{"id":142733,"date":"2022-01-09T16:16:53","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T00:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=142733"},"modified":"2022-01-09T16:18:42","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T00:18:42","slug":"seizing-power-vs-seeking-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=142733","title":{"rendered":"Seizing Power Vs Seeking Outrage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ezra Klein writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In his 2020 book \u201cPolitics Is for Power,\u201d Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.<\/p>\n

I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don\u2019t like that I have seen.<\/p>\n

To Hersh, that\u2019s not politics. It\u2019s what he calls \u201cpolitical hobbyism.\u201d And it\u2019s close to a national pastime. \u201cA third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,\u201d he writes. \u201cOf these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It\u2019s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage…<\/p>\n

But fury is useful only as fuel.<\/p>\n

…Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don\u2019t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.<\/p>\n

…I\u2019ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn\u2019t. Bannon calls this \u201cthe precinct strategy,\u201d and it\u2019s working. \u201cSuddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,\u201d ProPublica reports. \u201cThey showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding \u2014 myself included \u2014 remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not have one federal election,\u201d said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. \u201cWe have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can\u2019t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they\u2019re spending, what technology they\u2019re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ezra Klein writes: In his 2020 book \u201cPolitics Is for Power,\u201d Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms. I refresh my Twitter feed to keep … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142733"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142737,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142733\/revisions\/142737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}