It was not, but I’m not going to sit here and argue with a kid about things I lived through. And no, I wasn’t middle-class, I was deeply poor.
Perhaps you’re conflating “the electoral dog and pony show” for “politics” then, because if you were “deeply poor,” it’s hard to imagine not dealing with politics. Easy example, the cops are a pretty political institution, acting as the agents of establishment powers. Hell, the enclosure of the commons and the resultant practically monopolistic effect that landlording has is also pretty political, liberals just don’t talk about it (other than Adam Smith).
It wasn’t shoved in our faces 24 hours per day. Of course we were affected by the laws which govern us, but outside of much shorter election cycles, the government wasn’t something that normal people discussed every day, all day. The politicians did their things in the background and we lived our lives. You cannot understand how exhausting this new reality is unless you’ve experienced what it was like before what you referred to as “the dog and pony show”.
What you’re describing is a low consciousness of politics, whether due to desperation, poor education, or whatever else, since those moment-to-moment experiences generally could productively be described as political.
My argument, and you might actually sympathize with it, is that the only fundamental difference here is the media screaming at people about this nonstop. Seriously, lineral people who like to fancy themselves as “staying up to date” with political goings-on are basically in an abusive relationship with the media that complete contorts their ideas of the past and future to promote the “this is the most important election of our livetimes” bullshit that they’ve done three elections in a row now. It’s not what the politicians are doing, it’s this screaming from the media that is frankly wrecking the mental health of the people who listen to it regularly.
I actually do remember what it was like before then and a few months into it starting, whatever you might say of my decision making, I just disconnected for two years because I already hate Trump and don’t need a thousand headlines a day that ORANGMANBADORANGMANBADORANGMANBAD. It ended up being a good opportunity to learn about politics from a historical perspective and get some distance from this shit (and ultimately, that was a major factor in my becoming a communist, but we aren’t here for that).
