What is happening here? It’s simple: The Democrats have FOBO, or Fear of a Better Option…
The first thing to understand about FOBO is that it’s everywhere. Most Americans have slowly awoken to the reality that they live in a world of overwhelming choice. Thanks to Amazon, Seamless, Tinder and Netflix, whether you’re shopping for everyday household items, ordering food, dating or choosing what to watch, you are drowning in options. Making even mundane decisions has become incredibly time-consuming, and stressful, because of the piles of perfectly acceptable possibilities at your disposal. As a result, you spend precious time and energy poring over all of your possible choices only to procrastinate well past the point when you should have decided. You also increase the chance that you will never decide at all: FOBO is the reason that we live in an age that David Brooks calls the “Golden Age of Bailing.” If you just can’t bring yourself to commit, you are prone to never pick anything at all.
Over the past several years, I’ve studied how FOBO has gradually infiltrated daily life, from choosing how you spend your time to how you run your business. Now, the 2020 election cycle has provided the ideal conditions for FOBO to spread to politics.
