The loneliness and joylessness of today's politics

I have a joke I make every election season. Like most people who have lasted any length of time in progressive politics, I get through on dark humor. The worse things get, the more it seems to help. Whatever reputation the left has for earnestness, the overly earnest don't last. I don't think I would.

So as the season comes round I go up to peers of mine, people who work in politics, and ask brightly whether they're excited for the elections. Then I watch their faces contort. Eyes tighten, sometimes I swear I see a lip tremble or a bead of sweat appear on their foreheads. "You've got to be kidding."

Something has gone wrong when the people most drawn to politics are apologizing for how it makes them feel.

And those are the insiders. Ask someone who feels no personal pull toward any of it, no call to take part in civic life at all, and you don't get a stressed face. You get people who are angry or disgusted to the point they don't even want to talk about our current political reality.

Think about what actually arrives when politics comes to find you. An email with a siren in the subject line: 🚨URGENT ALERT🚨: All hope is HANGING BY A THREAD! For the next 10 MINUTES ONLY, your donation will be matched 10x! A text asking whether you saw the email. A clip of someone you dislike saying something appalling, "10 dollars please?". A deadline that isn't real, attached to a match that isn't a match.

The ask is always the same three things. Open it. Give something. Pass it on. Once a year or so, go and vote against someone.

You can absorb an enormous amount of politics this way and never once do any politics. The enshittification of our democracy is palpable in the pain we feel every time elections roll around.

And this is the part we are slowest to say out loud. What this produces is not only people sitting it out. I spent a book on this, The Age of Junk Politics. The through line is that a political status quo which contacts people only to extract from them opens a trust gap. In that gap our lack of trust festers into nihilism and sets the stage for cynical anti-politicians. The Trumps, the Mileis, the Bolsonaros are not persuading anyone that the system is disconnected and transactional. They are agreeing with them about it. That is the whole trick, and we handed them the evidence. The protest vote and the protest non-vote are not a failure of democratic values. They are a verdict on what we built.

Here is what I find strange. Almost nobody in this industry is trying to fix the joylessness. It is not that we are handling it badly — it does not appear at all. It is not on a dashboard. It is not in a strategy memo. There is no line anywhere for whether taking part in politics is any good to be part of. We seem to have decided, without ever deciding, that joy is the thing you get after you win.

Srđa Popović would tell you that is backwards. Popović helped found Otpor!, the Serbian student movement that played a large part in bringing down Milošević around 2000, in no small measure by making him ridiculous; he has spent the years since teaching the method to others. His argument, which he calls laughtivism, is that humor is not the relief from the struggle. It is a weapon inside it. "Laughter and fun are no longer marginal to a movement's strategy," he and Mladen Joksic wrote in 2013. "They now serve as a central part of the activist arsenal." Fear is the mortar holding bad systems together, and fun dissolves it.

If joy is strong enough to help topple a regime, it can probably survive a Tuesday night meeting.

If you ask people when they last enjoyed something political nobody names an email. They name a room with people inside it. A few neighbors working out what to do about something on their own street. Crafting a leaflet together with friends. Somebody's kitchen at eleven at night.

So why have we built almost none of that?

I don't think anyone chose it. Politics got complicated: the data, the compliance, the professional standards, an industry of vendors and consultants each with their own reasons to keep it that way… and somewhere in there it quietly stopped being something ordinary people could be trusted to do. It is also, plainly, cheaper and cleaner to run systems where the messiness of other people's autonomy never enters. (That deserves more than a sentence. I'll dive into it later this week.)

It is not only the digital side, either. Look at what we ask of the people who do show up in person. Nobody wants to lick an envelope. There is nothing of the whole person in it. None of their creativity, strategy, or individuality. They are not being asked how to solve anything. They are being asked to be a pair of interchangeable hands for a solution somebody else designed.

Even field work, the most human thing we do, has been reshaped into a machine for volunteer hours, run at perfect repetition and measured by the number. Andrew Willis Garcés wrote a piece after 2024 called We Knocked Too Many Doors, arguing that the sector poured its people into one-off conversations at the exact moment those conversations were least likely to move anyone, when what actually builds something is the slow local work of trust. We got extremely good at counting the thing and much worse at doing the thing.

The political scientist Hahrie Han describes what this has produced: a very small set of people who are the producers of politics, and the rest of us subject to it. Wendy Brown captured the end result of this. People end up treated as the consumer of democracy rather than the agents of it. They feel like targets of a large advertising competition.

And something follows from that which took me an embarrassingly long time to accept. We assume belief comes first and action follows: people show up because they already care. Usually it runs the other way. People find out what they believe by doing the work, alongside other people, over time. Which means a politics that gives people nothing real to do is not merely dull. It has stopped producing the very thing it runs on.

The disengagement this sector spends so much time lamenting is not a mystery, and it is not a character flaw in the public. It is exactly what we built.

So where do I sit in all of this now? We have had the first people using the platform my team has been building. I expected the feedback to be about time saved and new abilities. What I did not expect was how much of it was about fun and belonging. People with no design background making posters for their local event. Someone making a sticker for a family member. Instead of doomscrolling, they're finding themselves up a little later, doing something creative.

As it turns out, dark humor may not be the only way left to get some joy back into our democracy, after all.