If you’ve seen one day of congressional testimony from Jerome Powell, you’ve seen them all.

That’s an unfortunate state of affairs. The whole idea behind hauling people before Congress is to promote accountability, or at least the appearance of it — to give the public confidence in the idea that unelected officials are ultimately accountable to elected officials who are in turn accountable to voters.

Of course, it’s hardly that simple. Voters don’t trust Congress (just 18% approved of how US lawmakers as a whole are handling their job in the latest Gallup poll), and I doubt even one in five Americans could tell you anything about the Fed’s mandate, which suggests that by and large, proceedings like Tuesday’s are pointless.

To the extent that’s accurate, it’s hardly unique to hearings involving Powell. If the subject at hand requires any sort of analysis or reflection, Americans would sooner inject bleach than pay attention. In that sense, voters are more disengaged than ever.

But thanks to one of the most acutely polarized political environments in the short history of the republic, voters can be switched on in an instant by short video clips and soundbites featuring their favorite politicians reading from the identity politics script in a bid to tap the nation’s vast reserves of rage capital. In that sense, Americans have scarcely ever been more engaged.

The result: Nobody learns anything and nothing is accomplished on days like Tuesday, because rather than fostering substantive discussions with witnesses, lawmakers instead compete for likes and retweets with combative questions designed specifically to reinforce already entrenched biases among a nation of social media addicts who, when they’re not busy trying to make ends meet or watching their favorite Will Ferrell movie for the eight hundredth time, are committed partisans.

Do note: I’m not suggesting this is a new phenomenon. Congressional hearings are combative, partisan affairs by nature. What I am suggesting, though, is that in the era of social media, short attention spans and rage politics, it’s worse.

Tuesday was no exception. You only needed two exchanges to understand why these hearings are a waste of everyone’s time. The first was between Powell and Republican Mike Rounds, who said that in his view, America has “long been feeling the effects of a policy-induced inflation resulting from the decisions of the Biden administration.”

Rounds was referring specifically to energy policy, and he did make a few good points in that regard, but any and all well-meaning efforts to get at the heart of the issues were subjugated Tuesday to political sniping, which is why Rounds’s ultimate question to Powell, a fellow Republican, was this: “Wouldn’t it be fair to assess that a lot of the inflation that we’ve seen may very well be due to policy decisions by this administration?”

It was a deliberately asinine question. Powell couldn’t answer it if he wanted to. In a sense (not in a strict sense, but in a sense), it’d be illegal for Powell to answer such a question. He’s not supposed to be a political actor, and he surely can’t be one on live television. “Senator, it’s not our job to point fingers,” Powell told Rounds. There was more to the exchange, but nobody cared, least of all Rounds, because he already had his social media soundbite.

The second exchange came between Powell and Elizabeth Warren, whose line of questioning was so predictable that you needed to double check the timestamp and date on the video clips, and verify using Powell’s tie color (a pleasant purple) to be sure you weren’t watching last year’s reel.

“The Fed’s goal is to slow inflation and your tool, raising interest rates, is designed to slow the economy and throw people out of work,” Warren began.

Let me just stop right there. As regular readers will happily and loudly attest, I’m a progressive-leaning individual. I’m also someone who’s generally applauded Warren for all manner of things over the years. However, since 2020 (give or take), she’s become a caricature of herself, which would be forgivable if I thought it were due mostly to the aging process. We all become caricatures of our younger selves in old age, but that’s not what seems to be happening with Warren. Her transformation into a more abrasive version of herself seems wholly deliberate.

It’s through that lens that I view her exchanges with Powell (who she’s ludicrously referred to as a “dangerous man”), and it’s with that in mind that I’m compelled to chastise Warren for deliberately stoking the very same kind of divisive politics that she and her fellow Democrats so readily (and so accurately) deride as corrosive to the nation’s democracy.

The Fed is a lot of things, many of them bad, but Powell isn’t trying to “throw people out of work.” That’s a ridiculous mischaracterization and she knows exactly what she’s doing when she employs it.

Hilariously, Warren and Rounds both suggested Powell doesn’t have the right tools and that inflation may be beyond his control. Rounds blamed the Biden administration’s energy policies and Warren blamed (in part) “price gouging,” but both worried the Fed might be unable to accomplish its inflation goals.

Warren cited the median unemployment projection from the December SEP on the way to accusing Powell of deliberately engineering two million job losses across the economy. “It’s not an intended consequence,” Powell told Warren, something she’s far too smart not to know (hold that thought).

“If you could speak to the two million hard-working people who have decent jobs today who you’re planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them,” Warren wondered.

I can’t emphasize this enough: That’s maddeningly disingenuous on Warren’s part and it’s even more so considering how intelligent she is. Warren has doubtlessly done enough homework over the years to understand precisely what the Fed’s SEP is — and what it isn’t. She knows full well that characterizing the Fed’s unemployment projection as a “plan to get” two million people “fired” is pure, unadulterated demagoguery.

In addition, Warren knows the Fed’s unemployment projection from the SEP is widely viewed by almost all economists as far too optimistic — dangerously Pollyanna-ish, even. In other words, the overwhelming consensus among economists, including many Democrats, is that Powell is trying too hard to prevent people from getting fired, not the other way around.

Powell tried to be patient with Warren, but ultimately he tossed up one hand and asked, “Would working people be better off if we just walk away from our jobs and inflation remains 5%, 6%?”

That was a bit of a straw man, as I pointed out in a (rare) social media post. As I’ve mentioned here previously, the question isn’t about whether “5%, 6%” inflation is tolerable. The question is whether working people might be better served by 3.5% or 4% inflation if it means more robust wage gains, higher nominal growth and a more vibrant economy that serves the interests of everyone as opposed to the more narrow interests of those who’ve disproportionately benefited over the past three decades.

“K-shaped” inflation is a real thing, of course, but the track record for Main Street over the period we associate with low and stable inflation is very bad, suggesting that somewhere along the way, the tradeoffs are suboptimal for working people.

Powell’s logic faux pas (committed under duress) aside, Warren’s line of questioning was difficult to countenance. And it got considerably more confrontational the longer she went on. Powell tried to remind her that 4.5% unemployment would count as a very good outcome on any historical lookback, to which she replied, “Explain that to the two million families who are gonna be out of work.”

And so it was that another opportunity for America to learn something about an issue that affects nearly everyone was lost in the thick fog of partisan warfare.

Oh, well. At least traders got some incremental information about Powell’s thinking on the prospects for a return to a half-point rate-hike cadence. I suppose the day wasn’t a total loss.