Hello, Coffee House Shops listeners. My name is Freddie Gray and I edit the Spectator's US edition.

And the big story of 2020 is going to be the American election. So I would like to urge you all to listen to my Americano podcast where we discuss everything that's going on in Trump world and Democrat

world. If you go to spectator.com.uk forward slash Americano, you can listen to it all.

I'm joined today by Aitane Hirsch, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts

University, and the author of a new book called Politics is for Power, How to

Move Beyond Political Hobbiasm, take action and make real change. Now, Aiton, I came across

your book through a piece in the Atlantic, which was very, very interesting, and it sets up,

what I believe is the theme of your book, which is that we are living in a time where many of us are political hobbyists, and we think that we're very interested in politics, and we think we're taking part in politics.

But we are interested in it much in the same way as a sports fan might be interested in football, say, and we don't actually engage in it.

And that this is causing,

you say, terrible problems with politics in modern society. Is that a fair summation of what

you're trying to say? Yeah, I think that's just right. And in what ways is political hobbyism,

as you call it? How does it work? How does it warp politics? Sure. So we have

all of these people, like probably 80 or 90 percent of the people who say they're interested in politics,

who spend time, significant time, like an hour and more a day on politics, not at all doing real

politics. That is, they don't have strategies to achieve any goals. They don't have

some kind of long-term plan. They have basically an attempt at instant gratification to be close

to the importance of big ideas. And they think about political power as like a topic of interest, but not as something that they

want for the values or interests they care about. Okay, so why is that bad? You might just think,

well, you know, maybe they would just screw up politics if they got involved. There's a few reasons

why it's bad. One obvious reason it's bad is it makes politicians behave badly. So if you have all of these voters, the majority of those who are attentive to politics, really seeking kind of like emotional catharsis and instant gratification, then the politicians respond to that in ways that are damaging to their own, their own incentives,

their own interests. So, you know, in the book, I give an example of this with campaign contributions.

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