So, when I was in political science classes in college, we were introduced to two major models for policy making. And, when push comes to shove, the difference in preferred approach is at the heart of the problems the democratic coalition is dealing with. The centrist democrats prefer one approach, and I prefer a different approach.
My preferred approach: the rational planning model
My preferred approach to policy is the rational planning model. This model is taught in most political science classes involving public policy, and has five steps:
1) Defining the problem to be solved
2) Coming up with policies to fix said problem
3) Evaluating the pros and cons of different policies
4) Implementing the policies
5) Evaluating how well the policies worked at solving the problems, and making further adjustments as necessary (see: step 1)
Basically, you identify the problem you want to solve, you come up with policies to solve the problem, choose one, and then you implement it and see how it works, and then adjust from there. This is how I see the world. I see problems. I see problems with poverty and coercing people to work. I see problems with healthcare being unaffordable. I see problems with education being unaffordable and drowning people with debt. I see a problem of climate change that must be solved. I see problem, and then I come up with what I consider to be the optimal ways to solve said problems. Simple, right? Well, let's see what the democrats do instead.
Democrats' preferred approach: the muddle through model
The democrats tend to instead prefer the muddle through model created by political scientist Charles E. Lindblom. Basically, this model advocates for incrementalism. It believes political change comes slowly, and through successions of many small changes over time. Essentially, by shifting policy slowly over time, we can get something that resembles a larger change that people desire.
Advocates will point to the political constraints put on the system and how it does not like large sweeping changes. Those changes require significant amounts of effort, and often are unable to be passed without a large consensus around them.
Okay, so how true is this?
Well it depends how you ask, but honestly, I hate this model. Like, say you want to pass healthcare reform. As you guys know, I support medicare for all but compromise with medicare extra for all. Democrats want to make changes to the ACA. Hopefully over time, they can pass enough incremental fixes that get something that's similar to medicare for all. However, they don't really like medicare for all. Switzerland isn't Canada. There are fundamental differences between policies. I support more sweeping changes believing the entire system is broken, and they want more incremental fixes that don't solve the problems as well. They like putting duct tape on top of duct tape in hopes that one day they have a brand new car that works. But all in all, all they can do is merely imitate a working system.
Medicare extra for all is a compromise, but it's one that would make it easy to accomplish single payer in the future. I'm not against incremental shifts if I have to have some level of incremental shift to get toward a goal, but I make a good faith effort in trying to get us there, and medicare extra would have a clear path to expanding to single payer in the future. This is not true of, say, Biden's fixes. Even if they added all the subsidies they wanted, and cost controls, the system would still be a broken one full of band aids and duct tape. It would just vaguely resemble the elegance of a plan constructed under the rational policy models.
The same applies to UBI vs welfare. When democrats want to fix the safety net, they added layers of bureaucracy on top of layers of bureaucracy. In the 40s-60s, they would just add more agencies on top of agencies to provide aid. This would lead to a complex byzantine system, which is endemic to the muddle through model. And then conservatives say government doesn't work. Thankfully the conservatives under Nixon recognized this and proposed UBI to FIX this problem, replace the old broken system, replace it with one that's simpler and actually helps people. But that failed, and Reagan won, and then we got more great society programs broken over time under the neoliberal era where the new bipartisan consensus was to add more requirements to programs to make them less able to be used, leading to even less faith in them. I'll tell you who muddle through helps, conservatives. The arguments write themselves. Government can't do anything right. Everything government does is too complex. The free market does things a lot more efficiently. Minorities are gaming the system and exploiting loopholes (which loopholes exactly? no one knows because the system is so byzantine that no one know how it works, they just see brown person in grocery store pay with EBT while they get nothing), etc. And then the right further breaks the system claiming we need to stop fraud (what fraud? who knows?), we need to stop drug users from doing drugs on it, we need to get lazy people off of welfare rolls and into work, blah blah blah. The right LOVES it when the left does their muddle through crap. Because it gives them the intellectual high ground. As we've established yesterday, the right has NOTHING in terms of viable policies or ideology but they can make a living on attacking and sabotaging democratic muddle through politics by breaking already broken half measures and making them less efficient.
And still, the democrats either don't get this or don't want to. You ask for a UBI and they'll push for an NIT, then they'll whittle down the NIT to an EITC, and then they'll add work requirements and drug testing to the EITC or pull privilege politics and claim only POC should get it, which just further drives people to the GOP. Again, republicans love these politics. Meanwhile every time they get in power they'll just break things further.
The whole thing is, this model slows progress to a sandstill. I mean, every minor change becomes a slog. It requires insane effort just to pass the most incremental fixes. Someone said recently if we could just pass a UBI of $1 a year, we could then change it over time. But then people would be haggling over $100 vs 200, and no one would wanna raise it to $12,000 or whatever, and it would never be the policy if it was meant to be. Even worse it wouldn't be a UBI in practice, again, would basically be an EITC expansion. It's just so lazy. I mean, this is what happens when Biden's plans on healthcare too. You get this mild ACA expansion which helps a handful of people and everyone acts like its the greatest thing ever, when in reality it's just another band aid. The minimum wage also reminds me of this. Hasn't been raised since like 2007. And people fight and haggle over raising it. What a joke.
