Political thinkers are deeply divided about whether people are inside the bubble in that their political thoughts and actions are anchored in their actual social life or else that politics take place as a result of what is outside the bubble, politics a circling cyclorama of people and ideas churned out by policies, doctrines, and people who live in the reality of the media. This division does not line up with Conservatives and Liberals. DeTocqueville was a Conservative who thought that politics was grounded in the town hall democracy whereby local citizens learned to compromise with one another so as to get a local road created so that they could bring their produce to market. Marxists, for their part, thought that people were grounded by the actual conditions of their labor. Lazarsfeld political polling was based on the idea that voters were grounded in the demographics of their situation. Republicans were grounded in small town bourgeois life and Democrats were grounded in their working class situations rather than the working class allegiances that were derived from their situations. Thinkers of those who opposed these views took the idea that politics took place on the outside of their lives. Machaevelli’s view was that people in power had to instill both fear and love so as to get people to accept power and so that meant that these feelings were engendered by the people in power, on their balconies and through their marches, rather than by intruding with very many people so as to create and sustain order. Most politics is the theatre of politics. Ortega Y Gasset thought that the mass of people were dissociated from their structural ties so that they could roam around and riot as they will, their political activities independent of their allegiances or interests. Lord Bryce, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, thought that public opinion had come to dominate Democratic societies in that whatever were the popular views of the moment, the fads and catchphrases of the people, would motivate people to use their vote to get their way and effectuate policies. Closer to home, people are understood as responding to Donald Trump because they find him somehow attractive and compelling, and so are responding to the outside of the bubble, even if their own conditions are not so bad, or else must be responding from grievances, whether economic or cultural, as the reasons for why they get up off the coach to become engaged with Trumpian politics.
I do not think that either side of the issue holds up, persuasive as both sides can be. Rather, there is a complex process in which people take bits and pieces as well as whole ideologies to inform or influence the politics that are generated from whatever is on the home front. The trouble is that it is very difficult to document the transition of matters outside the bubble to matters inside the bubble and vice versa and so we are left thinking that Trump is either a product of his supporters being downwardly mobile or upwardly mobile or else that his supporters responded to the particular and peculiar figure that he was from outside the bubble. Ever so remains the difficulty of deciding which is the case. Historians can argue that Rousseau influenced the French Revolution because his ideas were “in the air” but it is difficult to see that in the documentary evidence, and yet it somehow must be true because Rousseau had been so taken as a figure.
The best evidence of a description of how outside the bubble influences and results from inside the bubble activities is in the election process. Samuel Lubell in his “The Future of American Politics” explained the process by which Eisenhower’s victory responded to both the changing social life and the public events of an election, something that requires people to lift themselves out of their private concerns and act as voters, which means taking a moment to be themselves outside the bubble, even if these voters were fitfully concerned with politics and soon enough drifting away from that political moment. The children of the working class, having experienced the Depression or else the Depression of their fathers, and so likely to be sympathetic to those who support Democrats because of their own working class roots, had been through the War, learning about the world and exposed to politics, and come back to go to college and find white collar work and move their new families to the suburbs. They wanted to be rid of their working class roots and the best way of doing so was to become a respectable Conservative, which means attractive to Eisenhower, a clear image from outside the bubble, Eisenhower identified with the war effort and being even headed and well balanced. So the ex-soldiers took up that public identity, and Eisenhower showed himself true to his tendencies: not revoking the New Deal but still thinking that the corporate leaders were the ones best suited to guide the nation. People got what they wanted because what was outside the bubble matched what was inside the bubble.
A generation later saw a less than perfect match of what was inside and outside the bubble. People of the Eighties had also been upwardly mobile and wanted to match their aspirations and new found success by emulating what they thought to be people who were now of the lower middle class. They became identified with the new version of respectability. That meant attending to and believing in their Catholic and Evangelical communities. They got from shat they had learned from outside the bubble a dislike for what were then called the social issues such as abortion and urban unrest while the more higher class Liberal supporters at the ame time picked up banners in favor of abortion and, in general, women’s liberation, so as to express the belief that women had a new kind of independence as well as paths to prosperity in the work place. The trouble was that there were mixed victories during that generation. The abortion issue was unresolved in that Roe v. Wade remained in effect and yet the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated and so the promoters of women’s rights had to deal with tangential issues to make their mark: the establishment of a regime to safeguard young female adults from being subjected to sexual harassment. This division remains, fought over in legislation and Supreme Court decisions, these outside the bubble, even as inside the bubble women were becoming ever more successful in the workforce in general and in the professions in particular, as is evidenced by the ever converging incomes of men and women with similar training and experience, and with the ever more visible evidence of women in the halls of Congress.
