College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics

If you participate in politics without being minimally informed about it, people will demonize you for not being up to date with policies and current affairs. If you do not participate in politics, people will demonize you for taking no sides and expressing no interest in the future of the country. If you have some academic training, try to stay informed about current affairs and participate in politics, people will demonize you for engaging in “political hobbyism”.

And this seems to be an issue specific to U.S. politics. Maybe it’s time to collectively agree that American democracy is about excluding people from politics, in detriment to the interests of the economic elites.

EDIT: while I generally agree that what the author calls "political hobbyist" can be harmful to specific causes and can even perpetuate the status quo/political inequalities, it is within their own right to engage in politics however they see fit. We have to keep in mind that not everyone can be actively engaged in political debates in the city hall, or organizing a group of like-minded people to fight for a specific cause. Excluding "political hobbyists" from the political debate just because they are not engaging in "real politics" (author's words) is straight up anti-democratic -- after all, who can define what "real politics" is.

I can't agree with every point of the article, but there's a certain truth to it, particularly the false attitude that the important stuff is happening elsewhere.

I strongly recommend finding a local political change that is needed and learning how to affect that change rather than worry about the endless news cycle of national politics. For me, this is housing and zoning reform: needlessly restrictive housing law is creating needlessly expensive housing that is decimating and disrupting local communities. Change here can be at the town level or at the state reform level, and either are infinitely more actionable than say fretting over the supreme court or a politically gridlocked congress.

Making changes to our local communities such that previously disadvantaged people are more empowered and their is better socio-economic justice is noble, and especially popular in the current news cycle, but let's not pretend that it is the full extent of politics.

There are issues like the environment, national security, social policy, fiscal policy, etc which all have substantial influence on us both as individuals and as a nation. Different people should champion different issues, and it makes a lot more sense for the people directly affected by issues to champion solutions which make sense for them.

I as an affluent white male do not understand, and likely can never perfectly understand, the issues of racism that harm people of color living just a few minutes away from me. While I want my neighbors to be free of those problems, I can't possibly evaluate which solutions work for them and which do not, and I would have no way of knowing if my efforts to help were doing more harm than good.

On the other hand, as an engineer who works on automation, I am extremely well qualified to evaluate the effects of economic policies on changes to the labor environment due to automation. Living in the rust belt, I feel I can do a lot to help rejuvenate my community as well as the larger nation, but that process looks very different. It's still political involvement though.

In a democratic society, getting large numbers of people to understand issues and support candidates who advocate for those issues is a key step towards any systemic change. Political discussion is an effective tactic towards this end. It's certainly not the only tool out there, and in many cases its not the right tool, but it's vital all the same.

Hmm, byline: “Eitan Hersh, Associate professor of political science at Tufts University”

If we accept the article’s description of the problem, the author would seem to be one of its architects. I mean, if the problems is really that college-educated voters are doing what they see as engaging in politics but “haven’t the faintest idea how to push for what they care about in their own communities,” whose failing is thar, if not professors of political science?

Though actually the article also states but seems to fail to grasp the significance of a contrary and more important point: the people it targets are “pretty comfortable with the status quo.” Which suggest the real issue isn't that they don't know what they are doing and would be better served doing something else, but that they are quite effectively deploying their political power to serve their interest by engaging in performative gestures while practically acting as a boat anchor preventing the political system moving out of their zone of comfort.

They aren't ineffective hobbyists, they are effective motivated agents protecting the status quo.

The Atlantic has really gone down hill in the past couple of years. They still have some great long-form articles, but more and more poorly-written junk seems to be getting in there.

This article is a series of unsubstantiated broad generalizations. It's frustrating to watch formerly good publications fall apart at a time when we really need them.