Why is Washington so dysfunctional?
Esty: The rise of social media. It’s a technology that has crated enormous incentives to be intransigent, outraged and outrageous. Social media is wildly disruptive, and it has been no place more disruptive than in the political realm. You get likes, you get attention, you get on TV, you get money, you get power by not playing ball, by going straight to social media. You can be a brand new member of Congress — you can be Marjorie Taylor Greene, you can be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and everybody knows their names and they raise a ton of money and they get on TV and are talked about all the time. And people who play by the rules, do their work in committee, get amendments done here and there, they get none of that. The first Democratic bill signed by Donald Trump was mine. So I was good at getting the legislation done, but it doesn’t get covered at all by the media. People don’t believe it’s happening anyway, and the narrative that it’s a train wreck in Congress is a pretty easy story to tell.
