Can incrementalism work?

Change requires a big surge of progress, not incrementalism

Question: Can incrementalism work?
Position‹2 of 3›: No, incrementalism does not work.
Argument‹3 of 3: Change requires a big surge of progress, not incrementalism

Both the momentum of a movement and innovation are lost if the agreement that both sides come to is too cautious and measured. Radical policy shifts must occur before society settles back into a new equilibrium.

The argument

The argument against incrementalism here is that substantial change requires an overhaul of the status quo, and an overhaul is by definition not something reached in stages. The historical examples offered are wars, revolutions and social movements — episodes that function as catalysts for massive change precisely because they break a settled arrangement rather than adjusting it. Against transformations of that kind, incremental changes are insignificant, and the argument treats their apparent reasonableness as their principal danger. The damage is done to two things at once. The first is momentum. A movement builds pressure over time, and that pressure is what makes a substantial demand negotiable at all; when the agreement the two sides arrive at is too cautious and measured, the pressure dissipates into it and cannot be reassembled afterwards. The second is innovation. A cautious settlement is framed in the terms already available, so the new arrangements a movement might have produced are never devised, because the problem is declared solved before anyone needs to invent them. The deeper cost is what a moderate settlement does to expectations. If incremental change comes to be regarded as the best that can be achieved, then the catalyst that made more possible has been spent for a fraction of its value, and future opportunities for substantial change are foreclosed along with it — the precedent set is that this much is what such a moment yields. Sometimes, moreover, dramatic change is the only way to halt aggression or to demonstrate that the parties are serious about making progress, since a small concession communicates the opposite. Radical policy shifts must occur before society settles back into a new equilibrium, because once it has settled the opening is gone. Because change requires a big surge of progress, incrementalism does not work.

Premises

[P1]Substantial change requires an overhaul of the status quo, of the kind catalysed by wars, revolutions, and social movements. [P2] Incremental changes are insignificant and lose a movement's momentum and innovation when agreements are too cautious and measured. [P3] Settling for incremental change wastes the catalyst and misses future opportunities for substantial change. [C] Therefore, because change requires a big surge of progress, incrementalism does not work.

Counter-arguments

Catalysts can create major change, but their results are unpredictable. Even when the public demands massive change, the resulting negotiations often produce incremental changes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Even when the public demands massive change, the resulting negotiations often produce incremental changes.