This week's "Hidden Brain" podcast is a revealing look at why people spend so much time on politics. As a lifetime apolitical person, this helped me understand where time spent on personal politics is better spent.
"Americans who engage in politics as a form of self-expression rather than as a mechanism for real change."
5:25 "people are really pursuing a hobby. They're in it for the thrill of debate - scoring points - and you call these people hobbyists."
38:38 many Americans engage in politics in the same way that sports fans engage with that teams as a form of entertainment and self-expression.
07:05 "As a form of engagement where you are trying to move public policy or electoral politics in a direction you care about...you have your one vote and you're convincing another person to vote the way you want them to...that really doesn't describe the behavior of what most people are doing when they're doing politics"
10:26 "In hobbyism, emotion is the goal. It makes you feel connected to something without doing anything yourself. It makes me feel I am part of this emotional high or I am part of this sad point, this low point even though I'm not doing anything. I'm just following it. But the emotion is the connection and of course, we have a whole media apparatus and social media apparatus to make us feel those emotions, but in real politics anger - righteous anger - is an emotion or something you leverage into action. If there's no second step there you might feel like you're feeling political and partisan thoughts, but you're not channeling them effectively into anything else."
24:44 Basically, he and his wife did decades of favors for people in their community and were really nice people - they built a lot of trust and with that trust came the opportunity to influence people's votes.
26:50 "on the White House website, you could collect digital signatures and if you got enough signatures the White House would respond to you.
... we started looking at what kind of petitions are being signed, how many people were signing them and we discovered...that most of them were about really small and mostly frivolous things...issues like a problem of puppy mills or regulating of premium cigars - the stuff that you know is important but doesn't affect the... general welfare of somebody struggling to get by. And so political scientists for a long time have noticed a shift in politics away from bread and butter issues...towards what they are calling "post materialist issues." Issues that are are not about economic welfare or education but this other stuff."
31:50 "So the media by your account are both the beneficiary and the driver of political hobbyism"
42:21 "My suggestion was: imagine political parties doing things like providing emergency child care and emergency elder care... maybe contracting with one of the companies that do this and by doing that they're saying hey, we have some big policy goals here...we really care about getting family leave passed in this country and its going to take us a little while to do that. But in the meantime, what we're going to do is we're going to show you as concretely as possible that we care about you and we care about these needs."
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