Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Eitan Hersh is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, focusing on U.S. elections and civic participation. His latest book is Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eitan Hersh discuss how to engage with politics in ways likely to bring about meaningful change; how political hobbyism tends to coincide with misperceptions about voter habits and the purposes of political rhetoric; and how to more successfully get students to engage with challenging ideas on campus.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity:
Yascha Mounk: What I’ve learned all of my life is that it’s good for people to be politically engaged. We want a politically active citizenry. We want people to care about politics.
You don’t completely disagree with that, but you worry that too many Americans and perhaps too many people in other democracies have become political hobbyists, that they care about politics in the wrong ways. What do you mean by that?
Eitan Hersh: I think that the way that 95% of people who are engaged in politics are engaged is not really politics. It’s like if we imagine that all football fans were actually football players. Of about a third of the country that pays attention to politics, nearly all of them are just engaging for some sort of emotional connection or for intellectual gratification. They want to learn stuff. And they’re not building the right skills or getting the right knowledge for them to inform votes or activism. They’re just doing a totally different thing.
Mounk: So what sort of a good form of political engagement would look like? I mean, one of my favorite essays to teach is Benjamin Constant’s “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” and he makes sort of two points: The first is that there was a kind of pleasure in doing politics. It was available to you in ancient Athens, which is not going to be available to you under modern circumstances, because there’s too many of us, we’re too busy, there’s too many distractions, there’s too many fun other things to do in life. So we’re just not going to be spending half of our day sitting around the assembly and actually deciding whether to go to war, who to banish from the city, what kind of musical instruments should be allowed, and all the kinds of things that ancient Athenians or people more broadly in the ancient Greek world did. But Constant still said what we’re going to do is to delegate a lot of our political decision making; you vote for representatives, they are your servants, they go off to Washington, they do this stuff for you, right? But you still have to be alert, you still have to be active because there’s a principal agent problem. In the same way in which, in a corporation, you have to make sure as a shareholder that the CEO isn’t just trying to line their own pockets. As a citizen, you have to make sure that the people who you empower are actually serving your interests rather than serving their own interests or perhaps taking away your right to engage in politics. And so I think that sort of set the way we tend to think about politics. But sure, part of the liberty of what we have in a representative democracy is that you don’t have to know exactly what they’re debating in Congress today. You don’t have to go and do all this politics yourself. But we need this active citizenry. And the danger is that we don’t have this active citizenry, that our politicians are going to go and run away with it, right?
So what does it mean that we’re sort of pretending to do politics?
More here.
