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I mean I wouldn’t mind so much if the vibes based people weren’t absolutely involved in politics and weren’t absolutely convinced that they are the serious ones. The vibes based political discourse that most people mistake for politics is destroying the country. We’re possibly the first civilization that will blow itself up simply because we’re bored. And it’s happening. We’re seeing political violence that usually only comes to civilizations in actual crisis— high inflation, high unemployment, mass arrests, etc. We have none of that. We have bored people yelling about politics, marching in the streets, and shooting people in an economy that’s probably no worse than the 1980s.
I wish that people would find politics boring so that policy could be made by wanks who actually know what is going on without having to worry about idiots on social media who see sad images on Facebook and decide that the other side is evil. I want it to be safe to disagree without having to think about whether it threatens my job, my family, or will end a relationship. But here we are, trying to turn an artificial cold civil war into an actual hot civil war. I wish the common response to politics was “boring”. And TBH real politics (reading the text of the bills, looking up statistics, reading FRED reports, and so on) is boring.
That's not politics, that's clerkship. Politics is fighting for benefits for your ingroup, which is evidently far from boring for most people. Back in the day, the politics people engaged in was local, family-level squabbling. Now we're atomized and online, so our involvement in politics is mostly in the global context.
It’s also issue and fact based, which 99% of political discourse is not. Arguing about the optics of a political issue and about issues you have no control over not only doesn’t make actual governing better, but prevents it.
Arguing about the budget and the size of government makes sense if you understand tge budget on the table and what it changes as compared to last year’s budget. Arguing the Marist of a program makes sense if you know what the program is, what it’s supposed to do, and if it’s meeting its targets. Just yelling into Twitter isn’t politics.
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