Politics & Power Quote by John Avlon

Avlon’s line is a small grenade lobbed into a media ecosystem that profits off friction. Calling “the American people” smart isn’t just flattery; it’s a rebuke aimed upward at the political-industrial complex that treats audiences like lab rats, endlessly prodded with the same stimuli: tribe cues, outrage bait, prepackaged enemies. The phrase “predictable hyperpartisan talking points” frames polarization not as an organic eruption of principle but as scripted content, a genre with reliable beats. “Canned anger” finishes the thought with a consumer metaphor: rage as shelf-stable product, engineered for distribution, optimized for clicks, fundraising, and primetime segments.

The intent is corrective and strategic. Avlon positions himself in the anti-performative lane of American commentary: not above politics, but suspicious of politics as performance. He’s arguing that the audience’s fatigue is real and politically consequential, a market shift as much as a civic one. That’s the subtext: if people are “sick” of the routine, then the routine can be disrupted - by candidates who don’t speak in algorithm-friendly absolutes, by newsrooms that stop laundering talking points into legitimacy, by voters who punish the outrage merchants.

Context matters here: the post-2016 era of weaponized attention, where partisanship became both identity and entertainment. Avlon’s optimism (“smart”) is doing work against the prevailing cynicism that voters are hopelessly manipulable. It’s a bet on boredom as a democratic force: not idealism, not unity, but exhaustion with the same rerun rage.