Donald Trump is attempting to dismantle American constitutional democracy before our eyes. For the past six weeks, many of us have been telling ourselves we have to do something about this before it’s too late. And yet many people who feel this way – no matter how outraged they are or how genuinely worried they are about our country’s future – are doing very little but handwringing and doomscrolling.
Elected leaders in the Democratic party are mostly failing to provide inspiration for people who are alarmed about the president’s actions. The protest paddles they held up at Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress underscored the fact that they’re flailing more than they’re leading. Meanwhile, for most of us, the chance to vote again is almost two years away.
The problem is not that there aren’t meaningful things ordinary people can do. There is strong evidence that protesting, calling our elected representatives and even just talking with people about our political concerns can create change. Fighting back against Trump’s naked power grab requires a whole “ecosystem of resistance”, as Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently put it. Each bit of that ecosystem adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
The question isn’t whether there are meaningful steps to take. It’s why we don’t take them more often.
The work of making change is difficult. Most of it is boring, unsexy and, at best, modestly incremental from day to day. But if asked to describe a success story of political change – for example, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is widely credited with paving the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act – what comes to mind is an image of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a triumphant, decisive moment. Images like these can be inspiring, but they can also cloud the imagination. What doesn’t always come to mind are the thousand small steps that led to that moment and carried the work forward the day after.
An anti-incrementalism bias keeps many of us from taking action. As the economist Albert Hirschman put it: “It is the poverty of our imagination that paradoxically produces images of ‘total’ change in lieu of more modest expectations.” The thing about modest expectations, though, is that they have a way of being met. Then they can grow a little. Then grow a little more. And before you know it, diseases such as smallpox are eradicated, global poverty has plunged and the average human lifespan has doubled.
One reason we resist incrementalism is because we mistakenly think it requires tolerating injustice, such as moderating on an issue like transgender rights in an effort to court swing state voters. But embracing incrementalism doesn’t determine whether you are a moderate, a liberal, a progressive or a radical. Incrementalism is about the means with which we achieve change, not the ends we seek. No matter one’s goals – growing local support for clean energy projects, persuading elected representatives to consider proportional representation or even amending the constitution – change requires small steps, each one pushing a bit further beyond the status quo.
Activists, organizers and other social change entrepreneurs are frequently incrementalists, even if they don’t say so. For example, members of the Black Panther party were no milquetoast moderates, yet they were serving breakfast to kids each morning in Oakland starting in 1969. Their work expanded to similar programs across the nation, which eventually inspired the federal school breakfast program, which now feeds millions of kids. Love or hate the Panthers, they showed up day after day, knocking on doors, gathering signatures, planning budgets, making the coffee.
The same is true for successful public policy. In most cases, incremental steps – such as ratcheting up social security through successive revisions over decades – are the most efficient path to transformative change. Whatever one’s goals, there’s no avoiding “doing the work”.
Another barrier to incrementalism is how easy social media makes it to put off doing the work while simultaneously helping us feel as if we’re actually doing it. In a survey from 2018, the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that one-third of respondents reported spending at least two hours a day reading, discussing and thinking about political news. Yet virtually none of these people spent any time working or volunteering for a political organization. Hersh worries that too many of us, especially on the left, misunderstand what politics is – or, at least, what it’s actually for. As he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Times: “Politics is about getting power to enact an agenda. It’s about working in groups to turn one vote into more than one vote, one voice into more than one voice, by getting others on board with you. If you aren’t doing that, you aren’t doing politics. But hey, congratulations on your interesting hobby.”
Other barriers to embracing incremental change run deeper: imagine two city governments, each of which sets a goal for policing reform. Their goals are basically identical, but government A gets much closer than government B to the target, even though neither of them reaches it. In a 2022 paper titled Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress, the psychologist Ed O’Brien shows that, once a threshold for success is clear, people often lump nearly complete failures together with partial successes as “all the same”. Even though government A made real progress compared with government B, we’re liable to discount its efforts if they don’t result in total success. Worse, O’Brien shows that when we chalk up partial progress as failure, we lose motivation to keep working for change.
Some climate activists worry that we’ll apply the same logic to the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5C. Indeed, the climate crisis demonstrates what is perhaps the greatest barrier to incrementalism: if we don’t know about progress, why would we doggedly keep working for it? Per capita, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are currently down to 1920s levels. Annually, our country now emits about what we did in the 1980s. But as Hannah Ritchie discusses in her book Not the End of the World, when asked whether emissions have increased, decreased or stayed the same in the US over the past 15 years, only one out of five people correctly say they’ve decreased. This lack of awareness of partial victories can breed cynicism and despair.
American conservatives have often been successful incrementalists, perhaps most notably in their decades-long assault on reproductive rights that culminated in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Even as progressives recoil at this rollback of rights, they should learn from how this political goal was accomplished.
Acknowledging partial success isn’t tantamount to complacency. While the United States and other countries have made important progress on the climate crisis, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, paving the way for a tremendous amount of suffering. Yet not acknowledging partial success is a recipe for inaction. It leaves us with the idle hope for a moment of liberation, delivered on the wings of a social change angel who doesn’t exist.
What gives me hope is the unoriginal, even banal thought that most people are trying to be decent, most of the time. Of course, that leaves a lot of room for bad things to happen. We can do terrible things to one another under the misapprehension that we’re doing good. We’re biased about how, and to whom, we extend our decency. And the indecent few can manipulate the many to look away while they steal and plunder. But justice wouldn’t be possible if most of us didn’t care about it, however fallibly we pursue it. And most of us do, I think.
