Defining Liberal Bubble Syndrome
On Tuesday afternoon, a friend added me to a Facebook group called Pantsuit Nation: the digital home of more than three million Hillary Clinton supporters, thousands of them American women and men who donned pantsuits to head to the polls in solidarity with their chosen candidate. Many of these people not only hoped, but sincerely expected that Clinton would prevail on election night. I did, too.
Wednesday morning, presidentelect Donald Trump was no longer the stuff of hypothetical scenarios or nightmares, but a hideous reality. And Pantsuit Nation was but a dream.
In the words of one forlorn but hopeful citizen of PN: “Ladies, we must take back the Congress and our state legislatures. Who is running?” In the words of another, less hopeful citizen: “How did this happen?”
It happened for about a dozen reasons we’ve heard at least a hundred times already: The democratic status quo, led by an unpopular, untrustworthy female candidate, failed to get out the vote where it counted and win over a disenfranchised white middle class that preferred hope and change-style xenophobia to establishment liberal platitudes.
In addition to this, Clinton’s camp likely did not foresee the influence that closeted Trump supporters had in the voting booth: voters otherwise known — in the words of CNN anchor Jake Tapper — as “leaners” on account of their habit of “leaning in” to inform friends and journalists that they preferred Trump, in fear that doing so publicly would result in embarrassment (which in many parts of the United States, it would).
But “how did this happen?” — though an extremely important question — seems to have overshadowed another equally important question: Why are we so shocked that it did?
Why, in other words, is the election result such an earth-shattering surprise to everyone? Why, when documentarian Michael Moore predicted a Trump win months ago, was the progressive response a collective “yeah, right”?
Why did so many liberals on both sides of the border assume in their hearts that at the end of the day, things would be OK?
That the Trump candidacy was, like the candidate’s reality television show, a freakish but temporary spectacle?
For starters, there are the polls, which consistently put Clinton ahead and may have given some Trump-wary voters false hope that the Republican candidate would be toast whether they showed up to vote or not.
But there is something else at play here — something else that fuels this “Oh My God, I Can’t Believe It!” rejoinder, and it runs much deeper than misleading, erroneous polls.
That thing is Liberal Bubble Syndrome: the belief on the part of many well-heeled North American progressives that far more people think and act like “us” than they actually do because we reside in an echo chamber, both on and offline.
This condition breeds not only false hope but complacency: the assumption that truth wins out every time, that sanity in our politics is the rule, not the exception, and that words such as “tyranny” and “unrest” apply to people and places overseas but will never realistically apply here.
(For those “optimists” who are so keen on reassuring anti-Trump minorities not to fret because “there’s no way in hell he’ll do anything he says he’ll do,” consider this: the mere possibility that he might fulfil just one of his promises where Muslims, undocumented immigrants and LGBT people are concerned is sufficiently terrifying.)
What’s so troubling about Trump’s win isn’t merely that it was a surprise, but that his detractors, many of them otherwise very serious and sober pundits, believed it was an improbability worth laughing about.
Well it wasn’t. Political unrest and yes, fascism, are not just faraway ideas that exist to terrify and terrorize faraway people.
This continent is just as susceptible as any other to chaos. It’s time we started acting like it. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.