Watching Rachel Maddow Is Not Enough: Obsessively following the news but doing nothing to help your side gain power is less than useful.

• Author: Burgat, Casey

Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

by Eitan Hersh

Scribner, 288 pp.

Raise your hand if the following describes you: You follow politics closely. If you missed President Trump's most recent COVID-19 press conference, your Twitter feed gave you the play-by-play. You have the presidential primary calendar just about memorized and can even distinguish candidates' subtle policy differences in a crowded field. You often take to Twitter or Facebook to commiserate on the government's latest coronavirus response with your co-partisans, defend your stances, or at least silently judge the few you follow who disagree. You struggle to understand why others don't think the way you do about the other political party or its leaders. You can't help but check out the latest polls, especially if they are from battleground states. You vote in every election, even on local candidates or propositions you never thought about before hopping into the booth. But yet, you belong to no political or community organizations.

Congrats--you're a political hobbyist, and you're doing politics all wrong. At least so says Eitan Hersh, a political scientist and the author of Politics Is for Power.

Hersh's book offers an approachable reality check for voters. He forces readers to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that much of how they engage with politics isn't necessarily helpful. In fact, he argues, the hobbyist forms of engagement are often precisely the reason why many popular causes struggle to be advanced.

For political hobbyists, the time we put into following the news is more akin to a spectator sport than a goal-driven purpose. Any influence we might enjoy comes from behind screens, not from any meaningful human connection. Sure, we may vote, but that's about it in terms of tangible effort. Hobbyists' activities are cloaked "in the language of civics," Hersh notes, but are, at their core, virtue signaling, meant to show that we are in the fight because we post about it. It's the "I VOTED" sticker of engagement--it lets people know we are involved but doesn't demand any follow-up. We follow to be entertained.

So, then, what does Hersh say should ground our political involvement? Simple: the pursuit of power. The goal isn't as contemptible as it sounds. In Hersh's words, "Getting power means convincing people to take actions they wouldn't otherwise take." For example, individual citizens can organize to...