The Wrong Theater

Jacob Siegel recently published a lengthy piece in, ironically, City Journal, dissecting the supposed “Civil War” on the American right. Who’s manufacturing outrage, which podcasters hold sway over our congressional staffers, how “attention swarms” function in what he calls the “Information State” (coincidentally, one of his books.) It contains genuine insight into how the national information game is played, and it is almost entirely irrelevant as to how Americans are actually governed.

Siegel describes echo chambers, bot swarms, manufactured consensus… A game played for control of a stage. He speaks as if he’s standing offstage, but he’s not. He’s writing for a national publication, read by the same class of people who read The Atlantic and The Free Press and argue about who’s manufacturing whose consensus. It’s the national attention economy analyzing itself, the snake eating its own tail.

This is the accountability trap. When institutions face criticism, they can either accept responsibility or produce elaborate theories about why they are not responsible. Siegel’s option is several thousand words of the second option.

But my quarrel today isn’t with Siegel—in fact I find his commentary on this somewhat compelling. I just think all of this is a distraction from what matters.

By producing thousands of words interrogating the attention economy, he feeds it. By treating the question “is there a civil war on the Right?” as worthy of sustained intellectual engagement, he validates the premise that this question matters more than, say, whether the children in your school district can read.

The truth is the federal government accounts for somewhere around 55 percent of total government spending. When you strip out entitlements, funds that pass through to the states, defense, and other general nonsense, you’re left with a federal budget of less than a trillion spent on programs it directly administers. State and local governments spend over four times that on actual government: schools, police, roads, water systems, parks, courts, fire departments, zoning administration. And this money is managed by names you probably don’t know, elected in contests you probably didn’t vote in where turnout struggles to crack double digits.

Very little of this registers in the national attention economy. If it does, it’s because the data points are wrapped up in national narratives (*cough* Mamdani *cough.*) There are precious few influencers talking about county budget hearings. What Siegel describes operates entirely above this layer, they’re irrelevant to it.

Which is the point. The governance that shapes our daily life exists outside of the theater. When your school board fails to teach kids basic math or how to read, digital swarms are not there as a cope. There’s no Information State to take the blame. Our national discourse and all of its pathologies simply feel silly and self-absorbed by comparison.

I wrote last year about the broken windows of American government—the idea that American decline isn’t rooted in partisan warfare but in the cumulative weight of thousands of small civic failures. Infrastructure deferred and decaying. Permits delayed. Meetings ignored. None of it is dramatic enough to penetrate the national attention economy but all of it compounds.

This is where trust is actually eroding before our eyes. The national attention economy tells us who's to blame, and which side is worse, but the underlying dissatisfaction is primordial. It's the product of lived experience with institutions that stopped doing what works. Siegel's entire analytical apparatus floats arrogantly above this reality.

The disaffection he dismisses as an information operation or influence game is real, not some product of podcasts and posters on social media. If you listen to the populist base, they’re genuinely angry. But they haven’t been led astray, they’re simply angry that institutions don’t work. They want visible results. You may disagree with their policy prescriptions, but everything is downstream of competence. They’re sick of explanations that sound like excuses. At the national level, yes, but locally too.

At its core, these are local grievances. They’re about schools, roads, cops, business, about the general sense that no one is minding the store. These grievances have been captured by the national attention economy because that’s the only shared political language available.

The national discourse teaches people to care intensely about things they cannot change while ignoring the things they can. A voter furious about the system probably can’t name his city council representative. He’s been trained to look up when he should be looking around.

The populist instinct that someone should be held responsible is correct. It’s just been pointed at the wrong target by the very attention economy Siegel analyzes. His essay is part of the problem it describes.

When you can’t build roads, when you can’t pay cops, or balance a budget, or when millions of American children are relegated to poverty and lost opportunity because their schools can’t even teach them how to read, I don’t care about the bot swarms. We can worry about the Information State when we can actually govern ourselves. Right now we can’t.

Mississippi improved its reading scores more than any state in the nation over the past decade. A state government that decided literacy mattered passed a straightforward policy and executed it, doing FAR more for children than any influencer you can name from your Twitter timeline.

This doesn’t exist in Siegel’s framework. It can’t. There’s no swarm, no counter-swarm, no Information State dynamics. Just a government doing its job, the thing that actually builds trust.

American trust isn’t rebuilt in the national media. Not in the Information State.

I'm aware I'm doing the thing I'm criticizing, but I don’t care. Look away from the stage, America. There's nothing for you there. Look to your city council, look to Mississippi. Look to your neighbors and your neighborhoods. That’s where you can make a difference.