Jefferson Named It in 1795. We Have Spent Two Centuries Getting Better at It.
On a Monday in late September 1795, a retired farmer sat at his desk on a Virginia mountaintop, a box of pamphlets open on the floor beside him, and performed a small experiment in political science that nobody asked him to run.
The farmer was Thomas Jefferson, two years out of Washington’s cabinet and insisting to anyone who would listen that he was finished with politics.
The box had come from John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives and the closest thing the emerging Republican opposition had to a field operative. It held six dozen copies of a fat little volume bundling together the Jay Treaty and the newspaper war raging around it. The country was on fire that summer. Town meetings up and down the seaboard had denounced the treaty with Britain; John Jay had been burned in effigy; petitions had poured into Philadelphia by the thousand. And now the fire seemed, strangely, to be going out.
Jefferson wanted to understand why. So he took the enemy’s best essay — a piece signed “Curtius,” which he wrongly believed Alexander Hamilton had written — and he handed copies to his neighbors. Not to allies. To ordinary men, what he called “honest sound hearted men of common understanding.”
Then he watched what the essay did to them.
It persuaded them. “They were not able to parry the sophistry of Curtius,” he reported to James Madison. “I have ceased therefore to give them.”
The experiment had failed, and its failure taught him something he found more alarming than any single argument in the pamphlet. He looked out at the country and saw the great July fury subsiding — not because anyone had answered the case against the treaty, but because the public had simply run out of energy for it.
“There appears a pause at present in the public sentiment,” he wrote, “which may be followed by a revulsion.” And then he named the thing he feared, in a phrase that has waited two and a quarter centuries for its moment: the pause was the effect, in part, “of the quietism into which the people naturally fall, after first sensations are over.”
A republic, he saw, does not usually lose an argument.
It loses interest.
And the party that benefits from the public losing interest does not need to win the debate.
It only needs to outlast the public’s willingness to have one.
That was then
This is now.
Not long ago, American and Israeli aircraft struck Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and began a war. Recall the week that followed. Recall where you were when you heard, and how certain everyone was that it would be short.
Four questions now. No looking anything up.
What has the war cost? Did Congress ever authorize it? Is the ceasefire holding? And when did you last have a conversation about any of it that lasted more than a minute?
Most readers will miss all four. That is not a failure of character, and this essay is not going to scold anyone for it. It is a demonstration. Something happened to the attention of a few hundred million Americans, and it happened on a schedule.
Jefferson watched the same thing happen from a mountaintop in 1795.
The answers are at the end of this essay. Notice, on the way there, how little you want them.
Naming the thing correctly
We have a modern phrase for what Jefferson watched happen: the news cycle.
But the phrase quietly misplaces the blame. “News cycle” points at the press — at editors who move on, at cameras that swing to the next thing. It describes a supply problem: the media stops covering the story.
Jefferson was describing something else, and something worse.
He was describing a demand problem. The people stop wanting to know.
The merchants who had been “as open-mouthed at first against the treaty as any,” he noted in that same letter, had “chosen to tack about” — not because they were convinced, but because sustaining opposition had come to feel like a threat to stability, and it was easier to subside. The fever broke on its own. No editor decided it for them.
This distinction matters because the two problems have opposite remedies and opposite villains.
If forgetting is a supply problem, you fix the press.
If it is a demand problem — if the citizen himself simply stops attending after the first sensations pass — then the fix has to reach something deeper than journalism.
It has to reach the habits and institutions of a self-governing people.
Jefferson had located the leak not in the newspaper but in the reader.
And he had located it, without quite having the vocabulary, in what we would now call a resource. Attention is finite. A public can only hold so much in the front of its mind at once, and holding anything there costs effort that competes with work, family, and the sheer relief of not thinking about the republic for a while.
Attention can therefore be depleted. It can be rationed. And — this is the part that turns a quirk of human nature into a political mechanism — it can be outwaited by anyone with an interest in the public looking away.
The diagnosis Tocqueville supplied
Jefferson observed the symptom. It took a French aristocrat, forty-five years later, to diagnose the disease.
When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he coined a word for a tendency he thought democracies bred in their citizens.
The word was individualism, and he was careful to say he did not mean mere selfishness.
He meant something quieter and more respectable: the disposition of the democratic citizen “to withdraw into the circle of family and friends” and to leave “the larger society to take care of itself.”
