‘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.