Listen To the MAGA People

Maybe we’re not the bubble boys

You know what’s weird about this Paul Krugman tweet?

It’s not just that he makes sense — Krugman often does. No, it’s that in the tweet and the thread to which it belongs we see a reputable mainstream writer referring, in an offhand way, to the central myths of the MAGA tribe — that liberals are coming to kill them (so they have to kill liberals first), that BLM burned down major cities in 2020, that cities are cauldrons of violence, etc. — as evidence that somebody besides liberals are in a Bubble.

How often do you see that?

We’ve been told for years that liberals are in a Liberal Bubble and that we have to go out and get an earful of what the people who voted for Trump are all about — hence, all the MAGA voter diner safaris in the prestige media.

Of course, those of us who did in fact know people like that actually heard from them in that period, and maybe my experience was uncommon but what I mainly heard was racist and/or sexist and deranged persecution-mania gibberish, which led to me no longer listening to those people because who needs it.

I suppose peddlers of the Listen To The MAGA People perspective would consider this very liberal-intolerant of me. That’s what the “Bubble” frame insists: Your blinders are preventing you from seeing past the multiple parentheses your MAGA correspondent is putting around the names of well-known Jews — you should engage and try to understand their grievances.

When we talk about bothsiderism and Murc’s Law, that’s what we’re talking about —the idea that the liberal perspective is of necessity insular and blinkered, whereas the conservative perspective is some deep American truth that, despite the existence of Fox News and hundreds of other rightwing media outlets and columnists, just hasn’t broken though, which is why America is (sadly) divided.

There is of course an outrageously vain notion at the center of this: That conservative insights need to be acknowledged and authenticated by Liberal Bubble people. This was presumed to be so even when Republicans had the White House and both houses of Congress — they had the power to do anything they wanted, but until reporters had thought long and hard about what MAGA people were really saying when they chanted “lock her up,” and come up with an answer that sounded more benign than “they meant what they said, they’re just vicious assholes,” and printed it in a bunch of broadsheet thumbsuckers read by important people (i.e. six-figure earners), the riddle went unsolved.

This mandates that most reporting on left/right divide follow the bothsider template, even if the rightwing side of it is — as is often the case these days — egregiously nuts, lest someone get the idea that the journalistic enterprise is taking a side and therefore subsumed by the Liberal Bubble.

The Washington Post article off which Krugman riffed is itself affected. The reporter, David Weigel, is astute and thorough, but when you’re writing about the lunacy of the right, the form simply requires something that looks like balance to protect the paper against screams of Very Bias. Thus, when Weigel lays out some of the extremely loony and in fact violent language of major Republican 2022 candidates (e.g., Maryland GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox: “We were told 14 days to bend the curve, and yet antifa was allowed to burn our police cars in the streets… Do you really think, with what we’re seeing — with the riots that have happened — that we should not have something to defend our families with? This is why we have the Second Amendment”), he is obliged by the logic of the form to follow up thus:

The rhetoric is bracing, if not entirely new. Liberal commentators made liberal use of the word “fascism” to describe Trump’s presidency.

Again, maybe it’s just me, but when I see liberals having roundtables as to whether Trump is ackshually a fascist compared to an actual Republican gubernatorial candidate (in a state with a Republican governor) calling for his voters to arm themselves against “antifa” — well, apples and oranges is the polite way to put it.  

What makes this even sadder/funnier is despite years of this nonsense, and mastheads full of pundits calling for Bubble-busting and MAGA-whispering, the tipping point is never reached, so the ante must be upped; thus, Times columnist Bret Stephens emits a column called “I was wrong about Trump voters” — not because he was in the Liberal Bubble (Stephens is reliably rightwing, and sucks) but because he now feels he wasn’t MAGA enough: “in my dripping condescension toward [Trump] supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me…”  

Stephens is admitting that he is Bubble-adjacent, see, because like Bubbly liberals he went to college, wears fancy suits, and got squicked out when Trump called his colleagues “enemy of the people” — but now he sees the error of his ways! If liberals won’t do the work, Bret Stephens will do it for them!  

I have thought about this a good long time, and come to the conclusion that it is not you and I who are in the Bubble. The minority of American voters whose nihilism was exploited in 2016 by grifters who got lucky, and whose thuggish champion was after four years of malignity and incompetence cashiered in 2020 despite the best efforts and worst crimes of the thugs — and who yet insist they actually won that election, brag about their desire to eliminate the people who say they didn’t, and expect the rest of us to kiss their asses for it — they’re the ones in the Bubble. And though there’s a whole wingnut cottage industry of gerrymandering and voter suppression devoted to keeping that Bubble intact, there is nothing that would be better for our country than to see it finally and truly popped.