Where Jefferson had watched a public subside after one particular crisis, Tocqueville saw subsidence as the standing temperament of a free people. The citizen does not neglect public life out of stupidity or vice. He retreats into private life because equality has taught him that public life is somebody else’s business, and his own small circle is enough.
That, precisely, is quietism given a mechanism. It is why “first sensations” fade so reliably: the natural resting state of the democratic citizen is not vigilance but retreat, and a crisis only ever pulls him out of it for a while.
But Tocqueville did not stop at describing the retreat. He asked the question that Jefferson’s letter only implied:
If the citizens withdraw, who governs the space they have vacated?
His answer is the most chilling passage he ever wrote, and it is the hinge of this entire argument. Over a nation of citizens who have each retired into private contentment, he wrote, there rises “an immense and tutelary power” — a power “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” It does not rule by terror. “It does not tyrannize,” Tocqueville wrote; “it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The citizen who has withdrawn into his private circle, he added, “may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”
Read that as the answer to Jefferson’s experiment. The quiet that follows the first sensations is never empty. Something always governs the vacated square.
Tocqueville imagined it as a soft, managerial state, and that is one form it can take. But the deeper point survives any partisan use of the passage: whatever is organized and patient will govern the space a distracted public abandons.
In Jefferson’s own case it was not a bureaucracy at all — it was Hamilton’s Federalists and the merchant interest, waiting out the summer’s fury until the treaty could pass “a quiet passage,” as Madison bitterly put it that December, the opposition pretending it was “too soon now to meddle with it, as they will hereafter pretend that it is then too late.”
Concentrated interest keeps its attention trained on the prize long after diffuse public feeling has wandered off. That asymmetry — the few who are organized against the many who are merely outraged — is the engine that converts quietism into outcomes.
Somebody, right now, is counting on the four questions staying unanswered.
What the modern science found
For most of the two centuries since, this remained a matter of shrewd observation. Jefferson had his experiment of one afternoon; Tocqueville had his traveler’s eye. Then the twentieth century began to name and measure the thing directly.
In 1957 the economist Anthony Downs supplied the missing “why.” In An Economic Theory of Democracy he coined the term rational ignorance: for the individual citizen, the cost of becoming truly informed about any given public question almost always exceeds the vanishingly small chance that his personal attention will change the outcome. So the rational citizen disengages — not from apathy, but from arithmetic. Quietism, it turned out, was not a moral failing. It was a sensible allocation of a scarce resource by people with jobs to do.
In 1971 the polymath Herbert Simon named the resource itself, in a sentence that reads today like prophecy: “What information consumes is rather obvious,” he wrote. “It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” A society drowning in information would be, by mathematical necessity, a society starved of attention. Simon wrote that before the personal computer, let alone the smartphone.
And the following year Downs returned with the shape of the thing. His 1972 essay described an “issue-attention cycle” that runs in five predictable stages:
- a pre-problem phase known only to experts;
- a burst of alarmed discovery and confident enthusiasm that the problem can be solved;
- a dawning recognition of what solving it would actually cost;
- a gradual decline of public interest as the difficulty sinks in; and
- a post-problem twilight in which the issue lingers, unresolved, while some newer sensation seizes the front of the public mind.
Downs added the crucial detail: by the time boredom sets in, “some other issue is usually entering” its own moment of alarmed discovery. The new crisis does not resolve the old one. It merely evicts it.
Hold those five stages. We are going to run a war through them shortly.
But description is not measurement, and it was not until our own decade that anyone could actually watch the curve.
In 2019 a team of physicists and social scientists led by Philipp Lorenz-Spreen published a study in Nature Communications with the flat, unsettling title “Accelerating dynamics of collective attention.” They gathered data across a remarkable range — Twitter hashtags, Google searches, Reddit, Wikipedia, movie ticket sales, and the frequency of phrases in books going back a century — and they found the same shape everywhere, growing sharper over time. Public attention to any given topic rises faster and falls faster than it used to. The peaks are steeper; the intervals between them are shorter. To take their cleanest example: in 2013, a topic stayed among Twitter’s fifty most-discussed hashtags for an average of 17.5 hours. By 2016 — just three years later — that had fallen to 11.9 hours.
The mechanism they proposed to explain it is the one that ties the whole story together. They modeled topics as competing for a fixed pool of collective attention, the way species compete for a limited food supply. As the sheer volume of content produced and consumed keeps rising, the competition intensifies, and each topic exhausts the available attention faster. The acceleration, in other words, is not a quirk of social media. It is the arithmetic consequence of an information-rich world colliding with Simon’s fixed ceiling of human attention.
