Making Radical Change, Slowly

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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, keeping the seat warm for Brian, who has a well-deserved Friday off. If there's something in modern American politics that we can all agree on, it's that there's little that the right and left wings of this country can agree on. I despise, therefore I am, is how a recent opinion piece from the Washington Post describes political polarization in the United States as totally conflicting ideas like build the wall or abolish ICE, or bandied about, where does that lead us? Gridlock, stalling, feeling like we're a country that's boiling, but frozen.

With us now are the co-authors of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. From Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and co-editor of Vital City, and former executive director of the Center for Court Innovation, and Aubrey Fox, executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. Greg, Aubery, it's great to have you on.

Greg Berman: Thanks for having us, man.

Matt Katz: If one of you can begin by just take us to square one. What is incrementalism and why do you feel it's 'particularly well suited' to this current moment?

Greg Berman: This book really grows out of our experience over the past three decades trying to advance justice reform, not just here in New York, but around the country and across the world. Aubrey and I have over the past 30 years been involved in trying to create alternative incarceration programs, community crime prevention programs, youth development programs, trying to tweak the justice system to make it more fair, more effective, and more humane.

That has meant working with hundreds of judges, probation officers, police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys across the country. Over that time, we kept coming back to three lessons over and over again. One is that change is hard. It's really hard to move government systems. It's really hard to solve social problems like inequality or poverty. That's lesson number one.

Lesson number two is that by and large, and there's, of course, exceptions to this rule, but by and large, government is doing the best that it can. Most of the people that are working in government are trying hard to make a difference in dilapidated facilities, outmoded technology, working against real constraints. That given these two things, we should really be celebrating small wins when they occur. Not just because change is hard, but in our experience, particularly in New York City and looking at criminal justice, small victories can add up over time.

I think the paradigmatic example of that is that we've seen in New York over the past 30 years, crime go down dramatically contrary to conventional wisdom, crime went down dramatically at the same time that incarceration went down and our jail population went down. Our lived experience has been that those grand successes have been driven by a series of small incremental improvements year by year, made by reformers both inside and outside of government. That's the message of the book is that we should have faith in incremental process in America.

Matt Katz: Interesting. Aubrey, can you speak to some of those changes in the criminal justice system in New York that happens at an incremental basis?

Aubrey Fox: Yes. The writer Adam Gopnik called it a thousand small sanities in a New Yorker essay. What he was referring to was this multiple decades-long process of essentially no grand plan, but a bunch of un uncoordinated efforts by judges, people working within the criminal justice system who were frustrated by the limitations of the approaches they were using, nonprofit leaders, community agencies, and taken together, Greg mentioned this, even before bail reforms passed in 2020, a reduction in the city jail population from a high of around 22,000 to 7,000. Really incredible progress.

The thing that I would add to Greg's point, we're not arguing that incrementalism is always the right approach, but we are arguing that it is massively underrated both because it is from a real-world perspective, how government actually works but also has some real advantages. I guess I would make a plea to people who instinctively dislike the idea that there's value in incrementalism to remember a quote that's attributed to Thomas Edison, which is vision without execution is hallucination.

I think in today's environment, we tend to place a premium on vision without thinking through how to actually execute that vision. I think people who, again, instinctively think, "Ugh, incrementalism, that doesn't sound so good." It would really behoove them, particularly people who want to use government to make positive change, to understand how the levers of government actually work in practice, not just in theory. In practice, incrementalism is what government does on a day-to-day basis.

Matt Katz: Listeners, we hope you will weigh in on this. Should we approach the deadlocked political issues of our time, gun violence, wealth inequality, climate change, et cetera, bit by bit? Or are you unconvinced? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 is our number, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Guys, you admit that radical change has accomplished important things. Perhaps the most important thing in American history, the abolition of slavery. Are there not urgent problems in modern America growing wealth inequality, climate disaster, gun violence that are worthy of Swift's immediate action and that the system would allow for Swift's bold immediate action?

Aubrey Fox: Yes, I guess I-- Go ahead, Greg.

