On Incrementalism, Part II

The View From the Mountain

In Part I of this essay series, I asked you to visualize a major public policy goal as a mountain that needs to be summited. I talked about how what often is cast as a fight between “maximalists” and “incrementalists” around policy approaches and political strategy is actually a disagreement about what brings a movement closer or further to that mountaintop. I used the example of the role of employers in child care as a case study. In this part, I’m going to offer a perspective of how we can think about these questions differently, in hopes of finding a better path forward.

Looking Down From the Mountain

The key flip is to start by defining three things: the mountain, a credible path to get there, and the potential wrong turns. (In some cases, it’s really a mountain range: for instance, it’s unhelpful to separate child care from a broader family-centric policy agenda that includes things like paid leave and predictable work schedules, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s keep the aperture narrow.) In essence, start from the mountain and look across the plain, rather than the other way around.

You might think this is obvious–I’m basically describing a metaphor for backwards planning from a big goal–but you would be stunned by how few social movements actually do this. I recall one conversation with a leader of a major advocacy group for an issue that impacts tens of millions of families where they seemed faintly baffled when I asked them to describe their ideal legislation. The child care movement itself has only relatively recently engaged in intentional efforts to define the mountain (more on this in a moment). Part of the reason for a lack of up-front alignment is because people get caught too quickly in the maximalist/incrementalist trap I was describing in Part I–they never agreed on values and vision, so they’re caught fighting over tactics.

What would this look like for child care?

It would entail first coming to a general consensus on what an ideal system looks like, as a matter of first principles (free or a fee-based sliding scale? universal like public schools or means-tested? Inclusive of family caregivers and stay-at-home parents or strongly focused on licensed programs? And so on.) This work is already underway in some quarters, as with the Bainum Family Foundation’s WeVision EarlyEd initiative.

Then, the movement would determine what incremental steps move closer to that vision: perhaps strong workforce policies like Washington, D.C.’s Pay Equity Fund, or ways to include family, friend and neighbor caregivers like the Thriving Providers Project, or infrastructure-building by reducing zoning barriers for family child care, streamlining outdated or onerous regulations with limited impact on program quality or safety¹, or improving outdoor learning environments in the face of climate change.

A Question of Tradeoffs

This type of process would also determine what steps would constitute actively making it harder to reach their ideal even if it brings short-term relief. At some point, there is a cost-benefit analysis at play: does X amount of short-term relief justify making the ideal Y percent harder to reach? Such tradeoffs are of course difficult to quantify, but their existence should be named, and counterfactuals (what would happen if this action wasn’t taken?) considered. Importantly, this requires dispassionate analysis in both directions: there are times when clinging to desperate hope that lawmakers will take a given action in the face of all evidence to the contrary can lead a movement to leave aligned incremental wins (trading half a loaf for no loaf, per Bob Greenstein) on the table.

To see how this works, let’s go back to the example of whether or not to incentivize employer-sponsored child care through tax credits and time/energy/media attention/political capital. Such an exercise in tradeoffs would require analyzing the tension between, as a non-exhaustive list:

• How many new business leaders will actively advocate for broad-based, publicly-funded child care policies as a result?

• How many families will get access to (affordable) child care that otherwise would not?

• How many families will lose access to (affordable) child care that otherwise would not, due to local market disruptions (for instance, educators being poached from community-based programs, reserved slots or waitlist priority for specific employers)?

• How many families that acquire child care through their employer will lose it as a result of either losing their jobs or their employer electing to take away the benefit?

• How much market share will private equity/shareholder-backed child care chains gain, and how much might that increase the difficulty of achieving universal legislation?

• How many politicians will come to believe that child care is enough of an economic imperative to warrant major legislative action?

• How many politicians will come to believe that businesses can solve child care on their own without substantial government intervention, or that they can move on to other issues after passing employer child care incentives?

• How will public opinion change with regards to supporting universal child care policies if child care is cast as an individual service to be acquired through one’s employer?

There are other approaches. A Family Frontier reader, Andrew Peters, commented on Part I that at a previous job, he and his colleagues often asked “‘What is a good increment?’ … And even though it’s something that’s really difficult to tell in the moment, we started to think of a few criteria. One might be whether the increment creates new infrastructure that you can later build and improve–or, put a different way, what is the ladder of policies you are trying to climb and how is this increment helping us climb one more rung up? Other criteria might be whether the increment contributes to political pressure rather than sapping it, or to what extent the increment feeds into opposition messaging that could hamstring future efforts.”

While it is difficult to put concrete numbers to any of these questions, it is feasible to go through processes to establish probabilistic ranges. A comprehensive summing up of all the potential pros and cons can point toward an answer: either taking these actions are likely worth it, or they are not. The movement should act accordingly.

