No Revolutionaries

March 4, 2016

We’re on the verge of a political revolution. At least that’s what we’re being told by various presidential campaigns.

They are just the latest in a long line of candidates exhorting us to get involved in the Next Big Thing, a political revolution that will change everything. Isn’t this exciting? If only any of them were offering ideas that were actually revolutionary.

The true believers tell us these “revolutions” are a necessary part of progress, that without these bold thinkers we wouldn’t get anywhere. They are right in that bold thinkers forward the debate on important issues.

But most of the revolutions now cited are, in fact, the current version of a slow, evolutionary journey started long ago by others, and not yet completed.

We abolished slavery in 1865 and waited a full century before passage of the Civil Rights Act. The hundred years between the two was an endless, incremental struggle of changing minds and changing laws, bit by tiny bit.

We’ve a long way yet to go but, as ever, we are creeping our way there.

Women talking about breaking glass ceilings are the latest link in a chain that also stretches back more than a century. We didn’t even see fit to give women the right to vote until 1920 but we kept creeping along. Though she would be a historic first, if Hillary Clinton becomes president it won’t be revolutionary, just another step.

We’ve seen many claims of political revolution in the last 50 years. There was the civil rights and feminist revolutions already mentioned. There was the peace revolution that cropped up during Vietnam led by Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. It was going to be, some of you will recall, the Age of Aquarius, with peace and love overflowing. Peace remains elusive but the seekers are resolute.

There was the sexual revolution, but it turned out people had been having sex pretty regularly before that, just not talking endlessly about it (the Pill was revolutionary but it was more medical than political).

We’re still in the midst of a green revolution that can be traced back to at least Teddy Roosevelt.

More recently, there was the Republican revolution of 1994 and the tea party revolution. Both successfully elected politicians promising less government and lower taxes but then watched while the deficits continued unabated, the government kept growing and the national debt grew to exceed our annual gross domestic product.

The Bernie Sanders revolution promises universal, single-payer health care (an idea first suggested more than 100 years ago), higher taxes (suggested by many losing Democrat candidates for many years), and more regulation of the financial industry (FDR did that, the GOP undid it in 1999).

These are old ideas given a fresh, loud voice but not a lot more radical than Hillary Clinton’s tweaks of the same issues.

Ted Cruz’s plan for flat taxes has been around for decades. Marco Rubio’s three-tiered tax plan is just another version of dozens of similar proposals that have come and gone. Donald Trump’s nativism, bigotry and fearmongering are, unfortunately, as old as time.

This is not to suggest these discussions are without value. To the extent anyone can move us forward on income inequality, a financial system that rewards the very rich at the expense of everyone else, the budgetary drain Social Security/Medicare is becoming or military adventurism run amok, they will have made a significant contribution. But not a revolution.

There are no political revolutionaries, just modern warriors in old struggles. Our system, born out of revolution but with its checks and balances and ponderous Congressional deliberations, seriously discourages rapid change.

Political progress never moves fast enough for most of us regardless of philosophy. The setbacks sometimes create the impression we’ve made no progress on any issue at all. History, however, tells a different story. We move forward at a glacial pace but forward we do move.

Nothing currently being proposed will revolutionize anything because all of it, the good and bad from both sides, is an extension of foundations laid decades ago.

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I’ve recently read, twice, there are 30,000 people coming to Traverse City to work on any given workday. Apparently that excludes the thousands who both live and work in the city because both times commuters were referenced. So Traverse City has 35,000 or so jobs now? Very impressive. In fact, unbelievably so.

Add up all the employees in Traverse City who work at Munson, Hagerty, TCAPS, TBAISD, city, county, state and federal offices, local manufacturing, the hospitality industry and even add in all the part-time employees downtown and you are not even halfway there.

Either there is a semantics issue here or whoever first made the claim should explain how they arrived at such a number. And where all those people park.