The Death of Serious Politics

When's the last time you had a substantive discussion about policy instead of politics? Everything is now about horse races, political rhetoric, scandals—but rarely about how to solve real problems.

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Be honest: when’s the last time you had a substantive discussion about policymaking rather than politics? About tax policy instead of Trump?

For many of us, it’s been a while. That’s not because we’ve tuned out. It’s because politics—the art of determining “who gets what, when, and how”—has become subsumed by scandals, outrage, discussions of rhetoric, culture wars, and, above all, focusing on who’s winning and losing at politics rather than who’s winning or losing at solving problems.

Increasingly, modern governance is swayed by memes, vibes, feelings forged in ignorance, and an apathy for anything that requires thoughtful, sustained consideration of how to make our lives and our societies substantively better. We’re governed by narcissistic political influencers who trade in the currencies of eyeballs and clicks, rather than measuring their achievements by, say, children lifted out of poverty.

Our political cultures encourage this grotesque state of affairs, rewarding the extremists, the zealots, the spotlight chasers, while leaving the unassuming problem-solvers to languish in Sisyphean obscurity, until they inevitably give up and decide to do something more productive with their talents and their time.

We talk about politics endlessly, but almost never debate policy. Tune into the news, and you’ll get a firehose of information about political intrigue, but, too often, virtually no new information about the actual nuts and bolts of solutions or governance.

Here are some screenshots from Monday’s top news, from Fox News, MSNBC, and The New York Times:

Notice anything?

Where’s the policy? Politicians are supposed to be vectors to solve our problems. They’re not supposed to be the story. We are supposed to be the story. And many of our collective stories—of ordinary people struggling in modern society— are tragic, not just because they involve suffering and despair, but because their suffering and despair is completely avoidable in the richest countries on the planet.

It’s not that we lack the resources to eliminate needless suffering, but rather that we are unable to effectively coordinate and allocate our resources. That’s a maddening enough state of affairs, but it makes you want to fling stuff at a wall when you recognize that we’re not even talking about how to fix that dysfunction, because our collective political brainpower is focused on political stunts, horrific rhetoric, or armchair analyzing of the cynical personalities of political psychopaths—psychopaths who would happily let thousands of faceless children go hungry if it meant getting their face into a slot on primetime Fox News.

This is also one of the great, but often overlooked, tragedies of Trumpism. For nearly a decade, his extremism, vitriol, incitement to violence, and threats to the superstructure of American democracy have required us to fixate on him and the endless bile he spews onto the body politic. We can’t ignore it—because the threat is real.

But just imagine how many of our collective brain cells have been commandeered after being poisoned by Trump’s hateful venom and his endless supply of pointless, avoidable authoritarian drama. Many of us know what “covfefe” refers to, even as we struggle to keep track of his 91 felony indictments, all while we debate what he really meant when he warned of a “bloodbath” during a rally that began with him saluting the convicted January 6th prisoners.

We could be solving problems instead.

What a profoundly vapid waste of the power of our collective consciousness.

Why it matters that we don’t talk policy

Because of Trump and the full-blown, profit-seeking news industry embedded within the frenetic pace of American life, the United States is ground zero for the destruction of serious political discourse. We’re dopamine-addled consumers of snippets of information, delivered in digestible sound bites. Everything is BREAKING NEWS, but rarely is there a deep dive about why society is broken—or how to fix it.

I regularly appear on MSNBC, NPR, and CNN, and I admire many of their journalists, producers, and hosts. But I’ve never been asked about policy and what we should do to fix a problem. Not once. Pundits don’t have to be experts on policy. How crazy is that?

It’s not really their fault, either. In a world of hyper-competitive, for-profit news production, slow and substantive always loses, because media consumers with digitally shortened attention spans just switch it off. Leave the details to the eggheads! For countless millions, policy is boring. So, it’s easier to present our political system as though it’s WWE wrestling. The spectacle is the show.

Consider this: how many diehard cable news viewers—people who watch for hours a day—could accurately answer the question: “How much money does the US government spend on foreign aid?” or “What’s the current top marginal income tax rate?”

These questions aren’t gotcha trivia questions; they shape political worldviews, with profound consequences for governance.

For example, there’s a surging strand of isolationism in the political right, particularly in the United States. Many Republicans rail against foreign aid spending as extravagant, wasteful, and excessive. But when researchers actually probe these views among voters, the same pattern always emerges.

When Americans were asked how much of the federal budget they think is spent on foreign aid, the average answer was 31 percent—about one in every three dollars. The same Americans are then asked what percentage would be appropriate. The most frequent answers hover around 10 percent.

In reality, foreign aid consumes less than 1 percent of the US federal budget.

In other words, the people railing against the “excesses” of foreign aid would, if their stated views were enacted, lead to a ten-fold increase in foreign aid spending.

Knowingness, or, are news junkies “well informed”?

I previously wrote about the perils of “knowingness,” in which contentedly ignorant people lack intellectual curiosity to find out new facts that might change how they see the world. Jonathan Malesic explains it beautifully:

Knowingness is why present-day culture wars are so boring. No one is trying to find out anything. There is no common agreement about the facts, and yet everyone acts as if all matters of fact are already settled.

One could think, perhaps, that the antidote to knowingness would be higher news consumption—as a vector to better understand our unimaginably complex world. But that assumption falls apart under even the lightest scrutiny. As I previously explained:

We sometimes use the phrase “well-informed” to describe the same kind of person who can be classified as a “news junkie”…But if you know the minutiae of day-to-day horse race politics in the 2024 presidential race but lose sight of the bigger picture about the world and its people, are you truly “well-informed?”

Healthy societies keep a laser-like focus on reminding ourselves why we’re tuning into political debates. Politics isn’t reality television. It’s real life. As NYU’s Jay Rosen puts it, we should care about “the stakes, not the odds”—why it matters, rather than just endlessly debating who will win. The stakes, after all, are enormous: the decisions made by powerful people dictate not just the life chances of eight billion humans, but also the future of our species and our planet.

With existential risks lurking with greater frequency than ever before, our endlessly complex world demands serious politics. Instead, we have shouting octoboxes of pundits on cable news, TikTok reels from incendiary randos, craven politicians who have morphed into political influencers, and populist demagogues who have tapped into a proud vein of ignorance within our ailing body politic.

The scale of the problem demands not just a radical restructuring of our media ecosystem and the norms within it, but also a change in ourselves—such that we, collectively, consume news that covers policy and problem solving, not just political intrigue. In the meantime, we can all do our part by voting with our clicks and being stubborn about where we focus our coveted eyeballs, rewarding outlets that inform, educate, and debate solutions.

Until then, I fear that we will remain stuck on an endlessly dystopian racetrack, watching with eager anticipation as we enthusiastically debate which political horse and jockey will win, all as our rivers dry up and our democracies collapse.

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