Thread by @tzimmer_history

I really appreciate this deeply personal column by @perrybaconjr on life inside a political “bubble.”

I wholeheartedly agree that not all “bubbles” are the same, and not all are bad. Let me add a few thoughts:

https://twitter.com/perrybaconjr/status/1418308922163728384

I live in much more of a bubble than @perrybaconjr. According to this NYT interactive, 92 percent of the people in my neighborhood are Democrats. I’ll tell you why I’m fine with that. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

I have a personal red line for my private life: If you don’t think this country should be a democracy in which all people are equal and count equally regardless of race, gender, or religion, I’d rather not hang out with you.

The fact that democracy itself has become a partisan issue means that my personal red line is, in practice, a partisan statement. But that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of the Republicans who can’t meet the “Gotta accept democracy” minimum requirement.

Back in Germany, for instance, the same red line did not have such a clear partisan valence. It basically just eliminated political extremists, especially supporters of the far-right AfD. Does anyone seriously want to argue that more Germans should hang out with AfD supporters?

Which brings me to something @perrybaconjr touches on towards the end: As a general rule, the two sides in American politics are not the same, and that applies to their bubbles as well. It’s highly misleading to think of a Democratic bubble as the equivalent of a Republican one.

The Democratic coalition is far more diverse than the Republican one. It’s the reason why the Democratic Party could never get away with the same type of narrowly focused identity politics that Republicans are offering their predominantly white, Christian, conservative voters.

It is true that here in the capital, I am surrounded almost exclusively by people who vote Democratic. If you apply the Red/Blue binary, this means that I live in a bubble. But the concept simply obscures the enormous ideological and cultural heterogeneity of “blue” America.

The “blue” bubble contains cultural progressives and Black people who are fairly conservative in social and cultural matters; proper lefties and centrists who fear Bernie Sanders almost as much as Trump; religious people and atheists who despise organized religion.

My “blue” bubble contains climate activists and people like Matthew Yglesias who find them extremely annoying; people who fight for affordable housing and those who think this would destroy the “character” of the neighborhood; anti-racists and people who worry about “wokeness.”

The “red” bubbles are much more ideologically and culturally homogeneous than that. A red bubble in rural Kentucky and a blue urban center are simply not equivalent in terms of the political, cultural, and ideological insulation they provide.

Simply looking at partisan affiliation and coloring neighborhoods accordingly in either blue or red flattens and conceals these tremendous differences between the two sides and their respective coalitions. As always, the Red/Blue binary obscures more than it illuminates.

The two sides are not the same, and their bubbles are not the same; wanting to live in a blue bubble is not the same type of political statement as wanting to insulate yourself in a red bubble. In a vacuum, all bubbles might be equally problematic. But we don’t live in a vacuum.