Greg Berman: No, go ahead.

Aubrey Fox: I'd just start by saying two things. One, we're very eager on this topic. We love incrementalism.

Matt Katz: I see.

Aubrey Fox: I guess I'll quickly say two things. The first is it is true that radical change can happen, but we're not very good at predicting where it's going to come from. For example, let's just think about, what are two potential radical changes that have happened this year? The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and perhaps the redesign of the banking system. ChatGPT 4 and artificial intelligence. I think if you had asked most people a year or two ago, is that what you predict is going to be causing radical change? They probably would've said no unless they were someone who was an expert in that field. That's one thing I'd say. We're not really great at predicting what is going to lead to radical change.

The second thing I'd say is, some of the examples you chose often what feels like radical change when it happens is actually the product of a foundation that has been set through incrementalism. Again, to use a local example, when bail reform passed in 2020, and most people now are familiar with bail reform and are encountering this issue in a way that maybe they hadn't thought of before, it was really built on this foundation of the incredible change that was led by practitioners that allowed New York City, in particular, to deemphasize the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention so much. What felt like radical change, the abolition essentially of money bail for misdemeanor and non-violent felony alleged offenses was really built on the progress that had come before it.

Matt Katz: Greg, did you want to add anything?

Greg Berman: I guess I would just push back slightly on the premise of the question which is that the American system is designed to deliver a radical change. I think the opposite is true, in fact, that our federal system of checks and balances, the diffusion of power across city state, local federal government which creates multiple veto points. All the apparatus of government in America actually points in the opposite direction against radical change.

I feel sometimes my friends who are seeking transformative change are people sticking a dollar bill in a Coke machine and demanding champagne and getting really frustrated when the Coke machine doesn't deliver champagne. That's just not what it's designed to do actually.

Aubrey Fox: Just to really abuse that metaphor, that the Coke bottle that comes out, I think I've developed in writing this book an appreciation for the idea that in a diverse country with lots of diverse opinions and diverse ideas, the idea that we have a structure that allows not for arguments to end with one winner and one loser and one final outcome but creates a structure where we have ongoing arguments. That actually has some real benefits in terms of the trade-off. Now, it can be frustrating to be sure, but I think on balance, I have a growing appreciation for the structure in which we live and which Greg describes so well.

Matt Katz: You dedicated chapter in the book to outlining the principles of incrementalism, which I guess can be used in terms of what you were just talking about, about how the way government can operate in this regard, honesty, humility, nuance, and respect. How does gradual change promote these sorts of values?

Greg Berman: I think that we have to begin from a place of humility. A couple years ago, Aubrey and I were working on a project when we were both working at the Center for Court Innovation, looking at, in particular, why some criminal justice reforms succeed and others fail.

The reality is like businesses, most businesses fail, most new social programs fail too. We interviewed a bunch of experts around the country for this project. One of our favorite conversations was with a criminologist, unfortunately now passed, named Joan Pet Cecilia. One of the things that she said that really stuck with me was that looking back over 100 years of criminology and learning about how to change the behavior of offending populations, the best that we can do in terms of reducing recidivism, this is when you have the best programs, well-staffed, well-funded, the best we can do is to reduce recidivism by around 15% to 20%.

I think that we just haven't been honest. This is just one example from criminal justice, I'm sure that if you were talking to an education person or a housing person, that they could deliver a similar statistic. I guess one of the things that we're reacting to is that one of the things that we do in government all the time is that we overpromise and underdeliver. I think that incrementalism is a mindset, it's an approach that tries to push us in the other direction, which is to underpromise and overdeliver.

Matt Katz: [crosstalk] I'm sorry, one moment Aubrey, let people know who you are, and if people are just tuning in, it's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm WNYC reporter Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. My guests are Greg Berman, co-editor of Vital City, which is a great new criminal justice journal magazine that's out, covers all things in New York City and Criminal justice and former Executive, and Greg's also former Executive Director of the Center for Court Innovation, and Aubrey Fox, Executive Director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, they're co-authors of new book, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. Go ahead, Aubrey. Sorry to interrupt you.

