The politics of tedium

A personal bugbear of mine in politics is tedious people. I'm sure you can all think of a whole lot of different varieties of them: there's the activist that clogs up organising meetings by talking loudly and at length about their pet issue, which is almost always something completely irrelevant to the purpose of the meeting. There's the member of parliament who repeats, for some reason, slogans about fiscal responsibility when we're in the middle of a prolonged recession and our infrastructure and healthcare systems are falling apart (this, of course, is happening in a country with a very low debt-to-GDP ratio, so the case for borrowing to invest is about as strong as it ever gets). There are the media pundits who persist in bringing up points about trans people in sport and how that hurts the electability of the left, completely oblivious to the fact that trans people are currently being driven out of public life entirely (there is an argument to be made that they want to see that happen, and some of them must, but there are also a disturbing number of media people who simply don't seem to have registered that this is actually the case). And then there are, currently in power in the USA, the people who keep saying things about their leader that are completely detached from reality in ways that aren't even interesting or funny (Trump in 2016 was at least a bit witty: right now, not only is the state apparatus full of Nazis, their attempts to be funny somehow make you want to fall asleep while they're actively in the process of committing atrocities).

All of these species of people, despite their wildly diverging politics, have one thing in common: they trigger the "my God, you're saying this again? You're full of shit" response. It's not that they're boring (though they absolutely are), that they won't listen to any external input (though they won't) or that they lack any level of political imagination (though they very much lack that). It's that they do all of these things at the same time, to the extent that you'd think from the outside that they're completely unresponsive to any external input. Talking to them is like talking at a chatbot: whether they're friendly to you or outright rude, there is no hope in the world of actually influencing or engaging with them in a meaningful way, and they will mostly say the same thing regardless of environment: I wholly think that a lot of them, if they were arrested and thrown into prison, will still find themselves repeating their scripted lines, completely unable to see that the situation has changed at all. These are, in short, some of the most tedious and exhausting people in the world, and right now, they seem to control most of our politics across the board.

The striking thing is that, despite its prevalence, tedium is almost universally a predictor of bad politics. Even taking the moral elements of "staring-dead-eyed while repeating from your script that good things aren't possible and the best thing we can do politically is make other people suffer more than you" out of the equation, this flavour of deeply tedious politics is awful at actually achieving its stated aims (which is usually some flavour of "be pragmatic to achieve political power, and then something. Not sure what"). It fails to mobilise or empower people, which even a movement with mass appeal has to be able to do for some group of people. It fails to actually improve anyone's lives in a meaningful way or, heaven forfend, give anyone a reason to support the organisation's policies. Far too often, the main achievement of tedious politics winds up being that it gives the organisation's political enemies ammunition. And yet, despite it clearly failing in ways that we can see over a wealth of organistions, these organisations persist in their grey, tedious political positions even while their organisations fall apart and are replaced by outright fascists. Clearly this phenomenon bears further examination.

Why does tedium predict bad politics so well?

On the face of it, you'd not think there'd be any particular reason that politics that are expressed in a tedious way would be more likely to be bad. Lots of things about politics are, after all, quite boring and unfashionable: with the exception of a few people whom we should all be grateful for, for example, nobody really finds figuring out the details of a resource consenting process to be particularly compelling work. Things merely being boring, then, wouldn't seem to constitute them being politically bad: resource consenting, tax policy, transport planning and all the other hundreds of things that are profoundly uninteresting but make the society around us function are, after all, pretty damned important. Tedium, however, is a particular species of boredom: Nathaniel Bailey's definition of it as being "wearisome by continuance" comes to mind here, and most of the boring-but-important things, interestingly, don't meet this bar.

To describe politics or political stances as "tedious", to my mind, is to describe the kind of politics where a person repeats the same tired old stances over and over and over again, heedless of any differences in context over time, space or the people they're speaking to. The kind of Palestinian Liberation activist who is so set in their tropes that they repeat exactly the same shit as they always do when a Hannukah event in Sydney turns into a mass shooting, the centre-left politician that stresses austerity, fiscal responsibility and not spending or doing too much even when their country is in the middle of a deep, intractable recession, the people who persist in attempting to discuss "trans people in sports" when most anglosphere governments seem intent on driving us out of public life entirely... these are all species of tedium in politics, united, first and foremost, in their utter unwillingness to actually think.

