True Crime Politics

Political hobbyism, true crime politics, polarization and faction, and the evolving phenomenon of political spectacle as a threat to the common good

Many people do not consume political news with the intent to understand, but with the intent to cheer “for their team,” and to boo “the other team.” These individuals mostly have a negative impact on American political culture.

This general line of thinking is receiving a steadily increasing amount of attention in the modern era, although it certainly isn’t new to the nation.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised by my thoughts on the issue: people should know how government works (be concrete), they should treat it seriously (it’s not what you think), they should extend grace and understanding to fellow citizens (don’t demand they have a bad time), and they should treat our politics less like a sport (there is good duty here)—especially those with time and resources they could otherwise dedicate toward better ends. Maximum New York, as an enterprise, is dedicated to helping people do all of these things.

There’s an eventual post to be made about how this politics-as-sport attitude has manifested over time, both in common culture and academia. It’s gone by many names: political hobbyism, polarization, faction, and, of course, “true crime politics.” Broadly, it is the phenomenon of political spectacle, which is inherent to our species. As President Washington said in his farewell address in 1796: “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”

I don’t have a persuasive argument for this particular post. I just want to highlight the sentiment I’m seeing out in the world, and give you some past and present examples of it. I wonder where it will go in the larger national narrative.

#1) True crime politics

Jeremiah Johnson

wrote “You don't care about politics. You have a politics hobby: Entertainment is not the same as action” last Friday, July 25.

He opens the piece by describing a friend who consumes true crime content on potentially legitimate ground, but in reality is just in it for the entertainment:

Well, she wants to recognize the signs when men are dangerous. You need to understand how these things happen. You have to understand the problem before you can change it, and so listening to true crime murder stories is an empowering act, it’s taking back control. It makes communities safer in the end.

And yet! I’ve seen her giggling at the hosts of her favorite shows as they crack jokes about whatever the latest dramatic story is. She loves posting in forums and speculating where a case might go. And when I see this, with all respect to Katie, I realize that she doesn’t really think these podcasts are the secret to solving the problem of gendered violence. She just has a hobby.

He closes out the piece with a quote, and an exhortation to do something real, or consume less politics-as-entertainment:

My advice here isn’t new. Alexander Pope nailed it 1711:

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

The most famous part of this is the first line, and it’s sometimes misinterpreted as ‘Learning will make you dangerous’ or ‘knowledge is dangerous’. But you can see the full quote - it’s really saying small amounts of knowledge turn us into idiots, we we either need to abstain entirely or go all the way.

When many people get this advice (which is often good advice), they respond with something like this: “Well, I don’t have time to learn how this all works!”

They are correct, and they are not alone. No one can know everything, and there’s always new information. But, if someone chooses to participate in politics, they are not excused from the moral and civic weight of their participation. If they don’t have time to learn things in depth, it is their responsibility to choose good intellectual proxies to listen to. The standard isn’t perfection—it is deliberate care given the capacities of one’s individual context.

#2) ESPN and sports politics

Johnson quotes another author who had a piece in The Atlantic in 2020 that compares politics to sports:

“College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics: Political hobbyism is to public affairs what watching SportsCenter is to playing football.” This piece was a summary of the ideas found in the author’s 2020 book.

This piece itself makes some similar claims as an earlier piece in The Atlantic from 2012, although the former focused on broader based demographic behavior, the latter focused on journalism more specifically: “The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism”

#3) Politics as faction and adversarial teaming, contra the common weal

The Founders themselves were very concerned with people treating politics as sports, or as a hobby aimed only at “beating the other guys” rather than the civic good of the republic. One can find a functionally unlimited number of examples of this sentiment from the revolutionary and early American era.

In Federalist No. 10 (1787), James Madison famously wrote about the dangers of “faction” to the new nation:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

George Washington warned the nation about the same thing in his farewell address (1796) upon the conclusion of his second term as president:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

…the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

And writing in 1809, decades after the constitutional convention of 1787, John Adams said:

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.

The duel of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton