Elegy for the Solemn Ass

Politics should be much, much more boring.

The news is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel… We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings. — Don DeLillo

What is it to be “interested in politics”?

Politics are conflicts among individuals aiming to maintain or acquire power.

To be interested in politics is to be interested in such clashes—and the tactics and strategy involved in winning them. 

Seen this way, who wouldn’t be interested in politics? 

Spectacles of power-jockeying are among the most exhilarating ways the human condition is dramatized. Sports, the Real Housewives franchise, The Diplomat, and Succession enthrall for a reason.

But not so long ago, fictional or contrived athletic clashes were much, much more thrilling than American political campaigns for high office. 

While there was plenty of dirty dealing and Hamilton-style backroom drama among the principals, political campaigns were not staged with anywhere near enough beads and feathers and heels and heroes to compete with pop culture.

Campaigns, instead, were a series of pithy pitches about the character of the candidate and what he had to offer in material terms—to farmers, businessmen, families, labor, national security—should he take power. 

You were unlikely to hear masses of flappers screaming for Cal Coolidge. Or wearing his caps. Out of costume, you’d see them maybe trudge to the polls as if to a college exam.