Does It Really Matter Who Is Mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska?
Can you name the mayor of this Alaskan city?
Photographer: Quintin Soloviev/Wikimedia Commons
The Republican mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska (population 32,000), was defeated last week in his re-election bid by a Democrat. I can’t say that I followed this race closely, but that didn’t stop me from commenting on the result,1 as did other political obsessives I know.
Which leads me to ask: Am I part of the problem here? The problem being that too many people treat politics as a hobby, when it fundamentally isn’t: Ideally, it is a mechanism for democratic self-government. Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, coined the phrase “political hobbyism” in his book Politics Is for Power, which essentially urges people who care about politics to log off and engage more with the community they actually live in.