Do People Not Pay Attention to Politics Because the System Benefits Them?
The answer wasn’t as simple as I thought.
I will admit: politics wasn’t something I paid attention to before college. My parents are news-watchers, so in the mornings before school, I’d see the goings-ons of the national and international political players and have no real opinion of them. I was a kid; I didn’t have much reason to have an opinion. That is, until the murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014.
I remember Trayvon Martin’s trial — I watched it on CNN. On one day of the trial, they brought in expert Anthony Gorgone, a crime lab analyst, to talk about DNA and whatnot. When asked, Gorgone said that Trayvon’s DNA was not found on the grip of child murderer George Zimmerman’s gun. That was a very important moment in the trial, for me at least. I remember that whether or not Trayvon grabbed Zimmerman’s gun (among other things) would determine whether or not Zimmerman acted in self-defense. I remember thinking, “oh yeah, this guy’s getting locked up”. And then…he wasn’t. 13 year old me realized something right then and there: the system kinda sucks.
In the case of Michael Brown, it wasn’t quite the incident itself that stuck out to me, but rather the aftermath. Ferguson, Missouri was absolutely torn apart in the weeks following Michael’s murder. There had been several murders of unarmed black people by the police before this, but in my conscious lifetime, I had never seen anything like it. It showed me that black people — my people — were absolutely fed up with the current state of policing in the United States, and at age 14 and 15, I agreed with them. I think it was at this point that my opinion of the police began to change.
Since then, and especially since 2016, I have been paying more and more attention to politics, but usually only to the things that directly affect me, which, since I’m a woman and black, happens to be a lot these days.
That being said, I don’t participate all that much. I vote, because it would be a disservice to those who came before me to not exercise my civic duty. I made sure my friends were registered to vote on National Voter Registration Day because, again, civic duty. I’ve written my state’s senators — yes, actual physical letters — about net neutrality when that was a big thing, and I’ve been considering penning more letters lately. But, that’s it.
I’m probably gonna get some flak for this, but in my opinion, tweets and change.org petitions do very little. However, I would like to acknowledge that social media does a whole lot for getting people to actually organize, protest, and do more than just putting #BLM or the Palestinian flag in their bios. Because believe me, there are plenty of people who do just that — nothing else — and think they’re actually enacting change. (They aren’t, by the way. It takes WAY more than that.)
And listen, I understand why some would not want to pay attention to or participate in political matters. I didn’t use twitter at all for a few weeks in May and July of last year. After all, one can only stand watching a man die before your eyes so many times. The whole thing was just traumatic and I’m sure lots of black people peace’d out of social media for a time after witnessing yet another unjustified death at the hands of the police.
To this day, I still don’t have an opinion on most things, and my views are pretty basic — there are some fundamental rights that must be restored to black people and uterus-havers. I didn’t used to be so tilted about other people’s lack of political awareness, until January 6th.
Six months on, I still remember it like it was yesterday. I had gotten a nostalgic itch that day to play some Minecraft hunger games and did that until I got bored, around noon central time. They were going to be certifying the election results that day, so I decided to watch it during my gaming break. I still can’t quite comprehend what I saw that day — so many people waving trump flags and confederate flags and don’t tread on me flags, a couple people even carrying giant crosses…for some reason. The gallows set up on the steps of the capitol, the chants to kill Mike Pence. It was a whole lot to witness live. I couldn’t look away.
I texted a friend at 1:27 that day, “yo people are storming the capitol right now”. I’m not gonna show our private text conversation, because ew, but I will say the topic of conversation was changed pretty quickly. I ended up calling them sometime later because I was genuinely freaking out at what I was witnessing and just had to talk to someone else. Firstly, until I told them, they had no idea what was going on — understandable, as the semester had just started back up around that time, and it was a Wednesday. But, after I explained everything — the election certification, the rioters, the calls for Pence’s head — what they said to me really stuck out to me: It won’t matter a week from now.
I just witnessed a major historical event firsthand and you’re telling me it won’t matter a week from now? Plot twist, it’s been several months since then, and people are still talking about it. New details are still coming out. Arrests are still being made. The fickle creature we call Congress still hasn’t agreed what to do about it.
Since then, I have formed a hypothesis of sorts. It’s nothing revolutionary, really, just a realization that I’ve come to after 21 years of living on this planet:
People who claim to not care about or not pay attention to politics are usually the people who benefit from the current system and are uncomfortable with the concept of it changing. I would guess that these people are primarily white, heterosexual, cisgendered men. However, I’m not so sure about income level or education level, but I would also assume those are pretty important factors.
So, I got to Googlin’, and here’s what I found.
A 2014 article from the Pew Research Center claims that 1 in 10, about 10% of Americans surveyed don’t “give a hoot” about politics. They called these people political bystanders, which are described as being “On the sidelines of the political process. Not registered to vote, and paying very little attention to politics”.
Surprisingly, 32% of the people surveyed were Hispanic, and about a third were foreign-born. Unsurprisingly, they were not the majority: 48% of those surveyed were white and non-Hispanic. 39% were aged 30–49 in 2014, and a staggering 67% had only completed high school or less. Unfortunately, these demographics aren’t broken down further, but it still reveals a lot.
