Are You a Political Hobbyist?

Are You a Political Hobbyist?
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Consider this: a political hobbyist is someone who is involved in politics out of emotional need and gratification. Once upon a time, people tended to become involved politically, mostly to gain power, to change things in particular ways, or out of a moral obligation.

Now things are different. For the political hobbyist, emotional gratification is more important than a sense of duty and civic obligation. There is the person who listens and watches news reports without end, and there is the person who wants results now and in their absence finds no motivation to do the harder work of going to meetings within existing political avenues. There is the person who is terribly upset about the state of things, but who has no plans to vote in the next election. Is this ringing a bell yet?

Eitan D. Hersh, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, in the NewYork Times (June 29, 2017, “The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is theParticipants”), writes about many Americans being involved “in a degraded form of politics that caters to the voyeurism of news junkies and the short attention span of slacktivists.” When we spoke, he mentioned his current involvement in writing a more detailed and in depth book on political hobbyism. He is very articulate about the subject, even as he reminds me that he is a political scientist and not a psychologist.

Hersh realizes that one aspect of political hobbyism involves the way people pursue what he refers to as infotainment. He suggests that people who visit Twitter constantly and use other social media sites all the day long are not necessarily more informed than someone who does a fairly thorough reading of a morning newspaper. And then of course there is the issue of what we are doing with the information we have, and if we are doing anything at all.

A huge part of political hobbyism comes into play when people use their free time to indulge rather then their freedom to feel obligated to change things for the better. The latter takes time and effort and does not have the casual connotation of hobbies, where people are usually playing for fun. To turn political involvement into a hobby turns a part of life where really the stakes are high, into something that seems less important than it really is; after all political decisions affect lives and quality of life, and of course the planet. Showing up to do the hard work of change, sometimes attending meetings, which may be boring, and working from a local level up can be important antidotes to the hobbyism about which Hersh is speaking. Even though Hersh well knows that when partisanship is relentless, change is hard to effect.

Of course I am interested in this topic, because, well, it speaks to me about me. I recognize myself. I don’t love the recognition, mind you, but I see what I sometimes think of (if whimsically) as political involvement mood disorder, as in fact a kind of hobbyism. There can be a flirtation with involvement, where (for me) sometimes seeing a film about a crucially important subject (like “I Am Not Your Negro”, for example) can become a substitute for being active in the field of racism. Seeing a late night comedy show can provide an outlet hat imitates or passes for being active. It is like being in the know, reaching a status of knowing that can feel more important than doing.

Making fun can feel to me like a way of protesting, whereas those of us who do it a lot—instead of waking up to the dangers of having a President with a negligible moral compass at his disposal—can be a distraction from the imperatives of acting to see what we can actually do. Too much comedy that is relentless becomes for me—and probably for many-- a dulling of the senses. In that when any of us are entertained only, we can go to sleep, feeling as if our laughing is no different from a real participation in a democracy. Or it can seduce us into feeling chronically superior and smug—less than willing to look at our own flaws.

We see how our passions can come alive in the fields of entertainment in general, however misplaced. In Table For Three, a column in the New York Times (July 15, 2017), entitled “Bill Maher and Fran Lebowitz: When Comedy Cuts Deep”, Philip Galanes conducts a three way interview between himself, Bill Maher and Fran Lebowitz. Lebowitz says at one point: ”There’s always outrage over people in show business, who have no actual power. They’re entertainers. We would prefer that they agree with us, and do the right thing. But moral outrage should be reserved for Congress or the Supreme Court. To me, the fact that people can’t tell the difference between these things is why we have Donald Trump as President. People want to be entertained 24 hours a day. And they’re seeking from entertainment what they should be seeking from other branches of life.”

Amen, I say, though without real moral or even intellectual or even practical certitude.

And I understand: I am probably a political hobbyist. However and even so, that is not all any of us are.

Meanwhile I hope we can try to understand the dynamics of our own participation as well. Somehow to practice a practice of facing our differences even with people with whom we may also allegedly agree, but in fact don’t always.

So I come back, as I’m prone to do, to suggesting that while we try to get smarter about the dynamics of political hobbyism and of the ugliness of the polarization that is so destructive, we try to become as honest as possible about our own being lost in it in one way or another. That seems to me, not a solution, but part of a promising beginning.

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