‘Flooding the zone’ and the politics of attention
This is a guest post by Zsolt Kapelner (University of Oslo).
‘Flooding the zone’ is a term often used to describe the strategy Trump and his team have followed in recent weeks. This strategy involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion. Many have criticized this strategy and, in my view, rightly so. But what precisely is wrong with it? In this short piece I want to argue that ‘flooding the zone’ is not simply one of the, perhaps dirtier, tricks in the toolbox of democratic competition; instead, it is an inherently antidemocratic strategy which deliberately aims at exploiting one of our crucial vulnerabilities as a democratic public, i.e., our limited attentional capacity.
Flooding the zone
Those who have been actively following the actions of the second Trump administration likely find themselves in a state of utter confusion and exhaustion. President Trump began his term by issuing an unusually high volume of executive orders, including very controversial ones, such as pardoning January 6 rioters, as well as making a number of controversial statements, e.g., about taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
And this is just what comes to mind right now. Much more has happened, but at one point I just had to tune out. I simply could not deal with the unceasing onslaught of news, each more worrying and outrageous than the previous one. I suppose many others feel the same way. This is no coincidence, in fact, it is part of the plan.
The term ‘flooding the zone’ is often traced back to a 2018 interview with Steve Bannon. It is a political strategy which has been used by both the previous and the current Trump administrations. It involves overwhelming the media and political opponents by creating an overload of information and controversy such that both the opposition and the general public loses focus and concentration, as well as the ability to clearly discern what’s going on. The result is exhaustion, fatigue, and inadequate or non-existent political responses. I suspect that many would agree that there seems to be something clearly objectionable about this strategy. But what exactly?
The content of the flooding
One option is that flooding the zone is objectionable because of the ‘content’ of the flooding or what one floods the zone with. When the zone is flooded (it’s worth mentioning that Trump is not the only one doing this), it is often flooded by fake news, disinformation, outrageous and unjust policies, and the like. Any such input into public discourse or policymaking is objectionable in and of itself; it flies in the face of the norms of public deliberation. When the ‘zone’, that is, the deliberative forum, is flooded with objectionable content, the badness of such inputs aggregates. So perhaps the badness of flooding the zone is wholly explained by the aggregate badness of the individual inputs.
But I think there is something more going on here. Flooding the zone is objectionable independently of the objectionable nature of what the zone is flooded with, i.e., the badness of the individual inputs: Any kind of political system faces countless issues and problems at any given moment. Any one of these may be worth addressing. But if a political party or the executive decided to push all these fully legitimate issues in the forefront of public discussion, e.g., by introducing legitimate policy proposals to address them, but in high volume and in rapid succession, then, most likely, the same confusion and disorientation would follow. And I would argue that it would be objectionable for the exact same reason as flooding the zone with objectionable content, namely, its detrimental effect on the polity’s capacity to pay attention to what’s going on.
Distraction and democracy
But perhaps the worry around ‘flooding the zone’ is inflated. After all, new administrations, especially in the US, tend to go into their term guns blazing, trying to demonstrate strength and energy through a lot of executive activity. And even if they do this with the intent of distracting their opponents – so what? Democracy is conflict and contest. “Strategic distraction” is but one, perhaps unseemly, tactic in political warfare. It is not great, but given the overall messiness of politics, it’s not something worth moralizing over.
I agree that distracting the media or political opponents is commonplace in democratic politics. This doesn’t make it okay. But if what was going on here was simply an instance of ordinary political distraction, I would say there is nothing to be freaked out about. However, I think there is a crucial difference between ordinary distractions and flooding the zone.
Attention and democracy
A political system, which at the end of the day is made up of ordinary people, has a limited ability to pay attention to and process information about all the issues it faces. A key function of democratic institutions and public deliberation is not only to identify the best solutions to the problems we face, but also to select which of the many possible problems are taken up, how collective attention is allocated, and how the agenda is set.
This process of agenda setting is crucially important and yet extremely precarious. Meaningful political discussion and action presupposes focused attention; if an issue is not given enough attention by the democratic public and decisionmakers, it cannot be addressed. It is thus incumbent on us as a democratic public to allocate collective attention to the right issues at the right time. But given that we also labour under the limitations of bounded rationality, we are always at high risk of misallocating our limited attention. This can leave important, indeed pressing issues unaddressed, and thus engender government inefficiency and social injustice.
And yet remedying these wrongs, and indeed keeping the ship of democracy afloat is only possible if the democratic public and its institutions retain their ability to pay focused attention to the relevant issues they face.
Flooding the zone – irrespective of the ‘content of the flooding’ – destroys this key collective capacity for focused attention on the part of the democratic public, and consequently the possibility of meaningfully democratic politics itself.
This is why flooding the zone as a political strategy aimed at decapacitating public deliberation and opposition politicians through creating confusion and disorientation is not simply a dirty tactic, but an inherently antidemocratic one. This also highlights the crucial importance of managing collective attention for the healthy functioning of democracy. What threatens democracy today is not only fake news, disinformation, and polarization. It is also the destruction of our capacity for collective attention. To preserve democracy, we will have to find ways to defend and develop our shared ability to pay focused attention to what really matters.
Dr Zsolt Kristóf Kapelner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo. He works on moral and political philosophy. In the GoodAttention Project, he researches the role of attention in democratic deliberation. His research looks at how individuals and institutions can promote good attention norms for ensuring the proper functioning of democratic deliberation.
