What If Echo Chambers Work?

A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the author, in all earnestness: Why not?

After all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been decisively falsified less than a week before!

This came up again today with the ongoing "echo chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems not to be true.

So the real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?

It's a harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.

But maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024 (and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response, and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There, of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would never apply a similar retort to those demand foreswearing scorched-earth electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.

But if we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am, with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics we're talking about here.

But here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from behind.

As I said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist, and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum about.