So elections go back and forth, politicians end up running on mild fixes, and rolling back those mild fixes, and nothing happens. Democrats keep control scaring people the republicans are going to come for their mild fixes, while republicans try to roll them back. Progressives ask for substantive change, but are walked back to a compromise, which is walked back to another compromise, meaning it takes decades to do what gets passed in years.
I'm not sold on this. If it takes such massive effort to do anything, then is muddle through even worth it? The way i see it, looking at history, a lot of American politics is like this. You had politicians in the 1840s haggling over the missouri compromise, while telling abolitionists they were stupid for being abolitionists and how they need to get with the program and vote within the system. Meanwhile all hell broke loose in 1861 and we ended up having a war. In the 1880s and onward republicans and democrats haggled over the coinage of silver and tariffs and other stupid BS, while people suffered and worked gruelling 12+ hour days in sweat shops without a minimum wage. Eventually the great depression forced their hand.
Can't it be said that actually, all of these incremental fixes are all for nought? It seems to me like incrementalism is a waste of time arguing over minutae, with political theater simply being a thing to placate the masses, while keeping the overton window away from actual change.
However, as a rational policy guy, I'll tell you exactly how to pass these rational policies. You get enough votes, and then you pass them. If you can't pass stuff even if you have a majority, wtf is even the point in voting for a party like the democrats? Are you on board with change or not? But that's the problem. American politics is like a swamp, you got all of these special interests, and the two parties aren't really interested in change. If the parties all thought like Bernie or Yang, we could have UBI or M4A. But instead the incrementalists fight us to keep the system exactly as it is. Because they don't want change. They're often part of this corrupt swamp that favors the status quo.
Again, in the 1970s we had conservatives talking about BASIC INCOME. Nixon was also for a public option. I'm to the left of today's democrats, but I look a lot like a new deal conservative. Because that's the environment you had. In the wake of FDR, the overton window was so progressive both sides proposed grand ideas, and sometimes they passed them, and sometimes they didn't. Heck, the reason I am like a conservative back then is because conservatives back then were like "what the democrats are doing is too complicated, let's simplify it." They were helpful, and they proposed policies that helped. Both sides, back then, were adherents to the rational planning model. They proposed their grand plans, campaigned against each other, one side won, and tried to pass stuff. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.
The alignment today isn't like that. The republicans are trying to sabotage the system and the democrats refuse to be for fixing it. Any changes they are for are incremental. Nothing gets done. It takes 40 years to do what used to take 4-8. We saw massive strides in the 1930s-1970s in social and economic progress. From the 1980s on everything has been a slog. It's not that politics has to be like that, it's this specific generation of politics, this specific realignment. And if history teaches anything, it's that alignments like this often lead to problems getting worse until the government is forced to step in and do what it should have done all along. So that said, I think muddle through is a long term failure.
Conclusion
Honestly, I think the democrats are wrong for using the muddle through model. It's often a model used during political alignments with high levels of dysfunction, and a government unwilling to do anything. I do not believe you actually get good policy through the muddle through model. If the core base isn't good, there's no reason to try to improve upon it. But democrats love doing this thing where they add layers of duct tape that just add layers of bureaucracy to layers of bureaucracy, causing the system to get complicated, confusing, and inefficient. This leads to a loss of morale in support of it, strengthening opposition to it, which just makes changes harder.
I really dont think it's harder to implement policy via the rational policy model than the muddle through model inherently. You just need the votes and political will to pass it. But muddle through destroys political will, making any change a slog, where slow changes start requiring as much effort as big changes should.
At worst, muddle through, throughout American history, seems to be a waste of time. Politicians leave problems festering for decades, nothing is done about them, and in the long term, I'm not sure they want to. Ultimately, change is forced upon people, as the status quo gets so bad that it just explodes in a powder keg that forces us to realign ourselves according to our new reality. This happened in the 1860s with slavery, it happened in the 1930s with the new deal, and it might end up happening again, if the two parties can't get their crap together.
Ultimately, the rational policy model is what gets crap done for real. You need someone to come in, say this is broken, it needs to be thrown out, and this is what we're gonna replace it with, and this is why it's better. This isn't to say compromises cant be had or vestigal parts of previous systems can't remain when needed, but I will never get this cult of compromise and incrementalism today's democrats are obsessed with. When I compromise, it's because i absolutely have to. But to democrats, compromise is a way of life, and it just seems to be a one way ticket to nothing ever getting done. Ive talked a lot on here about how our core system for economics and social programs and labor relations stem from almost a century ago. We're not much better off than we were then, because we haven't done anything since then. It's time for us to do stuff. And unless you wanna wait another 100 years, you need to actually think outside the box, define problems, and then propose elegant solutions to fix them. Muddle through will just cost us decades of political effort and capital for little results.
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