DO OUR POLITICAL MASTERS REALLY WANT US PAYING ATTENTION?

I've contended that governance is a drag on civilization, because people have to think about ever-larger bundles of policies being imposed on ever more people.  Sometimes I consider the possibility that devolving power from national governments, or the international institutions, to regional, state, or local institutions or government might be the sole way for those national and international politicians to save themselves.

That's not the way Tom "Death of Expertise" Nichols sees it.  "'I know my reaction to the Tom Brady coverage is churlish,' said Nichols (Ph.D.), 'but it’s also consistent with 40 years of my astonishment that Americans know everything about sports figures but can’t read a goddamn map or name their own member of Congress but who then bitch about democracy.'" It might be that Congressional districts are too big, or that as long as the streets are plowed and the power stays on, there's not much to get worked up about.  Perhaps it has never occurred to Mr Nichols that if those Americans who astonish him paid more attention to politics, and voted, the outcomes might not be to his liking, or to the pleasure of the professional managerial classes?

What Nichols seems to be suggesting is that there is something wrong with the fact that many Americans are aware that, say, Jonathan Taylor is the 2021 rushing leader but do not know that the House Minority Leader is a fellow named Kevin McCarthy. I am not familiar with any public polling that attempts to compare knowledge of or interest in professional football with the Schoolhouse Rock understanding of politics whose absence Professor Nichols laments, but my sense is that many millions of Americans will find themselves on the receiving end of his implied censure.

But what is he actually complaining about? Is it really such a strange thing to think that for the vast majority of people in this country, football is simply more important than politics, especially in the narrow electoral sense of the word? Readers of this website are far more likely to be interested in politics than the average American, but I would pose to them the following question: When was the last time an action or decision made by a member of Congress—your own representative in the House or any other—meaningfully altered you and your family? I suspect that very few would be able to answer the question, and that even fewer still would say that an elected official had done anything in living memory that inspired joy, awe, longing, envy or any of the other emotions (save perhaps despair) that millions of us experience weekly, indeed even hourly, during football season.

Food for thought there. Perhaps the parties have gotten so good at drawing Congressional districts, for instance, that even if the representative from that person's district was the influential voter in a close vote, that person would most likely approve of the outcome (whether that person voted or not).

But how often does such a thing happen?  There's no regular order with each Cabinet department having a separate appropriation, only a quarter century of continuing resolutions, and for the past two years Congress and the state legislatures have mostly been irrelevant as the two presidents, and fifty governors, have issued ukase after ukase.  If we gripe about that, Mr Nichols, it's not democracy we're griping about, it's tyranny.

Besides, as Matthew Walther continues, politics-as-practiced looks more like sport than serious discourse.

This is to say nothing of the fact that politics in the sense meant by Professor Nichols is something its followers mostly enjoy at precisely the level on which football fans engage with their sport. Being “informed” does not mean understanding why it is that store shelves are empty or being able to make the case for giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine (one of the esteemed professor’s hobby horses); it means watching the Red Team beat the Blue Team and vice versa.

That is, if your participation is engaging only on social media, or you get your information from watching cable news squabbles, you're delegating the thinking, such as it is, to others, who are paid by the sound bite, not by the insight.