Politics is not about you
Against politics-as-fandom
A programming note, now that we have a handful of subscribers: I’m still figuring out what I want this thing to be, but for now the goal is to do at least one post a month. If continues to be fun and interesting, there’ll be more.
Coming of age politically during the Bush years, I thought the great enemy was apathy: If more people cared about this stuff like I did, like they should, we wouldn't be stuck with people like Bush and all those fucking mutants Republicans kept sending to Congress.
Looking around now, toward the end of 2022, I don't think apathy was the problem. People care so much about politics they will beat you over the head with how much they care about politics. People care so much about politics that multibillion-dollar companies find it profitable to pretend to care about racism and LGBT rights. And yet — as I was complaining last month — our politics still sucks. How'd that happen?
The problem is what political scientist Eitan Hersh calls "political hobbyism," or what I like to call politics-as-fandom.
How to be political without doing politics
This article from Hersh in The Atlantic a couple years ago remains worth a read. Here, he describes a type of person you probably know well:
Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.
He contrasts this with the work of a 63-year-old school bus monitor who, in her spare time, organizes her local Latino community and builds political power — in other words, a person who actually does politics. Read the whole thing, it's good. Personally, I prefer the term politics-as-fandom, because I suspect most political hobbyists don't really think of it as just a hobby. If you follow the NFL or watch all the various Star Wars movies and shows, that’s a hobby; if you make your interest in those things central to how you present yourself to the world, that’s fandom.
People blame the current wave of politics-as-fandom on the shock of Trump getting elected president or on the pandemic driving us all crazy, and but I think Trump and the pandemic were just gasoline on a fire that started back during the 2008 presidential election. I watched it happen: politics was a fairly nerdy interest to have, and then all of a sudden Barack Obama was running for president and he was so much cooler and more exciting than the politicians people were used to, and politics became hip seemingly overnight. But the actual work of politics, the knocking on doors and making phone calls and spending long hours at city hall or the state capitol didn’t get any less grueling and unpleasant. As a result, we had a huge influx of people who were into politics, but who weren't necessarily involved in politics. They were political hobbyists, or politics fans. Their fandom was intense, but they didn’t have any grounding in the history and mechanics of how politics actually happens.
Politics is about impact, fandom is about itself
In retrospect, this was never going to be sustainable. The reality of politics is that change comes grindingly slow, and victories are seldom total and never permanent. The reality of fandom is that it requires regular rewards or else it dies. So, when Obama won the presidency and then did not swiftly and completely solve America's problems, the fans were left disappointed and frustrated by what should have been a predictable outcome.1 In another era, perhaps this would have been the point where most of the hobbyists and fans would have gotten bored and moved on to something else, while the few with the stomach and heart for it stuck around for the long, unglamorous work of making the world a better place. We would all have been better off if that had happened. But alas, by this point we were well into the social media era, and it turned out that social media could reward political fandom in ways that had nothing to do with actually advancing political goals.
No matter who you were, you could get rewarded with likes, follows and maybe even fame and professional success just for expressing your opinion about politics. This kept the fandom going, and, worse, shaped people’s political priorities. Look at some of the narratives about politics that have become central in recent years:
“The personal is political.” True, but also pretty convenient if what you really want to do is talk about yourself and judge other people’s behavior.
“Representation in media and culture is important.” True, but also pretty convenient if talking about pop culture is what you like doing anyway.
“The privileged should speak up for the marginalized.” True, but also pretty convenient if you’re a privileged person who really likes to speak.
If you’re not careful, you can convince yourself that talking about politics — expressing your politics and yelling at others for their opposing politics — is an end unto itself. But it isn’t. Talking about politics is obviously a necessary part of achieving political goals, but if talking is what you spend most of your time doing, then it’s not about the goals, it’s about you. Politics is about impact; fandom is about itself.
If you’re engaging in politics in a healthy way, you understand you’re part of work that was going on long before you showed up and will continue long after you’re gone. Because we’re human and we have egos, it’s a struggle to keep sight of that, but it’s true and it’s what politics is. What’s less healthy but so much easier and more immediately rewarding is to treat politics as a personal performance until you disappear so completely up your own ass that you come to sincerely believe that all the time you’ve spent on Twitter has benefitted anything or anyone but you and your own standing within the movement/fandom.
Politics-as-fandom is worse than useless
If the biggest problem with politics-as-fandom were just its ineffectual vanity, then it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I would be grumpy about it like a hipster who’s grumpy about all the new fans of a band he liked back when they were obscure, but at the end of the day it would be basically harmless.
But it’s worse than that. The following will ring familiar to anyone who’s watched an internet fan community implode:
That was written about fans of entertainment properties; political fandom looks a little different, but it ends up in the same ugly place. While your devotion to speaking up about causes you care about may seem more righteous than somebody else’s devotion to the Star Wars multimedia franchise or whatever, the truth is you and the Star Wars superfan are in the same self-destructive position. You’ve invested so much of your sense of self in something that you personally have no control over. If your engagement in politics is, at its core, about you the individual and the kind of person you want to show yourself to be, then your politics are going to turn just as toxic as any other fandom. Nihilism will start to creep in.
Here are a couple narratives that I don’t think are true, but that some politics fans have convinced themselves of:
“America is irredeemably racist and sexist.” You might sincerely believe that, but it’s also pretty convenient if you’ve built a personal brand around crusading against racism and sexism. If this is all about you, and you’re not seeing progress, then either you’re not doing a good enough job or the problem is intractable. Your ego would prefer the latter to be true.
“Burn it all down.” And there it is: the inevitable endpoint of politics-as-fandom. Maybe the injustices you’ve suffered have so thoroughly robbed you of hope that you truly think there’s no way forward but to burn society down and start over — but I doubt it. In my experience, people who are truly marginalized and ground-down are more interested in concretely improving life for themselves and their immediate communities than in making grand pronouncements about the system, man — and anyway, such people tend to be too busy surviving to spend much time spouting off on Twitter. But if you’re an educated, highly online liberal who has been a huge fan of politics for the past 10-15 years, and every politician and movement you believed in has disappointed you, and it just seems like things keep getting worse despite all the time and mental energy you’ve put in to caring about it, and you’re starting to feel like it all must be destroyed… then you’ve gone too far down the politics-as-fandom rabbit hole. You’ve learned that you can’t control politics. You hate it. You must destroy it.
But you know what? It’s not about you. And if you can make peace with that, you might just be able to do some good.
To be clear: this is not all a roundabout way of me saying that liberals and leftists who want more and faster progress should shut up and enjoy the incrementalism. We can and should have vigorous debates over what’s politically possible, and anyway I’m usually on the faster progress side.
I think you've put your finger on something pretty important here, unfortunately something political hobbyists will not want to hear.
have an incoherent response like a year and a half after you posted this because I was looking EVERYWHERE FOR THIS post and couldn't remember where I read it. I kept looking through Freddie DeBoer's archives somehow convinced I read it on his substack woops.
Anyway this speaks to my experiences. The internet makes it so easy to signal that you have the right opinions while never doing anything remotely helpful. I unfortunately love living in a space where everything is theoretical and never emerges into reality, so also I have been very guilty of performative bullshit and behaving as if this was very, very important and helpful of me.
And then I realize what I'm doing and am ashamed. It's a tragic cycle and I'm confident I'll repeat it until I die. but hopefully with increased gaps in between the performative bullshit....