Incrementalism vs. Revolutionism

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time.  What’s happening with Trump in the Republican Party is also happening with Bernie in the Democrat party.  Which is to say, it’s happening in America.  It’s a cultural shift that has hit an acute point of acceleration.

Let me back up a moment.  I am a conservative, politically.  Have always been so.  But when I attended my first college republicans meeting, I began to think I was a moderate because I really didn’t think the idea of “banishing the department of education and all entitlement programs” was quite the right idea.  So, I put myself in the moderate category and stayed there for a long time.  But it always rubbed me.  “I am a conservative”, I’d think, “just not a nut job.”

It occurred to me, recently, that “moderate” is not the correct way to label myself.  I am, indeed, a conservative.  But I’m an Incrementalist, meaning, I believe in moving in the conservative direction increment at a time until the right balance is struck.  For example, welfare programs could be better managed, perhaps even a bit stingy, so as to help those who genuinely need it (something I agree with), but without making it so easy that it creates an incentive or dependence.  There’s a balance that I want to strike.

So, Incrementalism is a matter of substance for me, but it’s equally an issue of tactics.  Quite simply, most “all-or-nothing” efforts in government fail miserably and spectacularly.  Most of the grueling work involved with policy making is two steps forward, one step back.  Here a little, there a little.  The neat byproduct of this tactic is that the small movements in whichever direction you are heading tend to bring the body politic along with you, and they have the change to digest and understand the changes as they are happening.

Revolutionism, as I will define it, is the opposite of Incrementalism.  It seeks an all-or-nothing tactic to policy making.  Rarely succeeding in accomplishing it’s ends, but even when it does (e.g. Obamacare), it succeeds in such an earth-shattering and disconcerting way that the people do NOT come along.  They’re given little or no chance go absorb and understand it.  The usual outcome of Revolutionism is characteristic of its namesake - a lot of people die, and when the smoke clears, things are usually worse.

Politically, Incrementalists tend to be moderates, and Revolutionaries tend to be more purely conservative or liberal.  I think I’m an oddball in this sense.  I’m a conservative Incrementalist.  I’m a conservative looking to find a balance (i.e. an Incrementalist), not a conservative who wants to burn the house down and start over from the ground up (Revolutionary).

So, in these terms and explanations now made, I will turn to the cultural shift I referred to at the top.  There is no doubt we have become a culture of instant gratification.  We must have everything we want on-demand.  And, unlike times past, we have developed the capability of getting everything we want, when we want it, and how we want it.  So, we turn to the last remaining object of our infatuous desire - to have politics our way, too.

The Founders were absolutely terrified of this.  As I’ve pointed out in other writings, the Founders put quite a few barriers between the People (read “mobs”) and the levers of power in government.  The President is not elected by the People.  S/he is elected by Electors (see Article 2, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution).  The Supreme Court, of course, is nominated by the President who is elected by electors.  The Senate was not directly by the People.  They were originally selected by state legislatures (see Article 1, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution).  The House was/is the only body of the federal government designed to be elected directly by the people, and is generally viewed to be the weakest body in the federal government.

Go back and read the Federalist Papers, if you’d care, to find out why the Founders set things up this way.  Observed Robert Kagan in a recent Washington Post article: “But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.”

The American culture has been working it’s way down this path for quite some time, now.  Slowly chipping away at our precious institutions, ignoring centuries of history in the process, believing that we can do differently what the ancient experimenters in democracy could not - tame the mob.  Or worse, fooling ourselves into thinking there is no mobocracy amongst us.

Additionally, whether we like to admit it or not, the representatives we get in government are better representatives of us as a People than we dare admit.  For every philandering, cheating, self-serving politician lining their own pockets in capitols across the country, I am sadly convinced there are equal proportion of philandering (ahem, Ashley Madison website), cheating, self-serving voters putting them in office and looking the other way.  We collectively get what we collectively deserve.  (Certainly there are many good, humble, and self-sacrificing folks out there.  But the numbers are dwindling.)

So, we have two Revolutionaries threatening to overthrow the Incrementalists.  Trump has succeeded on the Right (although, I think, if there were an opening on the Left, he would have been just as willing to do it there), while Bernie doesn’t quite have the horsepower to succeed on the Left.  They are two sides to the same coin, in that they are both Revolutionaries.

(I think Trump is absolute filth masquerading as filth; whereas Bernie seems to be an earnest and honest fellow who is drawing in the masses with that honesty coupled with the illusory promise that giving everyone everything they want for free is actually the solution to what ails us as a nation.)

But either way, they are both Revolutionaries, and Incrementalism lost on the Right, and appears to be just barely hanging on on the Left.  The sum total is that the American people, who have inherited the mightiest government, land, economy, defense, and civilization known to man; the American people have decided to burn this 240 year-old house-of-a-nation down in the name of the Revolution.