The present situation of the dynamics of what is inside and what is outside the bubble is murky. It might be that there is a third generation that is moving upwardly mobile, this time with people with even more limited education, and so liable not to respect the principles of the Constitution as they were becoming identified with Donald Trump from 2015 on. Or maybe Trump is an external demagogue who took hold and was not prevented by the political elites from Trump taking power, which is just what happened when the elite groups were not able to or did not care to control Hitler, also an external force in that the economy and the democratic electorate were rebounding in 1931.
Recent political polls are relevant to the issue of whether Trump supporters treated him as a vehicle for his Republican politics or as a force of his own. A PBS-Marist poll of a few days ago says that 69% of Republicans say that Trump has little or no responsibility for what happened at the Capitol last week. That leaves Republicans off the hook and can allow them to see themselves as the legitimate opposition party when Biden takes office. At the same time, 90% of the people in general think that the perpetrators of what happened in the Capitol should be prosecuted, while 17% of Republicans disagree. So those in support of the perpetrators are what I would consider a small minority and we need to look at those people who are within their own bubble, already committed to a way of their activism and their opposition to normal government. Detailed interviews may not be very revealing because they, as I judged from the interviews at the Capitol, were not very articulate, however much Sen. Josh Hawley is indeed a very well educated man who is dedicated to his view of a Christianity where religious belief is to be applied to all manner of walks of life. I am thinking, instead, of a woman within the temporarily occupied Capitol who said “This is the people’s house and so we should be here.” She had adopted a term to justify his intrusion without thinking that the people referred to were the idea of the people to be represented and not to the right to invade. She was appropriating language to make her own life of extremist persuasion a bit more plausible and so is just one of the ways in which language gets through the membrane from out to in.
Focus, then, on that small minority of people who become agitators and so see themselves as their own way of life as being normal while the majority of people are outside the extremist concerns that make them live and breathe. There were a few Stalinists who lived in my childhood neighborhood in the Bronx and went to Paul Robeson concerts while trying not to be so impolite as to offend their neighbors and relatives. Here is a sociological formula for sorting this relationship between the minority within the bubble and the majority outside the bubble. People who are low level agitators are largely impacted by events from outside the bubble. That is the case when I went on demonstrations for civil rights or against the Vietnam War. I was responding to what I saw on television and in the newspapers because these events had very little to do with my way of life where I continued to be a graduate student and a young husband and father. Moreover, there was very little consequence in my way of life because of my forays into the world outside. One colleague at work wondered why I would want to go to the March on Washington because, after all, I was white, but that was about all. I felt grateful to again be surrounded by the New York Police Department after I had gotten to Grand Central Station that evening rather than been subject to the leashed members of the Alabama National Guard (with their Confederate shoulder patches) that had protected me, because they had been federalized, in Montgomery, Alabama during just that very same day. I was back in my cocoon. On the other hand, people with high impact agitators, those people who disrupt their own lives because of their intrusions into the public arena, have little impact with the world outside of themselves in that they are subject only to the social media that share their points of view and so don’t register what the mass media are saying. That is why cutting off the social media is so important in thwarting insurrectionists against the Capitol. It is their oxygen about what is happening and what they are to do, even as they are subject to severe penalties for having gone outside their own environs so as to challenge the Congress. I take them to mean what they believe, which is that Trump should not leave the presidency, whatever Congress and the Courts say.
An implication of this proposition that there is an inverse relationship between level of social disruption and public life is that there is no or little connection between the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer after the death of George Floyd and last week’s insurrectionists at the Capitol. It wasn’t copycat crime in that what happened in the summer fomented the actions that took place last week. Most of the demonstrators in the summer in New York City, I could see, were well dressed and looked forward, so I supposed, to meeting friends with dinner, while looters took their place in the evenings (and, as I said at the time, the peaceful demonstrators should have been chastised for having given some cover to those who in the evening became violent). So the demonstrators were low intensity agitators. Those last week at the Capitol, on the other hand, were heavy intensity agitators, deeply ingrained into their point of view, so reports said, aware of how significant there events were, long fomenting and organizing for their point of view, and so not likely to have taken it up as a lark. That there is this force in the United States, however small it might be, is likely to last after Trump and we will all of us have to decide that this is a new malady but a kind of criminality that always abides, however infrequently this minority erupts into action because of reasons both internal and external.