Politics Is for Power

How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

Eitan Hersh

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982116804
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Partidos políticos

A groundbreaking analysis of political hobbyism—treating politics like a spectator sport—and an urgent and timely call to arms for the many well-meaning, well-informed citizens who follow political news, but do not take political action. Do you consider yourself politically engaged? Probably, yes! But are you, really? The uncomfortable truth is that most of us have good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly "engage" by consuming politics as if it's entertainment or a hobby. We obsessively follow the news and complain about the opposition to our friends or spouse. We tweet and post and share. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime.Instead, political scientist and data analyst Eitan Hersh offers convincing evidence that we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our local communities, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. Aided by cutting-edge social science as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values.In an age of political turmoil and as the 2020 election looms, Politics Is for Power is an inspiring, vital read that will make you hopeful for America's democratic future.

PART I

All day long,

I can’t shout back at the boss,

I can’t shout back at the wife,

I can’t shout back at the kids.

But I come here in the evenings and I shout at these people,

and I go away feeling like a new man.

—Democratic club activist,

Riverside, New York,

circa 1962¹

When we do politics, what exactly are we doing?² In this first section of the book, we are going to observe five common types of political activity: news consumption, partisan cheerleading, voting, activism, and donating. How would we describe our motivations for these activities? As we’ll see, we often engage in politics not to effect change, not quite for the sake of the common good, but for emotional or expressive ends. Much of the time we spend on politics is best described as an inward-focused leisure activity for people who like politics.

We may not easily concede that we are doing politics for fun. While maybe some portion of our political activity is for entertainment, calling politics a leisure activity does not capture the feelings we often bring to politics. Obsessively checking the news, for instance, can be neurotic, anxiety-inducing behavior. True, sports fanatics also agonize as they soak up endless minutiae of sports, but in politics the day-to-day minutiae seem much more important.

Even when we insist that we have higher motivations, our actions often betray a shallower basis for political engagement than we might like to admit. Consider a person who spends an hour a day ranting about politics on Facebook. He may genuinely feel an obligation to right the wrongs he sees in his newsfeed, to help others see the truth of his viewpoint. To outsiders, though, it can seem as if he is spending all this time not for others but for himself, because he is lonely or wants to get something off his chest. Neither he nor they could easily diagnose the true motivations in his heart. No matter the true motivations, we may want to determine whether his actions (like our own) objectively fit with the stated civic motivations: Is he really changing people’s minds so they come around to his viewpoint?

Actions matter more than motivations, but thinking critically about our motivations helps us determine how much of our political activity is even meant to be a service to others and how much is meant to be a service to ourselves. While reading the coming chapters, we should both evaluate whether our motivations are mostly about personal gratification, service to the common good, or something else; and regardless of our motivations, we should evaluate whether the actions seem effective or ineffective, deep or shallow.

To build some intuition for what deep versus shallow actions look like, the chapters in part one will contrast our common behaviors with four stories of ordinary people who take power seriously. These stories will introduce key themes for the rest of the book. The volunteers who are profiled came into activism because they cared about issues or because they were upset about the direction of the country. However, rather than just spinning their wheels and feeling upset, they found ways to increase their own political power. Their energy is spent not on following political drama or debating issues, but on winning over people to their side.

CHAPTER 1 Refresh the Feed Hobbyism and News Consumption

Late one evening, I called my father on the phone while he was watching TV in his bed. He told me he was watching cable news. I asked him why. “It’s our civic duty to be informed,” he said. I thought he was joking. “Every morning, you read the paper,” I said. “On the way to work and on the way back, you listen to NPR for twenty-five minutes. And you think you have a civic duty to watch cable news at night?” When I pressed him, my father acknowledged that, really, he just likes watching TV before bed, and he prefers cable news to anything else on TV at that time.

Like my father, many of us use the language of civics to describe our news habit. We need to be informed to figure out how we will vote, and we need to absorb the news to be informed. Yet watching hours of cable news each day or endlessly refreshing Twitter and Facebook would be hard to describe as something required of us by civic duty. A better description is addiction. Walking around the house, we might find it difficult to resist checking our phones to see the latest political controversy. When we are disturbed by the news, we may feel that we need to do something, but the only something we can think of doing is reading more news.

Changes in media offerings since the 1970s reveal key insights about what motivates people who closely follow political news today. News choices used to be quite limited, especially on television. During the broadcast-TV era, the Federal Communications Commission required the few channels to show some kind of educational content for an hour between 7:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. The major networks all satisfied this requirement by producing an evening news program. Up until 1987, broadcasters also needed to present politics in an ideologically balanced way, under a policy called the fairness doctrine.¹

In this environment with just a few TV channels, lots of people, including those who did not particularly care for politics, ended up watching news. The news they watched was evenhanded, in recognition of the fairness doctrine and that the audience for the news program was ideologically broad-based.² In hindsight, it seems peculiar that in the broadcast-TV era many people who didn’t care for politics at all ended up watching the nightly news. In fact, they just liked watching TV more than they didn’t like politics, and news was the only thing on.³

Once cable was introduced, and with each subsequent technology, the choice set expanded. Consumers who do not like politics can watch something else. The producers of political content no longer have an interest or a legal obligation to appeal broadly. Instead they want to capture a dedicated following of viewers who will seek out political news obsessively.

To appeal to the news junkies, every venue for news—from cable to social media to newspapers—has discovered that loyal news followers like drama and emotion and provocation.⁴ As scholars Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj describe in their 2014 book, The Outrage Industry, cable news anchors use vicious language, mockery, insults, and sarcasm, all while looking directly at the camera and conveying intimacy and mutual understanding with their viewers.⁵ The studios learned from Rush Limbaugh that they can cheaply produce content with meandering aghast reactions to current events. Through a string of tangents, the shows convey both that viewers are justified in feeling outraged and that viewers can rest assured that, any day now, their political opponents will be vanquished.

Cable news offers little investigative journalism, but the anchors put on an act that they are taking viewers on deep dives, behind the scenes, into the weeds. Rachel Maddow, for instance, will report information such as the prison identification numbers of convicted members of President Trump’s inner circle (Trump adviser Paul Manafort is three-five-two-zero-seven-dash-zero-one-six; Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is eight-six-zero-six-seven-dash-zero-five-four),⁶ information that is neither hard to find nor in any way useful to viewers. Reading numbers out loud, though, seems authoritative.

Shows on both sides love “proving” the hypocrisy of their opponents. From George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, cable news has maintained a regular trope of calling the president fascist. Of Bush, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann fumed, “You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with FASCIST on it! … You, sir, have no place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people.”⁷ Some of us find these rants cathartic.

Cable news has long been more popular on the right than on the left. Why? In part, this is because cable news viewers are mostly retirees, and retirees lean Republican. The median age for both MSNBC and Fox News is sixty-five, and more Republicans are around that age than Democrats.⁸ Scholars have also posited that those of us with conservative dispositions are more attracted to the strength and certainty projected by cable news anchors.⁹ Nevertheless, while Fox News has defined the outrage-industry genre, Donald Trump’s presidency has spurred intense demand on cable news for outrage on the left. From 2016 to 2018, viewership of MSNBC doubled. When Americans were asked in 2018 about their news diets, almost as many reported having seen MSNBC (33 percent) as reported having seen Fox News (39 percent) in the prior month.¹⁰

News junkies who use social media rather than cable news have revealed a similar taste for outrage. The algorithms that govern our newsfeeds show us whatever content we will keep watching, sharing, and commenting on. Our demand for extreme and provocative content induces supply, a phenomenon that Facebook has finally acknowledged to be a serious problem on its platform. The more provocative the content, the more we tend to engage with it. At Facebook’s scale, even Mark Zuckerberg has said this “can undermine the quality of public discourse.”¹¹ Whereas on cable, it’s conservatives who prefer to be in the outrage bubble of Fox, on social media it’s liberals who prefer to be in ideological bubbles, unfriending people who convey political opinions they disagree with at higher rates than conservatives.¹²

Junkies who read newspapers have also revealed their penchant for outrage. In their research, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj looked at newspaper columns at three points in time: 1955, 1975, and 2009. In the first two periods, they found that columnists basically never resorted to name-calling and belittling. But suddenly, in their 2009 data, popular writers such as Charles Krauthammer and Maureen Dowd had emerged who regularly used this language.

Demand for outrage helps to explain the market for fake news that became a matter of national attention in 2016. In 2016, one in four Americans visited a fake news website, as discovered by a team of researchers who asked a sample of Americans to install software on their computers that tracked what websites they visited.¹³ The researchers found that participants who were most interested in and most knowledgeable about politics consumed fake news the most. These people weren’t easily duped by the lies of fake news stories. They were sophisticated consumers who sought the fake stories because they are junkies. After already reading through the comparatively tame world of real news, they wanted to up their dosage, and so they went for fantasies.