Phrased in this way, the reason that tedious politics are so often bad politics becomes quite obvious: tedium indicates an unwillingness to think and a complete lack of flexibility or ability to adjust their political stances and tactics to the situation at hand. It's a failure of empiricism; a failure of the ability to take in new information from outside and integrate it into a worldview.

The converse of this, is, of course, that politics that's not tedious usually has some level of value to it. There are two fairly consistent examples of this, even: old-school conservatism of the Burkean variety on the one hand, and classical libertarianism on the other. Looking at libertarianism first, I spent many of my university years in frenzied debate with a whole lot of classical libertarians, and I don't think I ever found them tedious. Exhausting, yes. Foolish, yes. "Why the hell would you think that?", yes. But I never found them tedious as such. Now, classical libertarianism was, fundamentally, a fucking stupid ideology: when the ideology has actually been put into practice, it tends to end with things like a massive increase in bear attacks in the community. It really fails to take into account the sheer amount of co-ordination and co-operation that a modern society takes to function, and honestly, it mostly leans into the teenage boy "nobody should be able to tell me what to do" attitude, which is appropriate for teenage boys, but not so much for grown-ass adults. It didn't help that the ideology attracted a lot of bad-faith adherents: people who wanted to use libertarian ideology to cover for bigotry and who were sheltered more than they should by the wider movement.

And yet, for all that, there was some value in what they said. Right now the more serious elements of the trans rights movement, for example, are making what are fundamentally libertarian arguments. The state should not, for example, coerce civil society organisations into discriminating against trans women or legislate to ban medical care that should, when all is said and done, be between a patient and their doctor. These are all sound libertarian stances based on sound libertarian principles. The state does not and should not have the right to tell me what to call myself, how to dress or prohibit me from taking estrogen if that's what I want to do (in fact, the reluctance of New Zealand doctors to prescribe progesterone in itself feels like a violation of my freedoms). I should be able to do all of these things, importantly, even if they fuck up my life: it is not the government's responsibility or right to stop me from doing that. Similarly, while I think a lot of the classical libertarian stance on free speech and free expression left a lot to be desired, it's hard to disagree with much of it in 2025, with censorship closing in everywhere and free expression being under threat more than it ever was. I should have the right to commission Shadowheart hentai from an artist on BlueSky and pay them for it without worrying about the state punishing either of us, and payment processors should not have the de facto right to impose their morality on us unilaterally. Finally, there aren't many libertarians around these days: for the most part, they've either gone full MAGA (these are the bad-faith libertarians) or they've moderated out into some flavour of civil society liberal (the ones that engaged in moderately good faith). The fact that there were good-faith libertarians who were able to change suggests that as stupid, morally odious and foolish as the libertarian movement often was, there was some value to it. And, as expected, they were many things, but they were not tedious (in fact, the movement was often altogether too interesting).

Burkean conservatism turned out to be valuable from quite the opposite direction. I am fundamentally a person who sees the world through the lens of systems, environments and all the things that shape human behaviour in broadly predictable ways. I've not, in general, been a fan of personal virtue or morality as driving forces in human behaviour, and this has, historically, put me in conflict with a lot of more traditional conservative figures (like Burke). There are, obviously, good reasons for this: the conservative arguments tend to get recycled until they come out of the mouths of centre-right politicians explaining why it's important that the unemployed starve because if we don't, we somehow won't learn "personal responsibility" or some shit. Given that employment is, more than anything, a factor of the state of the economy and (for a lot of people) the ambient levels of bigotry in society, this is obviously horseshit and cruel to boot. There are half-a-hundred other ways in which traditional conservatism is awful, and fighting against it is pretty necessary. And yet, the best forms of traditional conservatism have not, historically, been tedious, even when they were very wrong. Burke writes intelligently, coherently and poses us liberals and leftists with some real challenges: he also, in his political life, was consistent with his beliefs even when it caused him real pain. GK Chesterton's politics were well-thought-out and cogent (even when they were wrong), and I remain of the belief that there is something to Chesterton's fence, even when it keeps getting misused.