What has changed, and what has only sped up
It would be easy, and false, to blame the smartphone for breaking a public that used to pay attention. The evidence does not support the golden age. Jefferson’s public forgot; Tocqueville’s citizens retreated; the disease is as old as the republic. What technology changed is the rate, and one other thing that may matter even more than speed.
The rate first. A 2024 study by William Brannon and Deb Roy of MIT compared how news moves on Twitter against how it moves on talk radio, analyzing 26.6 million tweets against more than half a million hours of broadcast. News on the digital platform, they found, “circulates faster, fades faster, and is more negative and outraged” — and the outrage itself was more short-lived. The thing that arrives as a wildfire is often the thing that burns out quickest. This is Downs’s cycle, compressed from years into days.
But speed is not the deepest change. The deepest change is fragmentation.
When the Church Committee laid bare the intelligence abuses of the 1970s, its findings landed on a country that largely watched the same three networks and read the same handful of papers. There was a single national narrative to sustain or to lose.
A scandal today refracts through Fox and MSNBC, through a thousand podcasts and algorithmic feeds, into mutually exclusive accounts of what even happened. One audience’s outrage is another’s persecution story, and a third audience never hears of it at all. Scholars of what Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj called “the outrage industry” have shown that much of this media exists not to build shared understanding but to confirm a tribe’s existing convictions.
The consequence for Jefferson’s mechanism is grim. His public, at least, went quiet together. It could in principle be roused together — that “revulsion” he hoped might follow the pause. A fragmented public goes quiet separately, each faction subsiding into its own version of events, so that no unified constituency ever survives to demand reform. The quiet is no longer a single silence that might be broken by a single voice. It is a thousand smaller silences that can never again be gathered into one. That may be the genuinely new thing under the sun — not that we forget faster, but that we can no longer even agree on what it is we are forgetting.
The republic that remembered
And yet. If the story ended in the fragmentation of the feed, there would be nothing to do but mourn. It does not end there, because the historical record contains a countervailing pattern — rarer, harder-won, but unmistakable.
Sometimes public attention held. Sometimes a democratic people sustained its focus long enough to force durable change. And when it did, the reason was always the same, and it is the most important finding in this entire inquiry.
Attention never held on its own. Every time it held, someone had built a machine to carry the memory when individual attention flagged.
Consider the abolitionists. Public feeling against slavery spiked and subsided for decades — a rendition in Boston would convulse the city for a fortnight and then the fever would pass, exactly as Jefferson’s model predicts. What made abolition different from mere recurring outrage was not the intensity of any single moment. It was infrastructure. William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831 and the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833; within five years the society had roughly a quarter of a million members and had spawned hundreds of local chapters, a torrent of newspapers and pamphlets, lecture circuits, and petition campaigns aimed relentlessly at Congress. When opponents tried to kill the movement by engineering forgetting — Southern postmasters seized abolitionist mail, and in 1836 Congress passed a “gag rule” literally forbidding the House to discuss anti-slavery petitions — the machinery absorbed the blow and kept manufacturing attention anyway. The outrage was ordinary and would have faded. The organization was extraordinary, and it did not.
Consider the muckrakers. Diffuse public resentment of corporate abuse accomplished little until McClure’s Magazine built a delivery system for sustained attention.
- Ida Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil ran as a nineteen-part serial across two years, from 1902 to 1904 — and the serial form was itself the memory machine. A single article fades within one turn of Downs’s cycle; a nineteen-part investigation rebuilds attention every month, defeating the decay curve by design.
- Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle produced the Pure Food and Drug Act within months of publication in 1906.
- And Ida B. Wells, working nearly alone, compiled the statistics of lynching into pamphlets precisely because the mainstream press and the comfortable public wished to look away — one determined person constructing a record against an active national forgetting.
And consider a general, standing in the worst place on earth. In April 1945, days after American troops liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, Dwight Eisenhower walked its grounds. He did something that no one required of him. He ordered the Signal Corps to film everything; he commanded nearby troops to tour the camp and witness it; he summoned members of Congress and journalists to come and see for themselves. He explained exactly why in a cable to General Marshall: he had made the visit “deliberately, in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
Read that sentence against everything that has come before. Standing in the one place in human history that most demanded never to be forgotten, Eisenhower understood Jefferson’s thesis before it was a thesis. He knew that attention would fade, that first sensations pass, that some future public would be tempted to let even this slip into doubt. And he knew what to do about it — not to hope that people would remember, but to build something that would remember for them. The film, the witnesses, the congressmen, the record itself: a machine of memory, erected in anticipation of the forgetting he could already foresee.
