Americans used to accept that political change was slow and difficult. In a constitutional system requiring three branches of government to agree, this was a good thing. Over the last forty years, America has polarized, and we are reaching the point where government can’t function. It’s mostly because voters and politicians stopped believing in incremental change. In his book Landslide, Jonathan Darman tells a compelling story about Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, the first American presidents to promise that the swift and total adoption of their programs would bring about an end to America’s problems. Ever since then, more and more liberals and conservatives have adopted a black-and-white worldview, eschewing compromise while waiting impatiently for the swift and total adoption of whatever they believe in.
Darman is right, and he made me think about features of America’s past that laid the groundwork for this transition.
The first is World War II and its aftermath. The modern world’s defining war was the closest we’ll ever come to a real, all-out conflict with evil in which compromise is an unacceptable defeat. It’s easy to see how, in the aftermath of such an all-consuming conflict, this zero-sum way of thinking permeated the American political mind.
After 1945, many conservatives transferred this good vs. evil mentality onto the Soviet Union. The Dulles brothers, founders of America’s ignominious Cold War policies of covert intervention, believed the Soviet Union to be as evil and untrustworthy as Nazi Germany (in fact, in the case of John Foster Dulles, as more evil than the Nazis). Uncompromising antipathy towards communism fed the uncompromising antipathy towards government spending that defined the emerging conservative movement: communism is evil; taxes and redistributive programs represent a slippery slope to collectivization; any policy that acquiesces to such programs is itself an endorsement of those programs, and effectively equivalent to socialism.
America’s religious devotion and Calvinist heritage had prepared many voters for ideological fantasy. This belief system predisposes its fervent practitioners to see the universe as a zero-sum struggle between Christ and the Devil, and therefore to view compromise on moral issues as equivalent to defeat. These voters make up a significant portion of the conservative movement, and helps explain why Republicans have been so unwilling to compromise as to let the US government default on its debt or shut down entirely pending the repeal of Obamacare.
Fast-forwarding to 2015, the media and technology landscape is threatening to make incrementalism extinct. It’s a confusing world out there; the Web can expose things that had once been private. In politics, we find seeming contradictions and outright hypocrisy in places we couldn’t see before. And it’s not like we can choose to avoid it; it’s always there, right on our news feed, assaulting any sense of hope or optimism we want to have (and Obama’s first campaign proved we do want it).
People have been reacting in two ways: 1) withdrawing from politics entirely, because it’s just too frustrating and difficult, which is what most Millennials are doing, and 2) take refuge in whichever of the two ideological fantasies is most culturally comfortable based on where they live and who they are friends with.
Is there still room for incrementalists of all stripes? For the sake of democracy, I hope so.