Submission Statement: Highly relevant to r/neoliberal as it raises a question about the relationship between democratic participation, political incentives, and policy quality. The essay argues that the constant, partisan, dramatic, low-effort, zero-sum political engagement produced by mass media and social media pushes politicians toward populism, while making it harder to pursue unpopular but necessary reforms.
Posted by ProblemAdmirable8763
1 Comment
Related to a theory I have of Issue Saturation. Where you talk about an issue so much everyone persuadable has already picked a side and everyone else is just tired of hearing about it. This happened to gun control and climate change here.
Conversely it means one of the better strategic moves is to let the issue go quiet for a bit until something changes the emotional register. I think the best thing to happen to the palestine activists was to be relegated to irrelevance for a year after Trump returned to office because then people weren’t paying attention to them they were paying attention to the godawful shit Israel has been doing and suddenly realized “wait wtf why didn’t anyone who wasn’t an annoying leftist tell me about this?”