I have a tendency to over-consume and over-indulge on a subject without stopping and reflecting on why.
Recently, I’ve been consuming lots of information on the Trump 2.0 tariffs and the potential fall (destruction?) of Pax Americana.
In school as a kid, I didn’t pay much attention to the way things work. As an adult cresting my 30s, it’s the question I’ve been most obsessed with. Why they work the way they do is the obvious second order question there, but first I’d like to know How.
As far as I can tell, one of the reason I’ve become obsessed with How things work is because so many people, especially like almost everyone online, act as if they know Why things work the way they do.
Trump presidencies seem to be the ultimate exposure machine. They create incredible amounts of stories, headlines, and open questions on systems and institutions. If most other presidencies are convection ovens, Trump’s are a pressure cooker.
Let me take a leap here and pathologize the situation. This is an attempt to package all of this reading and consuming and begin to form a coherent theory of it all:
1. I think politics are now sport for the masses. And sports are best when they have good rivalries.
And maybe there’s no better rivalry than American’s hating (on) one another and arguing over the definition of what it means to be an American.
I’m sure we’ve always been playing this game — e.g. some people though Reagan was a hero, some a dictator, yada yada — but it seems like we’re in the fourth quarter now.
If this were a basketball game, we may be in the last minute where the whole game seems to both happen all at once and still take minutes (years, e.g. Trump coming down the golden escalator in 2015 to now) to play out that one minute.
One key difference in sports and politics:
If sports encourages you to cheer for something, our politics of today largely encourages you to cheer against something, and usually against someone.
2. I think politics have replaced religious identity for many of us and we look to them for meaning and community.
Religion is not as important to us anymore, but the need –– and desire –– to find meaning through a vehicle other than our own selves hasn’t gone away.
Religion is an old story. It’s a slow burn.
It compels you to invest over a lifetime.
It asks a lot of your attention span. An attention span that’s tested daily by more “relevant” and sugary stories.
So, if religion offers you a myth, a place to form your identity, community, and something bigger than yourself, politics conveniently offers you the same thing except that instead of calling you to something higher, it’s a zero-sum race to the bottom.
Religious adherence is declining and it seems like more and more people find their community through sports. Think of the trend of people getting into sports like F1 or the English Premier League because Netflix makes wonderful documentaries about them.
Think of running clubs.
We have now long found meaning outside of a local community and that is now largely filled on the scale of countries, economies, and movements.
Meaning, when we look for answers about ourselves and what to do in life, we look on a global scaled rather than find satisfying answers very locally.
To some degree this feels predictable. The world is a global experience now. Your zipcode doesn’t impose the constraints it used to.
Now, you can find your identity “out there” instead of “in here” or even “right there”.
Religion is obviously a global experience too. But you don’t go really go to church with everyone in the world even though most Christians go to church at roughly the same clock hour.
You go to church with a few hundred people at most.
Sure, you could say that when a Christian in Seattle and a Christian in Mississippi go to church on Sunday, they are in tune with one another through the holy spirit and the common worship of God. But there’s a lot of nuance in the Christian expression that makes those experiences less common than they seem. Think, Lutheran and Southern Baptist.
However, when you watch F1 or the Manchester Derby, and someone in Malaysia does the same, you see roughly what they see and, if you’re on the same team, you have a shared global experience.
But what’s the final boss for religion and maybe even sports?
Politics.
As more and more politicians become influencers – from AOC to Trump himself (the O.G.) – it’s become so magnetic to our attention that it’s absorbed the exports of religion (meaning and community) and sport (all the coverage you could want, like NFL Sunday Ticket).
Politics-as-sport has become a useful framework for me in how I relate to, or don’t, current affairs.
Productively encountering useful updates on what’s happening is getting easier. I think my radar is pretty well attuned to what’s slop and what is interesting/useful.