In contemporary American politics, attention is not incidental to power—it is power. What citizens are induced to notice, react to, and argue about, obscures what goes unscrutinized and unchallenged. Attention-grabbing is therefore not a personality trait or media gimmick; it is a governing strategy. Its purpose is not persuasion through reason, but dominance through distraction, emotion, and exhaustion.
Attention-grabbing operates by saturating the public sphere with provocation. Shocking statements, norm-breaking proposals, and perpetual crises force a constant reaction. The pace is deliberate. When one controversy barely settles before the next erupts, citizens lose the time required for reflection, memory, and pattern recognition.
This strategy thrives on emotional activation rather than deliberation. Fear, anger, grievance, and humiliation travel faster than policy or law. Once emotions are engaged, attention shifts from what is being done to how it feels. Governance becomes spectacle, and spectacle substitutes for accountability. Each provocation also moves norms: what was once unthinkable becomes debatable, then acceptable, then routine.
The headlines created by the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, combined with rhetoric surrounding Greenland and domestic flashpoints such as Minneapolis, transform disparate places into symbols—foreign threat, territorial ambition, and internal disorder—woven together to create a sense of omnipresent crisis.
These examples share little substantively, and that is precisely their function. Their value lies not in policy coherence but in attention saturation. While debate centers on the spectacle, deeper questions about law, democratic norms, and institutional restraint recede into the background.
This dynamic is clarified by Siren Call, in which Chris Hayes argues that attention has become a commodity—produced, monetized, and sold. In an attention economy, outrage outperforms truth, novelty defeats memory, and disruption is rewarded over resolution. Provocation is no longer aberrant behavior; it is rational behavior.
Democracy, however, depends on continuity, context, and sustained judgment—the very qualities the attention economy undermines.
If attention is power, then distraction is its most efficient weapon. Attention-grabbing politics does not aim merely to confuse or inflame; its end game is more exacting: to accumulate and retain power without being meaningfully challenged or held accountable. When attention is endlessly diverted, scrutiny weakens, norms erode quietly, and power consolidates in plain sight.
It is here that Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “A Knock at Midnight” offers its enduring warning. In retelling Jesus’s parable, King did not name attention-grabbing as we understand it today, but he recognized its moral consequence. “It is midnight in the social order,” King warned—midnight being the hour when clarity fades, comfort dulls conscience, and vigilance is most easily surrendered.
In King’s telling, truth does not arrive as spectacle or outrage. It comes as a knock—quiet, persistent, and demanding recognition. The danger is not that truth fails to announce itself, but that a distracted and comfortable society fails to rise and answer.
The question, then, returns us to where we began. If attention is power, and power thrives on distraction, will we remain absorbed by the spectacle—or, in this hour of midnight, will we awaken long enough to open the door before power secures itself beyond our reach?