A realist’s problem with realism
I’m not going to use any citations and you’re going to have to deal with that.
The split I feel from the liberal section of the left as a socialist really boils down to two things. One, of course, is their allegiance to capitalism. But practically, that allegiance doesn’t actually transfer into many real policy differences in comparison to those that democratic socialists would push for in organizing campaigns that focus on policy.
The second issue though is the one that DOES drastically divide the two sections on policy: incrementalism and pragmatism. First, it’s frustrating that the liberal and centrist wing of the left has chosen to identify pragmatism and incrementalism as things that THEY OWN, and things that MAKE THEIR APPROACH MORE MATURE than socialist approaches. It’s pretty easy to read between the lines on that: “suck it up and accept capitalism, and if you don’t you’re an idealistic teenager who we don’t respect because children are stupid.”
But more than that, is that they don’t own pragmatism or realism, and they don’t own incrementalism.
I feel like realism has been redefined by modern political and social norms to subtly mean “cynical.” If someone says, “I’m just being realistic,” often times what they mean is that they don’t want to accept your idea because they believe human beings will all act in a way that reward their greedier and more competitive instincts.
That’s a problem. It’s the same problem that manifests itself in the vocabulary of pop-economists, even Robert Reich who is sort of an icon for wealth redistribution right now. Years ago, I saw him in his documentary say something to the effect of “humans need incentives to work or else they won’t.”
Reich is making an assumption about human nature that is verifiably not universal. While the prison experiment from the 1970s where they made a bunch of college students guards went horribly awry and pointed to natural galvinization toward unhealthy power dynamics, similar studies were done in the same time frame that showed the opposite. While Lord of the Flies shows an island of violent boys giving into their competitive natures, a real world example of boys trapped on an island during World War II ended in a small cooperative where the boys shared what they had until their rescuers arrived. Not all humans will be collaborative, but they’re certainly not all competitive, and they’re certainly not all lazy by nature. Not just a minority of them, but likely much of the population.
If that’s all true, then we must divorce the idea of “being realistic” from assuming the worst about humanity, and planning policies around that. Thinking realistically about what humans will and won’t do means looking at the material conditions around them, and making judgements based on what people have and how they have been trained to work with that environment. From those observations, it’s reasonable to infer SOME assumptions and let them be a basic guide for how we think about how society will interact with policy, but it still is not a total blueprint. What “I’m just being realistic” should mean is “I don’t expect people to act a certain way.”
This is important to consider when we look at the liberal ownership of incrementalism. By socialist definitions, I’m an incrementalist. I believe in structural systematic change. I believe in this type of change because I don’t want to see a revolution tear my country apart and leave the streets a bloody mess which results in a balkanized continent for upward of 50 to 100 years with the possibility of expanding into a world war. So, I’d rather see us try to salvage our system and turn it into a socialist economy.
I think the interpretation that we use regarding incrementalism is also false. We tend to think about incrementalism, both from socialist and from liberal perspectives, as employment of policies that will gradually change some small elements of programs a little bit at a time, and the very vein hope is that the program will eventually improve enough to take care of everyone.
The result is often that small program changes lead to useless results, greater expenses, more bureaucratic barriers, and/or less social benefits than the economic cost of implementing the program. ACA has helped some people get healthcare, but it still remains too expensive with little help for people in middle-low income ranges, and that problem is not a post-Trump problem, it is a problem that persisted from the Obama era even during the payment mandate.
Having recently started tackling depression, I know what my perspective of incrementalism for the self is: do one thing at a time, integrate that one thing into your routine, and eventually you won’t have to think about that one thing, you’ll just do it. If you do too much stuff at one time, you’ll get overwhelmed and do nothing.
That has a lot of power in terms of thinking about incrementalism on a social scale. We shouldn’t be thinking about incrementalism as changing small parts of each system, we should be thinking about incrementalism as devoting resources to changing one system at a time. Healthcare needs to be fixed. It’s the most urgent priority. We should hold party conferences where we commit to all focusing on healthcare. My vision would of course be a tax-funded public healthcare system which no longer relies on private insurance and provides care to everyone without upfront payment. But regardless of what we choose, we should JUST focus on healthcare until it’s done.
That’s what we need to think of when we think of incrementalism: fix system A until it’s fixed, THEN fix system B, but don’t put a bandaid on system A and assume it will be fine. That’s a strategy, not an ideology. And it’s a strategy I think the left should adopt universally because I think it would put us back on speaking-terms.
Climate change, healthcare, housing, minimum wage, we’re putting bandaids on all of these things right now, and each time our policy-makers do so, they say “I’m just being realistic,” and people like me are pissed as hell. We’re pissed because nothing actually changed but symbols and a few words in the thick congressional text that nobody read anyway.
If you want to be realistic, if you need to listen to more than just centrist conservatives and accept that humans don’t all suck. If you want to incrementalism, then you need to employ effective incrementalism and work on a system until it’s actually fixed before you move onto the next thing.
