Democracies Have an Attention Span Problem
Illiberalism advances under the West’s click-oriented media cycle.
Kyiv in April 2022 was a really terrific place to get drunk. Many of the Ukrainians were keeping sober as part of a solidarity with the war effort and there was a curfew, but that was usually negotiable with the soldiers manning the checkpoints. There were bars that felt more like the cantina from Star Wars—volunteer fighters and mercenaries (the distinction wasn’t always so easy to make) trying to link up with each other and with units; shady guys peddling a wide variety of drone equipment; the sniper rifles left leaning against a wall while their owners sipped “Putin Is An Asshole Beer”; the Ukrainian salsa band that really was astonishingly good.
And there was the press, too, as part of the flotsam of the war. The hotel I was in (I was there to make a documentary) was lousy with press, and doing a crisp business from it. Bucha, at that moment, had just become the center of the world. There were still mines and, apparently, pockets of isolated Russians in the city, so trips there were organized under the auspices of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. When I went there was a massive traffic jam. The colonel we were with jumped out and did a really first-rate job of traffic wardening. And then, in Bucha itself, there was a scrum. Ex-U.S. military colonels with their selfie sticks recording their pieces for outlets back home. The “TikTok crowd” milling about taking photos in front of the charred tanks and the spray-painted signs saying “People here.” And, in the background, out of shot, the fixers, drivers, the reps from the companies providing combat insurance—all the ancillary people making their living from the business of war.
I was new to all this—my first time watching my step for mines, my first time seeing a mass grave with the dirt not fully covering all the fingers—and I was very grateful, back at the hotel, to have the full buffet and bar. “I am for drinks,” I can still remember the bartender saying, her crisp enunciation of her role. The people I was around were more veteran war correspondents—and they were deeply disgusted by the whole circus of war coverage, and by the economy of it, and for some of them by their own addiction to it. Recently, they had been in Afghanistan, before that Syria, before that Iraq. Some joyful reunions had occurred in the Star Wars cantina. Soon they would all be moving on to the next conflict. Same people, same sort of hotel. Ukraine would be a filed story and maybe a few grisly souvenir photos discreetly shared around.
I’m sharing this as a mildly-amusing quasi-war story, but I’ve been reflecting a great deal on the boisterous energy of Kyiv in early 2022 and how that contrasts with the grim, plodding war that Ukrainians are experiencing nearly three years later—with the foreign volunteers having largely gone home, the press having moved on, and the outside world, tired even of hearing about Ukraine, starting to urge the Ukrainians towards the peace table.
To my jaded war correspondent friends, this was just a fact of life. Real war happened to civilians and well out of sight of reporters or cameras. Coverage of war was more a kind of entertainment—the sport of crisis-hopping.
But for those who are outside the liberal international order, there is a real opportunity to be had from this reliably quick-twitch attention economy. More and more I’ve come to realize how much Putin in particular, but also autocrats and malefactors all over the world, game their foreign policies around outlasting the fickle attention spans of Western media.
Putin very deliberately timed his grab of Crimea in 2014 for right after the Sochi Olympics—the world would have a reservoir of goodwill towards Russia, the journalists would all be headed home, nobody would be in the mood for the story of Russia’s aggression. In 2022, Putin, as a goodwill concession to Xi Jinping, waited for the Beijing Winter Olympics to end before launching his escalation of the war in Ukraine. And Putin’s strategy for the conflict very clearly has simply been to outwait the West—to assume that the politics would change, the Republicans would get the House and stifle funding to Ukraine, that Trump might return to the White House, and, more prosaically, that the Ukraine flags would eventually come down across American neighborhoods, that the Ukraine bumper stickers would peel off the cars, and the press wouldn’t particularly want to spring for a return trip (with combat insurance! with the danger to reporters!) to a grinding, indefinite war.
This has always been the argument for authoritarianism—it was something like the conventional wisdom in the ‘20s and ‘30s when the liberal democracies all seemed to be suffering from a failure of nerve. That democracies have no singleness of purpose. That their leaders are too beholden to the whims of the electorate. That they are unable to keep their eye on the ball for very long.
The antidote for short election cycles was supposed to be robust civil society—whether NGOs or advocates or a fourth journalistic estate that had the capacity to remain focused on issues that mattered. But, as everyone knows, media has had its problems. The bureaus that were supposed to guarantee news-gathering stability were gradually closed down—and then, eventually, many of the newspapers and magazines running the bureaus themselves closed. The media, with very few exceptions, finds itself a part of the click-economy.
This is no one’s fault exactly. Outlets are unwilling to run stories on Haiti, which is in the midst of a near-total breakdown in civic order, or on Sudan, where hundreds of thousands are facing “catastrophic hunger,” because those pieces never get very much traction—and it’s just not worth it for outlets to invest in the difficult and dangerous reporting of stories like these without seeing any dividends. Same goes for Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. There was a point in the 2000s when everybody you talked to seemed to be an expert on Iraqi and Afghan politics, sort of in the way that every four years everybody is an expert on curling or shot put. Now, I’d be shocked if one American in ten thousand could tell you who the prime minister of Iraq is. It’s not as if everything has been peaceful in Iraq or Syria, or that the countries have lost their strategic importance; it’s just that the press has moved on, because public opinion is understood to have moved on. And when the Syrian Civil War roared back to life last week—actually, it never really went away—everybody once more had to look up “Syrian Civil War” on Wikipedia.
So, no one’s fault, but there are real-world consequences. The paladins of illiberalism are, sometimes with almost puckish humor, basing their foreign policy on these blindspots in coverage. That’s China with its economic imperialism in Africa. That’s Russia testing out the capabilities of the Wagner Group in the Sahel—exactly where they think the West is least likely to notice. That’s Saudi Arabia’s long-standing war in Yemen. That’s Putin slotting his wars into the calendar wherever he thinks they will do the least public-relations damage.
So bear that in mind the next time you (like everyone) flip past the worthy-but-dull international news story on A32, the next time you get subsumed by some cultural tempest-in-a-tea-kettle that seems to be chewing up Twitter and burying all the actual news stories. The illiberal paladins are paying attention even if we’re not.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
Another human failing that I wish were not true, but, counter to the empty words of our 'leaders', this is exactly who we are.
This is one of the most beautifully written articles that I have read in a very long time. The content is good too.