Aubrey Fox: Thanks, Matt. Sorry about that. I'm really glad that you brought up those values of incrementalism, honesty, humility, nuance, and respect. Part of the reason that we tried to find them in the first place is that when we talk to people who work in government or work adjacent to government, often they end up really speaking as incrementalists in practice.

They understand the constraints they're operating under, they understand how hard the work is, but it's often hard for them to admit to that in public. Take humility as a value, people who work in government often confront problems that are really difficult to solve. At some point, they need to be able to say, I don't know how to solve this. I need to really think fundamentally about how to address this difficult problem. If we knew the answer, we would've come up with it already.

Our goal in defining these values is to really stand up and say, it's okay. It's okay to admit to this. It's okay not to know the answer. It's okay to say this issue is very complicated. It's not so clear. There's one perspective or another perspective. I think ultimately we'll all benefit from that, but it can be difficult in this current environment to allow yourself to state these things that are true, and you will hear in private conversations publicly. That's our goal is to really put down on paper, not just definition of incrementalism as what happens in practice, but actually has some values associated with it that are positive.

Matt Katz: Let's see what our listeners think. Rabbi Barra in Park Slope. Hi there, Rabbi.

Rabbi: Hi, Rabbi Barra Elman. Yes. Thank you for taking my call. I have a lot of respect for what the speaker is saying. On the other hand, my problem with incrementalism, and this has come from many, many past examples we could draw upon, is that it tends to favor the mainstream at the expense of the marginalized. I'm thinking of the feminist movement, for example, and how when the coalitions come together to see what can get moved, what gets moved is that the things that the power base already has, and those who are on the edges are the ones who are deemed expendable because their message can't get pushed through.

I have two daughters. One is definitely an incrementalist, and the other one's a more radical as as I am. I think this is something that I think is a position that can be entertained when you have power already at your hands. When you are outside of that power realm, you're likely to be expendable. That's my problem with that approach. I agree it is how government works but I think that's one of the things that radical movements and leftist progressive movements are trying to fight against is because that incrementalism advantages those who already have power.

Matt Katz: That's very interesting. Thank you very much for that, Rabbi. You guys have a reaction to that about how incrementalism might not include the marginalized.

Greg Berman: I hear you, rabbi. I have two radical daughters actually, and make no mistake the world needs dreamers, the world needs visionaries, the world needs activists and radicals, we're not discounting the importance of that. We're just saying that most of us in fact are gradualists and most of us probably should be.

I guess the one thing I would say in response is, and I hear the distinction that you're making, I think it's just important in a country as big and as diverse as ours, that in addition to honoring the moderate left versus radical left distinction that the rabbi was articulating, that we also honor the fact that in fact the most powerful force in our political force in our country as the data scientist David Shore has articulated, is in fact status quo bias, and the desire to not see any policy chain whatsoever.

We just have to figure out a way forward as a country, which again, we do it imperfectly in all sorts of ways, but we do manage to move forward incorporating the ideas of radicals, moderate, centrist, conservatives and people who just don't want any change whatsoever. We have to acknowledge that reality that those people exist.

Matt Katz: I'd love to hear, maybe your radical daughters will write a book and you guys can-- I'd love to hear the debate between you and your radical daughters. Jim in Asbury Park. Hi there, Jim.

Jim: Hi, Matt, how are you? It's actually Jim Katie, I'm in Spring Lake now. Used to be in Asbury as a councilman.

Matt Katz: Sure. Nice to hear from you.

Jim: Thanks: 25 years experience as an activist, grassroots activist, an organizer, and also have held public office. My concern is in line with what the rabbi just raised. I feel that the position that the gentleman are taking with their book, it marginalizes activists. I'm not saying that the speaker was intending to do this when he said the world needs dreamers, but usually that's said in a dismissive way, and we get put on the margins when in a lot of instances, historically, it will be shown that we were right.

