but honestly not understanding them. Liberal values are the butt of jokes, because they don’t understand how anyone could think that way.
But I will also say that urban liberals are in a bubble, and do not understand anything about how small towns work. This bubble was why Clinton lost the election, frankly. She was ignorant of all the people hurting, and that they needed to be helped. Instead, she just saw the hurting minorities.
I remember someone saying not too long ago on this board that Republicans should drop abortion because it is a losing case. And now there is a President that the Religious Right held their nose and voted for because he promised to repeal Roe v. Wade. My dad flat out told me that “Hillary kills babies” and that’s why he couldn’t vote for her.
That’s not to say that every urban liberal is in a bubble, nor every rural conservative. I definitely know the former is overblown at times. I definitely don’t think the idea that they had that Trump would lose was due to a bubble.
Though I do wonder if Clinton’s not going after working class whites showed her bubble. And, yes, even after living in Arkansas, I do think she could still be in a bubble. She was in Little Rock, after all.
So, I decided to quantify what I said before about big-city liberals being exposed to more conservatives than rural conservatives are. For numbers, I turned to Ohio’s presidential results by county (I could have tried this with the whole US, but that’d be a heck of a lot of data to sift through, and Ohio is reasonably representative of the country as a whole). The reddest county in the state, percentage-wise, was Mercer County, at 80.7% Trump (17,200 to 3,335). The bluest county in the state, percentage-wise, was Cuyahoga, at 65.8% Clinton (383,974 to 179,894). In other words, the bluest county had over ten times as many Trump supporters as the reddest county. People here in Cuyahoga cannot avoid conservatives, because we’re surrounded by them. Given that, how can one claim that Cuyahoga is a geographic bubble, but that Mercer is not?
I think everyone is in a bubble, all the time. Tell me, think of your best friend, or spouse, how much do you really understand about them? It’s less about understanding exactly what someone’s experiences are, and exactly what makes oe tick, and more looking at the more granular issues of what is fact, and what is lie. What is a good idea, what is a terrible idea. What will help people, and what will hurt people. These are factual issues, that require those making the choices to be dependent on facts and knowledge, not on the gut feelings of those who do not actually understand the economic situation.
We all live in a bubble of our own experiences.
Case in point…
We all have different experiences. I have seen this. I will say that I see more TV’s set to sports than news or politics, but pretty much every tv I see not set to sports is set to fox. This is at my barber, my dentist, my CPA, the bar in my strip, the applebee’s I stop by sometimes, and my parents. I can think of several other examples, but honestly it is so prevalent that I would note exceptions rather than every instance. I can say that I have only once seen MSNBC on, and that was when I was catering at a Microsoft satellite office. Oh, thinking of a small exception here, when I catered at an Aetna office, they had Fox Business on, not Fox News.
So, while I don’t discount your experience of having never been in a restaurant or a bar with Fox News on, I can assure you that it is just supreme coincidence that you have never been in an establishment like that. That Fox News is the prevalent news channel that is broadcast both in public and in private is most certainly is NOT a false claim.
Yeah, that’s what I don’t understand about accusations of living in the bubble. I live in Butler County. If you look at that, I am surrounded 2 to 1 by Trump supporters. My street was filled with Trump signs. My family and most of my acquaintances are Trump supporters (to be fair, my close friends are not). A couple of my employees are Trump supporters. Many of my clients are Trump supporters. My local news is dominated with conservative viewpoints. My local newspaper has endorsed the republican candidate in every election from the time it was founded up until Trump.
But I’m the one in a bubble.
You’re kidding, right? The Colbert quote is 100 percent an opinion, not a fact. So it matters very much who said it. That’s pretty much the whole point.
BTW, I have also heard this quote: “The facts of life are conservative” attributed to Margaret Thatcher. Do you still say it doesn’t matter who says things like this?
- My comment was with regard to your statement
“To be a liberal is simply to see other people as being worthy of respect and dignity, regardless of their background and culture.”
Your answer IMO deflects from the point of my criticism by going off on a tangent based on definitions. I don’t agree morality is simply whatever everyone agrees at a given point but it’s irrelevant. We’re talking about now. Now it is considered wrong not to recognize everyone’s basic human rights, but you are attempting, as is unfortunately common nowadays, to define the left side of the US political spectrum as people who agree with this and the right side as people who don’t. Similarly it’s a deflection to use the definition of ‘liberal’ as 18th century liberals like the US Founders. It’s clear from my post, and in the general context of this discussion we’re defining ‘liberal’ as the left side of the current US spectrum.
