Many of my friends and long-time social media followers may find it a shock that I don’t want to post about politics anymore. I’m this way not because I’m a sore loser over a recent election outcome, but because political content is no longer interesting to me, and more often than not, it makes people less informed about current events.
Political debates aren’t sincere efforts to understand the truth anymore (if they ever were), but loud propaganda campaigns intent on flooding the zone with obfuscation. There are culprits on both sides, but one side is far worse than the other.
Even if our political discourse was intellectually rigorous and maximally virtuous, it would have minimal electoral consequences. Elections have always been swung by the least informed and least principled voters. This was as true for Trump as it was for Biden, Obama, Bush, and other presidents.
This critical mass of voters made a decision to punish the incumbent party in both 2020 and 2024, not out of an informed reflection of policy or political philosophy, but out of a sense of retributive anger. In the most recent election, swing voters cited the poor economy for the reason they voted against the incumbent. The problem with this justification is that, on a global and historical basis, the economy was strong by all reasonable measures.
Relative health and well-being just wasn’t good enough for these voters. We had to punish someone for a bad thing that happened, just as we did in 2020. Put aside the fact that the U.S. economy was going to suffer due to a global pandemic in 2020 no matter what. And we would then be rocked by mild inflation for a year or two after no matter what.
It didn’t matter who was the President, it would have happened anyway.
This voting bloc is worse than the most committed partisans because they cannot be bothered to make civic decisions with wisdom. This isn't a matter of intelligence, but of character. We have been given the greatest country in the world and an unsettlingly large number of people lack the temperament to live up to our inheritance.
That's not to say partisans are better people - they usually aren't. But this unengaged bloc, spoiled by abundance, should anger everyone who cares about the future of our country. The larger this group grows, the more disempowered everyone else becomes. We can’t sustain a shared, informed, and reasonable conversation about public affairs so long as a significant share of the population refuses to pay attention to basic facts about what’s going on. They are an anchor bringing down public discourse, and no content strategy or conversational norms can overcome them.
Instead of fighting that uphill battle, I’d rather wander through evergreen content like novels, or in writing posts like this. That sounds pretentious, but the reason people consume content is to find stimulation. I choose to consume and produce the stimulation that feels good.