The people who were considered radical and stood up against slavery in a radical way were right. The people who were considered radical and stood up against women not having full rights under the Constitution were right. The kids who are standing up now to protect a planet and try to stop the climate crisis, they're right. The incrementalists aren't, you're in the way. I know from serving in government and having written law and pushed for more progressive policy and one victories like that, you're really more in the mold of what Dr. King called the white moderate in his lament from a Birmingham jail.

You're in the way of progress. You try to pat yourself on the back and say, hey, but we are in the majority. The majority was wrong on so many things in terms of history. You're in the way of progress, and you paint people like myself and the rabbi and others as radicals, as dreamers, as activists, instead of joining us and saying to a lot more other folks, these people are right, and we're either going to change this in 50 years and have 50 years of suffering for marginalized people, or we're going to change it now.

Matt Katz: Thank you very much.

Jim: What you're talking about lends itself to just maintaining an unjust status quo on so many levels and in so many areas in our body politic.

Matt Katz: Appreciate you calling in and chiming in here, Jim, very much so. Aubrey, would you like to respond to Jim's points there?

Aubrey Fox: Thank you Jim, and thank you, Rabbi. These are great questions. This is exactly the debate that we want to create with this book. Again, just going back to what we said earlier, we're not arguing that incrementalism is always the right strategy, but what we are saying is that people who want to use it should understand how they can use it in an effective way.

I think that includes the marginalized people, the term that I've heard from the two callers. I'll give you an example, the fight for gay marriage as defined by the writer, Jonathan Rauch was explicitly about marginalized people who wanted to create this opportunity for gay men and women to marry each other, taking a consciously incremental approach. There were a lot of different approaches taken. It's not just one vector, but there was a group of people who consciously from the margins adopted an incremental strategy.

Yes, it took time, but we have seen an entire revolution in our society. I think the people who were in the middle of that work, who promoted that strategy self-consciously, would argue that incrementalism isn't just a tool of people with power who are trying to maintain the status quo. That it was a lever that they were able to use to make what overtime amounted to radical change.

I think, again, part of our purpose in this book is to bring nuance to this concept of incrementalism. Often we set up a binary between incremental change versus radical change. It's almost as if we have like a dial and that our only decision is do we move the dial to radical, or do we move the dial to incremental. In other words, it's only our choice our passion, our belief that allows to define how much change is possible in society.

I don't agree with that view. I think that that is too easy an assumption to make that if we only press for radical change, radical change will happen as a result. Often it's precisely those people who are on the margins who need to be able to use the tools that are available to them to make change possible. Because the term increment sounds like it's small, it can be misleading to people, increments can actually lead to enormous changes. That's part of what we're arguing.

Matt Katz: We do have some callers who endorse your approach, so we're going to get to them too. I want to play Devil's Advocate beforehand just with one question that I've been thinking about a lot as I've been reading some of your ideas. Incrementalism sits in opposition to radicalism and therefore, rejects the rapid adoption of bold ideas on both right and the left. Part of the premise, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the political spectrum has an equally powerful and radical right and an equally powerful and radical left.

You point to Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the last election as recent right-wing radicalism and then calls to abolish ICE the Immigration Agency and defund the police, and Ibram X. Kendi's proposed department of anti-racism as examples of radicalism on the left. Is overturning an election the same thing as ending ICE, which has only really existed for 20 years anyway? What do you say to those who might find some false equivalency baked into this?

Greg Berman: I guess our argument is not that they're equal forces. Aubrey and I are good liberals at the end of the day, and like a lot of good liberals look in abhorrent at what Donald Trump has done and January 6th and the rest. I guess it's not that we're saying that the far left and the far right have equal power in this country or are equally detestable, but we are saying that on both the right and the left, there is a kind of increasing in age of social media and increasing default to simplistic solutions, radical rhetoric, threat inflation and that we should just push back against.

