Crisis is the solution to the public attention problem

Liberals should not fear crisis in the Trump era. They should understand it is their only tool against him.

The main paradox of modern American politics is that people are more connected to political news and information than ever before, but also less responsive to political events than ever before.

We spend hours a day (over six, on average!) staring at screens that flooded with political information. Those screens are in our homes, at our workplaces, in our pockets. Orwell never could have dreamed.

And yet Americans seem to respond to almost nothing that happens in politics. The country has been deadlocked at an even partisan split for years. Despite nonstop scandal, corruption, even catastrophe, the president’s popularity seems locked in place at “mediocre.” Very little seems to move the American public.

In theory, the constant immersion of the modern American in an endless stream of information makes us more responsive to occurrences in the world - new developments, drama, twists and turns, disaster can be delivered to the whole country in hours, even minutes - this has not been borne out in practice. Instead our society’s recent response to politics has been narcotized, paralyzed — bizarrely so, by historical standards. There are not shortage of historical examples of politicians rising or crashing in response to news (Nixon, Bush) or events shifting public opinion (civil rights, the Vietnam War). But the public’s ability to respond to stimulus has vanished, like a key pathway in our nervous system has somehow been cut.

I think the culprit is the structure of our new, omnipresent media system. Yes, we’re all hooked up to a firehose of information — but the information we received has become incredibly fragmented. There is no single National Broadcasting Corporation speaking to every American. Instead we are presented with dozens of channels, hundreds of websites, millions of social media personalities. Each individual chooses who to listen to. Over the last two decades we have become adept at choosing the sources that will validate our preexisting beliefs. Stories that would change our minds are not told to us, at least not by people who we trust.

The analogy I’ve used before for modern media is a convention hall. Whereas previous eras’ media was closer to a movie theater - everyone watching a single screen, receiving a single message - the modern environment is like having the whole of society stuffed inside one twisting, cavernous complex. In it are countless voices shouting for our attention, and we cluster around the ones that say things we find most compelling. Everyone might be in the room together, but we’re all facing different directions, listening to different people.

Most of the time.

But the last few years have shown that in rare circumstances, everyone can suddenly find themselves facing the same direction, listening to the same few sources. There have been events that have commanded the attention of large swathes of the public, or even almost all of it, and in doing so have propelled mass movements, protests, intense public pressure, changing individual behavior and political opinion. Things like George Floyd’s murder, or COVID, or the Women’s March or airport protests in the first Trump administration, or Kavanaugh’s confirmation, or the ACA repeal, or Charlottesville, or January 6, or the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What do these events have in common? They were perceived as crises.

In a crisis, there is a rapidly evolving problem with a genuinely uncertain outcome. People want to know what will happen, and feel fear and nervousness about the outcome. Crises inspire strong, gut emotion: anger, terror, obsessiveness.

Crises solve the attention issue. During crises, our fragmented media ecosystem effectively restructure itself. Someone once told me that when there’s a disaster, “everyone flips on CNN.” That might be an exaggeration, but we find ourselves all watching a very few sources, the ones with the most up-to-date information about whatever topic is at the top of the public mind.

To return to our convention hall, everyone is facing different directions, talking about different things - until someone yells “fire!” Or more dramatic still, there actually is a fire, smoke and flames and all. Suddenly everyone is looking the same way, talking about the same thing.

In those moments the full reach and power of our media ecosystem, typically limited by extreme fragmentation of attention, can immediately become apparent. Sixty percent of Americans can abruptly declare their support for Black Lives Matter and endorse the burning of a police station, while double-digit shares of the country go join protests. Everyone can abruptly stop going to the store, locking themselves in their home. The president’s approval can suddenly fall off a cliff, as everyone simultaneously watches a foreign policy boondoggle play out on CNN. There’s no predetermined shape or form these responses must take, they’re determined by events and by public consensus. But unlike normal, non-crisis conditions, a response becomes possible. Where our information ecosystem was previously diffuse, unstructured, and shapeless, it suddenly takes a shape, and we are reminded that almost all of us are plugged into it, for many hours a day.

Most of Trump’s two presidencies have been defined by his opposition seeking to avoid any kind of crisis. Democrats and liberals have preferred to lower the temperature, avoiding the language and politics of crisis so they could make careful arguments, centered around issues and topics they deem most persuasive: health care, kitchen-table economics, food prices.

The problem is, by lowering the temperature and sticking to mundane topics, Democrats and liberals have also ensured that most Americans remain caught in the diffuse, fragmented information ecosystem that predominates during normal times. They have kept the information ecosystem from entering its more centralized, focused crisis formation — a state that would allow bad news about Trump to reach many more Americans, much more quickly.

It’s time to abandon this timidity. Trump’s opponents should stop trying to ward off the sense of crisis his politics creates, and instead foster it. Americans should not be prevented from entering a state of fear and panic about the economy, about civil rights, about the Constitution, about the basic functioning of government or the safety our nation. They should be encouraged to slip into fear and panic. Once they do, we’ll find it much easier to speak to them.