Downs was a seriously good scholar, indeed an intellectual force.

He was one of the founding fathers and a giant of public choice theory, which remains a powerful, indeed a compelling, explanation of the workings of so much of public life and politics.  He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Economics.

ATTENTION

His most famous book was An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), but he is perhaps best remembered for a short article written in 1972 with the title Up and Down with Ecology: the “Issue Attention Cycle”.

This article caught the attention of his peers and a much wider audience at the time, and continues to be useful to those seeking to understand public policy and the behaviour of the public in relation to it.

It might even help us to understand the issue of that novel corona virus and the policy responses to it, of recent memory.

Downs’ thesis was that every policy issue has its own, finite life cycle. He began thus: “American public attention rarely remains sharply focused upon any one domestic issue for very long – even if it involves a continuing problem of crucial importance to society.

“Instead, a systematic ‘issue-attention cycle’ seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behavior concerning most key domestic problems.

“Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there for a short time, and then- though still largely unresolved – gradually fades from the centre of public attention.

“A study of the way this cycle operates provides insights into how long public attention is likely to remain sufficiently focused upon any given issue to generate enough political pressure to cause effective change.”

His argument has been especially useful in explaining how and why some issues capture and retain public attention when others don’t, how issues “take off” in the public imagination, and why issues suddenly fall off the radar without apparent explanation.

It is a theory of the likely trajectory of political issues.

POPULARITY

The issue attention cycle sought to explain the sudden popularity then waning (at that time) of public commitment to the environment, but its much wider application was immediately clear to many. 

Downs saw five stages in this cycle:

1. Pre-problem;
2. Alarmed discovery, with euphoric enthusiasm (about society’s ability to solve the problem or doing something effective quickly);
3. Realising the cost of significant progress;
4. Gradual decline of public interest, through either discouragement (in the face of growing understanding that the problem cannot easily be solved), boredom or the fact that other issues are getting greater attention;
5. Post-problem, or “the twilight of lesser attention”. The issue hasn’t gone away, it may well remain “unresolved” but the public just moves on.

How does Downs’ thesis stand up in the age of COVID and of climate madness?

The coming of the manic and sinister COVID State and, equally, with the strangely persistent and widespread (but, mercifully, not universal) current belief in government action to “address” climate change.

Would not we have expected such patently irrational policy obsessions to have gone the way of the dodo, when their advocates are daily confronted with compelling empirical evidence that makes a mockery of their positions, as the Downs model predicted?

Leaving climate change aside, does Downs’ thesis have any relevance to understanding COVID politics and COVID policy? Yes it does, perhaps despite initial appearances. 

Several aspects of the COVID pseudo-pandemic in particular have caught the attention of anyone with an interest in the behaviour of citizens and voters.

Perhaps the most obvious question is – why have people given up their freedom so easily, so comprehensively and without reserve on the most part?

And why have so many signed up to full membership of the COVID Class and such ready participation in COVID theatre?

Or, in terms of Downs’ schema, why did a middling virus so capture global public attention for so long, as an obsessive priority and to the exclusion of other issues?

These questions seem to perfectly align with Downs’ approach to the policy cycle. In fact, it might be argued that the issue attention cycle was invented just for times and issues like these.

GRIM

It seems almost forever that the majority, at least the polled and reported majority, of people have clung to COVID mania with grim determination and have seemed loathe to let go of the obsession.

Far longer than for most issues, even lethal ones. After all, viruses aren’t the only things proposed to be existential threats to humanity.

Think of the still extant nuclear threat. How many of us still go the bed as nervous wrecks knowing that demented dumbos like Biden and warmongers like Putin are inches from the red button?

Nuclear war was a policy obsession for many in the 1950s and 1960s. And the weapons do still exist, after all.

But any poll taken now on voters’ worst fears would, oddly, likely have nuclear war pretty low on the list. 

It might seem on an initial reading, in view of the longevity of the COVID madness, that Downs’ theory of the issue attention cycle is no longer applicable.

If so, then why has this happened? But perhaps with the recent evidence of a public letting go of its commitment to the cause of zero COVID (or some approximation of it) and emerging from its collective madness, the Downs thesis remains persuasive, and the question becomes, why did stage two of the cycle last so long, and why was stage three so slow in arriving?

You might say that the future of post-COVID sanity is already here; it is just that it is unevenly distributed.

While there are pockets of madness still around, in both the political class (especially in Davos-penetrated Cabinets) and among the broader population, the evidence is there that we are collectively emerging from the insanity.

These include:

• Markers across the West include a dramatic reduction in mask-wearing in places where they are optional;
• A fall-off in at least some media of relentless reporting of COVID and vaccination numbers;
• A relaxation of many COVID rules and restrictions despite continuing high infection rates (of the admittedly mild Omicron variant);
• Anecdotal evidence that businesses are ignoring vaccine mandates for new staff in the same way that many (especially small and rural businesses) have been ignoring contact/trace requirements;
• Whole nations (like the US) where COVID simply isn’t much of a story in most parts any longer;
• Borders being re-opened to travellers and associated bureaucratic processes being dumped;
• Judges around the world ruling that vaccine mandates are illegal and governments deciding that the legal grief isn’t worth the effort of fighting such judgements;
• And, finally, the piece de resistance, the abandonment by zero COVID nutters like Jacindarella of the Shaky Isles and the malevolent Austrian overlord, of many of their previously sacred and vile impositions, often without even the bother of an explanation.

