![]() ![]() He’s just caught up in the national news cycle and he’s not actually improving anything. So a hobbyist might learn all the details of the Mueller report and feel that’s important to know and will spend hours and hours on it.īut then if you asked him how he could get involved on some issues of importance in his local community or in his state, or where the pressure points are in his community to influence government, he has no idea. You are typically learning about big national news items, and oftentimes it’s just drama. When you’re a hobbyist, you’re learning the wrong information and practicing the wrong skills. They mistake this for actual politics, but it’s not because it doesn’t contribute to power-building. Political hobbyist is a catchall term for the person who spends a lot of time consuming news or signing online petitions or engaging online with people about this or that issue. ![]() The issue here is something you call “political hobbyism,” an approach to politics that has become dominant. Some people see that as a conservative message, whereas I just think that’s what building power requires. I think we need more institutional engagement with religious organizations, for example. In a lot of ways I’m liberal, but the message of the book is conservative in the sense that it’s prioritizing local engagement over national engagement. This isn’t to say that this sort of behavior doesn’t happen on both sides, but it’s mostly on the left. The reality is that the people who spend the most time consuming news and arguing online are disproportionately college-educated white people, and right now that demographic is predominantly Democratic. You argue that liberals, in particular, are doing politics wrong. This is sort of the starting point of the book. The problem is that this just doesn’t describe how most people engage in politics. And you can influence the government by convincing people who they should vote for, or by interacting with politicians and lobbying them in either case, you are getting these other people, whether they’re politicians or citizens, to take some action they wouldn’t otherwise take. ![]() What is politics actually about for you? Eitan Hershįor me, politics is about working with other people to influence the government. I spoke to Hersh about how politics became mere sport for so many people, why it’s particularly a problem on the left, and what he thinks people should do if they really want to organize and change the world around them.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. We may be emotionally invested in politics, but we’re not actually committed to solving problems. Many of us think we’re politically active - but in fact, we’re doing little more than signaling who we are to other people. “We participate in politics by obsessive news-following and online slacktivism, by feeling the need to offer a hot take for each daily political flare-up, by emoting and arguing and debating, almost all of this from behind screens,” Hersh says. He coins the term “political hobbyism” to capture the problem. A self-identified liberal, Hersh tries to understand why the left stopped pursuing power and instead started treating politics more and more like a spectator sport. His book is half lament, half rallying cry. This is the thesis of a new book called Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University. If you spend a lot of time consuming news, there’s a good chance you’re doing politics wrong.Īnd you’re not only doing it wrong, you probably also think you’re doing it right, which means you’re almost certainly making things worse. ![]()
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