One doesn’t have to go back far to find a time when most people would not consider a run for Congress because it was boring.

Who wants to sit around in committee meetings listening to people drone on about policy matters, and why would anyone want to travel back and forth every week to Washington , anyway? People did it out of a sense of duty or a call to public service. Others saw the potential of power. Nevertheless, most times, for the people who ran and won, the institution of Congress shaped them as legislators and as the people who provided oversight of the executive branch of government.

With the advent of C-SPAN, 24-hour cable news, the internet, and, finally, social media, Congress is less an institution and more the ultimate reality show. Why do people watch reality shows? The same reason we slow down to look at the result of a car crash. Human nature causes us to be fascinated by conflict and tragedy.

When the House voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) walked outside the Capitol, and a swarm of reporters and television cameras surrounded him. And that is what he wanted above all else. As he said, “If you aren’t making news, you’re not governing.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spends the bulk of her time emoting on social media, saying insipid things on television (such as recently blaming sanctions on the Venezuelan migration crisis instead of the despotic regime of President Nicolas Maduro), and then complains about getting criticized and engages in a victim complex by saying she’s getting “harassed.”

All of it is one giant feedback loop. Gaetz doesn’t care about the debt. He doesn’t care about spending. If he did, he’d spend more time with tax experts, entitlement experts, and budget experts, figuring out a way to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. But doing so would require actual work. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t care about immigrants or the border. It’s merely a vehicle for attention, as she doesn’t offer solutions.

The dysfunction in Congress, particularly in the House, where most legislation gets drafted in the speaker’s office and not committees, makes it alluring for people who would rather use the institution as a platform to raise their profiles, resulting in social media engagement and television coverage. It works in a sense as their high profiles make it easy for them to raise money, particularly from small-dollar donors.

Unfortunately, all it does is create a legislative body that is more divided and much more partisan, making it difficult to get any real legislative achievements. Gaetz criticized McCarthy for not using individual appropriations bills to pass a budget, but he did. The problem was that people such as Gaetz would torpedo those spending bills with outrageous demands — only to turn around and blame McCarthy for not getting it done and having to pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down.

Unfortunately, the problem starts not with the people in the office but with the voters, particularly the primary voters. It’s primary voters who kicked Eliot Engel, a reliable progressive Democrat, out of office and replaced him with Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who excels in buffoonery, including pulling a fire alarm to prevent a vote on a short-term spending bill from taking place.

The representatives who use Congress as a platform to build a brand get sent there by voters who don’t care all that much about policy either — except they want the opposite of whatever the other party wants. They want “fighters” and those who will “push back” on the media and “take on the special interests” and “the establishment.”

It’s all performative, and there are no signs it will get better anytime soon.

Jay Caruso is a writer and editor residing in West Virginia.