A lot of digital ink has already gone to the question of how the media missed Donald Trump’s victory. The most common argument so far, at least on social media, is that the media is trapped in a bubble — walled off from the white working class that felt compelled to vote for Trump in droves.
But as Patrick Thornton argued on Twitter and Roll Call, this problem of being walled off to other communities isn’t exclusive to the media or “coastal elites”:
I'm from the rural midwest. All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backwards.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
My home county is 97% white. It like a lot of other very unrepresentative counties went heavily to Donald Trump.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
My high school had about 1,200 students. Two were Asian. One was Hispanic. Zero were Muslim. All the teachers were white.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
In many of these areas the only Muslims you see are in movies like American Sniper (I knew zero before going to college in another state).
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
In areas like I grew up, you never see gay couples. First gay person I knew personally was my college roommate.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
It is much of white working class America that needs to reach outside its comfort zone and meet people not like them.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
Many rural Americans have isolated themselves from the rest of the country. They live in very unrepresentative areas.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
I have friends and acquaintances who are Trump supporters. They genuinely do not understand today's shock, particularly from minorities.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
So, yes, people on the coasts could stand to meet more rural and exurban people. Rural and exurban people need to see more of America.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
Here it is in sharp relief: My HS had more sexual predator teachers (convicted!) than minority teachers. That's a rural American story
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
My brother-in-law married into a rural New Jersey family. His wife's family had never been to DC before visiting me (just a few hours away).
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
People do not understand the depths of how little much of rural America travels and sees other people and cultures.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
I'm from the Midwest, and I love the Midwest, but it's not representative of modern America.
— Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 9, 2016
I’d frame this a bit differently than Thornton does in these tweets: It’s not that any particular group is living in a bubble; it’s that everyone is living in different bubbles. People, for the most part, tend to congregate based on shared traits in terms of culture, race, ethnicity, and especially class.
This applies to the white working-class voters who voted for Trump. It applies to people in the media who missed Trump’s rise time and time again. And it applies to just about every other community in America.
The internet was supposed to alleviate this, but in many ways it’s done the opposite. As Tim Lee has argued on Vox, Facebook’s algorithm tends to feed us content that we like. The result is we only tend to see articles that align with our views, creating the same problem online that our geographic segregation has created offline.
It’s hard to say what the proper solution is to all of this. It’s one thing to tell people that they need to be more empathetic toward each other, but it’s another to actually make that happen.