It isn’t just extremes and outrage that attract us. We’re also attracted to a seemingly infinite supply of news that serves no useful role to us as citizens. I have personally read articles in my newsfeed about Melania Trump’s dresses, Paul Manafort’s suits, Betsy Devos’s houses, Donald Trump’s meals, Hillary Clinton’s flu, Paul Ryan’s workouts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance routines, Donald Trump Jr.’s intellect, Barack Obama’s vacations, James Comey’s opinions about Donald Trump’s hands, and commentators’ opinions about other commentators’ opinions about tweets. None of this helps me be a better citizen.

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The increased number of media choices has not only revealed that we demand outrage and celebrity political gossip, but that we do not demand news about our local communities.¹⁴ The typical readers of this book may intensely follow the news yet not know the issues or candidates in local races. They might say they don’t have enough information to know how to vote in local contests, and so they abstain in those elections. Thus even as they consume the news, the most basic civic reason for why anyone would consume the news (to know whom to vote for) does not explain why they are doing it. Just from 1990 to 2014, regular newspaper readership and local television viewership plunged from over 70 percent to under 50 percent of the population. Online news consumption increased, but online readers opt for national news sources rather than local ones.¹⁵

The decline of local news consumption has multiple sources of blame.¹⁶ Part of the story, for newspapers, anyway, is the loss of classified sections as a source of revenue. Part of the story are the economies of scale in national news distributed online. But another part of the story is simply that local news, however important, doesn’t inspire the clicks and likes and shares that national news does. Local news is tiresome. It is especially tiresome for college-educated Americans. Among TV-news watchers, college-educated Americans say they get their news from national programs, whereas non-college-educated Americans get their news from local programs. According to a nationally representative survey from 2016, those with a degree were 58 percent more likely than those without a degree to say they get their TV news exclusively from national programs.¹⁷ According to 2012 data from the Pew Research Center, while over 60 percent of daily-newspaper readers are not college educated and over 70 percent of local TV-news viewers are not college educated, a clear majority who say they are regular consumers of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal have a college degree.¹⁸ While some of these educated consumers are surely getting both national and local news, many simply skip the local stuff and read from sources that cater to the educated class interested in the national drama.

To the political hobbyist, news is a form of entertainment and needs to be fun. In the past, local news, even when not itself fun, was bundled with sports and weather and national scandals that drew us to local news broadcasts and local newspapers. We ended up learning about local politics accidentally, when we were waiting for the local station to tell us the weather report. Now that all of these separate items have been decoupled, our lack of interest in local news shines through. We have collectively shown that what’s fun is the scandal in Washington that seems big today and will be replaced by another drama tomorrow. That’s what keeps us coming back to cable news anchors and keeps training our newsfeeds.

CHAPTER 2 Staten Island, Staten Island, Take Me In Empathy and Authenticity in Political Power

In 2017, Lisa Mann was alone riding the subway in New York. Lisa is in her midfifties, an architect. She and her husband, who is also an architect, are in business together. The couple has two teenage sons, whom they raised in the Windsor Terrace and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

Lisa was hesitant to speak with me, not just about her subway ride, but about the political work she has done since then. She is reserved. She doesn’t like to talk much about herself. Yet, she participates in a form of political activism that seems absolutely least conducive to her guarded personality. I wanted to understand her.

Lisa was riding the New York subway when two teenagers got on her train car. They approached a third teenager and started to taunt him aggressively. The third kid may have been developmentally disabled, Lisa first thought. The altercation felt ominous: something dangerous, something ugly, was going to happen, and as soon as the train pulled in to the next station and opened its doors, other riders quickly shuffled out to switch to another train car, away from the brewing fight.

Without thinking, Lisa stood up at the subway door near the teenagers and put her foot up against the sliding door, preventing it from closing, which prevented the train from moving on. “I let the door thud against my foot again and again and again,” Lisa remembered, “more of a sensation than a sound.”¹ What was she doing? Not escaping the car like the others. Not calling for the police. She just stood there, stopping the train from leaving the station. She inserted herself into the story of this brawl, changing the pace of this scene from dangerous and fast to dangerous and slow.

One of the “almost men,” as Lisa called them, got in her face, stared her down. Lisa’s mind...