...His book [
Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh] 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.
[Interviewed, he says]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. This isn’t to say that this sort of behavior doesn’t happen on both sides, but it’s mostly on the left.
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. I think we need more institutional engagement with religious organizations, for example. Some people see that as a conservative message, whereas I just think that’s what building power requires.