The Problem With Echo Chambers and “Yes” Men
We need to push back against life in an echo chamber and among “yes man,” so we don’t sound like Pauline Kael or act like John Kasich. Or, worse, appear totally disconnected from Main Street America.
Back in 1972 when Richard Nixon won the presidential election, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael told the New Yorker: "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” Kael is often misquoted as saying, “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Regardless, the thrust of Kael’s quote is right: she lived in an elite bubble severely disconnected from how a clear majority of Americans viewed Nixon--he won the election by a 520 to 17 Electoral Vote landslide over George McGovern. Kael lived in a huge echo chamber called the Upper West Side.
Today, more Americans than ever live in echo chambers on both the Right and the Left. We’ve self-sorted into friendships, neighborhoods, cities, and states based on Red versus Blue. We see this echo chamber on the Right in the fact that a majority of Republicans as of 2017 still thought Barack Obama was born in Kenya. We see the echo chamber on the Left in the majority of Democrats who still think Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win his elections. As David Marcus noted about the Left’s echo chamber, “[A}ccording to new polling from YouGov that shows 24% believe the alleged shooter is a Republican, compared to only 21% who say he is a Democrat. Only a shocking 8% of Democrats believe, as every shred of evidence shows, that he is left-wing.” It appears Jimmy Kimmel was deeply buried in this “MAGA kid shot Kirk” echo chamber. In most cases, echo chambers don’t result in bad things happening.
That isn’t the case today with the Left, as a substantial number of its voters believe celebrating the death of someone on the Right is okay. Specifically, a recent YouGov survey found that very liberal and liberal voters totaling 34% said it was “always or usually acceptable” in answer to the question “Do you generally consider it to be acceptable or unacceptable for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose?,” with another 37% being “not sure.” Only 7% of conservative and very conservative voters answered similarly, with 18% being "not sure.” This gross sentiment is why so many on the Left have felt perfectly comfortable publicly applauding Charlie Kirk’s death.
The increasing echo chambering of America is why I’ve raised the question of whether America is headed towards a national dissolution in the coming decades.
With politicians, we often see the echo chamber represented by the group of straphangers surrounding a governor or president. I saw it up close and personally with Ohio Governor John Kasich. In 2009, when Kasich was doing dinners with possible supporters and funders, I got roped into his larger kitchen cabinet. I attended a couple of gatherings at Rex Elsass’s house in Dublin. I got kicked out of the group when I raised Kasich’s sharp elbows and brusque style as something we needed to work on for his run for governor, as being a feisty congressman wasn’t the same as being a stately governor. You should have seen the looks I got from the straphangers in the room. You’d have thought I said something like Kasich’s habit of smacking babies needed to be curbed (for the record, he never did that). The bottom line is my mild critique of Kasich simply wasn’t permissible. From their point of view, Kasich walked on water and my apostasy was impermissible.
As we all know now, Kasich desperately needed someone on his team who wasn’t a “yes man” or “yes woman.” Someone who could tell him he was being a jerk or his ideas were dumb or shortsighted. Because he was surrounded by straphangers, he did things that hurt Ohio, its people, and their businesses and didn’t do things that would have helped. Like Kasich, Vivek Ramaswamy has had enormous success at a very young age. One hopes that success hasn’t gone to his head making him susceptible to surrounding himself with straphangers like Kasich did. Ohio’s next governor must be willing to make the hard choices every governor over the last twenty-five years has been unwilling to make. Ramaswamy cannot afford to have a bunch of "yes men" and "yes women" who won’t challenge him when he says or proposes doing ill-advised things, as he did back in December when he made his remarks about American culture.
The problem with echo chambers and “yes men” is that they prevent leaders from making the best decisions based on all data and information and after a robust debate on the efficacy of the proposed action. The Left loves diversity when it comes to skin color, genders, and the like. It abhors diversity when it comes to ideology. We on the Right must be careful that we too don’t fall into the trap in which we only listen to Fox News, read right-leaning news, tune into conservative radio, and develop friendships only with like-minded folks. We need to push back against life in an echo chamber and among “yes man” so that we don’t sound like Pauline Kael or act like John Kasich. Or, worse, appear totally disconnected from Main Street America as the Left’s looks after Kirk’s assassination.
P.S. Talking about being totally disconnected. America’s ultimate left-wing hack posing as an advocate for America’s kids, teachers’ union head Randi Weingarten, came out with a book this week, “Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.” In case you didn’t know, the “fascists” who Weingarten is referring to are Republicans. Personally, I don’t know any Republicans who fear teachers; rather, I think we fear the negative impact too many deficient teachers are having on too many kids stuck in public schools. The timing of Weingarten’s book couldn’t have been worse, as it coincided with the release of the latest report card on America’s K-12 schools. The punchline of that report card is America’s public schools are losing ground in all reading and math metrics, as the charts below unequivocally show. Instead of worry about fascists, Weingarten and her members should be worried about how much they are failing America’s kids.