And as we have it, it seems that the classical conservatives once again turned out to be right in some important ways: once again, there was some value in what they had to say, even when it was mostly wrong. In particular, the traditional conservative stress on people in power being held to higher standards than people who don't hold power, and on the importance of virtue and social shame to holding a society together, turned out to be really rather important. We really do have an issue in our societies with people engaging in transparent, obvious, shameless vice in public: the Epstein files, in particular, really show that the people we have in power are obviously unconstrained by any sense or decency to speak of. Expecting the people who hold power in our society to not rape children, then, is both a perfectly valid traditional conservative stance and absolutely a stance that we need to hold in our society. Similarly, conservative ideas around public and private spheres, and the idea that you ought to conduct yourself differently in public to how you do in private... well, that seems difficult to argue against in any real sense. Again we see a lack of tedium corresponding to politics that, if not generally correct, have real value to them, and just like with the libertarians, we see traditional conservatives, when conditions change, being able to change their positions: just look at Bill Kristol.

Generally, then, when people hold at least some values that are relevant to the current situation, even when they're embedded in a fucked-up framework, they tend not to create the worst kinds of political tedium, even when they're saying things that you'd label as mad or potentially criminal. Logically, then, to produce properly tedious political content, you would have to essentially hold no values that hold any relevance to anything that exists. To see how this hypothesis holds up, let's have a look at Keir Starmer's Labour.

Starmer's Labour is perhaps one of the best examples of the politics of tedium out there at the moment. This is a party that is nominally there for workers and the working class, and they consistently surround themselves with the trappings of that. They're nominally against racism and for the equality of women. However, they don't seem to have updated what any of that actually means for at least fifty years, and the values and principles that they hold have consequently ossified to the point where they're completely useless for understanding or making policy in 2025. In 2025, for example, we spend a lot of time on the internet: this isn't something that we need to judge, it's simply an observable thing that is the case. If you wish, then, to protect peoples' rights and civil liberties, that has to include the internet. Labour, however, having not checked what the hell was going on, is passing increasing amounts of deeply regressive and censorious legislation about the internet that protects nobody and exposes people to mass surveillance. As they haven't kept their underlying faculties of observation alive and thus haven't updated their principles, they simply don't see the internet as a place where those values need to be put into place, and now we have to deal with all this shit. Similarly, while there are fossilised remnants of a very second-wave feminism in the Labour party's principle set, the organisation completely failed to update on that in any useful way, and so while they have some idea that they should fight for gender equality, they have no idea what that means or why they hold that value in the first place, and thus have no compunctions about denying trans people healthcare or driving us out of public life. Simply by a persistent failure to observe and update, then, Labour has become a deeply regressive institution that is honestly creeping up on crypto-fascism.

And, quelle surprise, Starmer's Labour is a deeply, deeply tedious organisation. The party tends to just... say shit, without regard to truthfulness, or worse, relevance. We simply have to listen to the same hackneyed comments about "not being able to afford" something or the other that's deeply necessary, whether that's a functioning health system or infrastructure spending. Criticism isn't engaged with or refuted: it's simply ignored and the party goes on as though nothing was said. They can't respond in any effective way to obvious crises, and they persist in making policy, especially in the field of tech, that in some cases actively violates the laws of physics because they don't know what they're talking about and feel no need to learn. Even when they're grossly violating human rights, they somehow manage to make it exhausting to the point of tedium.

Tedium and bad politics, then, seem to spring from a common root: a lack of adaptability, poor observational skills and a habit of mind that will learn one set of principles and then never update them, no matter how much the situation might change. Bad politics and tedium, then, wind up closely correlated because they express, in so many ways, the same basic flaws. But then, perhaps this is something that we have to tolerate for the sake of being able to do politics at all. Surely the cost of dealing with some tedious people can't be that great?