The watch
I spent a good part of the 1960s inside a machine built for exactly this problem.
A submarine on patrol is an instrument for sustaining attention past the point where human attention fails. The Navy has known for a very long time that no man can hold a contact in his mind indefinitely. Concentration decays on a curve you can nearly draw. So the Navy did not ask for better men. It built the watch bill.
Four hours on, eight off, around the clock, for months. Every watch ends with a turnover — the man relieving you does not begin fresh, he begins where you left off, because you brief him and he repeats it back and then he says the words: I relieve you. And it is written down. The log is not a formality. The log is the reason a contact tracked at 0300 by an exhausted sonarman is still held at noon by a man who was asleep when it was acquired. No individual sustained that attention. The institution did.
Aboard USS Ray we spent long stretches holding contact on Soviet submarines. Nothing happened. That was the point — nothing happening was the outcome we were paid to produce, and producing it required that somebody be watching during every one of the thousands of hours when nothing was happening and no one felt like watching. The tedium was not a flaw in the design. The tedium was the design. Attention had been engineered into a structure precisely because it could not be relied upon in a man.
That is the whole answer to Jefferson. It’s been in front of us for years. Some know the answer and are adept at addressing it; some are clueless and enjoy the quietism.
A republic is a boat on a long patrol. The citizens are the crew, and the crew will get tired, because crews always do. The question was never whether we would get tired.
It is whether anybody built the watch bill.
We did build one. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was written by men who had watched Vietnam and understood exactly what Jefferson understood: that a public’s fury at a war fades faster than the war does, and that something institutional has to hold the question open after the marching stops. It was a memory machine, erected in anticipation of the forgetting.
Which brings us back to the four questions.
It is happening again
Here are the answers. Read them against Downs’s five stages, and watch a theory published in 1972 predict the year you are living in.
Pre-problem phase. Years of expert warning about the Iranian nuclear program, followed closely by a few hundred specialists and almost nobody else.
Alarmed discovery. American and Israeli aircraft strike Iran and kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and fires on American bases and allied capitals from Qatar to the Emirates to Saudi Arabia. Wall-to-wall coverage. Universal confidence that it will be brief.
Recognition of cost. The estimates start climbing and do not stop. By spring the Pentagon put the figure at twenty-five billion dollars. Within a fortnight it was twenty-nine. By summer the Defense Secretary was telling the Senate thirty-seven and a half billion, and reporting indicates the department’s internal number is two to three times that.
Read those figures as a slope rather than as a set. They are not drifting upward. They are climbing steeply, revised every few weeks, each revision larger than the last, with no one in a position to say where the curve levels off. And they are acknowledged to be incomplete — they exclude the cost of rebuilding damaged installations, which the Pentagon has said it cannot yet estimate.
Congress has meanwhile been asked for sixty-seven billion in supplemental funds on top of a defense budget request of $1.5 trillion, a forty-two percent increase in a single year and the sharpest since the Second World War. Gasoline is up about a dollar and a half a gallon since the war began. Commercial aviation fuel is up more than fifty percent. Every American who buys gasoline is paying for this war whether or not he can name it.
Decline of public interest. And here is the part that should stop the reader cold. In late spring the House of Representatives voted 215 to 208, with four Republicans crossing over, to direct the President to remove American forces from hostilities against Iran. Three weeks later the Senate did the same, 50 to 48, with four more. It was the first time in the half-century history of the War Powers Resolution that both chambers had ever done it. The story lasted about a day and a half. A great many Americans who follow the news closely are learning it here for the first time.
Post-problem twilight. Now. The ceasefire has been broken repeatedly, shipping in the Strait has been attacked, and the President has said he considers the truce over. The war is getting larger while its coverage gets smaller. It is second-page news.
So: what has it cost? At least thirty-seven and a half billion dollars by the most recent public accounting, probably two to three times that in fact, and rising fast enough that any figure printed here will be low by the time it is read — plus a dollar-fifty at the pump. Did Congress authorize it? No — Congress formally voted the other way, twice, and was ignored. Is the ceasefire holding? No. When did you last talk about it for more than a minute?
