People who are uninterested in politics
The ignorance of the average voter — even the average educated, affluent voter — is difficult to fathom for those of us who are more engaged, even if we’re not obsessive about it.
A year or so ago, I heard a young mother, about 30 — a seemingly intelligent and affluent college graduate — “blame” Biden for the overruling of Roe v Wade (she was pro-abortion, obviously) because it happened while he was president. This level of ignorance and irrationality, while common, is so deep as to make meaningful discussion impossible.
The same is true of the people on the “Right” who seem to think “Zionists” are behind everything wrong with the United States.
Given the left’s dominance of the media, and the wishy washy nature of the supposedly “rightwing” Fox News, I expect the Democrats to avoid blame for the shutdown. Apparently, the media was able to convince many people that the border disaster under Biden was the fault of the Republicans.
To many of us who follow politics closely, it does seem very odd. Why do so many people seem not to care? Why do they read only information that comes from one side? Or little to no information at all?
But at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll give my answers, and those answers come from my own personal experience. I’m not just talking about my experience with acquaintances, friends, and family. I’m talking about my own behavior and thoughts.
For the first thirty years of my adult life I simply did not follow politics closely. I read the Boston Globe and The New Yorker, but in those days the latter wasn’t politics-heavy; that happened much later. I read the Globe mainly because I lived in New England, and I was especially interested in the arts and sciences section. Some Sundays I got The New York Times, again mostly for the arts, sciences, book reviews, and also the double-crostic (I’m not a crossword puzzle lover). I didn’t like TV news – still don’t – and rarely watched it unless something especially important was happening.
Did I think I was well-informed? Not really. But I thought I was well-informed enough. I wasn’t keen on most politicians. The majority of people I knew about seemed to vote for Democrats, but I actually didn’t even know the politics of many of my friends because the subject didn’t come up. My entire family voted for Democrats; I did know that. And it was perfectly fine with me to vote for them too.
What was I doing most of that time, instead? Mothering, reading, writing fiction and poetry, working when my son got older, going to the movies, listening to music, exercising, cooking, socializing, talking to my husband, traveling to see relatives and friends – all the activities of normal life. Later, I went back to grad school and got my MFT degree, but that didn’t involve politics, either.
And yet it did; I just didn’t realize it. I found myself at odds with a lot of what my professors were teaching us, and I often argued with them about the way to treat clients. My fellow classmates weren’t so enthralled with my orneriness, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t agree with me. But looking back, I think a lot of it had to do with my more conservative way of looking at human nature and human interaction – including, for example, issues of responsibility as well as truth-telling.
I’ve written my story in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” posts; no need to go into all that again. The point I’m trying to make here is that I believe most of the people I know – nearly all of them are Democrats – fall into the same patterns of news and politics consumption that I had for those thirty years.
Sure, there are people I know on the left who follow politics much more closely. But they’re nowhere near as numerous among the people I know, and I think that’s true in general. Dedicated leftists and activists depend on the much greater number of people who are neither.
I imagine some of you are thinking: oh, so you were a useful idiot. I may have been useful, but I was no idiot. I was the very same person I am today, except that now I spend many hours reading and writing about politics. It’s a great surprise to me; I simply didn’t see that coming. But life can be surprising.
“Why do they read only information that comes from one side? Or little to no information at all?”
The average person is rarely exposed to good news concerning Trump, or bad news concerning the left. You have to intentionally find it online, through blogs like this as well as others NEO links to.
Surprise!
“……I expect the Democrats to avoid blame for the shutdown…..”
Yep, that’s a slam dunk.
The media not only controls the news, they create the news, they invent news and they make news totally disappear when is suits their agenda.
This allows the demonkrats to deceive, to lie, to misrepresent , to engage in illegal behaviour – all brushed under the carpet by the media.
This results in about 1/2 of the electorate believing everything they hear from the demoncrats.
I do not know what the solution is to the “media problem,” though by now one would have thought that the dumbpublicans would have developed means to counter the Quisling, the Fifth Columnist media.
You were living in a world like a fish living in water. Why question what just is?
