I just finished watching the excellent Liberty's Kids with my son. It's funny how much the centrist compromise agenda comes up again and again. First we watch as people debate whether or not to continue to live under King George. Then America tries and fails to live under the centrist Articles of Confederation. Then, though mostly foreshadowed in the show, Americans try and fail to compromise on slavery.
After slavery was decided by civil war Americans tried and failed to reach some slimy compromise position on unions and civil rights. And after much turmoil centrism always fails - people radically fight for an win their freedom despite the worst good intentions of every incrementalist.
Now the latest fad for centrists is that we can reach a compromise with evil on not regulating corporations and the military. As usual all sorts of reasons for not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good are raised while the country falls further and further from sustainable policies.
Centrism will fail again but how much misery and suffering must continue before progress is allowed might be something we can all help control...
Oh I know centrists claim victory for all American progress. Civil rights supposedly happened incrementally. It's just nonsense. What actually happens is that people wait miserably for progress for decades or centuries but when it comes it comes fast and radically. There never was and there never will be a centrist victory on American soil. They can only claim that revolution was unnecessary - that kings, slaves and sweat shops could have been vanquished without breaking a finger nail.
The claim that science moves forward incrementally is also dubious. America's technological progress was mostly the made by concerted, focused revolutionary effort. Roll outs of telephony, roads, trains, canals, internet and electricity were massive forward looking projects. The same goes for sequencing the human genome, nuclear power, antibiotics, X-rays, microwaves, radio and it's the "green revolution" not the "green incremental". Similarly in art had the Impressionists challenged the art establishment incrementally you can kiss your Haystacks goodbye.
Even the claim that evolution works through incremental steps is suspect. Punctuated equilibrium replaced gradualism in biology long ago. There was no support for slow change ever amounting to anything in the fossil record. There is no support for gradualism in our social history either but for some reason we must continue to suffer this kind of theory. Incremental change in evolution does exactly what it does in politics - one century a species has 3 horns and the next 2 but it amounts to nothing. The species survival, like America's, depends on real change not incremental embellishments.
Change we can believe in is bold change. Anything else is sand castles in the sand as the tide comes in.