Column

Writing About Politics Sucks

This is Drew’s swan song for his GEN column. Not really a song. More of a dirge.

Photo: John Springer Collection/Getty Images

This is my last post as a regular columnist for GEN. This is because I am tired. Over a year ago, I came here to write exclusively about politics, which was a subject I had gravitated toward during my tenure at GQ. For the bulk of my existence, I never wanted to be a politics guy. But then I got old and a nasty case of boomerism struck, and I found myself actively giving a shit about, like, tax reform. And in 2020, it’s become virtually impossible to escape politics regardless of your age. Politics is the reason my kids aren’t going to school, in person, every day. You would think they’d be elated to ditch routine school days. You would be wrong, and you better believe these kids have opinions about the politics that have actively reshaped their formative years.

So becoming a Politics Knower made sense for me, on a certain level. It was an election year. The president shits out new scandals on an hourly basis. There’s no shortage of stuff to have opinions about, yeah?

Nope. No, I’m out of political opinions. The kind of torpid recycling of stances you see from David Brooks and other professional thought havers? I’m no different. Go back through my archive here and you can see ideas repeat themselves. I’ll list them for you here in bullet point form, to spare myself from superfluous elaboration:

• Trump is a Nazi.
• The pandemic deaths here are his fault.
• There is no need to ever see things from the perspective of a Trump voter because those perspectives are rooted in lies, idiocy, and hatred.
• This country doesn’t actually care if it wins or loses wars, so long as the wars keep going.
• Fuck the New York Times and its steadfast refusal to present the truth with anything resembling clarity or directness.
• The only people who bitch about “cancel culture” are people who either deserve to be canceled or already have been.
• I have absolutely no use for horse race analysts who interpret the horrors of the past year strictly through the prism of party branding, and then treat that branding as…