It’s the attention, stupid!
Greg Sargent and others including Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California recognize that the fight to prevent the U.S. from slipping into dictatorship is not a policy battle. It is a battle for attention in an attention economy.
The president’s pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, is tossing around the word insurrection and its variants almost daily. He means to drill the idea down deep into Donald Trump’s pea brain. Miller means to poke and prod lefties with inflammatory actions by ICE until a predictable, violent, national attention-getting response gives him and his puppet the excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law.
Pritzker and Newsom “grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.”
To further his goal, Sargent writes, Miller “relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. ” A 21st-century Red scare, only with “radical leftists” hiding in every woodpile.
So far, Miller’s scheme is floundering. The ICE queen’s helicopter-fueled raid of a Chicago apartment building was supposed to generate a propaganda video that would drive Miller’s invasion narrative. Instead, media coverage “depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.” Miller declared victory while Pritzker declared it Trump’s invasion.
Sargent explains:
The rub here is that both these men want this fight. To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.
But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.
Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”
In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.
Sadly, the overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress are not just bringing a knife to a gun fight. They are fighting the last century’s political war with obsolete political weapons. There are exceptions besides Pritzker and Newsom. Sen. Chris Murphy gets it better than most. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does as well, as Lawrence O’Donnell reported Tuesday night. Mockery, as I’ve argued as well, works against small men like Miller and Trump’s clown-car cops. “Laugh at them,” AOC urges. “Make them feel small.”
It is another tool that most Democrats ignore. Laughter is empowering. It is contagious. Autocrats like Trump and his hangers on absolutely hate it. Most of all it is attention-getting in this war. It’s the attention, stupid!
Policy is a yawn in this political moment, no matter how important Democratic legislators believe health care will win them seats in 2026.
Sargent again:
Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.
Low-attention voters (and nonvoters) are the battleground. It’s why most of the signs I’m displaying for thousands of rush hour commuters four or five days a week are not about health care or Gaza or deportations, topics not front of mind for commuters. Trump’s and Miller’s ICEmenschens are attacking your precious freedoms. Take that thought home with you.
Update: Something shareable.
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