Elites

09:33 Sunday, 23 August 2026
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I like listening to Sarah Longwell's Bulwark podcasts about focus groups, because I like to hear what the people in the focus group are saying. You don't get everything, obviously, but you do get to hear nuggets that Sarah or her team felt were illustrative.

Yesterday I listened to (watched mostly) this one. It struck me because of something that came up in my feeds recently regarding Frederico Viticci and MacStories. Jack Baty had one view, while Rob Fahrni expressed what is probably the consensus view.

These things resonated because of the focus group discussion.

Now, I may not have been paying close attention, so maybe I got this wrong. These were Trump voters, may have been Biden voters who went for Trump, and they're unhappy with Trump, but they're also unhappy with "the left."

It's not the politicians on "the left," it's the people in their lives on "the left." They don't like the self-righteousness, the shaming, the shunning. They feel that we on "the left," think we're smarter than everyone else. (Truthfully, I considered posting a snarky comment that 50% of the population has below-average intelligence. But then I reconsidered.)

So here's the thing, our performative virtue signaling seems to be alienating the very people we need to persuade to come over to our side.

There's an old saying in politics, "People will never remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel." And I think that's kind of true in life as well.

I think a lot of this "piling on" is an artifact of social media, and people being online too much. I used to think that we said things online that we would never say to someone's face. Now I think that some of that is bleeding over into "real life." That we've fashioned these notions of who we are by the positions we've taken online, and that identity is sometimes asserting itself offline to the people around us.

We never should have been that way online in the first place, but now it's spreading.

Frederico isn't a neighbor. That is strictly an online sort of thing. It's unfortunate, and unhelpful, but it's not alienating a neighbor.

But we all have neighbors, and friends.

Back in May I went to Pennsylvania to have a little get-together with some of my classmates from the Naval Academy. We spent four years together, all in the same company, Good Times Ten.

Of the four of us, I'm perhaps the most liberal, the furthest "left." Two of the other three guys are more middle of the road, though I think I'd say one is closer to the left and the other is closer to the right, but it's not a huge difference. The fourth guy is a hardcore MAGA Trumper.

He was also my roommate and one of my best friends at the academy. He's also super-smart, very funny, generous and usually fun to be around. But he has a problem that many people in my life seem to have with regard to politics. They want to have a "discussion," except it never seems to be a discussion, it almost always turns into a debate and then an argument.

I suspect, though I don't know, that this is an emotional/psychological need. I think these guys are addicted to right-wing media, and that their interior experience is one of habitual outrage. When they're in a social setting, Fox News isn't on, they're not scrolling Truth Social or X, and there's this stimulus that's missing in their immediate experience and it makes them feel uncomfortable. So they have to generate it by engaging with the people around them.

This doesn't have to be people that disagree with them. I'm sure they would welcome validation from like-minded people. Perhaps that's what they would prefer, but when they know they're with people who probably disagree, they must invite a discussion, knowing that there will likely be some disagreement, because they need to nurture their interior experience.

It happens all the time with two of Mitzi's brothers-in-law, and it happened with my classmate last May. We knew where it would go.

A few years ago we were all together with a few more of our classmates in a similar setting. At one point my former roommate was talking with a like-minded MAGA type, boasting about how he attended a Black Lives Matter protest and carried a sign that said something like, "Burn Loot Murder," and they were both laughing about it.

We were in a public setting, but it pissed me off and I came up on the governors and turned and confronted him right there. I asked him what the point was of his sign? What view was he expressing? What did he hope to achieve? He had no real answer, other than it was his form of "counter-protest."

Things were pretty tense for a while after that.

So last May, perhaps foolishly, we tried to make a good-faith effort to engage with him on whatever it was that wished to discuss. I think it was trans athletes. And I don't think that trans athletes really affect him, but it definitely is a topic that nurtures this inner experience of outrage. It inevitably led to a "discussion" of women in the military, and "standards," and whether or not women can do the job.

It remained mostly civil, bordering on heated, until it got to whether or not women can do the job, because one of my classmates was married to a Navy diver, and they have two daughters. Then it got a little intense.

I don't remember who or how we got it dialed back, but at some point I told my friend that I simply wasn't going to argue with him anymore. That he had his opinions and we didn't agree; but there was no further point in arguing about it, we weren't going to change each others' minds, and our friendship was too valuable to risk hurting by raising our voices.

We were able to remain in each other's company and enjoy ourselves, but I suspect my former roommate was still struggling a bit with this lack of stimulation.

I'm going to hasten to add that this same phenomenon occurs on "the left." We are online too much, consuming too much media. I don't think it's unfair to say that we have genuine issues to be alarmed about, unlike the manufactured outrage of trans athletes, white replacement, and Sharia law. But saturating ourselves in this stuff all day, every day, can't be healthy.

My neighbor next door is retired, and I gather he spends a lot of time watching Fox News. He helps his son with the build from time to time, and we chat a bit. Mostly about what growing up was like around here, things he did in his youth. But, trans athletes came up. I didn't engage and just tried to change the subject. I think he was looking for a little validation or stimulation, more than a broader examination of the topic, and I didn't see any value in offering that.

"Both sides," have their problems with too much media in an economic system that competes for attention and focuses on "engagement" by hijacking our amygdalae. Our technology and our economic system are making us ill. It's a systemic problem, and I don't know what the solution is, other than it has to be a kind of "public health" response.

There was a time when people threw their excrement out their windows into the streets. Or poured it into the adjacent canal or river. We invested significant sums of money into sanitation infrastructure. We taught people about "personal hygiene," the importance of bathing, washing our hands after using the toilet, brushing our teeth.

We have nothing like that for this "social media" infrastructure, and it's making us all sick.

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