Earlier this
month, I was unintentionally listening to MSNBC. (Over the last two years I
have almost completely erased my exposure to cable news except on cases of absolute
necessity.) Two pundits were discussing one of Donald Trump’s criminal trials:
the details escape me and are irrelevant to this story. What matters is that
one of those pundits, thinking about next year’s election mentioned this random
statistic. I don’t know where he got it, but unlike most statistics, I’m
convinced of its accuracy.
In a mournful
voice this reporter said: “The average American thinks about politics an
average of four minutes a week.” It might have been a day, but that wouldn’t
have mattered: all that matters is that this reporter says it’s not enough.
When I heard
this stat I agreed with it. In fact, I’m convinced the number is inflated. But
after a few weeks, I’ve come to grips with what this figure makes me feel to
this average American.
Envy. Sheer,
unadulterated envy.
As one of those Americans who thinks
considerably more time each day than that person, and who has written so much
about it over this past year, I am inclined to think when it comes to the world
of politics today – hell, for much of my lifetime – ignorance is bliss. Indeed,
little that I have encountered in any major source of discussion of politics –
the mainstream media, cable news, social media, even the countless columns that
I read on this very blog – have done much to convince me that the people who
supposedly know far more politics, who live and breathe it, are making the best possible argument for a
well-informed populace on the subject of politics or history, particularly the
American version.
Now I speak as
someone who probably spends closer to an hour a day dealing with politics – and
has been encouraged by those who care about him that it’s in his interest to
perhaps not to obsess over it as much as everybody else. And they’re not
entirely wrong. Because even if you spend those four minutes in a day listening
to discourse on politics from those who are more knowledgeable, there’s a
certain argument to it.
There are a lot
of things I get from all of the writing, TV, social media, and basically
everything I have absorbed from politics for the last fifteen years, well
before the time Donald Trump came on to the scene. The specifics are
irrelevant; I’m going to concentrate to tone. They all involve some combination
of outrage, dismay, hostility, depression and particularly on sites in the
blog, a sense of impending doom. In the latter case, I’ve noted that some of
the people in this column seem to be looking forward to that impending doom,
which is what they have in common with so many other people who claim to speak
the ‘truth’ on politics’: self-righteousness.
The combination
varies from source to source: mainstream media tries to be objective in its
reporting, but the sense of dismay seeps in, nonetheless. Cable news deals with
anger and outrage on some channels; contempt and dismay on others. In social
media with no filters or safeguards, they all overwhelm you.
At their core,
what you find everywhere is blame for why the world is like this. And the
scapegoats are everywhere. The left loves to blame rightwing media and the repeal
of the fairness doctrine. The right is just as rabid at blame the coastal
elites and the decline of family values. Depending on the narrator on social
media, you can blame the problems in America on everything: institutional
racism, institutional sexism, institutional homophobia, failure of education,
failure of the right kind of education. Rich white people are usually the
top to blame. The electoral college, too much democracy, too little democracy,
Citizens United, The Kansas-Nebraska Act, the designated hitter – basically everybody
but the person writing the column and the identity group they belong to.
But at a certain
point, in all of these narratives, someone will eventually blame the average
American. Not of course, the people who are the loudest voices at columns
these. But really, everyone else. They blame them for many things: they are
held as being vessels for cable news to fill them in on the right, for living
in rural states, for believing in God instead of science (because in their
minds the two are mutually exclusive). On the right, the inverse is always the
truth: because they don’t live in real America, they don’t have the values and
logic and keep falling for the Democrat spiel. The news media will blame it on
other factors, usually the cable network that gives the opposite message of
them and is poisoning the listeners with the wrong message.
And at the core
of it is a subtle, underlying truth: if the average person were better educated
(by the education they agree with) if they were better informed (by their
sources of media) or paid more attention, we could begin to fix America.
The thing is,
all of the people purveying these messages are better informed, educated, and pay
more attention. In many cases, their employment depends on it. And none of them
seem particularly happy to know everything that we should know. The constant underlying
tone from everybody who spends their life and careers in the political system
is that the world is doomed and nothing that anybody can do will stop the
apocalypse.
If it doesn’t
happen this year – like many ‘informed people’ thought was going to happen in
the midterms last year – they don’t take it as a sign things will get better,
they shrug and just say that the apocalypse has been postponed by a couple of
years. The purveyors of doom-porn on this blog are just the social media
example of what we see constantly on CNN and really every other news channel.
The world’s going to end in a few years and nothing can change that. I remember
Michael Moore saying in Fahrenheit 11/9 Donald Trump would be the last
president of the United States. He still hasn’t offered a retraction from that
after five years.
So I think it’s
good that the average American doesn’t pay more than four minutes a day or a
week on politics. If they spent half an hour a day on the subject on any major
news network, I think the only realistic reaction would be an inability to get
out of bed the next day. If the average American had absorbed the narrative of
2022 they would have believed with every fiber of their being that it didn’t matter
if they voted, democracy would end after election day that year. The fact that
the red wave never happened is a demonstration that all of these people who
spent their lives eating and breathing politics more than the ‘average American’
are no more able to see the future than the rest of us.
Now I’m not
going to lie and say that the person that spends less time then me on politics
in the course of the day is the paragon of happiness: I have little doubt they
have their own miseries and struggles that make their lives barely tolerable at
times. What I am suggesting is that because they aren’t drowning in the
obvious morass of our system the way so many of us do, the politics of today
aren’t living rent-free in their head. Perhaps its easier for some of them to enjoy
life a little more than so many of us well-informed people who talk about the
subject. I certainly get the sense that most of the people who write on any
part of politics are utterly despondent and miserable in a way that dominates
their lives that they are incapable of expressing any other emotion in their
writing.
Similarly I’m
not going to dare to suggest that the answer to all our problems in America lie
in caring about the precarious state of our nation less. But let me speak
from experience here. To obsess about any single subject – particularly one
where you can do nothing to change no matter how hard you try – almost always
brings anguish in the short and long run. It’s one thing to write these columns
because you find them therapeutic, as I often do. But so much of the writing in
these columns, so much of the political discourse, all of the polarization in
our society seems to be built on three little words:
Misery loves
company.
I honestly feel
that’s the reason so much of our discourse takes this form. It’s not about
telling ‘the truth’ or informing the public or even to express our common
outrage. It’s because for some people, our misery about society is so horrible that
they can only feel whole when they build a community of people who are as
unhappy as they are or want them to be as unhappy as they are. How much of this
is built into the very real flaws of our system or the idea of some kind of
misguided utopia that can not be formed but they still think would be possible
will differ from person to person. I do know that solutions are less important
to them than being upset at how broken it is.
I won’t lie that now America is currently broken or that fixing it may be impossible. The difference
is the modifiers in both statements. The electorate has spent two centuries performing
in ways no statistician can ever predict. It’s the most frustrating thing about
the democratic process. It’s also the most reassuring. Every two years, we put
the faith of our system in the hands of people who pay infinitely less
attention to the political process than the talking heads spends do. It’s scary
for all of these people, I grant you. And I have to tell what scares me more
than that is that some of the loudest voices – the ones who think more than
four minutes a day on the subject – have decided the best thing to do is not do
what all of them are willing to do.
So I’ll ask those
very people who might read this column: if the knowledge of ‘the truth’ of how
our American democracy works has made you feel so superior than those who don’t
think about as much as you that voting is something you feel is beneath you, then
maybe, just maybe, these people who don’t pay as much attention to American
politics as you do, care about our democratic system then you do. They may not
be smarter than you or me but speaking for myself, I respect them infinitely
more than you.
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