Breaking the Bubble
I’m a Boomer. I came of age in the 60s in southern California, in Orange County, to be exact. It was the era of the Beatles, of Bob Dylan protest music, the Vietnam War protest, free love, experimentation with drugs, and distrust of anyone over 30 and authority in general. I was a die-hard McGovern, McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy supporter. The closest I ever got to conservatism back then was when my dad came out as a Regan Republican. Leftist politics of the 60s and early 70s is in my DNA.
Living in Orange County for almost 70 years has given me a unique vantage point on its checkered political past. For decades, the county was a Republican stronghold and a hotbed for radical conservatives. Think the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But the county has undergone dramatic changes both politically and demographically, shifting from the largely white center of conservative politics to a far more diverse place. It is now one of the few true purple counties in the US due to the Trump election in 2024 when the county had him winning over Harris by just a slim margin of about 2%.
Trump’s recent win notwithstanding, Democrats still outnumber Republican voters in California. I’ve been along-time registered Democrat, but in 2020 I switched to ‘No Party Preference.’ I was not enthusiastic about the Biden/Harris ticket and was increasingly disenchanted with the party’s lack of effective messaging to what used to be their bread-and-butter supporters. I could also see identity politics—what James Carville calls identitarianism[1]—seeping into the national conversation and sensed the party shifting toward white-collar, highly educated, and affluent Americans. The party seemed to be paying less attention to rural and working-class voters, and currying favor with tech bros and the Oprahs, the Clooneys, and the DiCaprios of Hollywood
Although I left the party in 2020, I continued to lean left which put me squarely in a left-wing bubble despite all the social and political division that was taking place in the country. My left-leaning pals and I acknowledge that we’re in a bubble, and we like to pat ourselves on the back for admitting it. But we rarely ever take any action to break out of it. But I get it. It’s hard to break out of the bubble, to imagine someone else’s existence, to understand and be tolerant of someone else’s views and beliefs.
When Trump won his first term in 2016, I started to notice that Trump voters became targets of all kinds of disparaging remarks. It seemed like anyone who voted for him were fair game for verbal attacks such as: they’re stupid, they vote against they own self-interest. I started hearing the phrase ‘flyover states,’ implying that the people who live in the Midwest don’t matter and that they are looked down upon as being uneducated. Sadly, this pattern is still going strong today following the 2024 election, coming from those who easily throw insults at Trump supporters but would die before using a racial epithet. Each time I hear a criticism or a slight like this, something in me takes it a bit personal, an attack on my own background and heritage…my own people.
I was born in farm country USA…small town Nebraska to be exact. I come from a line of Dutch immigrant farmers. My parents moved to southern California when I was 10. It seems incredible to me that 10 years of a particular influence, 17 if you count the annual family vacations that we spent on my Grandparents’ farm, could leave such an indelible impression on me. But it has. I was brought up to think that the simple life was virtuous and that farmers and other hardworking people who make things with their hands lead honorable lives. I learned that hard work does not equate to some romanticized version of the American dream, but rather to fulfillment and sometimes survival. I understood that it's worthwhile to persevere in the face of adversity. I learned the value of repairing the broken and making use of everything until it runs out. Because I watched, and occasionally participated in, the planting of the vegetable garden, the seasonal harvesting of crops, the raising of livestock for the market, and yes, even the killing of animals, I knew the source of the food I ate when I sat down to a meal. I knew that the metal pails of milk we carried into the house came from the cows we just milked by hand. Even the bread, the catsup, and butter were special not just because it tasted better but because it required hard work to make them. Have things changed on farms and other industries in the Midwest? Of course. Modern methods now free many farmers the drudgery of manual labor, but I think traditional values are still the bedrock of these rural communities.
Am I glad my parents moved from the provincial influence of a small farming community? Absolutely. But the values I saw modeled as a kid have stayed with me. I don’t see them as Depression era values passed down to me from my parents; I see them as proverbial middle America values…flyover state values. I see the folks who possess these values as having character worthy of respect, not derision because they voted for someone I don’t like. I suspect that all my cousins, aunts and uncles who still live in that small Nebraska community voted for Trump and they certainly don’t deserve the hateful speech that sometimes comes at people who have different values and a different way of life. The thing is you can disagree with someone’s politics and who they voted for without the name calling, the derision, the meanness, the nastiness. Isn’t this something we learned in kindergarten?
My feelings about this are exemplified in Chris Arnade’s December 2024 article The Year of McDonald’s. It really hit home, and I think it does a great job of explaining our political divide and maybe even lifting the curtain a little in helping us break out of our left wing and elite bubble. Arnade’s article centers around Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s in a swing voter area north of Philadelphia, where he spent the afternoon slinging fries and gladhanding patrons. Arnade observes that, love it or hate it “McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans—urban, rural, male, female, middle or working class; it unites every demographic in the U.S., with a single exception: the highly educated, especially academics.”
