Sociologists claim we can only know about 150 people well; from them, we derive our sense of community and family. The downside is that it means most of us live in positive feedback loops in which everyone we talk with mostly shares our same worldview. That can be deadly for politicians and political parties.
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren writes in the New York Times (as she did recently) that the reason Democrats are suffering in opinion polls is because they haven’t moved far enough or fast enough to the far Left, she illustrates the problem. Everything that the Massachusetts Democrat hears from her family, friends, colleagues, donors, and employees reinforces her ideological bias.
And she absolutely couldn’t be more wrong.
True believers have a blindness. They often cannot understand how anyone else could disagree with them. When they run across people who do, they tend to cast those differences in terms of moral shortcomings rather than disagreements of opinion. They become prisoners in their own echo chambers, lacking the dispassionate objectivity required to see beyond the horizon of their own ideologies. Worse, the consultants and pollsters they pay to maintain dispassion and objectivity either fall in line or end up excommunicated.
Incidentally, this is also why members of Twitter’s board can claim Elon Musk is an existential threat to free speech when he promises to lift their own constraints on free speech. They truly believe that free speech is speech that aligns with their version of reality. To the true believer, speech that doesn’t line up with their outlook isn’t free; it’s dangerous “misinformation.”
Given all this, it’s understandable, if not forgivable, that Warren advocates an even more radical lurch to the far Left as a way of enhancing the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. Public officials elected from states or districts deeply graded in the hue of their own partisan sympathies can be just as blinded.
But what’s President Joe Biden’s excuse? He promised to represent everyone in America, not just those on the outer limits of his own party. Democrats chose him and rejected his competitors because he was more centrist than them. And yet, in nearly every instance, his administration advocates an agenda at least as radical as the most radical of his party.
If taken, Warren’s advice to Democrats assures that in the midterm elections, Republicans will win states and districts that they could never have thought winnable a few months ago. It will also clear her party’s benches for the 2024 presidential nomination.
In the long run, the party’s echo chamber will drive huge numbers of sensible Democrats to see in clearer relief that their party has rejected the values of family, freedom, and community — that it’s Republicans who are working in sensible ways to deliver on America’s promise of equal opportunity, parental rights, and unbounded opportunity.
Most people aren’t interested in rooming with Warren in an echo chamber as isolated from reality as the one she has constructed. Her insistence that they do so is setting the stage for a historic realignment.
Tony Marsh owns Savanna Communications, a strategic communications firm retained by companies, associations, and candidates.
