On Incrementalism, Part I

The Path to the Mountain

Imagine you are on a journey to summit a mountain. To even begin your ascent, you must first cross a wide plain. The path requires many steps, and the plain is checkered with crossroads. You and your traveling companions – as well as all the other groups of travelers on the plain – must regularly decide on the direction of your next footfalls.

I bring up this metaphor because many modern policy debates are cast as a battle between the incrementalists and the maximalists, and I think this is actually a misunderstanding of what’s going on. It’s an important concept to unpack, and language I’ll use frequently throughout The Family Frontier, which is why I’m leading off with this two-parter. While there certainly are unyielding maximalists and milquetoast incrementalists, more often in my experience there are groups of travelers taking steps toward the mountain and groups taking steps away from the mountain.

Incrementalism, in other words, is a vector rather than a speed: it has properties of both magnitude and direction.

Incrementalism Can Help or Hurt

Let’s look at two classic examples of issue incrementalism: one that led the issue toward the mountain, the other that led it further away (note that I take these subjects descriptively, not normatively; I make no claims here about whether the mountains in question represent desirable societal outcomes – although, cards on the table, I’m an unapologetically progressive Democrat).

The conservative legal movement began in the 1970s in the wake of court rulings such as Roe v. Wade that thwarted conservative goals even though Republicans were regularly winning presidential elections. As one reviewer of Steven Teles’ book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, puts it, the movement engaged in “slow and indirect efforts to outflank” the liberal establishment. This was a project of decades. It “required skilled social action in a variety of critical roles: intellectual entrepreneurs to develop and broadcast conservative legal ideas; network entrepreneurs to develop a conservative legal community that could nurture these ideas and recruit and train candidates for court appointments; political entrepreneurs to help feed these ideas and candidates into policymaking circles; and patrons to provide the financing needed to facilitate all this social action.”

By any reasonable definition, these shifts were incremental and required a degree of luck in when Supreme Court vacancies became available (or were able to be held open); yet the bet paid off. In the past 10 years, the conservative legal movement has been dominant, reshaping wide swaths of American life.

A classic example of incrementalism gone awry can be found in health care. As I explained in The Atlantic in 2023, “During World War II, companies began offering health insurance as a perk. This was done to get around wage caps established in 1942 to prevent the economy from going haywire as companies competed for the suddenly shrunken labor force. Coming out of the war, President Harry Truman proposed a national health-insurance system akin to what would become the U.K.’s National Health Service. The plan failed under opposition not just from business interests but from several major labor unions that had become invested in the idea of employer-sponsored insurance—a decision whose effects the country still feels today.”

Is Incrementalism the Same as Centrism?

In the above example of the conservative legal movement, were the proponents moderate centrists? I would argue not; in fact, some of those funding the movement over the decades take positions that could charitably be considered on the fringe. Similarly, labor unions are regularly on the progressive rather than moderate side of the ideological left.

It may be more helpful to think about a simplified typology of stances (note that these are stylized; actual humans are more nuanced in their approach, and this is best thought of as a continuum):

• Pure maximalist

• Flexible maximalist

• Flexible incrementalist

• Pure incrementalist

The pure maximalist is one who sees any compromise as an unacceptable betrayal to the cause. In our metaphor, the only option they see is a dead sprint to the mountain, at any cost. One can easily conjure examples from the environmental, health care, or anti-war movements, or from either side of the abortion issue. They are not always popular; as journalist Dylan Matthews once wrote of the “ethos” of Bob Greenstein, stalwart leader of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “Notching incremental advances is not a moral failing, it’s what moral seriousness looks like. What’s morally unserious is demanding a full loaf, being offered half, and rejecting it in favor of nothing.” The challenge with pure maximalism, then, is its disconnection from the reality of how politics and policy moves.

The flexible maximalist is one who is guided by a clear sense of where and what the mountain is, and also sees the path and interim steps leading there. Take Bernie Sanders, a mountaineer if ever there was one. Yet his campaign manager told Ezra Klein that if Sanders had been elected, he wouldn’t have been my-way-or-the-highway. “So while he’s pushing, let’s take Medicare for All. Then he gets into Congress: And can we at least lower the age from 65 to 60? Can we talk about Medicare expansion so that it covers home care, dental, hearing and vision — even if you can’t all move with me to Medicare for all? That actually is [how] President Bernie Sanders would have governed.” The challenge with flexible maximalism is that it is a difficult balance to maintain and can come across as mercurial, thus risking falling into an influence-less no-man’s-land.

