I offer you a gift link to the whole interview (and transcript if you prefer.) It’s super interesting.
A little excerpt:
Klein: I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. Certainly at the high levels.
There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.
I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made, and Democrats haven’t.
Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.
Hayes: I really like this theory. I think there are a few things: One, I think you’re totally right to identify that it’s sort of a sliding scale between the two. Which is to say: For politics that get the least attention, money matters the most.
So in a state representative race, money really matters — partly because no one is paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been gutted. Money can buy their attention. You could put out glossy mailers. There’s a lot you could do. The further up you go from that, to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts.
And you saw this with the Harris campaign. They raised a ton of money, and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people’s attention, whether that’s through advertising or door knocking — but largely attention and then persuasion: I’m running for president. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why you should vote for me.
Now you can do that at billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention.
What Trump and Musk figured out is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere. That in some ways, it’s kind of a sucker’s game to try to pop in and be like: I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? What do you like?
All that is just going to whiz past people. The sort of attentional atmosphere — that’s where the fight is.
And that’s what Musk’s Twitter purchase ended up being — an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.
Hates’ book is called “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”