Max Weber, the father of the academic field of sociology, described politics as “the slow boring of hard boards.” Weber was saying that politics isn’t always glamorous or attention grabbing. Rather, it is the slow work of building alliances, making hard strategic choices, and staying at it over the long haul.
You don’t have to be a politician to get this. There’s a political dimension to most every leadership position I’ve ever had anything to do with, whether it’s being the senior minister of a large church, the president of a college or the principal of a school. It’s often slow work. It’s always hard work. It requires perseverance. It is “the slow boring of hard boards.”
Such thoughts I have about politics and leadership may seem entirely out-of-date in today’s world of performative politics, outrage videos, and competing in the “attention economy.” Just grab the headlines. Own the libs. Deplore the right wing. Get in front of the cameras venting accusations and anger against the other side.
Some readers have been troubled that I have not been using “fascist” to describe Donald Trump and his administration’s battering of laws, due process, and democratic norms. With Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing she will go after any who use “hate speech” (namely, when it is directed against her boss), with ABC caving to the FCC and Trump by benching Jimmy Kimmel, with Vice-President Vance telling us that political violence comes only from the Left, who must be taken down–and that’s all just this week– there’s plenty of reason for concern.
And there’s plenty of grist for the mill should you want to be shouting — or screaming — “Fascist,” “Fascism,” or “the Nazis are coming!” So why am I not doing that? Why am I not part of the chorus of outrage.
Because “politics is the slow boring of hard boards.” Moreover, while many are crying “fascist,” who is doing the “slow boring” work that will make a difference in the 2026 congressional elections? Apparently not the Democratic National Committee.
Crying “Fascist” may get you clicks and cheers from your team, but I can tell you this for sure: It falls on deaf ears on the other side. They have their own long list of the opposition’s deceptions, power-grabs, and lies that they will, and do, happily trot out.
Nobody so far as I can tell is being moved, persuaded, or changed by the back and forth of flaming rhetoric. Sides have been chosen. No one is moving, certainly not in response to high-decibel rhetorical broadsides and name-calling.
This week Ezra Klein joined with a conversation on the podcast of his fellow New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Klein said what worried him most was the mismatch between the level of alarm people are expressing and the level of seriousness they are practicing. Here’s Klein:
“My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.
“Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio, and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
“And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing — failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail.” (Emphasis added).
Klein is talking about “the slow boring of hard boards,” doing the things that move voters in your direction. Shouting “Fascist” isn’t one of them, however cathartic it may be. There’s lot of alarm wherever I turn, but precious little evidence of the opposition getting strategically serious, asking hard questions of itself or doing things differently.
There was a lot of alarm being sounded in 2024 — “democracy is on the ballot” — but the Dems didn’t act like that was the case. They didn’t field a candidate who could beat Trump. They kowtowed, as Kamala Harris recently admitted, to an incumbent whose time had come and gone.
Or consider, for example (really a counterexample), our congressmember for Washington’s 3rd District, Marie Glusenkamp Perez. Here is someone doing “the hard boring of slow boards,” communicating with her constituents, listening to them, working effectively on their and her district’s issues without a lot of performative bombast or appearances on MSNBC.
As a consequence of her approach, her diligence and absence of bullshit, she has twice won election in a red district against a very Trumpy opponent. But does the Democratic Party establishment pay attention to MGP? Do they ask what they might learn from her and others like her? No. They criticize her for not following the party line, for not being “a team player,” for not repeating the creed. Hey, if your team is losing every game, maybe it’s time not to be a team player?
Klein comments on the Dem’s now oft-maligned recent winners: “Clinton and Obama ran politically — a kind of politics that sat with the idea that people were absolutely going to disagree with them, and they would need to win over some of those precise people, that their politics would need to be palatable to people who did not agree with quite a bit of what they wanted to do — I think we lost that.”
Right now the urgent “slow boring of hard boards” task is for the Democrats to find and field strong, attractive candidates — who are serious people — for the 2026 Congressional election. You can cry “fascist” until the cows come home, but if the Democrats don’t gain control of Congress in 2026 it won’t make a damn bit of difference.
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A smart piece, Tony. Thank you. I’m reminded of David Bell’s essay “The Triumph of Anti-Politics,” where ‘anti-politics’ is the preference for purity, especially in thought and speech, over results, especially in elections and policy.
IKR? J.D. Vance was SO uncivil when he referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler” in 2016. And people who worked most closely for the president in his first term — like Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley and former chief of staff John Kelly — also crossed the civility line by calling the president a “fascist.” Even former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney supported this nasty name-calling. Why are all those woke progressives SO MEAN?
They just got distracted from the real problem, the Democratic party’s radical leftism. Everyone recognizes that it’s the Democrats who responsible for all this, and with a few steps backward on their part, Trump and Project 2025 would wither away.
I like MGP’s commitment to her voter base, but a fundamental job of the legislature is to be a check on the executive’s actions and spending decisions — not seeing that from her. I predict she’ll lose the next election when she runs against a GOP candidate other than Joe Kent.
I was born during World War 2, Tony, and when I was a kid growing up, we all knew what fascism was, because our fathers and mothers had been putting their lives on the line to fight it. Now we are having to do this all over again, and the same elements of fascism are right out there in plain view for everyone to see — and experience. It boggles the mind that you would argue that we shouldn’t call it out for what it is, every day in every way, as loudly as we can lift our voices? What, I ask, is the qualitative difference between your argument and the “Don’t Say Gay” policies pushed by the fascist governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis?
These are societal and cultural issues, including, but hardly limited to, electoral politics. Certainly the MAGA right wing ad their neo-Calvinist theocrats recognize this, no matter what highly paid fools like Ezra Klein write. We are compelled to fight fire with fire, and we had better be up to the task. You’re pissing in the wind to imagine that it is otherwise.
I have to wonder, though – fight fire with what fire? Isn’t more like, fight fire with a lot of smoke?
What I’m hoping is that he’s wrong, and people are going to be moved. Not the hard core that you meet at the barricades, but how many people voted in 2024 on little more than a whim? The midterms should reflect, hopefully, a little more serious electorate. But that assumes we still have a normal civil society, and I guess that may be up to the military and their willingness to do whatever they’re told.
We can cool it on the use of the term Fascist since it can turn people off and/or most folks have no idea what it means. It is accurate for what is going down. It is not the time for “if they go low, we go high” nor is it to the time to beat our swords into plowshares. Food is getting more expensive, we are losing our right to freedom of expression, ICE and the military are being used against law-abiding folk, the separation of powers is fading. MAGA in one form or another has always been the dark underbelly of this country. This is a domestic war for survival of our democracy and as with Ivan’s father and mother, we need to put our lives on the line. Are American’s up to this challenge? We’re going to find out.