The flexible incrementalist is one who just wants to do something generally helpful in the short-term, and is less concerned with the long-term implications. To these individuals, exceptionally modest steps, like minor increases in funding, are worth celebrating. In our analogy, they simply do not want to stand still. There is often little acknowledgment of the possibility that small steps may be unintentionally harmful if not aligned with a larger vision (indeed, a common refrain from flexible incrementalists is that “something is better than nothing,” disregarding myriad examples when this is not the case: the proverbial cure that is worse than the disease.) The challenge with flexible incrementalism is that movement can be so nonstrategic and meandering that the issue never reaches the foothills, much less the mountain itself.

The pure incrementalist is someone who literally only wants to pursue small steps. This person thinks the status quo is basically acceptable and all that is needed are minor polishes. To make more than small improvements would actually be detrimental, like cleaning a glass so much it shatters. They either feel like they’re already at the top of the mountain, or they don’t see nor care to pursue a mountain path at all – either way, they’re more or less happy where they are.

One can hold different positions on this continuum on different issues or even within a given issue: I am a flexible maximalist when it comes to child care funding and access, but my instincts lean incrementalist when it comes to modifying child care regulations. Similarly, none of these categories are an unalloyed good or unalloyed ill, although I would argue that flexible maximalism has the highest “expected value” of real-world impact, in probabilistic terms.

That said, pure maximalists often have impressive moral clarity, while flexible incrementalists can see opportunities for compromise where others may not; pure incrementalists, meanwhile, know when to say ‘enough’. All roles are needed in a healthy policy development ecosystem; but, like any ecosystem, the mix can – and frequently does – get out of whack and become unhealthy. Again, this is not so much about centrism or moderation or pragmatism vs. left/right-wing or progressive/conservative or idealism (pick your adjective fighter!) as it is about being able to discern which steps and strategies actually get you closer to your vision, and which work against your cause.

Incrementalism in Child Care

In my chosen area of child care, the incrementalist/maximalist debate is seemingly alive and well. It crops up in multiple areas, such as whether the goal should be a universally free system or one that is means-tested with a sliding fee scale. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen wrote before the 2024 election, her interviews with movement actors “revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting ‘scarcity mentality.’” Perhaps nowhere is this tension clearer than surrounding the question of employers’ role in child care.

To simplify, there is a camp within the child care movement that believes employers should be actively encouraged to provide child care benefits to their employees, benefits usually in the form of an on-site child care program or a stipend for securing a spot at an outside program. In the past few years, encouragement has been bipartisan and taken the form of tax credits, national summits, and even a requirement for semiconductor manufacturers in the CHIPS Act. The argument from these proponents is a combination of the fact that something needs to be done now, and that helping businesses take care of their own employees can be an on-ramp to their broader systems-level advocacy. I want to be clear that this is an issue on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree: it’s a fair case, even if one I find ultimately uncompelling, and I respect its backers.

I and others, on the flip side, find this push quite worrisome (I wrote a whole report on why). In my view, moving so hard to foreground employers as a child care solution carries massive risk of replicating the health care experience with all its attendant ills, and where it is seen as normal and expected that child care runs through the employer-employee relationship. We do not, as I often point out, think to ask employers to cover the third grade for their employees’ children. I would like to see all of that energy and time and money going toward persuading employers that their only course is loudly supporting public solutions; at the very least, if an employer is going to offer child care benefits, they don’t need to pocket taxpayer dollars while doing so.

There is also, I assert, a political opportunity cost: lawmakers are being handed a way to pass a small token instead of a real solution, as well as a chance to pass the buck. This is already happening: as the speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives said recently to business leaders, “I think it is incumbent that you should not be looking in the state of Indiana to solve your child care needs. If you think you have child care needs that are preventing you from having the workforce capacity you need, I would suggest you figure out how to do it instead of looking for us to do it for you.”

Yet here again, I think this miscast as a question of maximalism vs. incrementalism. By any analysis, America is sadly many years away from any version of universal child care (the mountain most left-leaning advocates, myself included, would like to summit). This is a question of whether the incremental step of incentivizing employers around child care is taking us closer to, or further away from, that mountain. In other words, there is a needed conversation about trade-offs. But it is difficult to have that honest conversation when we default into thinking this is a more fundamental disagreement around how one approaches the world.

In part two of this series, I am going to use the example of employers’ role in child care to talk about a better way to analyze these types of questions, cut through to the important and actionable conversations, and chart a better path forward for family policy. See you Tuesday!