Helen Chandler-Wilde: Can any Politician Focus on Core Issues?

I’m currently reading a book called The Revolt of the Public. Written by a former CIA media analyst, Martin Gurri, it traces the effects of the internet on politics, and argues that fragmenting information has broken the communication channels between leaders and voters. Politicians stop delivering what voters want, sometimes because their demands are impossible, and often because they don’t even know what they are.

When you read books like this I find there’s a window of a few months afterwards where your mind feels reshaped by the thesis: every single piece of information you encounter seems to magically slip into this neat new framework (and with the best books, of course, this lasts forever).