Arnade cleverly uses McDonald’s popularity as a metaphor to highlight the division in our country and the lack of understanding among elites of the folks who voted for Trump. For many on the left, McDonald’s is a bastion of corporate evil, with no redeeming qualities. Of course, the elite go there like everyone else, but they do so grudgingly and with a kind of mean spiritedness. They cite the corporate greed, the unhealthful food, the soulless of the décor, the aggravating experience of ordering, etc. But Arnade makes a convincing argument that McDonald’s has become America’s community center for the working class, the downtrodden, and as well as the mentally ill of our society. McDonald’s plays a role in the day-to-day life of Americans, especially those toward the bottom, those he calls the ‘back row.’
Arnade asks “How is it that McDonald’s, a mega-corporation founded and designed to make eating as quick and transactional as possible, has become America’s default community center? It’s happened because people are fundamentally wired to make meaning, and because having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are. But to the educated elites—what I call the front-row—this kind of community is seen as embarrassing and a bit backward.”
There’s something powerful that happens in basic human interaction when someone says ‘I got you’, ‘I understand what you’re going through.’ Even if it’s a lie, we can’t help but resonate with that kind of recognition and be drawn to it. What could be more powerful than Trump showing up at a McDonald’s and saying in effect ‘I’m just like you.’ Arnade says that “Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s ‘just like you,’ despite being on the surface nothing like them. This is what many in the front-row still miss about his appeal. His apparent love of McDonald’s is effective because it goads his critics into signaling that they are not ‘just like you.’ Further, it shows that “he’s a back-row guy at heart while also showing that while he should be a member of the front-row, given his education and wealth, he’s not, because such people despise him for many of the same reasons they look down on you: for what he eats, how he talks, for what he believes in.”
I continue to be confounded by the Democrat Party and its failure to compete effectively for what was once its traditional voting bloc. They still seem not to have gotten the message. Shouldn’t they be busy re-branding themselves in light of who their constituency voted for? Here’s Arnade continuing on what the elite are missing “This is the thing about the front-row: Their framework doesn’t fully understand what makes the average American tick. By focusing on what can be measured, they often miss what is meaningful. In their eyes, systematically imposing ideas from the top down is the route to building the best society, and a human is a transactional, rational, economic thing. They congratulate themselves with the increase in America’s wealth, and ignore our declining life expectancy due to drug overdoses, suicides, and reckless diets—which is all evidence of a nihilistic despair, as is a growing and desperate loneliness.”
In a recent Yascha Mounk podcast, Arlie Hochschild, author and sociologist, offered some compelling insight into Trump voters in what she calls a right-wing deep story: “In some parts of the country, if you're a middle-aged man, you feel like you're waiting in line. At the very end of line is the American Dream. It's at the top of the hill. You can barely see it. And the line hasn't been moving. You're not prejudiced against anybody as you see it, you’re waiting patiently. And then there are line cutters. Well, you’re a white male, remember. It's a woman that gets there, damn, half the population are them, so new competitors. Blacks getting in, immigrants, refugees, highly paid public sector workers are all line cutters. And then you look over your shoulder and Barack Obama is waving to the line cutters.”
“Then there's an existential crisis. The final moment in the right-wing deep story is that someone ahead of you, maybe with more education, turns around and calls you a prejudiced, racist, sexist, homophobic redneck and then you think, okay, I am furious. I've been shamed in two ways here—pushed back and then shamed for being at the back. Then this charismatic leader comes along who seems to take you out of that situation. That is the right-wing deep story.”
I want to be clear here. I’m not trying to make a case for who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m merely looking to understand because with understanding comes empathy…compassion. I don’t agree with those who voted for Trump, but I think I understand why many of them did. And I try to have compassion for the situation in which they find themselves…a situation in which they felt so desperately compelled to vote for someone I don’t agree with.
I haven’t completely given up on the party. There’s a Democrat who may be able to show us the way forward. Recently I came across an episode of The Ezra Klein Show, in which he interviewed Representative Jake Auchincloss (D) of Massachusetts. They explore why Auchincloss sees himself as “a Democrat who is thinking differently.” Klein cites a line from Donald Trump's first vice president that goes: “I'm a conservative but I'm not angry about it.” Klein asks Auchincloss what his version of that is for Democrats. Auchincloss responds: “I'm a liberal but I'm not condescending about it. What I mean by that is when we either roll our eyes or shrug our shoulders we are stopping the conversation before it can start. People are not going to listen to us about economic theories of cost disease and how we're going to lower the cost of living if they don't first feel heard about shared values like meritocracy, fair play, and hard work. What they have felt like is that rather than being enlisted to a party, they are being lectured to by elites.”
“You got to go out there and shatter echo chambers. Particularly in places where maybe the thrust of the conversation is not normally about politics, normally it’s about sports or it's about cultural current events but (then) you're able to insert 10 to 15 minutes about housing or healthcare. Gone are the days of the big broadcast networks having this linear domination of our attention economy. It is now a go everywhere, talk to everyone vulcanized media landscape and so we're going to need individuals who can execute.”
I don’t know about you, but maybe this guy Auchincloss is on to something. Could he be our Democrat candidate in ’28?
[1] “…identitarianism tells me that I should look at you more for your identity than your humanity, and I can't do that. I cannot look at you first as anything other than a human being. I have to say identity has taken over the Democratic Party, internal politics, and it doesn't help them win elections.” ~James Carville, Firing Line, Jan 31, 2025