It’s been a big week for the word “bubble.” There’s the liberal one, in which Democratic voters supposedly got so comfortable that we couldn’t hear the jackboots of Trump Nation storm troopers marching to the gates of our right-on utopia.
Then there’s the conservative one, where the large minority of Americans who elected Trump are apparently content to insulate and isolate themselves into the delusion that this country belongs exclusively to ignorant white motherfuckers exactly like them.
But despite being totally real, these bubbles are really just sub-bubbles of the much larger spheres that surround urban and nonurban America. This is a subject we’ve covered before, at LENGTH (see “The Urban Archipelago,” November 2004). But clearly we can use a reminder—and a revision—every decade or so. Let’s review:
