You Can't Solve Half a Problem
The moderate's delusion.
Political moderates are those who believe that wisdom begins with the rejection of perfection. It would be nice if the world were the way that we wish it would be, but it’s not going to be that way any time soon, and insisting that it should be is therefore a mark of unseriousness. Incrementalism, they believe, is the adult choice; everything else is utopianism, which is an immature waste of time. The moderates, the centrists, the incrementalists, the adults in the room—all are eager to discard the great leap forward in favor of a modest step in the right direction. In many cases, their embrace of this philosophy is rooted in a genuine belief that it is the best that they, and we, can hope for.
Even if we grant the moderates the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their sincerity, we do not have to grant them anything when it comes to their skills as negotiators. They are masters of bargaining against themselves. Their most reliable move is to cede ground before the battle even starts. While they imagine that picking a more modest starting point marks them as realists, it actually marks them as marks. They give their opponents something for nothing. It is not necessary for the other side to wrestle them as far. If the moderates had had the courage to ask for everything rather than an increment, they would, after all the tussling was over, land closer to where they actually wanted to be. This basic principle of negotiation is clear to anyone who has had to struggle for something they need. But since moderates need nothing, and approach politics with a bias towards stasis rather than progress, they are prone to the pitfall of giving up on political substance in exchange for keeping the struggle itself as genteel as possible.
Another way to say this is that the philosophy of moderates, their approach to politics, only works if the people on the other side are moderates as well. Theirs is a game with intelligible rules played by people who live in horror of being perceived as extremists. When a moderate comes up against someone whose political beliefs are stronger than their beliefs in decorum, the moderates get destroyed. They get yanked towards their opponents position due to their own abhorrence of sweat, of conflict. If moderates had deep ethical beliefs, they would recognize the need to change their strategy when their opponents grew more radical. Sadly, the moderate mind, lulled into paralysis by the air-conditioned air of Washington, DC conference rooms, always seems unable to rouse itself to evolve past the rudimentary epoch of polite political jousting.
Americans today are living in the socioeconomic rubble left by the failure of the incrementalists. The Democratic Party, dazzled by the passing success of Clintonian triangulation theory, has been institutionally unable to recognize that that era has passed, and a new and more brutal period of political war has settled upon us. As a result, we have all been subjected to the humiliating spectacle of mainstream liberal institutionalists harrumphing about norms as an increasingly fascist Republican Party gleefully smashes up all of their hallowed traditions with hammers. The destruction of the Trump era, of course, does not affect the material lives of Democratic political leaders one bit. They suffer only mild chagrin. Regular people pay a higher price.
The thing that Democrats, as a party, have still not yet accepted is that they have to solve the problems. Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place. It means you have to expand the Supreme Court and put in term limits and end the antidemocratic unaccountability of the institution, rather than hoping that the inherent robustness of our storied institutions will somehow reassert itself in time to save the day.
The distinction that I’m making here is less ideological than practical. The entire pseudo-civil war inside of the Democratic Party over “socialism” is a canard. Nobody really knows what socialism means, and the policy overlap between the socialists and the “progessives” is significant. What is propelling the popularity of the socialists in certain districts is less an upswell in Marx-reading and more the fact that these candidates are touting both policy positions and a fighting attitude that would solve the problems of the people. Medicare for All solves a problem; incremental improvements to Obamacare do not. Aggressive wealth taxes combined with aggressive promotion of mass unionization solve a problem; minor tax increases on the rich and “business and workers can thrive together” platitudes do not. Expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on justices solves a problem; calling on the next Democratic president to appoint someone liberal does not. This list can go on and on and on. The point is that in each of these cases, the left-most position is the one that would actually make a significant positive material impact on the macro-level problem, whereas the incremental approach would mitigate the underlying problem to such a small extent that the average person could be forgiven for not perceiving the change at all. Instead of thinking of the differing approaches to these issues on a left-to-right or radical-to-conservative axis, it can be helpful sometimes to just ask: “What would it take to actually solve this problem, as opposed to just moving somewhat in the right direction on it?”
The ultimate failure of the moderates is that the thing they prize the most—their savvy realism—is a big illusion. When the reality of life is extreme, the radicals are the realists. They are the ones trying to bring about a change appropriate to the severity of the problem. This is not quite a perfect metaphor, but when I think of political centrists, I often imagine a person dying of thirst in the desert who finally crawls up to a stand selling bottles of water.
MAN DYING OF THIRST: A liter of water, please.
VENDOR: Sorry, we only sell two-liter bottles.
MAN DYING OF THIRST: Well, forget it then. That would be too much. [dies]
Institutionalists who imagine that they are playing a civilized game with honorable peers are neither savvy nor realistic when they are actually facing religious zealots, corrupt strongmen, gutter racists, and fascists whose goal is to crush their opposition by any means. Achieving your political ends means, first, accurately assessing who your opposition is and what it will take to overcome them. That assessment will naturally lead you to more radical measures as your opponents themselves grow more vicious. An unwillingness to accept this will leave you impotent, as today’s Democratic Party institutionalists are.
Taxing Elon Musk’s wealth from a trillion dollars to $900 billion will not alter the fact that a small handful of ultra-rich oligarchs hold wealth and power that exceeds that of the majority of America’s citizens combined. No. You need to relocate enough wealth and power from the oligarchs to the public that the underlying problem is solved. What is the point of saying “We’ll start with a little, and then down the road we’ll get more”? You’ll never get more. You will get beaten, because you did not attack your opponent with enough force to stop him from coming back and beating you. Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good. It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude. Billionaires are going to fight against you raising their taxes, period. If you’re going to have the fight, it might as well be over a change that would, if you win, solve the problem. Moderates are shocked when they can’t mobilize Americans over policies that would not meaningfully change their lives for the better. This is, frankly, stupid.
Assess our economic and social and political problems honestly. Decide what measures are necessary to solve those problems. Then fight for those measures. Do not cut your request in half before you begin to fight, due to your mistaken belief that this will make winning your fight more realistic. It won’t. Your fight will be just as hard and even if you win you still lose and the public won’t be happy either way because the problems are still there. There is no such thing as solving half a problem. You solve it, or you don’t. If you’re not willing to go all the way then you are in favor of keeping the problems in place. This is all common sense, if you haven’t been deluding yourself for too long.
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Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Confiscate Their Money; What Is Centrism?
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I agree! There used to be a much higher tax rate for the likes of billionaires. Now they have a fit if you want to raise their taxes by a couple of dollars. I think that if billionaires threaten to leave a State or the US, because of a tax hike, after using taxpayers infrastructure and labor then they should be charged a hefty "exit" tax. Their should also be a law against them coming in and gutting companies and towns for their own greed. MAGA Republicans have already proven that they are against the working class, we don't need a bunch of super moderate Dems abetting their cause.
"While they imagine that picking a more modest starting point marks them as realists, it actually marks them as marks."
Excellent wordplay aside, this statement is some astute fire.