As examples of people who never paid much attention to politics, I have my mother and older brother. Neither paid much attention to news and especially political news.
My mother voted mostly because of local issues and candidates. It was a small town, and the local pols were well known. People recognized how their policies affected their lives. Statewide and national candidates – not so much. For national candidates my mother seemed to like the best looking and well-spoken candidates. Party was not a consideration.
My older brother was a lifer in the U.S. Navy. He cared only about his job in the Navy and his family. Politics simply wasn’t on his radar. I’m not certain if he ever voted.
My younger brother, however, was a committed Democrat. He lived his life according to conservative principles but felt that life wasn’t fair. He believed the Democrats were for the little guy. He worked during election season getting out the vote and as a poll watcher. We could talk politics, but only briefly – neither of us was going to change.
A small sample, but it may reflect our society. 50% politically active and informed, and 50% low information voters or nonvoters.
Not a very good state of affairs for a democratic republic.
Until perhaps the mid-1990s, I paid little attention to public affairs. The Watergate scandal got my attention when I was a teenager, as did the Vietnam war, but both in an extremely superficial way. I noticed the gas lines in the late 70s without having any particular views I can remember about what should be done about them. In 1980 I thought Reagan was a puzzling weirdo, but gave him little thought. I believe it made a slight impression on me that Carter had failed to solve the Iranian hostage crisis, which resolved itself immediately upon Reagan’s taking office. My accountant told me I was going to like the new tax cuts; I was skeptical, because I still thought high taxes were the cure for the deficit.
The first time I remember questioning any media narrative was the push for socialized medicine when Hillary Clinton was First Lady. I hated the idea.
The first large crack in the edifice occurred when I approached a tax partner I respected and asked whether it could be true that lower tax rates could yield higher tax revenues. He said yes, but they were still wrong, because the tax code should be about redistributing wealth. I think I was lost to the Democrats from that day forward, though it took a while for me to admit it. Though being a Republican in my law firm was not a happy thing, Newt Gingrich made good sense to me when he compared the DMV to a MacDonalds.
9/11 did away with the rest of my reluctance to be happy with my new identity as a conservative Republican. Then I really began following the news and was horrified by the press bias.
When we declared “we will have no slaves” we declared concomitantly “we will have no masters”: Good!
Right?
Because we’re all masters, right? We’re rulers of ourselves, the self-ruled sovereigns in our nation. Aren’t we though also our own selves slaves to our masterships? Sure, we’re responsible coming and going.
But wait a second. What are we to make of these who renounce their self-ruling responsibilities? What sort are these? Surely they’re not cattle. Nor can they be slaves, by definition.
Ah, perhaps best to know them as wonderous risk-takers, gamblers with the world. Bless them lord, they’re gonna need it.
One of the responsibilities of citizenship in our Republic, is to be well-informed enough to vote wisely, and then to actually vote!
My BiL, whom I’ve mentioned switched from a non-political moderate to a rabid leftist by sitting at home watching MSNBC all day, this afternoon posted the usual nonsense about climate. I challenged him asking if he would like to see some actual data. He replied that he knows I know more about it than him, but he KNOWS that fossil fuels, fracking, etc are not good. I asked him how he knows that? What evidence is there to support such a statement? I also said just stating his opinion doesn’t cut it with a scientific question. Since then, crickets.
Those in Neo’s early world, and in mine and, I suppose, in others’ worlds who are not particularly well-informed or interested still have opinions.
In my experience, talking to those people with actual evidence is fruitless.
There is a weight to the opinion which is much more important.
Several years ago I was in a conversation with my sister and four sisters who had grown up with us in our NE small town. Family friends forever. I was relating some long-ago anecdotes about political figures. One was about my uncle, on his way to his commuter train at Grand Central, seeing LBJ and RFK in a heated discussion in a limo in front of Grand Central. LBJ was wagging his figure in front of RFK’s face.
I said this is not big news, as the animosity between LBJ and RFK had been well-known for decades.