I think the sample size is worth mentioning as well — this study, The 2014 Political Typology, surveyed 10,013 Americans. When studies like this reference percentages, it’s usually the percentage of the people surveyed, not all 300+ million Americans. I suppose it could be argued that those 10 thousand Americans don’t represent America as a whole. Nevertheless, the 2014 Political Typology study has yielded some very interesting results, and I suggest giving it a read if it interests you. I took the quiz myself — apparently I’m a solid liberal.
This was 2014, though — the Obama years. Have things change since then? According to the Pew Research center, they have. In a 2017 article, Since the 2016 election, 52% of Americans surveyed say they are paying more attention to politics, with more women saying that than men. What’s also interesting is that 15% have said they have attended a political event or protest, with 67% of that 15% stating that it was in opposition to trump or his policies. It seems the 2016 election has really made people start paying attention, and I can say it’s done the same for me.
In another article, this time on Jacobin Magazine from September 2019, A YouGov / Economist poll showed that primarily, those paying a lot of attention to the 2020 election were white, male, over 65, and made over $100k a year. The article hypothesizes that society’s most privileged demographics — white, male, aging, and above all, rich — have a better understanding of politics than everyone else.
So, these are all interesting findings, but still not quite what I’m looking for. I’m close, but maybe I’m just putting in all the wrong search terms into Google Scholar. So, I searched for a link between white privileged and political participation, and came upon the article “White identity politics: linked fate and political participation.” Unfortunately, it was behind a paywall. Fortunately, Sci-Hub still exists, so I was able to bypass it, and you can as well!
From this article, I gathered that white people are participating in politics in a significant way — which mirrors the results of the Jacobin Magazine article — and are doing so because of something called “linked fate”.
Linked fate is something derived from common experiences. For example, in the black community, that includes slavery, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, and, potentially, this past decade of murders at the hands of the police. Historically, this linked fate has caused black people to mobilize and fight for and end to these, specifically at the ballot box. So, what do white people have to fight against? Losing their place at the top.
Whites’ position at the top of this racial hierarchy has led many scholars to examine the role of social dominance in their political attitudes and behavior. While “the era of large scale immigration of the past four decades has dramatically and decisively changed the face of U.S. politics”, the Tea Party movement and the campaign of Donald Trump suggest that Whites are not yet ready to relinquish their position at the top of the racial hierarchy.
Honestly, I can’t say I’m surprised. That being said, this paper suggests that “linked fate” as it relates to political participation should be taken only as a hypothesis, so do with that what you will. Either way, this paper is well worth a read.
So, it seems like my hypothesis has been disproven. From what I’ve seen, it seems like the most privileged population in the united states does actually pay attention to politics. Honestly, the only way I can actually test my hypothesis is to actually do some polling myself, but I simply do not have the resources. I am but an unemployed internet person with little money, not a sociology grad student with grants.
Even though the cold hard facts are there, I simply cannot ignore the anecdotal evidence. To me, it really does seem that the people who claim to not pay attention to or care about politics are the people benefiting in some way from the current system. I’ve seen it in my own life, as stated before, and online, specifically in reddit comments.
I even asked my YouTube audience what they all thought about it, and was given 3 distinct answers — yes, I know the sample size is way too low for a real experiment, but I just wanted to know what y’all thought.
When asked Do you have someone in your life who “doesn’t pay attention to politics”? How do you feel about it?, at the time of writing this, out of 23 people, 57% said yes and 43% said no. One person said:
He consistently refuses to engage with politics even on issues he cares about because he doesn’t think he can do anything
Which is something interesting that I hadn’t quite considered for the purposes of this video. I think hopelessness does cause some to be politically inactive, but I also think it’s very important to push through those feelings and take action. There is strength in numbers, after all. And even if you don’t have numbers, just be really loud. It worked out for some people.
Another commenter said,
What I’ve learned is they fall into 2 camps. Camp the first is people who for whatever feel overwhelmed and simply shut off, their privilege lets them give up on the social projects the rest of us have no choice but to confront. The other is friends or family who hold right leaning and far right views but don’t want to be seen as bigoted or reactionary. They often frame their positions as centrist and claim to just be “talking common sense”. Subnote “common sense” feels almost like a dog whistle these days but maybe thats just me.
I will say, centrism did come up in my search queries while trying to find scholarly articles for this video. I am familiar with the term “enlightened centrist” and their “both sides are bad” arguments, especially when it comes to the alt-right bogeyman Antifa and, more recently, Israel and Palestine. To me, they really add nothing to any argument and just show an unwillingness to pick a side on anything, not because of lack of information, but rather lack of wanting to piss either group off. Weak.
The last commenter said,
of course i know him he’s me!
I don’t have much to say to that, but I wish the commenter went into detail as to why.
In conclusion, this video’s findings are kinda all over the place. Some studies support my hypothesis, others outright disprove them. And then, there’s the enemy of scientific research, anecdotal evidence. Full disclosure, I’m not a professional researcher. I didn’t major in social sciences in college. I am just a person who made an observation and wanted to learn more. And, I wanted to share my findings.
[Note: this article was previously published as a video essay which can be viewed below]
