In 2024, one day after the shocking assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign stop near Butler, Pennsylvania, Bernie Sanders went on NBC and said something curious. “Politics should be kind of boring,” he said. “Our healthcare system is dysfunctional. How do we fix it? Well, it’s kind of a boring discussion. We have massive income and wealth inequality. Well, maybe a boring discussion: should three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society?”
That Sanders would be boring in this tense moment and in precisely the way that he has been lampooned for, all while claiming that politics should be boring, is just another example of his political singularity. His statement was also, in retrospect, an unwitting commentary on the state of left politics today.
While the Left has historically been anchored in political organizations and unions, today’s Left is strongest in a different set of institutions. Bungacast host Alex Hochuli has aptly named the activist core of the Left today “MANGOs”—people in the media, arts, academia, and NGOs. Not all left-wing activists fit the description, of course, but a significant portion of them do, and their embeddedness in these institutions gives rise to a specific set of incentives. Left opinions are circulated through savvy media entrepreneurs, hoping for clicks and subscriptions as much as the next, and through organizations that can be quite insulated from popular opinion. For this reason, there is an understandable desire to make being on the Left as “interesting” as possible, but in a way that—consciously or not—resonates primarily with coastal blue-city dwellers.
In the process of realizing this desire, lefty rags, Substackers, podcasters, and streamers have produced a library of content demarcating the left opinion on every topic under the sun (including Thanksgiving!), which often take the form of provocative “takes” that, again, are interesting to MANGOs, with their eclectic and rootless sensibilities, but simultaneously end up somewhere between odd and alienating to most other people. These in turn get absorbed into the cultural ether and eventually become political liabilities for a Left that would be a far more effective force were it not for the persistent maximalism that I’ve critiqued elsewhere in these pages.
So when Sanders said that politics should be boring, he could have just as easily been making a grander statement about this particular conjuncture. But, to slightly modify this sentiment, it’s not simply that politics should be boring; it’s that socialist politics should be boring.
Politics as such, the politics of the ruling class, needs, in fact, to be quite entertaining as a way of dressing up the raw, anti-human corruption at its heart—Rousseau’s “garland of flowers over our iron chains.” The incensed talking head, showmanship in committee hearings, attempted assassinations, seedy affairs, public bathroom goings-on, “Of course he knew what that tattoo signified”—that’s all politics! Not in the narrow sense of elections and legislative fights, but in the broader sense that Americans have come to know the term. The kinds of things people will mention in casual conversation before stopping themselves short in disgust, and then saying, “Ugh, let’s not talk about politics.”
So the fuller version of Sanders’s statement would be something more like: “While contemporary American politics is a thick mixture of the titillating and the repellant, a politics that actually aimed to make life better for the vast majority of people would, by contrast, be quite boring.” And as his chosen appellation for that better politics is democratic socialism, it seems worth drawing the natural conclusion that fighting for socialism is (or should be) a fundamentally boring endeavor.
As Sanders indicated on NBC, a discussion of the rationality of Medicare for All or socialized medicine is not an exciting one. It involves the administrative bloat of private insurance companies, the tapeworm effect of insurance costs on businesses, the monopsony purchasing power of the government, and other topics that are the conversational equivalent of watching paint dry. The same is true of any plank of the Sanders platform, even a topic as infuriating as wealth inequality. You can only say that “X number of people having the same amount of wealth as Y percent of the population” before you get into the nitty gritty of progressive taxation, and the emotional swell of rage at injustice subsides into cold calculations.
One might grant me this point that a discussion of the details of socialist policy can often be quite boring but still believe that the fight for socialist politics should get the blood going. Undoubtedly there are moments of excitement in the life of anyone on the Left, but in a time of broad defeat for working-class politics, either those moments are fleeting or delusions of grandeur have taken over. Besides, much of one’s time on the Left is spent in endless meetings—some productive, some not so much, many where people complain there are too many meetings. Outside of meetings, when people finally get to “doing the work,” monotony again is the norm. Organizing, whether it is rank-and-file organizing or salting or canvassing, entails a lot of going through spreadsheets and having repetitive conversations. It can be gratifying to do boring work in concert with others, but this does not detract from the fact that the work itself is essentially plodding.
There are some leftists who, sickened with the typical doldrums, take on a more revolutionary attitude and start talking of direct action. Their justification for doing so is that the “meeting leftists” are complacent and compromised, unwilling to make the bold moves that true anti-capitalist action requires. In reality, they are just unwilling to tolerate the boredom that collective action requires. They are engaged in an activity as noble as breaking off a conversation to scroll through your feed on your phone.
I know that the instinct here is to grate against such claims, under the notion that the cause of the Left must be sold to people as an inspiring thing to be a part of. Though the desire to inject “fun” into the Left often comes from the same place as Kamala Harris wanting to find “joy” in her campaign, it’s perfectly understandable that people need social events in an antisocial age. And maybe there are organizers out there who are truly jazzed every day doing list work and having one-on-ones.
My point here, like Sanders’s, is more strategic: at this particular moment, when everyone is seeking short hits of gratification on social media, and primed to see the actual stakes of left politics in television shows like Andor or films like One Battle After Another, it’s worth defending a deflationary account of life on the Left. It’s better to say that socialism is boring than to always dress it up under the attention-grabbing incentives of the left mediasphere. Worse, the latter more often than not involves unflattering complications. It’s apparent to most people that living under the churn of capital is immiserating and degrading, and that people should have healthcare and housing as a right. Trying to make these things inspiring within the narrow confines of the MANGO mindset makes them less rather than more appealing to the majority of people.
Not everyone can be the exemplary labor leader John Brophy, who was so boring that even close friends reported wincing before going into long meetings with him. But we can try. Deleting social media is low-hanging fruit. Pitiless self-censorship whenever the urge to petty moral condemnation rears its head is always good. But the key, to my mind, is cleanly separating entertainment from politics. Watch sports, read the news, enjoy shows, hang out with friends, pontificate loudly about your opinions in a crowded bar, but don’t confuse any of these activities for the long-range commitment of socialist politics and the inevitably boring nature of much of what that involves. Indeed, it’s a positive good to find entertainment elsewhere, so that it is not expected of political activity. The socialist project is certainly meaningful, but it’s a long, frustrating, vexing, monotonous slog. And in his talent for persistent repetition, Sanders still—boringly—guides the way for socialist politics in the twenty-first century.
Benjamin Y. Fong is the co-editor of Rustin’s Challenge and keeps a Substack on labor and logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.