Unlooping the Transatlantic Echo Chamber

Break the spectacle, by turning toward small, true things: conversations on porches, a grandmother’s recipe folded into a church bulletin, a poet’s marginalia rediscovered in a secondhand bookshop in Lublin. These are the footnotes of history that do not trend on Twitter, yet they anchor a people to place, and place to meaning.

The feedback loop between American-style populist fervor and its European counterparts thrives on abstraction and amplification. It relies on the illusion of a monolithic West under siege from within, from without, from imagined enemies that are more useful as archetypes than people. But the real frontlines are not at national borders or in parliamentary chambers. They are in the daily erosion of nuance.

In the Netherlands, a country once held up as a beacon of tolerant liberalism, we now see a tightening spiral of culture war discourse--where the politics of fear wears the borrowed cloak of freedom. In Poland, where national identity is so intimately intertwined with the Catholic faith and the scars of history, there's a painful tug-of-war between progressive urban centers and reactionary rural strongholds--fueled in part by imported American narratives about gender, family, and sovereignty.

What’s shared across these contexts is the reliance on spectacle: the high-drama theater of crisis, betrayal, and savior figures. It is designed not to inform, but to inflame. Not to build, but to brand.

To interrupt this loop, we must become connoisseurs of quiet. We must notice the resistance that doesn’t shout but endures: the village priest in Lower Silesia who counsels patience rather than panic, the Rotterdam street artist who paints migrant stories onto canal walls, the youth in Kraków translating climate data into poetry. These are small acts, yes--but they’re also subversive acts, because they refuse the script.

Europe does not need to borrow its backlash from across the ocean. Nor does America need to find its ghosts in foreign lands. Each has its own reckoning to attend to. But the loop persists as long as spectacle sells. When we step outside the theater, into the light of lived experience, the mirror cracks--and we can begin, at last, to see clearly.

Mari Fitzpatrick, 04062025