Alison Beyea is a senior distinguished lecturer of public policy at Colby College and the executive director of Colby’s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs.

Over the last decade, something fundamental about politics has shifted.

When I became executive director of the ACLU of Maine in 2014, we were learning to navigate social media; it hadn’t yet become the absolute center of political life. Cable news, local papers, and in-person events still shaped a lot of how people understood politics.

A few years later, when images of children in cages at the southern border surfaced, the pictures were still able to break through. They led the news, dominated conversation, and moved people into the streets to protest.

Today, I’m not sure those same images would stand a chance in a feed crowded with clips, memes, and hot takes. Our attention is so fractured.

We aren’t just dealing with more content; we’re dealing with content engineered to keep us emotionally on edge. We’re living in the era of what I am calling “dopamine politics.”

Scientists tell us that social media is engineered to deliver constant dopamine hits. Over time, we need bigger, faster hits just to feel anything. Recently, “rage bait” has become a go-to phrase in politics — even earning the word of the year by Oxford — and economist Robert Reich just wrote a Substack about how content is designed to make us furious because anger drives clicks. He’s right, but this phenomenon goes beyond rage.

The platforms—X, Tiktok, Meta—don’t care whether we’re delighted, scared, amused, or enraged. They’re engineered to give us constant dopamine hits.

That same dynamic is now shaping politics. The politicians who break through now aren’t just good communicators; they’re the ones who can trigger an emotional spike in under 15 seconds.

The quick clip, the sharp insult, the meme that lands instantly — anything that makes us feel something, the good, the bad or the ugly. Communication has always mattered in politics, but this is different. Technology has changed, and our brains have changed right along with it. That’s the era we’re in.

Successful politicians in 2025 deliver great dopamine hits, across the spectrum. Think Zohran Mamdani, Gavin Newsom, Majorie Taylor Greene, Graham Platner, and, the King of Dopamine, President Donald Trump.

The problem is that democracy doesn’t run on dopamine spikes. Strong democracies depend on strong conversations. A real conversation doesn’t reward you every 15 seconds. It asks you to stay with an idea long enough to understand it, and with a disagreement long enough to see the human being on the other side.

A conversation may surprise you, but it unfolds at a human pace. There’s no instant payoff, no algorithm feeding you emotional hits — just the slow work of listening, responding, and sometimes changing your mind.

That slow work is exactly what democracy requires: the patient, often tedious work of building consensus, persuading people who disagree with you, and finding compromises that a community can live with.

Conversation is what democracy needs, but we repeatedly hear that interest in real conversation is gone — especially among young people who are too online to pay attention.

Let’s not give up so easily.

In my experience, young people are particularly hungry for something different — a forum away from phones that feels like a detox from the constant dopamine of politics.

At Colby College, where I now run the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, we host a weekly series, “In the News.”

Every Wednesday night, over 150 students show up for an hour-long, student-driven conversation with journalists, politicians, and policymakers from perspectives across the political spectrum. Students ask the questions. They push. They disagree. And, to the disbelief of many, they keep their technology in their pockets and go analog for sixty minutes of conversation and thought.

The era of the podium lecture may be over. But there is a wide space between a TikTok clip and a long-winded speech, and that’s where democracy can still breathe. At Colby, “In the News” is our effort to claim that space: fast, substantive, student-centered, entirely Q&A. And it’s working.

“In the News” has become a pillar of civic life on campus and an example of how to hold attention for longer than the length of an Instagram reel.

We can’t compete with the internet. But in Maine, our schools, libraries, campuses and town halls, we can choose to create spaces that reward curiosity instead of outrage.

Dopamine politics may define the era we live in, but it doesn’t have to define us. Dopamine hits don’t last. Strong conversations do. If we want a democracy that endures, we have to choose dialogue—again and again.