And one detail more, because it is the one that makes the mechanism visible. The Defense Secretary sat in that hearing room asking for money to fight an enemy the President has repeatedly called militarily defeated. Pressed on the contradiction, he conceded that Iran retains capabilities. Both statements are on the record. Both will stand. Neither will ever be reconciled — because reconciling them would require a public paying enough attention to insist, and the arithmetic of rational ignorance says we will not.
This is not an argument about whether the war is right. Reasonable citizens differ on that, and the case for the strikes has serious people making it. It is an argument about a republic that has stopped watching a war it is fighting, paying for, and has twice voted to end.
Madison’s line from that December is the schedule. The opposition, he wrote, pretends it is “too soon now to meddle with it, as they will hereafter pretend that it is then too late.”
Two centuries on, that is not a historical curiosity. That is a supplemental appropriation, moving through a Congress that already voted no, past a public that has moved on.
The watch was set in 1973.
Nobody stood it.
What we can do about it
The honest conclusion is not comforting: the citizen’s vigilance is a wasting asset. No one can sustain attention to everything, or even to much, and the arithmetic guarantees that most people, most of the time, will rationally look away. To demand permanent, universal civic attentiveness is to demand something no free people has ever supplied. Pretending otherwise helps no one.
But every counter-case in this essay points the same direction. The abolitionists, the muckrakers, the general at Ohrdruf, and every quartermaster who ever wrote a line in a deck log understood the same thing: because individual attention cannot be sustained, it must be institutionalized.
The remedy for a public that forgets is not a public that promises never to forget. That promise is always broken. The remedy is machinery that remembers on the public’s behalf when its attention, inevitably, moves on.
And machinery is built by people doing small specific things on a schedule. Not vigilance about everything. A watch, on one thing.
Pick one. This war, or something else entirely — the argument does not depend on which. Then:
- Stand a watch. Put a recurring hour on the calendar, monthly is enough, to check the status of the thing after the coverage has stopped. Write down what you find. That is a log, and a log kept by one citizen outlasts the outrage of ten thousand who have moved on.
- Fund a machine. Somebody is running the nineteen-part serial on your issue — a newsroom, an archive, a legal shop, a veterans’ organization, a historical society. That infrastructure runs on money and is currently starving. Pay for it on a recurring basis rather than in a burst, because the burst is quietism wearing a generous face.
- Make one turnover. Say the thing out loud to one person who has forgotten it, and give them specifics — the number, the date, the vote. Not an opinion. A brief. That is how a watch is relieved.
- Force one entry into the record. Write your representative and your senators and ask a question that has a factual answer and requires a written reply. What is the current legal authorization for this war? What is the total obligated cost to date? A letter demanding a number becomes a document. Documents outlive attention. That is the entire point. After a month, send the letter again. Repeat month to month.
And one that will cost you something: do it when the story is cold.
Anyone can be roused during the first sensations. The whole argument of this essay is that first sensations are worthless — they are precisely what the organized and the patient are waiting out. The letter that matters is the one sent months in, when the war has fallen to the second page, when nobody you know is talking about it, and there is no social reward whatsoever for caring.
That is the watch nobody wants. It is the only one that counts.
The warning
Two and a quarter centuries ago a man on a Virginia mountaintop handed his neighbors a pamphlet, watched their attention fail, and understood that the same thing would happen to his republic again and again, on a schedule he could almost feel.
He was right.
It has.
It is happening now, with a dollar figure on it and a casualty list and two votes of Congress lying where they fell.
But Jefferson could not have foreseen the last part, and it is the part that should keep us up at night.
He assumed the quiet was natural — a thing that simply happened to a tired people, like weather. He did not imagine that a free society would get good at it. That it would build, out of its own inventiveness and its own liberty, an apparatus of astonishing sophistication whose net effect is to shorten the interval between a nation’s alarm and its indifference.
Not by censorship.
By abundance.
Every improvement in how fast we can be told something is an improvement in how fast we can be finished with it. Seventeen and a half hours in 2013. Eleven point nine three years later. A war in a season.
We are not merely forgetting. We are getting better at forgetting, and we are doing it to ourselves, and each new instrument is sold to us as a way of knowing more.
That is the danger Jefferson named and could not have measured. Not that the republic will be argued out of its liberties. That it will be outlasted — by anyone organized enough, and patient enough, to wait for the quiet.
The quiet always comes.
The first sensations always pass.
The only question a republic ever really faces is what it has built to stand watch after they do.
* * * * *
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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