The cost of political tedium

Politics that is merely boring, as we've established, can still be quite capable of mobilising people. While they're usually fairly small, niche groups, there are people out there who care about sewerage systems, municipal water supplies, housing policy, government finance, anti-trust policy and basically any other recondite subject you care to mention. They will get enthusiastic about it, they will tell the rest of your political movement why it matters, and, should you trust them enough, they might even write your policy on the matter for you. With enough people working on enough things that are mostly boring but energise some people, and with a wider movement that is flexible and responsive enough to make use of them, boring politics can be very, very effective.

Repetitive messaging and hammering home a message via repetition is also not necessarily the sin of tedium, and can likewise be very effective. Multiple voices saying the same thing in different spaces and different ways can really push a message home, and especially in this era of media that's actively hostile to progressive and liberal causes, we're going to have to repeat our message a lot to get it across.

Politics that is tedious in the sense of being simultaneously long-winded and unresponsive to external feedback, however, is lethal. The most superficial defect in it, though no less dangerous than the ones we'll speak of later, is that tedium is the political equivalent of a neutron poison in a nuclear chain reaction. Politics is about how people live together in a society and co-ordinate, and to do it well, people have to engage with the process. Engagement, however, requires almost by definition that the entity or process that you're working with is responsive to you. To engage with something is to put a bit of yourself into it, to change it and to be changed in return. A politics that is unresponsive and thus tedious, then, is one that it's impossible to engage with. Whatever you do, whatever you put into it, whatever your needs and desires are, the politics of tedium continues rolling on in its grey, inexorable way, completely unmoved by anything you might do. And you aren't moved either: you don't learn anything new, you don't find new ways to engage with the world or approach problems, and you certainly don't get the chance to update your understanding of what is good or right in the world. You simply fall in with the movement or get crushed.

While some people find this kind of politics appealing for one reason or another, most people quite rightly see engaging with the politics of tedium as having no benefits for them and significant costs. They will then quite rightly disengage, and given that doing politics at all requires an engaged, motivated group of people, this means that the politics of tedium, even when it's right in the claims it makes, simply isn't going to work. It won't have the energy, the resources or the institutional knowledge to actually bring about its policy priorities and will, as a direct consequence, inevitably lose power to a politics capable of actually motivating meaningful groups of people. It won't even be able to persuade people that its views are valid or engage in a slow process of shifting how people see the world because, of course, to persuade people you have to respond to where they are right now. Regardless of the correctness of the positions of the politics of tedium, this kind of politics is just flat useless at actually bringing about any sort of change.

But of course, the politics of tedium is seldom right. As mentioned before, most people, faced with a tedious politics that they cannot for the life of them engage with, will avoid it like the plague. The kind of people who will engage with the politics of tedium, then, are almost all the ones that have something wrong with them. There's a void in their heart that needs to be filled by political power, the ability to abuse others or any of the other personality traits that a healthy society tends to want to repress to an extent (this isn't to say that political ambition is in itself a bad thing, but stripped of anything else to give it context, it is in general a net negative for society). These people, in general, will hold some pretty awful political positions, and will bring those positions into the tedium machine with them, where they immediately become impossible to engage with. Both the Wes Streetings and the Jeremy Corbyns of this world have that issue: as much as they have truly terrible politics, I don't think anyone genuinely interested in creating a responsive politics would have made it into the Labour party in the first instance: you have to be damaged in quite particular "will-not-respond-to-anything-from-outside" ways in order to make your way in a very dead, very tedious political institution at all.

The end-point of this is obvious: if the only people who can engage in the politics of tedium are kinda fucked in the head, then our increasingly tedious political institutions will, despite all the evidence that this is bad for them, take on increasingly terrible positions out of simple inertia and a complete inability to respond to the environment that they're actually in. Hence Wes Streeting and Simeon Brown banning puberty blockers for trans youth at a time at which trans people are being actively persecuted in serious ways: sure, they do this because they think that trans people aren't real, but if they weren't broken in the way that enables tedium, they would be able to respond to the fact that an increasing number of people think they're evil and will want their heads for the atrocities they've committed. I mean, hell, Gavin Newsom, for all his manifold faults, is capable of seeing when his actions are unpopular and responding to the fact that his voters aren't going to like him if he gets to be too bigoted about trans people.