I think that's, at the end of the day, what incrementalism brings. Just to be clear, incrementalism is not, in fact, a defense of the status quo. What we're calling for and what incrementalism calls for is, in fact, a ceaseless effort to advance change and to acknowledge that our status quo is, in fact, broken and to do nothing is, in fact, a moral failure. We have to do something. We're just arguing that the best way to proceed in a polarized environment where decision-makers are prone to the same cognitive biases that you and I are, Matt, is to proceed cautiously.

Matt Katz: Thank you for that. That's interesting. Aubrey?

Aubrey Fox: [laughs] Couldn't help myself. I also would push a little bit against, and I think this is the spirit of your question, Matt, pointing out that there are voices on both the right and the left that are calling for radical change. We're not making an equivalent see between them except to observe that there is a push now for radicalism on both sides of that ideological spectrum. I think I would argue in a sense that the idea that we can remove the constraints that we all operate under political constraints, intellectual constraints, and wish our sway past them is in itself a kind of status quo. I think people have long desired this and dreamed of it.

To be fair, it's very easy if you're sitting down at your computer about to compose a tweet or put a post up on Substack to call for that change, removing from your mind, because you don't need to encounter that in the act of writing a tweet or putting up a post. All those real-world constraints. I guess I would just suggest that the idea that dreaming of radical change is somehow the logical alternative to status quo thinking. I would challenge that a little bit. I think there's a lot of status quo thinking from people who are trying to skip the steps that need to be taken to create the change that they want. It's easier to think that way.

Matt Katz: Are you saying my tweets can't change the world, Aubrey? Is that what it comes down to?

Aubrey Fox: Your tweets are particularly good, Matt.

Matt Katz: Thank you, sir. [laughs] Let's go back to the phone lines. Katie in Sayreville. Hi there, Katie.

Katie: Hi. Am I on? Sorry.

Matt Katz: Yes, you are. Thanks for calling.

Katie: Oh, okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking my call. I had a question and I guess a mini-story. I work in public health and public policy space, so I've been more privy than a lot of my peers to what those incremental changes are and what the impact of those are. However, I've found as a millennial, my friends are often not aware of the impact of things.

A recent example is even just educating them on the difference between equity and equality, which I was shocked to have to share with them. I guess my question is, as public servants or people that work in public space, do you have any suggestions on how we can better communicate it to make sure this message is getting out to people? Because I think in the current landscape, there's a lot of apathy, so I'd like to reduce that. Thank you.

Matt Katz: Thanks, Katie. Thanks for the question. Gentlemen?

Greg Berman: Aubrey, you want to pick up?

Aubrey Fox: Yes, I think your story is really inspiring because I think it suggests that we all have a role to play. I think if you imagine yourself talking to a friend about your day or about your experience of your day, whether it's your work or your personal life, you often are using, whether you are conscious of or not, incremental language, you're describing challenges that are hard where you feel like you've made some progress or maybe you've had a setback, but you're really trying you're trying to do better.

Again, I think many of us are incrementalists in practice, if not in theory, or if we're not even self-identifying as incrementalists. I just think there's a lot of basic storytelling that people can do that can help bolster people's confidence in the idea that progress can happen in increments. I love that story and I just would encourage the caller and others to share their stories.

Matt Katz: Yes. It's really interesting on how it plays out in real life. You guys alluded to this earlier, but I was hoping you could dig a little more into it. In the first section of the book, you explain that advancing radical change is especially difficult in the United States for a number of reasons, and the first being the structure of our government. Can you take us back to the time the founding fathers? What about our constitution promotes gradualism over big structural change? Greg?

Greg Berman: I guess, I'll let Aubrey chime in about the Constitution, but I guess I just wanted to make one other point before the conversation ends, that hasn't come up, which is really there's multiple constraints that limit the possibility of radical change. One is in fact our constitution and our form of government. The second is what we call the practitioner veto, which is, in fact, the frontline practitioners, whether they be cops or judges or social workers, or teachers. The people that actually implement policy ideas have a mind of their own.