But again, many of your leaning now adopt annoyingly self-congratulatory definitions such as the one you gave: ‘we’re the good folks who respect others, they’re the bad folks who don’t’. Besides annoying, I really believe such shallow analysis is not in your own interest to promote ‘liberal’ (as in left leaning) politics and the Democrats. If you really believe that’s the political divide, ‘simply’ those who respect others and those who don’t, you’re going to miss a lot, because it’s obviously not anywhere near that simple.
Again, ‘respecting others’ gives no hint or clue whether the govt should be bigger or smaller (how much wealth has to be redistributed to others to the ‘respect’ them?), whether abortion should be legal (who are ‘others’?), immigration (does it ‘disrespect’ others in other countries to say they can’t all come to the US, how many have to be let in to show ‘respect’?)… it doesn’t answer any salient issue of policy.
- No, the point was that the Democrats and Republicans more than shifting what ideology they have, have shifted the degree to which they promote a coherent ideology at all. And at all times both parties have been in part coalitions of interest groups with limited overlap or agenda’s or even some opposition among their agenda’s. Eg. upper middle class/rich Democratic greens and poorer welfare state clients on environmental policy; or free market conservatives and the high school educated working class elements in the GOP, etc. Those groups don’t hew to their party based on an single shared ideology.
It’s also ironic you’d start to talk of ideology after defining the left as ‘those who respect others’. That’s not an ideology, it’s virtue signalling. Which has it’s place in practical political campaigning (who doesn’t want to think they’re the good guys?), but again I think there’s risk of missing a lot of the substance of US politics if you really believe that’s the definition of the left or Democrats.
It is not an opinion, it is an observation. The fact that the observation was made by a comedian does not make it any less true.
So, if you wish to discuss the observation on the merits of whether or not it is true, that’s one thing, but dismissing it because the observation was made by a comedian who specializes in observational humor is not a valid argument.
We should look at things where conservatives and liberals disagree, and see which one tends to be based more on facts, and which is based more on feelings.
The first is just basic factual information. We have in another thread PCP claiming that Obama never did anything to help jobs in the US. This is patently untrue, as you can look at the efforts of the admin in saving the auto companies, and you can look at the jobs that have been gained in the last 8 years. But there are people who feel that the economy has gotten worse. These ar pretty much entirely on the right. Liberals may agree that the economy can get better, but you aren’t going to find that many liberals who incorrectly believe that unemployment has gone up, that jobs have gone down, or that the stock market isn’t doing well, or any of the other economic indicators are showing poor performance, while you will find many conservatives who insist this to be the case.
Trump’s inauguration crowd size… need I say more? That’s a reality that certainly seems to have a liberal bias.
On and on, I could go with completely non-factual things that conservatives believe, form opinions on, and vote on, that are absolutely untrue. While there are liberal fringes that believe some silly things, these aren’t just fringe conservatives who believe these demonstrably untrue claims.
So, we can look at whether the conservative side or the liberal side is more inclined to believe in things like evolution or global warming, which, contrary to the opinion of some on the conservative side, are in fact facts.
We can look also at economic policies, and their results. This is murkier, and requires more nuance, but there is more than enough evidence that supply side economics does not work, that trade is a good thing for all parties involved, and that economic stimuli that target the lowest of the economic classes do the most good for the economy as a whole, yet conservative economic policies are opposed to these facts. Now, there is room for disagreement in these economic philosophies, but if you are starting from the standpoint that the economy has gotten worse over the last 8 years, it will not be possible for you to come to a useful conclusion.
So yes, reality itself does not care whether it is conveniently aligned with the left or the right schools of thought. However, that does not mean that the left and the right have not aligned themselves to reality, in such a way that the left is based on the best knowledge that we can have, and the right is opposed to everything the left stands for.
“Bubble” implies that the people inside the bubble are hiding from, ignoring or otherwise not exposed to some objective truth of reality that exists outside of the bubble. So maybe Trump supporters can enlighten me on what that objective reality Liberals are ignoring? I try to figure this out when I go to my inlaws. Best I can figure, we New Yorkers have no idea of what it’s like to live in fear of terrorists flying an airplane into the Delaware Water Gap.
