Conservatives frequently accuse liberals of being out of touch with Americans. It’s an accusation that stings partly because there’s truth behind it: Real evidence suggests that liberal institutions, the Democratic Party chief among them, inhabit a moral universe distinct from that of the median voter.

Yet far less attention has been paid to the disconnect between the right’s intellectual elite and the American public. Liberal intellectuals live in an unrepresentative world, but so too do the right’s thinkers — causing them to develop an idea of America that is largely unmoored from the country most Americans experience.

And in the Donald Trump era, this disconnect may be the more influential one.

This right-wing elite bubble is perhaps most precisely described as two bubbles.

The first bubble is created by the overwhelmingly left-liberal tilt of elite knowledge production industries — most notably journalism and academia, but, to a lesser extent, law and tech. Conservatives in these areas often feel outnumbered and even persecuted in their professional life, creating a sense that the left is far more socially powerful in America than it actually is.

The second bubble is a reaction to the first bubble: the creation of internally homogenous spaces within these liberal fields. These are spaces where conservatives talk primarily with each other about liberals and the left, often exacerbating their shared sense of threat.

Fox News and the Federalist Society are two of the most influential institutions of the second bubble: islands of right-wing thought in fields where liberals predominate. But they are hardly alone. A host of other spaces, ranging from formal institutions like the Heritage Foundation to some billionaire-created group chats, serve as venues for right-wing professionals to talk politics amongst themselves.

There’s nothing wrong with ideological movements hammering out ideas amongst themselves. However, there is always a danger in such spaces of groupthink and caricaturing one’s opponents. Increasingly, both are happening inside the right’s bubble — and warping its view of the country in the process.

In the past few years, there has been a cottage industry of

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