Steven Beschloss On How to Write Engaging Political Commentary

I’m pretty new to studying politics, trying to track it and analyze it in real time, and it’s only over the past few months that I’ve started contending with one of the biggest obstacle any political newcomer will contend with, which is this two-sided fact:

1. Pretty much every hot-button issue in US politics is easy to understand.

2. None of us ever have the whole picture.

The mystery that compels so much of political jockeying and coverage and commentary isn’t the issues around which everyone has presumably gathered; what captivates so much interest is the people; meaning the votership, sure (as in We the People), but also (probably mostly) it means lawmakers.

Take any issue on the agenda, study it inside and out, go out on a national platform and present your findings, Here’s how we solve this thing—

Fine.

But you never know how that solution fits into their larger professional calculus. Maybe pursuing that solution would make an enemy of some other lawmaker who’s a critically important ally in some other arena.

Could be a million things.

It’s the human drama that creates this mill of endless coverage. 24-hour cable news is the least of it. Podcasts, social media, whole books on some of these issues get churned out in a matter of months (as recently covered for Vox)…

A while ago, in the 20th century, the biggest obstacle for a political newcomer might have been finding some streams of information; in the 21st century, that political newcomer’s obstacle is filtering the bounty those streams.

We all start out saying we want the news, the facts, the truth—but the facts can be disorienting without an accompanying narrative. And what’s a narrative? It’s how you frame that fact within a larger network of issues; and, as Susan Sontag says, of a given photo you might come across in the news:

“It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”

And so for the past few months, trying to engage these issues as they unfold, I’ve become preoccupied with this question of what a reliable source for political news looks like—until I realized it’s not really news I’m looking for; it’s the framing. I’m looking to create a stable of voices, on my desktop, that I can turn to, after I’ve read the facts and processed them on my own…voices against which I can compare notes, in essence. I’m looking for voices in political ommentary that plays a role…more like what the poet Virgil does in Dante’s Inferno. Except modern. Andy Rooney! In hell. Taking it in, talking it out. Pointing at things: “Hey, see that tree? It’s bleeding.”

Well, whenever I see something outrageous, my first impulse in a situation like that is to question my own perception. My biases.

I will look at the bleeding tree and think, Sure, the trees in my climate don’t bleed, or weep, or apologize to the sky—but then again I live on the coast.

So it’s valuable just to hear someone, a stranger even, confirm that they’ve deduced something along the same lines as I have.

So here’s what I’ve been looking for in a political writer: someone who keeps their thumb close to the pulse of national politics, chimes in on a regular basis, and presents themselves simply as just a knowlegable, consistent, passionate observer; someone who spent the previous afternoon looking at the same headlines I did, and shows up the next morning not to regurgitate those facts, in a blog post or a podcast, but to contextualize them. Show me the patterns that they see

.

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Steven Beschloss

, author of America, America, writes that sort of commentary. His is one of the handful I’ve found on Substack that’ve helped me to cultivate an idea of how to make sense of the news, how to absorb it, and occasionally—when nothing remarkable’s hapened—how to spin the day’s events into an occasion for meditating on larger issues. Tangential issues.

From a rally where nothing of great substance happened, he makes it an occasion to study the politician’s speaking style; when a political candidate only makes the news that day because they were photographed coming off an airplane, he finds a gesture, something about the candidate’s body language, that reflects an aspect of his character.

It’s a portrait of a mind in motion, if nothing else; intellectually engaged and emotionally forthcoming too. Never maudlin, never shouting; but if something stirs him up, he mentions it. He levels with the reader. Presenting himself not as an expert in US politics but just another of we capital-p People, trying to follow the story.