Status Quo

Incrementalism preserves the status quo while Incrementalists are working (lazily or diligently, it doesn't matter) to "improve" some aspect of the situation. Incrementalists don't want any sudden or significant change in the methods of operations or the institutions through which they work, nor do they want their "improvements" to be too sudden or significant. This is the whole theory of "baby-steps." You build a little bit here and a little bit there, a teensy bit at a time, and very gradually, things get better.

Meanwhile, all that is rotten and wrong is preserved from precipitous harm or decline (and is still able to make advances, incrementally, as well) and general stability of systems is maintained.

Preserving the status quo is essential for Incrementalism to function. Radical change is anathema to Incrementalists...

Except...

The Busheviks were truly radical, and what they wanted to do from the outset was change the status quo; in other words to permanently redirect the interest and energy of the systems they were in charge of. They were setting a new direction for those systems, not building on previous minor changes or adjustments. In some respects they were Revolutionary (or Counter-Revolutionary) in that they were intent on changing the systems themselves, overthrowing the remnants of what went before and putting in place something else again (widely characterized as the Unitary Executive, but known in previous eras as a Tyrant/Dictator/Autocrat).

They were largely successful.

They accomplished their task very quickly (of course, given the boost of the 9/11 attacks, the speed of their transformation was accelerated); there was little or no effective resistance inside the government, and there was none at all -- that they felt any need to pay attention to -- outside it, in the streets, in the media, or railing on the Internets.

They simply bulled their way through.

Even when voters seemed to reject their radicalism (ie: in the 2006 congressional elections) the radicals still bulled their way. The opposition was no opposition at all when enough of them could always be found to collaborate with the radicals to form a working majority in the increasingly corrupt and discredited congress. It was literally breathtaking.

And now from the sidelines, Radical-In-Chief Cheney and his daughter continually snipe at any backsliding from the radicalism of the Busheviks, essentially asserting the permanence of the radical changes they made to the status quo in their brief time at the helm. And they get away with it.

Their sniping -- while sometimes countered with White House snark -- usually seems to work. Backsliding is reversed, and the radical Bushevik status quo is preserved or extended.

Progressives are disillusioned again. But they can't seem to do anything about it.

Partly, I argue, it's because they don't want to. Not really. With Incrementalism at their core, they do not seek or want radical change, and they would never attempt radical change on their own. If someone else does it, that's another thing altogether, and if radical change comes through no effort of their own, and it significantly alters the status quo, then these Incrementalist-Progressives will support the New Status Quo while continuing on their chosen path of Incremental, bit-by-bit, baby-step "improvements" to whatever the New Status Quo might be.

That's where we are right now.

And it's discombobulating a lot of folks who are still on a pre-Radical path of Incremental change. They're still trying to work through institutions that have atrophied or been destroyed, using systems that have been fundamentally corrupted.

It's disturbing to see the dysfunction of the Congress, for example, in such detail as we've seen throughout the Health Care Reform psycho-drama. The House is barely able to come up with something that at best gives only a hat tip to the Public Interest; the Senate is incapable of even that. And there is a very strong suspicion that the White House has been orchestrating all of it in a cynical move to further consolidate the Neo-Liberal side of the Corporatist endeavor that is Our Government.

Of course the Courts were long ago corrupted and folded into the Autocracy; after all, it was a seriously flawed Supreme Court decision that installed the Busheviks in power in the first place and which then sustained most of their most radical initiatives, as it has most recently done, tellingly, by refusing to review a lower court ruling that sustains the power of the President (as Autocrat) to declare anyone at all at any time an "enemy combatant", to strip them of any and all human rights, to order or allow their torture (which the subject should "expect") and to deny them any redress of grievance whatsoever. This is Law? Well, yes, yes it is.

That's now the Status Quo.

Incrementalists by their nature will support it -- while attempting gradual mitigations. That's what the Obama administration is doing, forthrightly, without apology. It is "change" of a sort, in that the Obama administration isn't the Radical Institution Overthrowing Counter Revolutionary endeavor the Bushevik Regime was, but it certainly isn't the kind of "change" that some people (even many Incrementalists) were anticipating.

No, they'd become used to the radicalism of Bushevism, and they instinctively accepted that Radical Change had become the New Status Quo, and they were expecting it to continue, on a different path, with the ascension of the Good Emperor, Barack Hussein Obama.

But no. That's not what happened at all. So there is plenty of keening and rending of garments over Barack's betrayal. But he's not "betraying" anything but the illusions of those who assumed he would continue radical operations.

No, Barack the Good is an Incrementalist, and the "change" he was marketing so well was the change from Radicalism to Incrementalism.

The systems the radicals put in place are now the Status Quo -- which was the Busheviks' intention, after all. Those systems are now being subject to gradual, incremental mitigations and adjustments.

THAT'S the "Change You Can Believe In."

Is that really so hard to understand?

[Note: I've been using the portrait of Ahkenaten as an avatar of Obama. I think there's a physical resemblance. But more importantly, it is the notion of Radical Change that seemed to accompany Obama throughout the campaign that Ahkenaten symbolizes that I wanted to convey. Given the upshot of this post, however, Ahkenaten may no longer be the historical figure I should use. I may have to go back to Hoover.]