If you spend a lot of time consuming news, there’s a good chance you’re doing politics wrong.
And 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.
This is the thesis of a new book called Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University. His book is half lament, half rallying cry. 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.
He coins the term “political hobbyism” to capture the problem. “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. 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 may be emotionally invested in politics, but we’re not actually committed to solving problems.
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