No country for old incrementalists
The politics of now is now.
We only come of age during one specific timeline, leaving us to imagine (if we choose) how our lives and particularly our formative years might have been different if we were born at a different moment.
Were we too soon? Too late? Just right?
I was born in 1976, late Gen X but firmly and spiritually Gen X, raised with my own key to the apartment and plenty of chances (ready or not) to learn responsibility at a young age. There was no internet or cell phones as I grew up, but there was plenty of MTV. I got my first e-mail address as a University of Minnesota freshman in 1994. I checked it every few days and was thrilled when I had one item in my inbox.
It can’t be anything less than an understatement, then, to say that my childhood and that of my kids is different. They can watch, listen to and sometimes even have anything they want almost instantly. It is all they have every known.
Knowing a time before that was the case, but now living a decade or two in a world where that is more or less the case, creates both a tension and a need for understanding.
The former was in greater supply recently as our 5-year-old asked for a drink of water from a cup in the front seat while we were driving. My wife was on a phone call in the passenger seat and I was driving in traffic, so I asked him to wait.
After a very short moment of silence, he asked again with greater force. I met his lack of patience with a slightly raised voice, saying something like, “Geez, buddy, I just need to make sure it’s safe to hand back to you. Hold on.”
He whined a little, then a lot. All he knew was that he was thirsty, and that usually in 2025 he (and all of us) can have things almost instantaneously. The cars around me dispersed, and I asked him to ask for the water nicely. He shouted a half-serious, half-angry “PLEASE AND THANK YOU!” and I somewhat reluctantly accepted that while carefully handing back the cup of water.
My wife got off the phone, wondering what all the fuss had been about, and all I could tell her was it was about water. “I just needed five seconds,” I said. “But nobody even has five seconds any more.”
This process plays out to varying degrees with all our kids multiple times a day, though more with our 5-year-old, a little less with our 8-year-old and a reasonable amount with our 10-year-old. But just a short time later, the 5-year-old was being impatient again and I heard my wife mutter, “But nobody even has five seconds any more.”
I strain to imagine what it would be like to grow up now. It would be awesome and maddening, both limitless and limited, I think. But I don’t know any more than what I see reflected back at me by our children.
And as I ponder that and understand our kids’ urgency, their impatience with anything that is not right now, I also come to understand the politics of our moment in a new way.
This is not fundamentally about left vs. right or winners vs. losers because that sort of framing these days is disingenuous and too narrow. It is, however, about what it takes to win right now in a lot of spheres, including politics.
Presidential election post-mortems have tried to drill down and isolate countless factors that tipped what was still a relatively close race, but it boils down to this:
For a long time, during better times, a safe path to power was upholding traditions, norms and the status quo. It was just fine to sell incremental progress as long as it felt like the overall trendline for the majority of voters was heading up, even if ever-so-slightly, and not surprisingly this approach gained traction in the 1950s.
But it has been more than 20 years since the majority of Americans (those polled, which I imagine at least somewhat mirrors those who vote) thought things were headed in the right direction in our country.
Anyone promoting a fast fix and/or selling hope, right or left, has the upper hand over anyone invested in the notion of a slow-but-steady climb.
Anyone tapping into the ethos of their modern voter base is going to have an edge over those who fail to understand the moment.
Those who exist closer to the extremes of political parties disagree vehemently about the direction they want things to move, but they don’t fundamentally disagree that we need to operate with speed and urgency away from our current direction.
Like a 5-year-old, we often don’t even care if fast change is possible. We are desperate enough to crave a fantasy about an instant solution over a truth about a long one.
The politics of now is now. This is no country for old incrementalists.
Again, since I’ve lived roughly half my life on either side of an instant gratification world, I see how demanding fast progress can feel both irrational and obvious.
We have been told that things take time. Systems don’t change overnight. Human nature requires time to adapt; too much change too fast can make us feel untethered from a base of reality. Even a 5% improvement is better than nothing and certainly better than 20% worse.
But even if improvements and small gains eventually add up, they are hard to see and feel. The sort of strategic planning that necessarily accompanies an incremental approach becomes harder and more complicated as the world becomes more complex and change happens faster. And when small alterations feel insufficient — combating climate change in a real and serious way on a global level is high on this list to many of us — urgency isn’t impatience. It’s common sense.
A reader summed this up beautifully earlier this week as I was pondering the subject:
Everyone’s patience is wearing thin, especially if you have the sense that things are going to get worse before they might get better.
Maybe I can take some solace in this: Understanding the necessity of urgency will become unavoidable for anyone in power a generation from now once tens of millions of their constituents — my kids, your kids — are voting adults who grew up expecting their needs would be met swiftly.
I kind of wish I was young enough to feel it along with them, but I think I would miss my MTV.
Your perspective of seeing people's views from both sides seems egalitarian, sensitive to others' realities. And, sometimes, we need to make changes quickly to avert disaster. But I take issue with the notion that "when small alterations feel insufficient [. . . ,] urgency isn't impatience. It's common sense." Perhaps the focus should be on the "feel," because that subjective stance indicates room for error; indeed, common sense goes out the window when we rush without enough critical thinking. Generally, the urgency is impatience and not common sense. In our attention-seeking society, which rewards the quick fix, we have people who use AI to "create" music--rather than working, practicing to learn to play instruments; we have people who focus their self-worth on how many "likes" they get--rather than living lives that truly deserve accolades; we have people who support political candidates that promise, through lies, immediate results--rather than the voters recognizing that these candidates have histories of criminal activities, lying, not fulfilling promises, and other negative actions and the voters recognizing that productive change usually requires time and patience.