“Share this if you’re outraged!”

Unless you’re clicking on, posting and sharing only cute animal videos, chances are these days that, in this heady, strange election season, not a scroll through your Facebook feed goes by without an invitation to share your exasperation and disgust about this or that abomination du jour.

Another police shooting of an African American, quarterbacks kneeling to the national anthem, guns, the rich, the poor, polluters, tax laws, legality of certain drugs compared to the illegality of others and of course the latest uttering and/or past exploits of our beloved presidential candidates.

The human mind cannot, of course, sustain a perpetual state of moral outrage, but that’s exactly what all of the media around us asks of us, of our moral barometers. And it’s not just the latest social media meme of the moment (MoM), the mainstream media hourly exhibits its bias–bias toward, as Jon Stewart so aptly puts it, sensationalism and laziness.

Forget the political slant of a Fox or an MSNBC, or what you might believe to be a political agenda of the major networks. The much more insidiously dangerous bias is this one that shapes what is covered, how it’s covered and the depth of coverage–all in the service of more viewership, higher ratings and thereby greater revenues.

Clickbait didn’t start with social media, it was born from the micro-segmentation of the television media spectrum into hundreds of tiny points of pulsing info-data, jockeying for your attention. And they’ve learned, like an ADD child, that what’s really important and interesting is not doing their homework, but that bright shiny thing over there in the corner, whatever it is. Look at it!

The effect on us is stultifying. We comply. We click on the spectacular car crash story, not the senate hearings on tax policy story. And in the process we contribute to the numbing down of America and, perhaps even the faltering of our own democracy. (And even when we do muster enough outrage to share it with others, whatever we post lands, thanks to Facebook’s algorithms, on the pastures of the already converted.)

Our finite capacity for outrage and the media bias for sensationalism combine to form the potently toxic stew in which the current presidential campaign is served.

This is why at tonight’s first debate you are much more likely to hear questions about emails, Benghazi, pneumonia, sexist and racist comments, birtherism, the behavior of one candidate’s supporters and whether or not they are deplorable and even if they are should you call them that, whether Putin really thinks one candidate is brilliant. And so on.

What you are most likely not to hear are questions such as these:

• How would you redistribute the tax burden and why is your plan better than your opponents?
• We still have 20 million Americans without health insurance, what is you plan to get them insured and how is your plan different from your opponent’s?
• Does global warming exist, is it caused primarily by humans and what, if anything, should under the federal government do about it? What’s wrong with your opponents position?
• Economic inequality has been on the rise for the last 40 years. Is this a problem the federal government should concern itself with and if so, what is your plan to decrease economic inequality in the country? Explain how your plan is more likely to reduce inequality than your opponent’s is.

You get the idea. And the post-debate coverage will focus on the former as opposed to the latter, along with who helped themself and who hurt themself in the horse race.

This phenomenon is both tragic and dangerous. What I wrote about in early August? It’s happening, folks. Trump has largely been collared and leashed and is pretty much sticking to his teleprompter script. The polls are naturally tightening, and artificially tightening (because more polls of likely voters, as opposed to registered voters, are being published and Trump tends to fare better in these, probably because of a more motivated voter base).

On fivethirtyeight.com, Hillary Clinton’s probability of winning has tumbled from the low 80s to just the high 50s (57.8% as I write this). Trump has consistently led of late in polls in Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina. He has been exchanging the lead in Florida with Clinton in poll after poll since the end of August, and the most recent poll in Colorado has him up by a point. FL, NC, OH, NV and CO are all he needs.

So more and more, this race is looking like 2000, when the country chose….well, elected, a dolt over a more experienced policy wonk, despite a booming economy. The debates were the gateway to that victory where a large portion of the electorate looked at George Bush and basically came to the conclusion, “well, he didn’t seem to fuck up too much and I like him more than the other guy.”

Fasten your seatbelts, kids. It’s going to be a bumpy ride–tonight and beyond, but policy agendas won’t even get a place in the backseat. You should be outraged.