You have to win their hearts and minds in order to actually change how government works, and there's palpable evidence through the years that they will reject, they will exercise what we call the practitioner veto, if there comes along ideas that they don't support. The third major break on radical change is what is the public want. In fact, I made reference to the David Shores argument earlier, there is very little evidence to suggest that the American public wants radical change. Gallup polls suggest that only 25% of Americans are open to increasing taxes to pay for increased government services.

We commissioned a poll for this book with the group YouGov, where they talked to 1,000 registered voters and asked them do they favor incremental change, bold change, or no change at all. Only a third of the American public was interested in bold change. That's a very real brake on the aspirations of those who would want to advance transformational change in a single quick, bold stroke.

Matt Katz: Interesting. Aubrey, did you want to speak to some of the history of this, the constitutional roots of incrementalism?

Aubrey Fox: Yes, just quickly to say that we have a system of government that was intentionally designed to frustrate and keep rapid change from occurring. We all understand the basics of a system where you have different levels of government exercising authority in different ways, and you have separation of powers where different branches of government balance each other out, at least in theory.

There's a lot of public attention and preoccupation and frustration sometimes with the procedural barriers to making change happen in Congress or in national government. I think part of what we're arguing is that there's virtue in that. What seems like creating the system that's frustrating is actually meant to ensure that we don't jam through big change on the basis of a temporary majority, that when change does occur, it is something that most people agree on. That process has some value, even though it may seem frustrating on the surface.

Matt Katz: Want to go back to the callers before I let you guys go. Ben in Williamsburg. Hi, Ben, thanks for calling in.

Ben: Hey, first time calling in. Thank you so much for bringing up this conversation.

Matt Katz: Welcome.

Ben: I do consider myself a bit of apathetic liberal and not super excited about the way politics are run, but I'm glad that you guys do see some positives. I will bring up that I do think that because the left and right have brought in so dramatically, that incrementalism doesn't necessarily have a place in the nation as is. Do you guys have any thoughts concerning maybe breaking up the nation, succession of some coastal more liberal states?

Matt Katz: That would certainly be radical change to break up the nation. Did that come up at all in your conversations, guys?

Aubrey Fox: Certainly, the frustration with the status quo leads people to imagine big changes like that. I guess, maybe to take the caller's point in a slightly different direction. He said at the beginning that he's the apathetic voter, and I think that's important because I think the right to not care about politics is something that we should remember as important. When we get into these passionate debates about how the system should work, and how it should operate, I think it's important to remember that for most people politics is not a major source of meaning in their lives and not something that they care that deeply about. They care about other things.

They care deeply about those other things, and so having the ability to take a step back and say, "Yes, this seems very passionate. It seems very urgent that we fix this right now," but in point of fact, most people are not engaged at the level that us political junkies are. That becomes, again, in itself, a kind of endorsement for incrementalism because as we quote from David Mayhew who is a well-known political scientist at Yale, often what the public is asking for is inaction because they don't want something to happen that they believe they don't support. I think it is important for us to have that humility, again, to understand that not all of us are engaged in that deep a level in politics and that lack of engagement is often in itself a statement of principle, in fact.

Matt Katz: Greg, I just have one more question and then I'm going to let you guys go. We were talking earlier in the show about abortion rights, and the very quick unraveling of abortion rights all over the country after the repeal of Roe v. Wade last year. Can you give a way in which this incremental approach could be used for those who want to preserve and expand abortion rights?

Greg Berman: I think that the incrementalism just cautions away from a maximalist approach and trying to orient the conversation, particularly within the Democratic Party, to where the mass of American people are, which is pro-abortion rights, but with accepting some limitations on them. I think, in general, one of our many challenges is that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party are, in fact, where most of the American people are, which is in favor of incrementalism, not for maximalist change.

Matt Katz: Greg Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of the great new journal Vital City, and former executive director of the Center for Court Innovation, and Aubrey Fox is executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. Their new book is called Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. Greg, Aubrey, thanks so much for coming on the show and having this very, very fascinating and important conversation with us.

Greg Berman: Matt, thank you, and thank you for your work at The Gothamist as well.

Aubrey Fox: Thanks, Matt.

Matt Katz: I appreciate it.

 

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