This is a key point. Conservatives always complain about how their “alternative views” should be heard. Well, those views often conflict with science and objective, verifiable facts. And I’m sorry, but if you continue to support an argument after overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that, by definition, makes you an idiot. Regardless of what party you come from.
Thatcher would have been on the left wing of the Democrats: UHC, gun control, etc etc.
Thread summary:
No bubble, no bubble. You’re the bubble!
K9bfriender already responded to this issue at greater length.
It’s not an issue that Stephen Colbert said it so it’s right or Margaret Thatcher said it so it’s wrong. Things don’t become true because somebody said they were true. Reality doesn’t work that way. Things are already true before anyone points out that truth. But if the truth hadn’t been there, saying it’s true wouldn’t make it so. And if the truth is there, saying it’s false won’t make it false.
Donald Trump and his supporters don’t grasp this. (And George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had their own issues with reality.) They feel you can simply make a claim and if you can get enough people to believe your claim, it becomes true. To them, reality isn’t what’s true; reality is what people believe. Maybe Trump did have the largest inauguration crowd ever. Maybe three million people did vote illegally. Maybe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Maybe vaccinations do cause autism.
Actually, you generally do not respond to what is typed. You respond to what you read into what is typed. If you can’t see how your statement “The reason that the media draws from urban areas is because there is far more to be drawn upon in urban areas, far more perspectives and people. One night in manhattan generates more newsworthy events than what a year or even a decade in a nebraska farming community.” is the epitome of a bubble view, then there is no sense in further engaging on this issue.
Look at the quote that I responded to. It was a very general blurb about newsworthiness of urban nightlife versus rural life. That has nothing whatsoever to do with any race or religion.
I think that tends to be the case whenever we compare opinions on a subject between those who “live” the subject (for lack of a better word) and those who do not. Opinions about agricultural policies are likely to have more nuance and complexity if you ask a farmer than if you ask me (uhm… there should be some? And they shouldn’t be an excuse to line up politicians’ pockets? That’s about all I can tell you on the subject). I’ve seen it re. foreigners’ opinions on policies (yes, I’ll go to the bathroom and take that beam out of my eye now), non-vegetarians on vegetarian food, people talking about other people’s religious beliefs, etc. In general, if something doesn’t affect you directly you’re more likely to paint it in black and white.
I am not sure what you point is.
Sure, local news is only going to be interesting locally, unless it is something with more than local impact.
My point is that there is more culture and people to draw from. There is more creativity to be inspired. There are more connections to be made. There are higher chances of creativity being recognized. When is the last time you heard someone say “I’m going to nebraska to be an artist”, or “Going to Boise to be an actor”?
Unless you are trying to claim that more rural americans watch only local news and farm reports than watch popular entertainment, or you are trying to claim that popular entertainment is produced in Nebraska, rather than in the big cities, then you are not refuting, or even addressing my argument at all.
As I’ve posted several places today;
Liberals listen to what Conservatives say to find out what they believe.
Conservatives listen to what other Conservatives tell them Liberals (allegedly) believe.
Now, which of those two groups is in a bubble?
Funny, I would think that the vast majority of liberals (including myself) listen to what Liberals in the media say about Conservatives, and vice versa.
this blog talks about the separations a “dark matter” analogy.
"People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit."
“For now we can just accept them as a brute fact – as multiple coexisting societies that might as well be made of dark matter for all of the interaction they have with one another – and move on.”
Certainly not my experience. It would be very difficult not to hear the loud and angry conservative voices in our society and in our news. So if you and your friends fall in this camp, you need to widen your experience.
Do you ever watch Trump’s list of “enemy media”?
Because it’s filled daily with conservative guests and opinions.
Does Fox or Breitbart or Rush give liberals the same amount of exposure?
Which conservative sources do you watch, listen to, or read? Do you listen to Rush Limbaugh? Sean Hannity? Glenn Beck? Do you watch Fox News? Do you read the Wall Street Journal? The National Review? The Weekly Standard?
I can’t speak for you, but most of my liberal friends and family do not subscribe to any magazine, listen to any radio show, or otherwise expose themselves to any conservative viewpoint. I’ve never seen anything that would justify the claim that “Liberals listen to what Conservatives say to find out what they believe.”