Everything is NOT Political

Everything is not political, but essentially anything can be politicized… Huh? Yes, there is a fundamental difference between the two. Just because something innocuous has the capacity to be politicized does not make that thing political. A lot of background is needed first before I can dive into my thesis. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Most Americans do not care about politics. Even a good chunk of people who vote for president every four years don’t really pay attention to federal politics let alone state or local politics. Because, in general, politics sucks. The terminally online, which, if you clicked on an article with this particular title, you basically are already, care about politics to an absurd degree over the average American.

I use America in general as my baseline because America is where I live and, thus, I understand this land and its general culture far more than I understand any other country even if I might be a weeb of some other country’s pop culture. You weird Australians and your Vegemite and cane toads… I have to use generalizations at times to criticize other people who overly generalize. Such is a quirk of humanity.

Those who intently pay attention to politics in America are in no way the norm. There is a saying that 1% make the news, 9% watch the news, and 90% don’t pay attention. I believe I first heard this on a John Stossel program back when he did those mini-documentaries on specific subjects over on the Fox Business Network about once a week. At that time, I was an incredibly nerdy college student and outspoken campus conservative. Made me very popular at parties and with the ladies.

The point I’m making with all of this is that the politically motivated and the politically engaged are both a tiny, tiny yet a very vocal minority. This ties into many issues from the trans acceptance movement to “woke Hollywood” to environmentalism. The people who understand (or claim that they understand) these issues are infinitesimal compared to the broader public. Overconfidence in one’s intelligence is a common problem for the bougie who have any mental energy at the end of the work day to involve themselves in politics.

Most adults pulling a paycheck in America are not only living paycheck to paycheck but are too focused on their own problems to truly care much about “world problems.” Charitable giving notwithstanding, most people focus on their own problems as they define them. Usually, this means their own issues and those of their friends and family, as they define those things. And, if they’re lucky, they might even have time for some escapism like video games or movies.

I keep having to say things like this because a lot of the politically engaged do not truly realize how little the average American cares about the issues which said politically engaged people care about. The average American might have a working definition of what, say, a trans person is, but precious few know what “trans acceptance” really means. Most Americans probably couldn’t define “woke” with a gun to their heads. And the average working adult really couldn’t care less about the delta smelt if they have even heard those two words strung together before right now.

The average American cares about themselves and, however they define it, members of their tribe. “I got mine.” Even the politically active are such because their Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are different from every other human on the globe. This is not truly a dig at the politically active, considering that is me, but an issue of too much aggregation. If you recall, I dislike Neo-Keynesianism quite a lot.

The problem with most behavioral sciences (also known as the social sciences) is making far too generalized a few of billions of people and their billions of trillions of decisions and interactions every single day. Everyone’s needs are a deeply individualized beast. Yes, there are base needs every human, nay, every living thing on Earth needs in some capacity, but humans have both higher order thinking (or sentience) and free will. When your base survival is essentially not a daily struggle, as has been the case for a vast majority of Americans since the end of WWII and especially since the mid-1960s, you begin to develop what can broadly be called hobbies.

Having solved all other problems… This is a dig especially people of my political persuasion, the right side of the spectrum, like to make when some whackadoodle, usually on Twitter, is going on about oyster farts’ effect on climate change or some such other thing that less than a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of one percent of the world even knows about and even less give two honkin’ dookies about.

More people will make fun of such people and flippantly dismiss their concerns than will ever listen to them. And, on top of that, most people will never hear about these crazy topics in the first place. Because it is ridiculous to care about these things when the price of gas is making it difficult to get to work or a tornado just tore through a city five miles down the road from you. And those same terminally online people will butt in and say “It’s all connected…”

I got back to it eventually, huh?

Everything is not political. What I mean by this is that there is no grand theory connecting every issue in a giant disgusting mess that would make John Carpenter blush. Some on the left side of the terminally online minority think every political issue is tied into every other one. Free Palestine ties into fat acceptance which ties into abortion rights which ties into environmental justice which ties into prison abolitionism which ties into the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. (To be bipartisan, trying to tie every issue into the spread of democracy was something the GOP tried to push from about the HW years until around the time Trump came down the escalator, for example.)

Anyone with the focus of a titmouse will tell you this can’t function well. Yes, it may be beneficial to link other causes together as a politician or activist, but the end goals of even the five issues I mentioned along with the Monty Python reference are wildly different and incongruous. A vast, vast majority of people are not politicians or activists. And, put simply, most just don’t give a shit. And they never will.

“You will be made to care.” Ben Shapiro, whether he coined that phrase or not, used that as a rallying cry to establish himself over at Big Hollywood and later The Daily Wire, which I discovered recently he does not even own. Activists cannot make the average American care about almost anything if it does not directly impact said average Americans in some way.

Fear and threats of cancellation may get some of the public who pay attention even a little bit to not stick their necks out, but it won’t make them care. And it rarely will get them to side with your preferred policy outcomes long-term. The committed partisan voter is not actually all that common. Just like with income and wealth levels varying wildly throughout someone’s life, so do one’s voting preferences, if one votes at all.

Ticket splitters are common enough that a governor of one party can win statewide with a healthy margin during a presidential election year as the state’s electoral votes go just as healthily to the presidential candidate of the other party. Joe Manchin won statewide as a Democrat in 2010 in West Virginia. That sounds insane, but it happened. And continued to happen a few times after that every six years. It probably helped that he literally shot the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in a campaign ad that didn’t mention his party affiliation.

The point of all this is that partisan does not mean the same thing to everyone. I am partisan to my own beliefs. As you, the reader, are partisan to yours, even if we largely agree or disagree on just about everything. But even among activists of the same political persuasion, one’s partisan leanings can be wildly different from even the lads and ladies you’re currently walking shoulder to shoulder with as you march on Washington for whatever cause is fashionable today.

All winning (and minority) voting coalitions are temporary alliances that sometimes last all of one day, Election Day. You can see this with how low midterm and especially off-year voting participation is compared to presidential election years.

And the solution is not to force everyone to vote under fear of consequences, which is stupid, but to present an alternative that makes the apathetic care enough to spend less than an hour to vote. (Early voting and absentee balloting make voting so very easy these days…) Having a more wildly misinformed voting public than we already have won’t make the politicians better. If a person cares so little that they can’t be arsed to get off their tuchus once every one, two, or four years (excluding primaries) to vote, then forcing them to won’t make them care who they’re voting for at all. Washington would get even worse under such a scheme.

Just because you care doesn’t mean anyone else does, nor should they. And just because the reasons you give for why they should doesn’t mean they will have any reason to agree with you. Nor should they.

We all have those things which we are passionate about. Whether it is action figures or music or movies or the economic philosophy of F. A. Hayek, totally random examples I assure you, there will always be things you or I or Billy Bob Joe down the street care about more than anyone else. Just try to enjoy your life and let problems that might go away without you doing anything at all fade into the background. Even for a few hours. On that subject, have you seen Late Night with the Devil? It’s pretty good.