“Incrementalism”

“Incrementalism”    Nov. 18, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 April 1963

"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." 

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." 

For just the fourth time in American history, the house has now open up impeachment hearings to begin the process through which the President of the United States can be removed from office. Though it is an obviously rare event, the fact that nearly all of us can vividly remember three of the four presidents facing impeachment means that it is now happening more often and that is almost certainly because of the real time nature of TV news coverage in which the public gets a front row seat to watch the dumpster fire of an administration going off the rails.

Deciding which crime to charge President Trump with is similar to asking which brick in this building is the one holding up our walls. I have listened to almost every minute of the hearings which have dramatically illustrated the specific but rather horrifying bribery around both political and business corruption between the White House and the government of Ukraine. It’s bad, but, as this all sounds, we have to bear in mind that moment of uncommon frankness in which the acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters, “We do this all of the time,” and charged them to simply “get over it.” 

Reporters jumped on that moment of clarity and tried to manufacture some moral shock but, come on, haven’t we come to accept a tremendous amount of corruption and have just gotten over it? Mulvaney was ill-advised to say it out loud, but his reasoning is almost unassailable. 

For example, this month, the New York Supreme Court has ordered Trump to pay a $2 million fine for the way that he managed the millions of dollars he raised for Veterans during the 2016 campaign. Saying that the “stole” the money is a bit of hyperbole, but he did manage it in a way where a huge amount of money was used in his campaign, sufficiently to justify a $2 million dollar fine. Trump was also found guilty of having used money from this charitable foundation to buy sports memorabilia and a portrait of himself. The judge shut the foundation down and ordered that his three oldest children, who had sat on the board of the charity, take a mandatory class on what it means to have oversight of a charity’s funds. This is scandalous at a level that it would force a third world dictator out of office but in America, it is hardly newsworthy. 

The point for me is that this happened two weeks ago, and it appears to have skated by without much public comment. Because, to reference Mick Mulvaney once more, “This happens all of the time,” and so, we, the public, have more or less “gotten over it.”

There is a huge psychological weight that comes with the status quo. Ukraine is suffering from the legacy of corruption that was just in the fabric of Russian and Soviet governing. Corruption is how it is done. I have paid bribes on several occasions to police in Managua, Nicaragua because that is how the police make a living. Their salaries are ridiculous, so they pull over tourists, make up some charge of traffic violation, you give them $40 and you get to keep your passport and you don’t become a permanent part of some construction project going on in town at the time. 

It is corrupt but it is the way a whole lot of the world works. I pay the bribe because, when I am in Nicaragua, I have bigger fish to fry than police graft, but it still isn’t right. American voters have been limbered up to tolerate government corruption in much the same way.

This assumption that the way that things are is the way that they have to be, forces even educated, intelligent people into a related assumption that all political change must be incremental. The progressive candidates in the 2020 presidential election keep talking about universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, closing the income gap, and meaningfully addressing the climate change crisis.

But the millionaire talking heads on even the liberal TV news channels, who represent the billionaire owners of TV news channels, absolutely insist that only the smallest and most incremental changes to our current system can be tolerated. They warn Democrats away from being too far left, or too idealistic, or engaging in pipe dreams.

Now, folks, capitalism has to be regulated or it turns into economic cannibalism. We need a government to place the guardrails on capitalism so that it does the most good for the most people rather than a lot of good for a few people while imposing the violence of poverty on most people. As capitalism has evolved in the years since Ronald Regan, it has become assumed that in the richest nation in the world, some children will suffer from malnutrition, tens of thousands will die because they cannot afford proper healthcare, but the modest proposal that billionaires might be a little less rich is considered to be impossible if not treasonous. 

I don’t know who originated the quote, but I love this meme that says, “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe because its handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them.” 

People vote against their own best interests because they have been trained to do so. 

It is not my place to try to persuade you to vote for one candidate or another. It is not my place to advocate for one party or another. But it is my place to talk about ethics, about social justice, about saving the planet and alleviating suffering . . . I don’t care which candidate wins and which candidate loses, I just want the candidate who will strive to the most good for the most people. And that will mean curbing military spending, increasing wages, investing in mass transit, renewable energy, and universal access to healthcare and higher education. 

Next month I will be speaking at an Andrew Yang event in Columbia, SC. If I may take a moment to plug another event, Dr. Paul Thomlinson and I will be doing a Saturday, Sunday conference on Vital Connections at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Columbia, SC on Dec. 7 and 8. Please come if you can.

