We’ve gotten a lot of interesting responses to the call out below. And I’m going to publish more of them. But I wanted to start with this one from TPM Reader AH. The tone will strike some as elitist. And AH’s email doesn’t really get down to business until a few sentences in. But it strikes a chord with me and dovetails at least to some extent with the accelerating pace of political involvement over recent years. The gist is: has the accelerating pace of mass political involvement simply made our politics less stable?
Good morning Josh, et al.
Politics itself might be going through a bit of a ‘fad’ cycle.
I’m starting to thinks in terms of the phenomenal success of certain best-selling books.
I read an awful lot of books, and, since I spend a lot of time in airports, I do a lot of that reading in public.
It has died down now, but there was a stretch a few years ago where there were quite a few people who would notice that I was reading, and then ask me if I had read Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’. (I hadn’t, and I won’t be, thanks.)
Their usual reason for mentioning that book was the ‘fact’ that ‘everybody is reading it’.
My take is that since hardly anyone reads books much nowadays, when there is a book that ‘everyone’ is reading, very few of the people who do regularly read will read that book (or enjoy it much if they do). Non-readers don’t see the flaws (and seem to genuinely enjoy some, er, lousy books).
I think that there’s a bit of a politics mania going on right now, and that there are a lot of people suddenly paying more attention to politics. The problem we’re having with these newbies is that they don’t have the same experience with politics that us older hands do.
They might think that they’re bringing ‘fresh energy’ or ‘new eyes’ to politics, but I think that they’re just enjoying new-relationship enthusiasm. I guess we should probably be patient with them, and keep some sort of dialog going, but let’s hope that they either get bored or get a clue.
After all, there are probably some people who read a Dan Brown novel and then ended up as regular, more discriminating readers.
