I recently made the mistake of watching a congressional hearing.
This was not intentional. Nobody sits down after dinner and thinks, "You know what would really brighten my evening? Three hours of procedural objections and carefully rehearsed outrage." Like many Americans, I arrived there accidentally. I was reading about an issue of public importance, clicked a link, and before I knew it I was staring at a hearing room where eighteen elected officials were taking turns interrupting one another while a witness looked increasingly convinced that witness protection might be a viable career path.
The experience left me with an unexpected appreciation for eighteenth-century government.
This is not a sentence I expected to write.
The men who founded the United States were not models of efficiency. They traveled by horseback, communicated through handwritten letters, and occasionally resolved political disputes through duels. They formed factions almost immediately after promising they would never form factions. They spent years accusing one another of destroying the Republic. John Adams considered Thomas Jefferson naive. Jefferson considered Adams a monarchist. Alexander Hamilton considered everyone an idiot.
Yet after watching a modern congressional hearing, I have become convinced that the Continental Congress possessed one extraordinary advantage over its modern successor.
Most of its members occasionally listened.
This realization arrived gradually. At first, the hearing appeared perfectly normal. Members delivered opening statements. Cameras rolled. Witnesses took their seats. Everyone spoke solemnly about accountability, transparency, democracy, and the importance of uncovering the truth.
If one knew nothing about Congress, one might reasonably conclude that an investigation was about to occur.
Instead, something stranger happened.
Questions were asked, but answers proved largely optional.
A member would spend five minutes delivering what was technically classified as a question but more closely resembled a campaign advertisement. The witness would begin responding. Three sentences later, the interruption arrived. Time was limited. The witness was filibustering. The committee needed to move on. Another member would then spend five minutes delivering an entirely different campaign advertisement disguised as a question.
The witness gradually became decorative.
This struck me as odd because congressional hearings were originally designed to gather information. The witness was supposed to be the interesting part. Yet modern hearings increasingly resemble theatrical productions in which the supporting cast has wandered onto the stage by mistake.
The actual audience is not present in the room at all.
It exists somewhere else.
It exists on social media.
It exists on cable news.
It exists in fundraising emails and campaign advertisements.
It exists in the thousands of smartphone screens waiting for a thirty-second clip that can be transformed into proof of either heroism or villainy.
The hearing itself is merely content production.
Once this became obvious, many mysteries resolved themselves. It explained why members often seemed less interested in answers than in memorable lines. It explained why outrage appeared with such remarkable consistency. It explained why everyone involved seemed to know exactly what they planned to say before entering the room.
The hearing was not a search for information.
It was a performance review conducted in public.
Benjamin Franklin would have found this fascinating.
Franklin understood media better than perhaps any founder. He was a printer, writer, publisher, satirist, and occasional troublemaker. He knew information could be manipulated because he frequently manipulated it himself. Yet even Franklin might have struggled to comprehend a world in which an entire hearing could be distilled into fourteen seconds of video, stripped of context, and distributed to millions of people before lunch.
Franklin once observed that "half the truth is often a great lie."
The modern innovation is realizing that fourteen seconds can be even more efficient.
A witness may provide two hours of testimony. Experts may submit hundreds of pages of evidence. Entire reports may be entered into the record. None of this matters nearly as much as the moment someone points dramatically across the room and raises their voice.
The hearing produces information.
The algorithm selects emotion.
The algorithm wins.
John Adams would not have enjoyed this arrangement.
Adams believed deeply in debate. He could be stubborn, argumentative, self-righteous, and occasionally exhausting, but he genuinely believed ideas should survive serious examination. He once famously remarked that "facts are stubborn things."
This remains true.
The modern challenge is that facts must now compete with content.
A hearing may generate facts all afternoon. By evening, millions of Americans will encounter only the twelve-second exchange in which someone appeared angry. The evidence disappears. The context evaporates. The clip remains.
And the clip performs far better than the facts ever could.
The founders, for all their flaws, operated in a political culture where persuasion remained the primary objective. They wrote pamphlets because they hoped to change minds. They argued because they believed arguments mattered. They often failed spectacularly, but they generally entered a debate believing somebody might leave with a different opinion.
That assumption increasingly feels quaint.
Today, congressional hearings often resemble social media arguments with better furniture.
Nobody expects persuasion.
Nobody expects compromise.
Nobody even expects surprise.
Everyone arrives with a prepared script. Everyone knows who the villains are. Everyone knows which clips they hope will circulate that evening. By the time the hearing begins, the conclusions have largely been reached.
What remains is simply the performance.
James Madison would have found this particularly alarming.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned about factions, passions, and tribal loyalties overwhelming reasoned deliberation. His solution was a large republic in which competing interests would moderate one another. Diversity, he hoped, would make it difficult for any single faction to dominate the entire system.
Instead, we invented social media.
Today citizens can spend years interacting primarily with people who already agree with them. Every faction has its own media ecosystem. Every ideology has its own influencers. Every grievance has its own podcast network.
Madison worried about factions.
The modern internet turned them into subscription services.
This has transformed politicians as surely as it has transformed voters.
Members of Congress once sought influence primarily inside Congress. Today they often seek influence outside it. A viral clip may be more valuable than a legislative victory. A successful hearing may generate headlines. A successful headline may generate followers. Followers generate attention. Attention generates fundraising. Fundraising generates power.
Somewhere along the way, the hearing became part of the content economy.
Everyone is building a brand.
The witness is building a brand.
The representative is building a brand.
The activist is building a brand.
The journalist is building a brand.
One occasionally suspects the Republic itself has become a branding opportunity.
History offers plenty of examples of ugly political behavior. Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. A Congressman once nearly beat a Senator to death with a cane on the Senate floor. The founders insulted one another relentlessly in newspapers. American politics has never been particularly civilized.
But there is an important distinction.
Most of these men cared deeply about winning the argument.
Today it often seems more important to win the audience.
That may be the defining feature of our political age. The performance matters more than the disagreement. The reaction matters more than the result. The audience matters more than the participants.
Politics has become content.
Congressional hearings merely reveal the process in its purest form.
Perhaps I am being unfair. Spectacle has always existed in politics. Politicians have always enjoyed attention in much the same way that houseplants enjoy sunlight. But there is a difference between spectacle serving politics and politics serving spectacle.
Somewhere along the way, those priorities appear to have reversed.
This is unfortunate because hearings perform a genuinely important function. They exist to expose problems, gather information, and hold powerful institutions accountable. These are serious responsibilities. Yet one leaves many modern hearings with the distinct impression that the least important person in the room was the witness and the least important activity was discovering the truth.
That seems backwards.
Then again, perhaps I am expecting too much. After all, the Continental Congress enjoyed certain advantages unavailable to modern legislators. The delegates were not competing with TikTok. They never had to wonder whether their exchange about tariffs would perform well on Instagram. Benjamin Franklin was never forced to condense a constitutional argument into a thirty-second reel.
And perhaps most importantly, when Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, he at least had the courtesy to wait until after the debate.
— John Handcock