You don't care about politics. You have a politics hobby.

Entertainment is not the same as action

I have a friend named Katie who really likes true crime podcasts.

When she talks about them, Katie tends to talk about a lot of Big Important Ideas. Turns out it’s actually very feminist to listen to stories about women being strangled and chopped up! Wait, huh? What? Well, she wants to recognize the signs when men are dangerous. You need to understand how these things happen. You have to understand the problem before you can change it, and so listening to true crime murder stories is an empowering act, it’s taking back control. It makes communities safer in the end.

And yet! I’ve seen her giggling at the hosts of her favorite shows as they crack jokes about whatever the latest dramatic story is. She loves posting in forums and speculating where a case might go. And when I see this, with all respect to Katie, I realize that she doesn’t really think these podcasts are the secret to solving the problem of gendered violence. She just has a hobby.

Recall the ancient wisdom:

The vast majority of true crime podcast fans aren’t studying the justice system or trying to advance a positive feminist vision of the world. They’re just entertained by the stories. True crime podcasts are a hobby (bordering on a kink) for most listeners. And that’s fine as these things go - but it’s uncomfortably close to how many Americans engage with politics today.

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Everyone likes to imagine that they care deeply about political issues. And for those of us who engage in online political discourse, we imagine that we do so out of a sincere desire to participate in democracy. We’re in the arena, we’re making the case for our beliefs! We’re changing the world!

Political scientist Eitan Hersh suggests that we’re wrong. In his book Politics is for Power Hersh argues that for most people politics isn’t about power or change, it’s about identity and entertainment. We treat politics the same way Katie treats true crime podcasts: as a hobby.

Hersh calls this political hobbyism. There are a lot of you reading this who probably spend a lot your time consuming political podcasts, reading political blog posts, and posting about politics online. None of that is bad in and of itself! But if you don’t ever do anything concrete - if you don’t show up at city council meetings, canvass for local politicians, join local political clubs, etc - then you don’t actually care about political power. You just enjoy politics as entertainment.

I don’t know if it’s suicidal for a blog to deliberately call out its own readers, so I’ll use the royal ‘us’ instead: Far too many of us engage with politics in the same way we’d engage with the Real Housewives or the Los Angeles Dodgers. We cheer for the good guys, boo and hiss at the bad guys, we love following the day-by-day drama of who’s doing what, and we hope our favorites end up succeeding. I’m sure that there are some folks out there doing the real work, but I’m equally sure that most of us are fundamentally divorced from the actual practice of politics. Most of us are hobbyists.

Again - there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with posting about politics or cheering for good things to happen online. But Hersh thinks it’s a bad thing for society that we have so many hobbyists and so few active participants. I agree. It gives us a false sense of ‘being involved’ when we’re actually highly disconnected from real political action. When you’re divorced from the real stuff, you’re less likely to believe in practical political solutions and more likely to engage in ideological fantasies - if only we just did [Insert Simple, Impractical Idea Here] then everything would easily be solved! You start to think that performative posting is enough to change things, and it’s really not.

I wrote about a similar idea last year in Activism is not a Social Club:

Activism is about winning. Activism is about changing the world in real, concrete ways. Politics is for power.

Activism is not a social club where the most important thing is to be morally righteous. Activism is not about looking cool to other activists. Activism is not dunking on people on social media. It is not when you ratio someone.

Activism is not about ‘making a point’ and it’s not about ‘being right’. Everybody thinks they’re right. Everybody thinks their preferred policies are the best and morally righteous ones. It’s not about making loud declarations. It’s not about renaming things.

Activism is about winning. It is about power. It is about changing the world. If what you’re doing doesn’t lead to concrete change, if it doesn’t WIN, if it isn’t about seizing real power and using it in the messy real world, it’s not activism. It’s political masturbation. It makes you feel good but accomplishes nothing, and it probably makes a mess in the process.

Unless you’ve got an enormous audience in the millions, politics is not a thing you do by posting on Twitter or TikTok. It’s certainly not something you do by consuming content. Politics is something you do in the real world. The thing you’re doing by reading blogs and watching YouTube essays is entertainment.

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This dynamic isn’t unique to politics. It shows up in all kinds of communities. Take dating apps. Lots of people use those apps and say that they’re looking for a real and lasting relationships - but if you check their actual usage patterns, they treat the app more like dating is a hobby. Swiping becomes a form of idle entertainment, not a genuine search for love. Another good example comes from one of my favorite subreddits, /r/NBA. Many of the most active posters there are less interested in watching actual NBA games and more interested in reading about off-court drama. There are dozens of daily posts with thousands of comments about who’s beefing with who, podcast call outs, and trade rumors that get spun into soap operas. For many of these nephews, the actual sport of basketball is beside the point. They’re not fans of basketball, they’re fans of drama related to basketball.

There’s the substance (finding real love, watching and enjoying basketball, working for real political change) and there’s the spectacle that only superficially represents the substance (mindless dating app swiping, nephew-posting in /r/NBA, doomscrolling on political social media). The former is real and the latter is ultimately an entertainment product. It’s not a societal problem when this happens with something as silly as a basketball forum. Katie isn’t hurting anything with her approach to true crime podcasts. But I worry this becomes dangerous when applied to politics.

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There’s good news and bad news here.

The good news is that change is always possible. Nobody is born doing politics, all the people who are currently doing real things in the real world had to start somewhere. If you have strong political feelings, you can simply make the choice to focus less on posting and more on real world engagement. It’s actually not hard! Especially at the local level, you might be shocked how easy it is to get a meeting with your city’s elected officials to talk about the things you care about.

The bad news is that thousands of brilliant behavioral scientists have spent decades refining the algorithms that are designed to trap you in the cycle of scrolling and posting. It’s addictive. They’re aware that it’s addictive. They designed it that way, and they’re very good at what they do. The systems we live in online are designed to trap us, and it’s so easy to just keep consuming content.

My advice here isn’t new. Alexander Pope nailed it 1711:

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

The most famous part of this is the first line, and it’s sometimes misinterpreted as ‘Learning will make you dangerous’ or ‘knowledge is dangerous’. But you can see the full quote - it’s really saying small amounts of knowledge turn us into idiots, we we either need to abstain entirely or go all the way.

If you’re going to be involved in politics, you should really get involved. Don’t just read blogs or listen to podcasts or post. Really go do it! And if you decide you just don’t have the energy or time that, maybe consider consuming less politics content overall. I wouldn’t ever say that you should be intentionally ignorant of what’s going on the in the world, but I would argue that following the political-news-cycle-of-the-day is bad for you. Do you really need to know what Hunter Biden said about the media? Do you need to debate whether Ben Shapiro dunked on some college kids or not? Does the content you consume really make you more informed, or are you using it as a form of entertainment? If it’s the latter, cut it out. It’s bad for you.

This a terrible argument for me to make to my own audience, but I hope you’ll appreciate that it’s real (and that perhaps this blog gives you some genuine insight and not just empty calories). Politics is about the real world. It’s about power. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring. Really get engaged with actual politics, or take a step back from your political hobby.