‘The Great Dismissal’: how our echo chambers fool us

The most insidious aspect of echo chambers is that the vast majority of people who live in one are unaware of their location or choose to ignore life outside their bubble. 

Someone recently described a book they were reading and when I furrowed my brow in distaste, their response was, “well I’m trying to operate outside my own echo chamber”. It stopped me in my tracks. I thought it was an astute, self-reflective observation. 

Back in 2016, Michael Moore truly stood alone as the only commentator who correctly predicted Donald Trump’s election win. And while he gave five key reasons for that prediction, the primary basis for his (we now know) prophetic warning was, as he calls it, “Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit”. (He also predicted a wash-out for Trump in 2024, but I digress.)

Back in 2016, describing the population as “angry and embittered”, he wrote, “From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the middle class.”

But the commentariat, the pundits, the pollsters, they weren’t listening. Because they don’t live in the Midwest. They live in places like New York, San Francisco, LA, Washington DC. In expensive houses. On comparatively high salaries.

No one was thinking about disenfranchised communities. People who were struggling to make ends meet and fell between the cracks, whose lives had not been made better by Republicans or Democrats. 

These were the people dismissed by those who had the microphone. And oh boy, did they teach everyone a lesson. 

When Donald Trump was, to apparently everyone on the Left’s surprise, re-elected in 2024, everywhere I went I heard a similar refrain, “the American system is broken” and “Americans just didn’t understand how the system works”.

The problem is that while the election win wasn’t a “landslide”, it was decisive. Trump won 312 seats to Kamala Harris’ 226 and was the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. Instead of listening to the concerns and motivations for voting for Trump, those on the other side just dismissed it as an error, a miscalculation, a misunderstanding. 

This is what I like to call The Great Dismissal (tm). It’s got nothing to do with Gough Whitlam and everything to do with people who dismiss points of view that differ from their own, who are happy to reside in their own echo chambers if it means their views are reinforced and not interrogated. 

Social media and online platforms have also reinforced binary thinking, because while it can be advantageous to curate what you see and hear, it’s also too easy to silence the voices that don’t align exactly with your own. It’s exacerbated by keyboard warriors who are happy to go on the attack at the slightest sense of dissent, in a way that wouldn’t happen in the real world. 

Another example is the Voice referendum. I know a lot of non-Aboriginal people who took part in door-knocking campaigns, rallies, letter writing, peer discussion campaigns and more. 

They were universally stunned when the referendum didn’t just fail, but failed to get up in any state or territory other than the ACT. They were utterly devastated.

When concerns were being raised that the referendum (a classically difficult piece of policy architecture to get past Australians on any issue) was going to fail, in part due to a campaign of fear-mongering and misinformation, in my peer group this largely fell on deaf ears. 

I believe this was exacerbated by people residing so firmly in their echo chambers that they didn’t know anyone who would declare they were going to vote no, giving them little chance to engage.

Equally, when people did suggest they were undecided or no-leaning, they were invariably dismissed as ignorant or racist. They may well have been both of those things – who knows – but they may also have simply bought into the “if you don’t know vote no” line peddled by the Voice’s opponents. 

Maybe if they hadn’t been dismissed at every turn, they could have known and then voted Yes? We’ll never know. 

I reside in the very Jewish part of Melbourne covered by Macnamara, the seat retained by Josh Burns in the recent Federal election. And nowhere was The Great Dismissal more evident than in the lead-up to that election. So much shouting, so much anger. Very little engagement, listening, conversation, acceptance of our ability to agree to differ. For want of a better word, it was an absolute shitshow. 

And Jews were in the thick of it, whether online or in real life, calling each other Kapos, shouting each other down, failing to stop for a moment and understand where other people were coming from. Just like any population group, the Jewish community is not a homogenous think tank. There are views that take up the Left, the Right and of course the middle ground. But also like any other group, there has been far too much polarisation and not enough listening.

For this we can thank Donald Trump himself. He dismisses anyone who challenges the status quo as he sees it, his ability to lead or his shortcomings. Trump, more than anyone on the planet, is the high priest of The Great Dismissal. 

Post-election, the Greens, which lost three of its four members including its leader Adam Bandt, described the election as a win because “more people than ever had voted Green”. Really? If this isn’t a dismissal of a strong and firm message being sent by so many Greens voters, I don’t know what is. I hope this is just public posturing and not another Great Dismissal of the kind that led the party here in the first place.

Another aspect of The Great Dismissal is the denial of experts. Doctors on vaccines, climate scientists on climate change, Jews on antisemitism. Don’t like what the experts have to say? Just wave your hand and dismiss them entirely. It doesn’t matter that they categorically know more than you about this subject. Just dismiss their fact-based contentions and move on, right?

While none of us have an obligation to listen to or take part in conversations that might do us harm, there are many conversations that would be helpful to all of us if we took a moment to engage. 

On occasions I have been tempted to dismiss, rather than discuss, but I stop myself and take the time to listen as well as speak – and more often than not I am pleasantly surprised by the conversations that ensue. 

Not because it results in whoever I’m engaging with agreeing with me or vice versa, but because having your views challenged and seeing things from someone else’s point of view is healthy, constructive and sometimes even cathartic.

At this point in time, as The Great Dismissal gathers steam, the most important thing we can do is stop, touch grass, take a deep breath, stop dismissing and start listening.