If there are better alternatives in the air, people will thankfully tend to go for them. Unfortunately, when the better alternatives are marginalised or deliberately suppressed, as is the case in so many of our societies, the politics of tedium leads, step by inexorable step, towards fascism. This is independent of the exact kind of politics you're espousing, for the record; centre-right "there is no alternative" governance, faintly reactionary liberalism, the kind of hard-left parties that endlessly repeat yesterday's fights for fifty or more years on end... they all drift, by degrees, towards one flavour or another of fascism.

While there are, of course, many different interpretations of fascism, one productive way to look at it is as a politics of tedium taken to an extreme. Fascism states, at its core, that there is no way to change anything: no way to make it out of a state of nature. You cannot change institutions, make new ones or make your institutions work for you in any way. Everything is awful, nothing can ever get better and the only thing you can really do is simply give full rein to your id, because if everything is fucked and there's no way of changing things, you may as well do whatever evil things you want and hurt the people that you think deserve to be hurt.

It is no surprise, then that fascism tends, even when it's cruel, evil and despicable, to be deeply tedious. It is, in the end, the same unbearable, stupid shit repeated over and over again. It's people repeated the same complete lies about immigrants, trans people, black people and women completely shamelessly despite the fact that we know them to be wrong. It's cruelties that, despite them being awful and causing mass death, are simply unbelievably banal, not even in the sense of Arendt's banality of evil, but in the sense of "what the fuck? You are literally trying to cosplay running concentration camps without any of the infrastructure to make it work." It's people trying, despite being perfectly well-educated about the Nazi regime, to pretend that this can somehow be solved via debate. In so many ways, fascism really is just an inability to be politically responsive to the society that political actors exist in, taken in the limit. It's the political ideology that you end up with when you become convinced that a politics that's genuinely responsive to things that people want is impossible.

We see here that the politics of tedium are deeply incapable, consistently fail and almost never lead to any actually good ideas. And yet, we find ourselves in a time where deeply tedious politics are in the ascendancy almost everywhere, whether they're in the explicitly fascist form or simply in one of the centre-right, centre-left or hard-left forms that inevitably, by increments, lead to this bullshit. So, if the politics of tedium consistently predicts bad politics, and it comes with few benefits and many costs, why do we find ourselves facing down a tidal wave of this shit?

Why does tedium win so much despite the costs?

The first and simplest explanation is that avoiding tedium requires, in one way or another, for you to think. Doing politics responsively requires you to actively pay attention to your environment and, even if you don't change your values, to change how you express them in given circumstances. Sometimes you will even be expected to change your values, whether that's in a more progressive way (accepting trans people a human) or what's seen as a more conservative one (trans people still need to be held to basic standards of conduct, and being marginalised is not grounds for behaving like a complete shithead). All of this takes a lot of mental work, and it's mental work that people just... don't want to do. The politics of tedium, for all their flaws, don't require a great deal of mental effort: you just learn the signs and the passphrases for your particular flavour of tedious politics, and then you don't ever have to learn anything else again.

Digging a little deeper, the politics of tedium seem mostly to come about when a previously responsive political movement fossilises its values and principles. A living political movement is one that, in many ways, constructs values and principles in response to a situation as much as it applies principles that were held a priori: values and principles are things that we work out when facing new situations as much as we apply existing ones that we held. We can see a lot of this at work in the opposition to the new fascist internationale that we're currently dealing with: we have to work out what principles we're going to apply to new situations and work out what values are important to us. We have to ask, for example, questions like "what do we expect Bill Kristol to change before considering him part of the team? What about Gavin Newsom? What are the non-negotiables on trans rights that we're going to demand people hold to, and what can we let slide?". This is, in large part, how a political movement is able to be responsive at all.