Even Her Majesty was allowed some company in her grieving for her late husband, second time around, despite there being higher COVID case numbers now.  (And yes, she is owed an apology, as Nick Rendell has recently argued).

All of this is classic stage four Anthony Downs.  The “problem” of Covid remains “unresolved”, but now far fewer people care about it.

Yes, there are holdouts – the clueless government in Canberra persists with booster madness in the face of compelling evidence related to vaccines’ uselessness, needlessness and patent dangers, and the lingering vaccine mandates for workers – but in many States, provinces and countries, the jig is up.

The argument has moved on to ensuring that we all hold the bastards accountable for their actions.

Here, there are promising signs, too, like the provocative and enterprising (informal) multi-party commission of inquiry into COVID management in Australia.

 China, of course, which started off the whole shooting fascist match, has reverted to type in the face of its latest outbreak.

REALITY

There is also embedded, legacy lunacy that is totally at odds with the new, broadly accepted reality of endemic COVID.

Much of this is lingering COVID theatre, and the continued desire of overweening politicians used to being able to throw their weight around.

Like mandated masks on trains in regional NSW, with the promise of hefty fines for non-compliance.

Utterly without justification, in view of the stripping away of mandates in cognate situations.

The rules and restrictions still in place also provide cover for politicians lest they be asked to defend their policy madness when cases were lower.

They are playing a game with voters and hoping, alas justifiably, that most of us still won’t see the con.

But overall, it is clear that the world is calming down on COVID. This isn’t necessarily all upside, by the way.

Dan Wootton has noted perceptively that there is a new phenomenon emerging – “COVID amnesia”.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has helped, of course.

We must never, ever let the people who visited a reign of terror on innocent people for two years get away with it.  Even if we are struggling to know how we can ever punish them sufficiently for their crimes.

But why did sanity take so long to return?  And why were governments allowed so effortlessly to expand “the Overton Window” of politically safe and (to the public) reasonable policy boundaries?

Explanations of the submissive behaviour of citizens since March 2020 have been many and varied.  Many ring true.  It is likely they have all contributed.

• “Rational ignorance”. This is another of Anthony Downs’ theories. He suggested (in his acclaimed 1957 book) that most people simply didn’t invest the time and energy needed to understand fully political issues, so they didn’t bother. And so, didn’t remotely perceive what was happening to them and why;
• The death of history as a discipline. We are destined to repeat the blunders of the past if we do not understand it. Presentism rules. We seem to lack any sort of reasoned perspective. We are paying dearly for the demise of liberal education and its emphasis on the development of critical faculties in our citizens. The sort of faculties patently lacking during the COVID circus;
• David McGrogan in The Daily Sceptic has argued that society’s nihilism has been clearly revealed in the self-regarding behaviour of “adults” during the COVID period. Especially in the shameful treatment of children, so we grownups would remain “safe” from a virus that left most sufferers unscathed and very, very few in real danger from it. He might also have mentioned the crushing of the elderly. The retired Australian Federal Court judge, Stuart Lindsay has echoed McGrogan’s thesis on the low threshold for discomfort now on display. He memorably suggested that most people are now content if they have “Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate”. McGrogan, too, mentioned Netflix. What would Socrates say? The unexamined life is now de rigueur out there in electorate land;
• The power of government bribes. This has worked a treat in postponing any potential public pushback. Largesse from the public purse effectively bought the compliance of many, and bought time for governments invested in the vaxx. Far too many of the punters got something from COVID. Again, from the Downs songbook;
• The seeming acceptance, following Downs, that any problem can be solved by government action. This has been, pardon the pun, endemic for some time and is a cause of ongoing policy grief;
• The power of social media. The emergence of bullying, and the pile-ons in publicising and supporting certain positions, instantly revealing and mobilising an apparent majority, creating public pariahs and scaring craven politicians and other decision makers witless, has been a feature of the panic so clearly seen in March 2020 and since;
• The madness of crowds. Much has been said on this by both Charles McKay and by Douglas Murray, well and truly before the lockdowns. COVID madness trumps woke madness by a considerable distance, since the near universal acceptance of wokedom, while it can destroy careers, has had only a fraction of the impact on lives that our collective madness over a virus has wrought;
• The ill-deserved respect that Jo Punter has for “science”, especially medical “science”, and for its talking heads. Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute has noted that early on in the “crisis”, two-thirds of people believed in the appropriateness of lockdowns and the rest if a public health official said it was necessary. That this figure had (mercifully) dropped to half by late 2020 only reminds us of the inevitability of Downs’ issue attention cycle. Even in purported existential crises.
• The sheer power over people of government and third-party propaganda. Especially in today’s world of bought-and-paid-for, ideologically driven legacy media companies which drive and monopolise 24-hour news cycles, and of tech companies whose censoring leadership is compromised, corrupt and omnipotent.
  This cannot be underestimated as an explanation of the ignorance of many in relation to COVID and of their willingness to believe in the veracity of the official information they were fed. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you are bound to be putty in the hands of skilled information-controllers.
  Many people, and not only the rationally ignorant, simply do not have the resources or skill sets to access those alternate news platforms which still ask all the difficult questions, venture plausible theories and which censor no one. Simply removing truths from media platforms or labelling their progenitors as liars, mad or evil, is now routine, and, no doubt, highly effective. Insulting opponents is nothing new.
  Preventing them from even having a voice is entirely new. Propaganda can be both covert and overt, and can be advanced by silencing or othering alternate views. Anthony Downs, when assessing the likely trajectory and persistence of hot button issues, would never have seen this coming.