But after we are done at the church on Saturday afternoon, I am going to do a presentation for clergy in the area on the ideas that support a Universal Basic Income. I am glad that some previous talks I have given on that subject came to Andrew Yang’s attention and I am glad to be a part of trying to inform the clergy on the topic. I am not, however, endorsing Andrew Yang’s candidacy. He seems smart to me. I am a big believer in his central message, about a Universal Basic Income, but we all know that he has no chance of winning the nomination . . . but, the Universal Basic Income will become a more necessary idea with each passing year, so I am glad he is talking about it, getting it on the debate stage, and I’m glad that he is giving me a forum in which to talk about it. 

I have personally been a pretty big Bernie Sanders supporter but not because of who he is but because of the issues he represents. The talking heads on the TV news shows say that he is far too radical and cannot possibly be elected. However, he has been endorsed by the most intelligent political scientist in the world, Noam Chomsky, and his economic plan has been endorsed by Thomas Piketty, the world’s leading economist. To those who have said that I am stupid for supporting Bernie, I can only say, “Yes I am . . . me and Noam Chomsky and Thomas Piketty are really really stupid.”

But, again, I am not endorsing one candidate over another, but I am endorsing one idea over another. Our environment is collapsing. We are entering a period of mass extinction. I may live long enough to personally see the coral reefs all over the world die. So, Bernie’s green new deal recommends spending five times as much on renewable energy and climate action than Warren’s plan, so I like Bernie’s plan better than Warren’s but if Biden gets elected, I’ll still be advocating for Bernie’s more aggressive green new deal because the house is on fire. But don’t believe this old gray beard, but do please listen to the world’s leading climate activist:

I took as our wisdom lesson today this brief quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, because he expresses so passionately the very thing that provokes Greta Thunberg’s outrage. The sympathetic white moderates around King kept trying to tell him that they agreed with his goal but that he was asking for too much, he was agitating too much. It wasn’t the KKK or the John Birch Society that was holding back the march for Civil Rights . . . it was moderate democrats and conservative republicans . . . folks, it was Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, it was Catholics and Disciples . . . it was our parents . . . sometimes it was us…. You can’t just integrate schools and neighborhoods, you can’t just wipe out laws that allowed for discrimination in hiring and that prevented inter-racial relationships! The real enemy of progress in civil rights, were the white moderates who wanted a peaceful, incremental path towards justice. 

As King wrote, “the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." 

I keep reminding you of how we fought for a generation for marriage rights for gay and lesbian partners and we would have moderate success in one state, and years later in another, but one day, there was a Supreme Court decision and same sex couples all over the USA could get married and as soon as we did it, similar rights were extended in many other nations. And look, no body died! It was a huge step for liberation on behalf of millions of people and there were no victims, no social or economic collapse. 

One day we will outlaw assault rifles and most hand guns, it will happen, it will happen in America, and the week after it happens, it will no longer be controversial except among a few disaffected people who needed treatment for their paranoia more than they ever needed their assault rifles. Incremental change has not helped. Deaths from guns have risen dramatically in the last year. No half-meaures should be our goal. We need to go for the whole enchilada.

I am sometimes envious of the people who say, “Oh, I don’t watch the news, I don’t want to be upset by all of that stuff.” And I’m getting close to the point where I could wallow in a certain indifference. We may not get Medicare for all but I know this much, in August of 2021, I’ll get Medicare for me! We may not get a universal basic income, but in a year and a half, 43 years of preaching will be turned into a guaranteed basic income for me. Most of you are already there. We really good spend our time meeting for coffee and talking about, “Well, what is pickle ball?” or “Why don’t our kids come to see us more often?” But we don’t want to be those people, do we? Unless I ended up in the wrong place this morning, we are people who are mostly on Medicare and living on a pension and we want for our kids and grandkids and their friends, and people we will never meet, to be given at least as many rivers and lakes as we have been swimming and fishing in. We want them to get to go to college and come out without crushing debt. We want for them to work with hope for health care and a pension because it is only fair and we can afford it if we will scale back our military spending and develop a fair tax structure. But we won’t get there by accident.

Frederick Douglass fought for the end of slavery and in his remaining days after the Civil War, he worked for racial justice. Over a hundred and fifty years ago, he told us, “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation . . . want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Far be it from me to tell you how to vote but there is going to be a political debate on TV this Wednesday evening. I am asking you to listen for who is telling you that they will rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic, and who will actually fight for something more than incremental change. And if you decide to vote for a moderate, well, you know that you have nothing to fear from me . . . I will, however, give your name and address and Greta Thunberg and I’ll let you explain yourself to her.