A frequent lament of pundits and politicians alike is that the American people (and some of their elected officials) refuse to “focus on the issues.” At the same time, however, such critics like to attack the public for investing too much time and concern in what they call “fringe issues.”

These two lines of attack reveal implicit assumptions on the part of elites. First, they (correctly) posit the existence of legitimate and illegitimate political concerns. Second, the labeling of some issues as “fringe” suggests that among the authentic issues there exists a hierarchy of legitimacy: issues on the “fringe” apparently have some legitimacy, but not enough to warrant the attention of serious observers. Third, public attention given to  fringe issues consumes time and attention that ought to be focused on the questions elites consider the “real” issues.

During elections, it is common to hear discussion of where a candidate “stands on the issues.” But which issues do voters mean? Presumably, it’s the legitimate issues—the ones that matter. But what determines that? For want of any official determination, we are left with a kind of arbitration board: the national news media. In a sane media environment, journalists would give the most attention to the issues that most concern the majority of America’s citizens. But we are not in a sane media environment.

In truth, referencing “the issues” is a media strategy to create the illusion that American society has already reached consensus about what the legitimate issues of concern are. But have we? Much of the political turmoil of the past 10 years can be understood as a conflict over the media’s attempt to preempt the dialogue on what matters. The national news media dictates what the legitimate issues are, and the American public challenges their right to do so. When voters are energized by a matter that the media considers a “fringe issue” —or worse, a “nonissue” —outlets attack citizens as unqualified to judge the real priorities of the nation.

The examples are legion. Around 2015, the media, leftist activists, and elites colluded to elevate “trans rights” as a legitimate, pressing issue—even though fewer than 1 percent of Americans identify as transgendered. As a result, they successfully conjured into existence “drag queen story hours,” “trans kids,” and biological men in women’s athletic competitions. Many Americans—far more than the 1 percent who make up the transgendered community—saw these developments as legitimate and outrageous issues in their own right. But as popular resistance to the trans-ification of public life grew, the media reflexively dismissed their concern as a fringe issue. After all, they say, only a small proportion of libraries host drag queen story hours. And the number of “trans kids” is so small as to make conservative fixation on the question “weird.” The vast majority of girls’ sports teams still consist solely of biological females. What’s the big deal, then?

As they dismiss these concerns, they’re banking that Americans won’t notice the obvious. That is, the media advanced the trans agenda as an issue by emphasizing transgendered people’s unique vulnerability as a tiny minority. Then, when their political victories generated public opposition, they rejected citizens’ concerns about them as a fixation on fringe issues—precisely on the premise that these reforms affect a tiny minority. Thus, the media is free to manufacture concern about nonissues of their choosing, and to dismiss public opposition to their efforts just as arbitrarily. In short, popular concern is never legitimate when the problem is small. This allows the problem to grow until it’s large enough that it can’t be reversed—at which point the media deems public opposition irrelevant because solving the problem would affect too many people to be practicable.

Sometimes, however, elites invert the dynamic of issue-production. Consider the emphasis placed on the issue of illegal immigration by the 2016 Trump campaign. Millions and millions of people had entered the nation illegally over the previous decade—numbers that would dwarf the number of trans people in America. Much of the media’s early disdain for Trump stemmed from the fact that he was giving oxygen to a matter that they insisted was a nonissue. There was no border crisis, they insisted. And even if there was, such a large number had entered illegally that nothing could be done. So why address it?

Much to media elites’ chagrin, Trump’s political success and popular support transformed what they deemed the “nonissue” of illegal immigration into a “fringe issue.” Outlets begrudgingly began to cover it. But the focus of the stories wasn’t the massive numbers of people entering the country illegally. Nor was it the many Americans who demanded action to address the issue. Instead, the coverage focused on this or that illegal immigrant whose rights allegedly had been violated, or on the collective mistreatment of illegal immigrants as a tiny, embattled minority.

When Biden took office and opened the floodgates at the border, the media worked hard to reclassify border crossings as a nonissue. After all, the aliens’ rights were no longer being violated. As Trump’s second term commenced and he pursued the problem much more aggressively, we now see that the media has decided that illegal immigration has become a legitimate issue. But, to the media, the issue’s legitimacy stems from the inhumanity of deporting Venezuelan gang members or revoking the visas of some activist students—not from the cultural and economic disruptions millions of American citizens now insist are caused by the invasion of these illegal immigrants.

There are, of course, many more issues the media has manufactured, disregarding the real priorities of citizens. In turn, many of Americans’ real concerns have been relegated to the status of nonissues or fringe issues by this same methodology. True public opinion is either bypassed entirely or public opinion is generated and manipulated where it did not exist prior to this sort of coordination by the media and elites. Remember when a newly elected Barack Obama passed a sweeping transformation of our healthcare system at a time when roughly 85 percent of Americans were satisfied with their healthcare?

At bottom, the question is who, in a democratic society, should determine “the issues.”

Unfortunately, as things stand, the answer isn’t very democratic. The demos have very little power to determine which issues get attention. The corporate media’s saturation of the public discourse with elite and niche concerns overrides the legitimate power of the public to identify the most pressing problems. The very fact that we must contend with terms such as “nonissue” and “fringe issue” demonstrates the ways rhetoric is deployed to marginalize concerns that enjoy organic popular support. After all, if popular concerns are genuinely nonissues, why would they be popular and in need of media attention for recategorization? They wouldn’t. The reason those concerns get coverage is precisely because they are legitimate issues in the eyes of many Americans and our elites don’t think they should be. Thus, every time an issue is referred to as fringe, you can be sure that it has risen to a level of concern that it requires media attention—if only to ensure that no one bothers to do anything to address it.

Where does this leave us? Fixing America will require that citizens—not a tiny minority of journalists and politicos—assert their right to determine which issues are legitimate. Returning that power to the people will require organizing the issues in a new way. We need to stop falling into the trap of talking about “real issues,” “fringe issues,” and “nonissues.” Instead, we might speak in terms of “organic issues” and “manufactured issues.”

The organic issues are the ones that large populations of Americans demonstrably care about: immigration, jobs, deindustrialization. The “manufactured issues” are the trivial, boutique matters that saturate the national dialogue—matters that are of genuine concern only to a tiny minority of elites, but are nowhere on the radar of average Americans without the media running interference. Trans rights, climate change, and the Russo-Ukrainian war? All manufactured issues. The media’s airing of these issues is a way to starve the public’s actual priorities—priorities the elites see as misplaced—of the oxygen they need to generate political action.

Public opinion polling is one way to determine what counts as an organic issue. But polls can also be a vehicle for distorting and misrepresenting popular sentiment. The ultimate poll—an election result—is a better indicator of public sentiment. We were assured by the media—the same people who dictate the issues —that 2024 would be a very close race. It wasn’t. Why?

Well, one campaign addressed the organic issues while the other addressed manufactured issues. Trump talked about immigration, jobs, inflation, crime, the administrative state, and the perversion of public culture. Harris, on the hand, talked about climate change, trans rights, Ukraine, and “vibes”—while telling us that worries over inflation amounted to a nonissue. When one side refuses to allow itself to be manipulated and dictated to about what constitute legitimate issues, the people naturally respond with their support. This, more than anything else, has been the lesson of the Trump years.