On shiny things in politics: What matters and what doesn't

Round whatever of Trump versus some freshmen congresswomen who have no power.  I'm not going to bother with a summary of the Tlaib/Omar hullabaloo.

I occasionally make reference to shiny things in politics.  Shiny things are things that don't matter, but draw your attention by reflex.  The 10,000 people who die every day due to waterborne pathogens?  Not a shiny thing.  The very opposite.  That matters far more than nearly anything you read in the news, and more than just about anything I say here, but it isn't shiny, and it doesn't draw attention.  Climate change?  Not shiny, except when there is a major storm or wild fire that can be tied to climate change, with the flip side being that idiots like James Inhofe will carry a snowball onto the floor of the Senate in winter because he thinks winter disproves climate change.  Yes, he did this.

Shiny things draw your attention away from what matters.  Shiny things are good at that, but by definition, they can't matter.  Shiny things can be policy-related, as long as they are minor and petty.  Decades ago, "flag desecration" laws were a thing that the GOP used to try to rile up their base, but for all of Antonin Scalia's complications, Scalia shut that down.  The left riles itself up with call-out culture to the point that they have gone after people including Stephen Colbert (anyone remember #cancelcolbert?) and Ani diFranco (don't get me started on that).

News.  That which is new and different.  The 10,000 people who die every day due to waterborne pathogens aren't new, collectively, because it happens every day, but by definition, the shiny thing is new.  The perversity, then, is that we spend a week talking about whether or not Rashida Tlaib will visit the West Bank on a combination family trip/political visibility thing for the... I'm not going to type the acronym for that "movement" because somebody didn't think through the acronym for their "movement."

Why were we talking about Tlaib or Omar in the first place?  They're shiny things.  What makes them shiny?  They say and do stupid, vile things.  Put them in a situation with Trump, who says and does stupid, vile things, and you have a shiny thing-feedback loop.  Shiny like a polished turd.  Urushi lacquer, or something, for you fountain pen people.

This is a schoolyard.  Some asshole kids just got into a fight, and the rest of the kids are standing around cheering because a fight is exciting.  That's politics in the United States today.  Or rather, that's the part to which anyone pays attention.  And that's the problem to which I call attention today.  That to which we pay attention is not that which matters.

Even supposing you don't care about the 10,000 people dying every day due to waterborne pathogens, how about climate change?  Anyone think they can top that for issues that really matter for the long-term future of the species?

Anthony Downs is best known in political science for starting us down the primrose path of spatial theory, which is the subfield in which I primarily work (because I... don't know why), but he is also the scholar who first formalized what we call "the issue attention cycle," about the process the public follows on various policy issues, when events happen to call attention to an issue through a crisis, and blah, blah, blah.  His original 1972 article is still worth a read, but the thing is, right now, public attention is so frequently focused on non-policy stupidity that some modifications may be in order.  In fact, our policy-making institutions rarely make policy anymore anyway, at the top level.  The bureaucracy?  Sure, but Congress?  Nope.  (Trump's use of executive orders is another matter...)

In Anthony Downs' formulation, each attention-drawing thing would be an event, with potential policy implications, and public attention may or may not lead to policy change, depending on political circumstances, but that's not what happens anymore.  Instead, the shiny things are stupid fights between Trump and whomever.  This week, and lately, it has been "the squad," because anything involving either Trump or "the squad" will be stupid.  Policy implications?  Not much, but it was a schoolyard fight, and whatever issue attention energy that drove Downs' model got sucked up by it.

And since our policy-making institutions don't work anymore anyway... meh.

You are complicit in this.  So am I, but at least I'm trying, when I remind you of how stupid, pointless, and petty this stuff is, and about how much more other things matter.  If I could stop reading about Trump and his professional wrestling feuds, I would, but it's kind of my career, as a political science professor.

This does mean, though, that I need to think about what I do here.  And here's the problem.  I am an elections scholar.  That's what I do.  Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president again.  I can't write about an election without writing about Trump.

I gotta think about this.

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