Growing up in Dickson, Tennessee meant I was never really connected to the political world.
At the time, Dickson was a smaller town where everyone kind of knew each other from school or church, and politics was this obscure thing nobody liked talking about.
That’s the community—the culture—I grew up in.
Now, after three years in the Washington, D.C. bubble, I have a better understanding of why towns like Dickson feel that Congress fails to do their job.
No one has time for politics
The sheer amount of context that a single voter must absorb before they can choose sides in a debate over a bill or policy proposal is simply impossible.
Let’s take a contemporary problem area that everyone can easily recognize: the economy.
It is entirely plausible that everyone can feel the rising prices. Whether it be from grocery trips bearing less and less, or the gas pump is becoming more of the monthly budget, people are noticing that the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.
The average Joe in America wakes up, maybe eats a breakfast, goes to work for eight, nine, or even twelve hours, then comes home, eats dinner and goes to bed. In those four-ish hours of not working, they are either cooking, cleaning, working on a side project, or consuming media of some form.
That’s the window.
So, when the teacher in Kansas stops to get gas or the McDonald’s worker in Ohio gets groceries, a billboard for the economy smacks them in the face. Many disgruntled people may go to the internet and ask why prices are so high, and then that’s when the frustration turns to anger and resentment.
Author’s Note: Of course, this doesn’t account for the times where we may learn things from friends or colleagues, but the point stands that the window for people’s attention on political topics is fractional compared to the politicos around the country.
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Politics and the internet
The internet is a boundless chasm of information. Think of it as a Library of Alexandria except in this library, there are no walls, books, or librarians.
The wild west of the internet is subject to a rightful amount of scrutiny: anyone can say anything, fact-checking is now biased, and billionaires can control what appears on your screen.
With former President Barack Obama legitimizing Twitter as a place to find official statements from the administration, that opened the floodgates to every politician having an official presence on social media. Flash forward to 2026 and now you have a new wave of digital populism making a play for filling Congressional offices, where going viral on TikTok gives you a chance at representing 3/4 of a million people.
This is where things get messy, and why the lineman in Texas wants to tune out politics in its entirety.
When the money comes out of their accounts and they look for a reason why, they go online only to find the mud-slinging, finger-pointing rhetoric of the people that are supposed to be solving the problems. The people in shiny suits being driven around talking about how they know times are hard.
So, when people tune in for a fraction of their free time in between chores or while they’re chopping onions, almost everything they get is some form of “blame them” from either side. That’s going to drive anyone insane. All they want to know is what is being done to fix it.
But of course, somewhere in all the mud-slinging is the answer. It’s a fractured picture given to the American people one soundbite at a time, and in theory, if they had C-SPAN on all day every day, they might put it together. But the reality is, no one can do that.
Amid all the chaos of the average American’s life, we, in the political world are asking that they try to put together a puzzle that requires an immense amount of context in order to eventually vote for people who say they want to fix the problems. That’s just not reasonable.
And that’s why there is record low trust in government right now. According to Pew Research, just 17% of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right.
Well, how do we fix it?
The 24/7 news cycle has abandoned the full-time worker. We can’t blame the waitress at Olive Garden or the truck driver for Walmart for putting down their phones and throwing their hands up at the dysfunction and still not knowing why everything is feeling out of control.
At the end of the day, every American is trying to get home to dinner with their friends and family. If, in the process of doing so, their life is interrupted by the shortcomings and oversights of the people they elect to keep things running smoothly, it’s hard for them to look at all the partisan name-calling and finger-pointing as the job being done at all.
This is true for problem areas like the economy, immigration enforcement, civil rights, and every other point of contention in contemporary politics.
In January, Gallup released a poll that showed almost half of Americans are politically independent. That means they don’t care about the letters or colors that appear next to a name, they care about choosing people they feel will do right by them. The ones who will promote prosperity for themselves and their communities.
The answer is in how we choose to communicate with each other.
While nothing will ever truly beat breaking bread and having a deep conversation, the internet is undeniably the modern town square. It’s a town square that rewards anger and vitriol, going viral if you are able to dunk on the opponents.
Even though that will never change, there is a deep longing we all have for authenticity and sincerity. If we can bring about an honest political discourse that roots out corruption and shames vitriol, we very well might set ourselves back on track for success as a nation.
At the very least, we may just restore a modicum of trust back in government.
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