One of the sisters—-we had been classmates—replied that she hadn’t known about the LBJ/RFK feud. Like her sisters, she is a loyal Democrat, and fairly well-informed—-but not so well-informed that she knew about the LBJ/RFK feud. Nor, for that matter, not so well-informed that over the years I couldn’t reply tit-for-tat to her statements.
But it was I who had a JFK poster in my childhood bedroom, not she. Different levels of interest and knowledge.
It’s hard work to dig into things, and not reasonable to expect everyone to dig into everything they hear. We are all susceptible, not just Democrats. There’s lots of issues where people on our side of the aisle are not interested in questioning assumptions.
What is the Purpose of Holding & Expressing Political Beliefs?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68576.html
“The point I’m trying to make here is that I believe most of the people I know – nearly all of them are Democrats – fall into the same patterns of news and politics consumption that I had for those thirty years.”
Since there’s far more to life than politics, a disinterest in politics is entirely understandable.
The problem is in their absolute certainty about issues of which they are entirely misinformed. A certainty they cling to despite the left’s gross violations of facts, reason and basic common sense. Most recently demonstrated by continued support for a man who has justified the murder of very young children.
It was once true that, “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” Ronald Reagan.
Once they condoned the justifying of the murder of young children, they abandoned not just their parents liberalism but their humanity itself. And this is exactly why God ordered Joshua to destroy the Amalekites and cleanse the land of Israel.
Leftism is a ideological cancer that evolves into a death cult: late term abortion, euthanasia of the terminally ill, the disabled, the elderly, the mentally disturbed and even children. Canada is considering it and the Netherlands has legalized it.
Political assassinations condoned and justified. Colorado passed a law that if a violent criminal is deemed to be mentally unfit for trial, they must be released back onto the streets. Ideological memes that inculcate a depth of self-hate for ‘ancestral sins’ that can only be atoned for by cultural and racial suicide…
“What is the purpose of holding and expressing political beliefs?”
In a dictatorship there is none. It only gets you put in prison or worse.
In a democracy it allows you to participate in the policies that the government enacts. If you have no opinion or won’t express it by voting, you might as well be living in a dictatorship.
I learned by experience that government policies matter to the individual. My goal in life was to be a petroleum geologist and retire rich. That didn’t happen because of government policies. Had there been no draft, I wouldn’t have gone into the Navy. Had the Navy not needed plots just as I was entering my training, I would never have become a pilot.
Had I not been assigned as a Navy recruiter in 1967, I would not have encountered the anti-war protestors that shouted, “Better Red Than De ad!” That slogan made me review everything I believed.
My life turned out differently because of government policies. So, I have tried to understand those policies and how they might affect my life.
As with chesterton they may fall for anything bu osmosis
https://open.substack.com/pub/elizabethnickson/p/we-hurl-our-most-precious-treasure?
Because things are not explicitly labeled as political but cultural economic scientific
Part of the problem is that up until Obama, Democrats and the media were undeniably liberal but they hadn’t gone batshit leftist crazy.
So if one read the NYT and WaPo and voted Democrat regularly it wasn’t a crisis of survival for American democracy.
I suspect many older Democrats are cruising on the 20th C credibility of Democrats and the media.
@ huxley > “I suspect many older Democrats are cruising on the 20th C credibility of Democrats and the media.”
That is my perception as well.
However, they maintained a lot of that credibility because people didn’t know the extent of the hypocrisy and bias of both.
The Dan Rather Memo Scandal tore off some masks, but a lot of people still believe Rather’s hit job on Bush was true.
And “60 Minutes” still has a reputation for veracity that is undeserved.
How many people knew, at the time, that Duranty lied? How many learned later? How many who knew, just didn’t care?
@AesopFan:However, they maintained a lot of that credibility because people didn’t know the extent of the hypocrisy and bias of both.
I agree. They have always done what they do now, but they were less likely to be caught at it and they were less blatant about it.
For example, in 1992 “Dateline NBC” rigged a truck with model rocket engines to explode so they could use the footage in a story about GM trucks being likely to explode in low speed collisions; they also lied about the speed of the collision in the footage.