The thing is, of course, that once the situation that a political movement is responding to ceases to exist, you wind up with what you might call "dangling organisations": the Labour parties in the UK and New Zealand are good examples of this. These organisations often have significant levels of political power, resources and lingering support, but the questions that they were fundamentally there to answer, such as "how do we make sure that everyone is looked after in an industrial economy where most people are working in manufacturing or the primary industries?" aren't really relevant to us any more, given that a) fewer people than ever actually work in manufacturing or primary industries, b) the people that do work in these industries are increasingly working in different industries that are more educated and look very different to traditional manufacturing and c) there a whole lot of precarious people in the service industries, academia and tech (among a whole lot of other fields) that their extant messaging simply doesn't speak to. In this kind of situation, it becomes very hard for organisations to adapt: the only real way is to reorient the organisation so that it speaks to a political environment that's currently live. But that, of course, requires thought and change, and that's often made harder by the way in which political institutions are structured: both labour parties mentioned above, for example, give certain specific unions a vote on leadership and party positions that were relevant to the old political environment, but not the newer ones. Add that to the fact that positions of political and institutional power tend to attract people who need said power to fix something that's wrong with them (Chris Hipkins strikes me as this kind of person), and there's a lot of pressure acting against the institution actually changing them, so instead they ossify, fighting the last decade's battles as though they're still live.

This means that as mentioned previously, we wind up with a lot of organisations with considerable institutional power, clout and money that aren't speaking to a political environment that's actually current. Naturally, these organisations become fertile grounds for careerists, people who seek power to fill some deep inner void and the kinds of people who enjoy exerting power over others; the kind of people, in general who suffer from an excess of ambition unconstrained by any other value set that might put that motivation to good use. And that having happened, the tendency towards tedium becomes very difficult to arrest. Given that these organisations, as mentioned before, still have considerable amounts of money and political clout, the instinct then becomes, first and foremost, to hold onto their power and status.

So, we've a situation where an institution that built up significant clout and institutional power has fallen into tedium at the hands of people who probably don't much care about the expressed values of the organisation even when it was responsive. This is, in the long term, politically unsustainable: if the tedious fuckers stay in power long enough, they'll inevitably be replaced by even worse people, and there are limits to how bad things can get before things start to break. Unfortunately, in the medium term, power, money and political influence can quite effectively choke out alternative politics, leading to a situation where the politics of tedium, despite being beyond awful, seems to everyone to be the only option. Once this has happened, those politics are unfortunately quite hard to dislodge, and as we've so often experienced, you need to wait for cracks to start to show before you can start unpicking it in any real way.

Building tedium-proof institutions

Politics becomes tedious, as we've discussed here, when it ceases to respond to the political environment it exists in. Tedious politics is, in turn, often harmful and always ineffective, and while fighting the politics of tedium is difficult and often requires cracks to show in the edifice before we can really start at all, building political institutions and movements more resilient to the onset of tedium is something worth discussing. As the politics of tedium sets in when the values and principles of an organisation fossilise and cease to become living things, what we find that we need is the ability to keep values and principles alive in the environment that they exist in.

As I touched on earlier, values and principles are things that we develop downstream of observation: we look at the world and how it is first, decide what we do or don't like about it and then formulate values and principles as an abstraction of the things we do and don't like. We can observe, for instance, that there's really no objective way to determine whether one person is more deserving of political rights than another, and that everyone who claims that there are ways of doing this has consistently been shown to be hilariously, grievously wrong. We can also observe that giving certain groups of people more political rights than others tends to have highly negative consequences for everyone, and thanks to the first clause, there are no good grounds to discount the experiences of those being harmed. From this, we can derive a value that we might hold: the idea, perhaps, that all humans are equal in dignity and should be given a fair shot at building a happy and fulfilling life for themselves.

This particular value is fairly easy to run with and, speaking as it does about fundamentals of human experience, is going to hold true basically all of the time. Some others, however, are going to be a bit more troublesome. To what extent should put control over our society in the hands of market forces? Should European countries be re-arming, and if so, how much? What's the best way of supporting unemployed people in our societies? Not only are these situations where the correct value to hold is unclear, these are situations where multiple values that you hold can run up against each other, and where the correct way to balance those values is going to differ drastically depending on time and place: it's perfectly consistent for me, holding the values of freedom and equality, to have a principle stating that the economy should aim to uphold both of them, and thus that Poland under the PZPR should have allowed much more free market activity than they did, while simultaneously thinking that the current New Zealand economy needs to be quite a bit more heavily regulated than it is. The only way to figure out what the right principles to hold in such a situation really is by being able to first observe without judgement.

