Principle and Pageantry

Have you ever worked hard on something? For years, maybe? I have. Plenty of times. One instance was when I spent 3 years in politics, which eventually culminated in my state’s first tenant union. I’ve done an amount of political work that many people never do, and it was a lot of effort for something that is very small. That’s just how this kind of work is.

This piece isn’t about people who disengage from politics. It is about people who replace the hard political work with spectacle and insist on being taken seriously anyway. When politics devolves into mere signaling, it stops being an avenue of real change and becomes a cheap substitute.

It is simply the case that for many people, they choose to signal their politics on social media as opposed to doing political work. And these same people demand their opinions carry weight.

Those 3 years of political work were hard. We knocked on doors, sat through a bunch of meetings that went nowhere, watched people join and leave the org, and spent weekends traveling to conventions and organizing marches, rallies, and fundraisers in my state’s capital. The tenant union was the most durable product of all that effort. The rental market in most larger cities in America is broken right now, so as civic-minded Americans, we went out and tried to fix problems in our community. We unfortunately discovered that this path is full of dead ends and can be very discouraging.

On top of this, there is no meaningful talent pool. In electoral politics, our brightest political minds get middling careers maintaining the current system, and have no license to enact necessary large-scale change. Mass politics can’t even attract the people it needs to make any meaningful political change at all. If you are well-educated, the rational move is to get a STEM or finance job and keep politics at arm’s length. In a system this dysfunctional, our brightest minds are disincentivized from getting involved.

The reason I bring up the talent pool is because for small, highly capable orgs to succeed (which is what we’re asking of mass politics), you need highly capable people. People who don’t treat politics as a hobby, but as real shit that needs to get done. There are no guarantees of success, so many capable people just get filtered out. Most mass orgs face this problem, and why wouldn’t they? It’s not like anyone’s getting paid! Competent and driven people can get paid lots of money elsewhere. This might sound harsh, but if you want to do politics, you need to have the work ethic and drive of a crazy person. You have to go to your actual job, then come home and read, go to meetings, do whatever political work is assigned to you, etc. It’s a lot, but serious political change requires serious people to do serious work. We couldn’t even get people to write simple articles and publish them on time. But everyone wanted to be on the social media team. And this is where I must form another harsh conclusion:

People would rather participate in spectacle, and this behavior becomes corrosive in real orgs. It creates noise in spaces where serious people would ostensibly go, it generates discourse that is detached from things that matter and are true, and ultimately just makes everyone angry at each other over irrelevant and often very abstract political issues.

Our modern political environment is chaotic and confusing. Our various institutions have fragmented, and it’s no longer clear where real political change is possible. In such an environment, this is going to be hard and time-consuming. For now, what fills the void is not sensible debate, but pure spectacle; nonsense and pageantry, produced by people who choose performance over doing the work.

When your political opinions cost nothing (no time, no responsibility) they just ring hollow to people who have done the work. To those with skin in the game, this brand of politics is obviously performative.

The moral pageantry is not valiant, it is cheap and dishonorable. Commitment is where the sincerity lies.

I make no claims that I have some secret insight into politics that makes me smarter than everyone. My claim is that the loudest people in politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table are also usually the least knowledgeable. There’s a humility that comes from putting in so much effort and seeing how difficult the problems you’re trying to solve are.

People like me don’t leave politics because we stopped caring one day. In some ways I act like a defect, but the core of my political identity is still intact. Sincerity is socially expensive, and most people are not willing to pay that cost. I was.

When real world outcomes stop mattering to you, your politics will find themselves just as irrelevant.