In 1986 “60 Minutes” rigged an Audi with a compressed-air device to make it accelerate with no driver, to illustrate their story on “unintended acceleration incidents”, which in every case turned out to be people hitting the gas instead of the brake.
Both stories were fed to these news organizations by PR firms working for lawyers planning to profit from the lawsuits. Both stories were rare examples, in those days, of them getting caught.
If you can stand to, watch local and national evening news for about a week. Pay close attention and you will see that many stories are illustrated with stock footage of completely different events from the ones being reported on. Look closely at news articles in print and on web pages, and see how many are illustrated with stock photos of completely different, and often staged, events. (The caption nearly always indicates a stock photo.)
The legacy media has always relied on stories packaged and fed to them by government and PR firms, and has always been willing to deliberately mislead in service of those stories.
Related, alas…
(Matt Taibbi with an essential article on slippery James—Janus—Comey…and further evidence of the corrupt rot within the American Judiciary…but how many will actually read it?)
“Jim Comey: A Man of Many Faces, None Of Which Are Speech Martyrs;
“Forty-two judges take a stand in the dumbest group letter ever”—
https://www.racket.news/p/jim-comey-a-man-of-many-faces-none
H/T Powerline blog.
In my 20s I wasn’t interested in politics much, yet always was a conservative. Leftists then, Marxists now made me get interested
Barry, thanks for the Matt Taibbi article link.
Sleazy should be Comey’s title, in place of “Mr.”
(Well, “sleazy traitor” is even better.)
From reading a few excellent, truly investigative journalists’ * writings, I was familiar with lots of those facts. But Comey’s behavior wrt Loretta Lynch I did not recall.
The 42 retired judges are clowns.
Pathetic is too kind an adjective.
* Jonathan Solomon, Sarah Carter are two.
Taibbi’s article is a boatload capture of Comey’s evil, arrogant subversion of his job and his oath.
He’s got to go down.
— JohnTyler
No, it isn’t.
— JohnTyler
At one time, the Left had near-100% news dominance. That is no longer the case, much to the dismay of the smarter Lefty players.
Remember, we had a government shutdown over immigration during Trump’s first term, I believe in 2018, and Trump won the PR battle. The public sided with Trump and Schumer had to back down.
Now Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell proceeded to give the victory back to the Dems in the subsequent budget negotiations, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a government shutdown battle and the GOP won it. At the time that came as a shock, because it just didn’t happen because the Dems controlled the information terrain, or had until that point.
Today, FOXnews is a side show. It matters, but podcasts and other Internet-based channels are more important. Trump masterfully took advantage of that fact in the 2024 election. GOP PR victory is not guaranteed today, but it’s a very real possibility.
I have long recognized that a low voter turnout was a good sign for a healthy republic. It meant that most people could spend their energies on their private lives with little need to engage with government.
The Left’s recent tactic has been to offer Leftist political engagement as a social necessity. Lonely people make the best leftists since it gives them what they think is a social life and a sense of belonging.
For me, I’ve recognized politics as having a tremendous influence on my life choices and my prospects for a better life.
Short version:
At this stage of the game, “politics” means either saving the Republic or seeing it
TRANSFORMEDcaptured, eviscerated, decimated, decapitated and destroyed by DPUSA and its various odious associates….No more, no less… (though since we’re living in a Through-the-Looking-Glass BIZARRO world, the demonizing Democrats and assorted anti-Trump cultists believe the EXACT SAME THING WRT Trump and his supporters….sigh.)
File under: Barmygeddon?
Related…perhaps…
(To paraphrase: You might not be interested in politics…but politics IS interested in you…)
“FAFO Found Out; Reported Killed By Fellow Gazans in Tribal Dispute”—
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/10/12/fafo-found-out-n3807764#google_vignette
+ Bonus:
“The Arab media giant accused of pushing Hamas propaganda;
“Al Jazeera has faced growing criticism as tensions in the Middle East intensify”—
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/97cf2f5079a2451a
H/T Powerline blog (for both).
The key phrase, “I thought I knew enough”.