Being able to observe the state of the world without judgement (or with minimal judgement), then, is the primary skill that a political movement needs to be able to cultivate without becoming tedious. We need to be able to observe the world that we move in now and identify from that what parts of it we like and what parts of it we don't, and to either formulate or update our values and our principles on that basis.

One way of ensuring that the capacity to observe reality doesn't become degraded is simply to make sure that a sufficient variety of new and different people cycle through any given organisation or institution. A large part of why our political parties are vulnerable to capture by some of the worst people in the world, for example, is that as discussed above, it's quite easy for a clique of sufficiently fucked-up people to gain control of an organisation that's descended into tedium and then cut off access to the organisation for anyone who might make it more responsive: Starmer sidelining the labour left comes to mind here. This is actually one place where I think the US democrats have something of an advantage: the primary system means that people tend to circulate in and out of the party quite a bit more than they do in Westminster-style parliaments, and this has allowed figures such as AOC and Zohran Mamdani to find a place in the democratic party. In turn, this means that the Democrats have on the whole been much more capable of being responsive to changing situations (albeit imperfectly, and the Schumers of the world are still giving us plenty of access to the politics of tedium in an American context, though it's also interesting to note that even Schumer has been pushed little by little into taking more of an active stand), and thus that they've at least partially been able to avoid the worst of the tedium.

Making sure that members of one's political organisation have regular contact and feel connected to the people whom they come from and whom, in one way or another, they represent is also of importance. Political organisations often have a tendency to draw their members from fairly isolated circles: a lot of hard-left groups, for example, draw their membership from some department in the humanities at one particular university, or even the students of one particular lecturer. More mainstream political parties often form their leadership from a distinct political class: the National Party in New Zealand, for example, tends to draw their members from a small subset even of centre-right businesspeople, simply because most businesspeople, even when they're right-wing, tend to care more about enriching themselves and building their business than engaging in party politics. In general, the rank-and-file members of right-wing political parties are pretty weird, and as centre-left parties have ossified, this phenomenon has spread to them as well. This isolation leads to a lack of ability to observe, and is particularly dangerous because, as with a lot of phenomena that lead to tedium, it's self-reinforcing: people tend to bring in people who, in one way or another, look and sound like them. Avoiding this means explicitly encouraging people from a wide range of backgrounds to get involved and aim at positions of power in the organisation. They don't even have to hold power (though it's most definitely a good thing when they do): just having the exposure to people who are not in the weird little bubbles that political groups often construct will be enough to course-correct.

Finally, in an idea that Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò introduced into the discourse and that I've been shamelessly cribbing from ever since, political organisations work best when they focus on doing something rather than being something: you should, in general, orient around your policy slate rather than around being, representing or standing for things. A policy slate is both a much more effective statement of values and principles than a document that states them directly and also an effective way of forming values and principles in the first instance: if, for example, you have a policy slate based around sensible rent control policies, effective public transport and resource consent reform that allows more high-density housing to be built, it's pretty clear what your values are and who you're for. If you just say that you're for working people and then do none of this, people might fairly ask what your values actually are at all. And for that matter, if someone who might otherwise disagree with you agrees on those particular policy points, you can, to a greater or lesser extent, work together to make that happen, and both of your values and principles will probably change for the better in the process. Policy-based organisation also has the significant advantage that when conditions change and the policy slate becomes less relevant, it pushes the organisation to either create a new policy slate that addresses new problems or wind itself up and free the members and resources to reorganise elsewhere: either way, this tends to lead to fewer organisations sticking around past the point where they're useful, which is a good thing.

As tempting and comforting as the politics of tedium often is, it's not something that we, in our current situation, can at all afford. Now, more than ever, we need a responsive politics that looks to engage with the issues that we actually face. In the end, we have a choice before us: relive the battles of a politics that's been irrelevant for years or decades, wrapping ourselves safely in our memories and pretending that the current moment isn't what it is, or observe the world that we actually live in, make our peace with it, and build a politics that's actually alive in this world. I certainly know which option I'd prefer.