Obstacles to, and Opportunities for, Alignment

How often, though, do family policy actors (and this goes for many issue areas!) actually get in a room and try to hash out the path forward in this fashion? Answer: Not often enough. Instead, movements commonly fall back on path dependency–we’ll do what we’ve done because that’s what we’ve been doing–or act as if there is simply an unbridgeable gap between the maximalists and incrementalists. The result is a lack of aligned vision, a lack of aligned strategy, and a lack of aligned wins.²

The health care movement offers an interesting example of what it can look like to seek alignment. As recounted by Jonathan Cohn in his invaluable Obamacare book, The Ten Year War, even prior to Barack Obama’s election a group of Ted Kennedy’s Senate committee staff were convening a series of tough policy conversations. They “called it the ‘workhorse group,’ because the idea was to stay out of the headlines (i.e. not be a bunch of show horses) and instead develop a real, durable consensus for what legislation should look like.” Cohn describes an “especially revealing” meeting in October 2008, which involved key advocates for better health coverage as well as the main health insurance trade group.

At the meeting, Kennedy’s staff “laid out three scenarios for reform, each named for famous avenues in the nation’s capital. Going down ‘Constitution Avenue’ meant blowing up the existing insurance and financing arrangements, then replacing them with a single-payer program or voucher scheme … An alternative route was ‘Independence Avenue.’ That meant pursuing a series of narrower, less ambitious reforms … The third possibility was to try ‘Massachusetts Avenue’–in other words, the [Mitt] Romney approach on a national scale … Of the twenty participants, nobody wanted to try Constitution or Independence Avenues, but about fifteen said they liked the sound of Massachusetts Avenue.”

One can continue to argue about whether what became Obamacare was the best Congress could do. But whatever one’s stance, the point is that it was this sort of serious, sober, unsexy, tradeoff-laden policy development work that formed the building blocks of major legislation–legislation that still only squeaked through to passage despite uniparty control.³

I would be remiss not to point out here the outsize role played by philanthropy. Policy and advocacy groups are largely dependent on philanthropic funding to keep the lights on, which means that funders are as much their constituents as children and families. While nearly every policy and advocacy leader I know is deeply, deeply committed to the cause–there are a lot of easier and more lucrative careers!–there’s no question that thinking ahead to the next grant renewal can cause organizations to work at cross-purposes. What happens if the conclusion of the above analysis is that pursuing a given strategy is actually a “bad increment,” but a portion of your ability to make payroll is tethered to that strategy? As Nina Luo, a progressive strategist, wrote in a recent article for The Nation, "Whether we like it or not, funding is the primary incentive structure that makes and remakes the current American left ecosystem today, what determines which work gets funded (or defunded), how, where, to what scale, on what timeline. If the money backing that work is unstrategic, the work itself will also be unstrategic."

Philanthropy can, on the other hand, guide actors toward what I once heard described as “forced coherence.” There’s a revealing story about the marriage equality movement: In 2004, the movement was reeling after losses across the country during the midterm elections. Soon after, as reported by Andy Kroll in Rolling Stone:

Rodger McFarlane, a legendary AIDS activist who had recently joined the Gill Foundation, summoned the leaders of the major LGBTQ groups to Denver for a meeting at [megadonor TIm] Gill’s behest. Gill couldn’t tell the Human Rights Campaign or Lambda Legal or the ACLU what to do. But he had the clout to tell them they needed to get along, a task he left to McFarlane, an imposing former Navy officer, baldheaded and standing six feet seven. McFarlane gathered the LGBTQ leaders in a conference room at the foundation’s headquarters and shut the doors. No one leaves this f%!&^ room, he told them, until we have a plan.

... McFarlane’s post-election meeting in Denver set in motion the creation of what became known as the 10-10-10-20 Plan, a movement-wide blueprint for winning marriage equality in 10 states, civil unions in 10 states and domestic partnerships in 10 states, while shifting public opinion toward the gay community in 20 states, all by the year 2020.

The development of the 10-10-10-20 Plan also led to massive increases in aligned political spending to turn it into reality. The momentum from the Plan was crucial in both making “good increment” gains in the intervening years and helping lay the groundwork for the Obergefell Supreme Court decision.

Witness the power of an aligned approach to the mountain!

The Difference between Getting to the Mountain and Summiting the Mountain

Note that what I am describing is not per se a political strategy for summiting the mountain. Getting to the mountain and climbing the mountain are connected but separate tasks. To even get an opportunity to climb the mountain–that is, to pass a transformative piece of legislation on the level of the Social Security Act or Clean Air Act or Affordable Care Act, or pursuing transformative legal decisions on the level of Obergefell or Brown v. Board–requires certain political conditions to be met.⁴ At the risk of overextending the metaphor, the weather has to clear. Again: Obamacare barely passed even though Obama entered office with a large House majority and, at least for a few months, a filibuster-proof Senate majority. And the ACA itself represented the culmination of literally decades of work: Ted Kennedy first called for a version of universal health care in 1969. Policy change is a long game.

Preparing to take advantage of an open window requires, quite simply, building political power. As an advocate once told me, if your movement can’t get a politician out of office or keep them in office, you aren’t demanding anything, you’re just asking nicely. Power comes from some combination of organized people, organized money, and organized status. Whatever else a movement is doing–and wherever one falls on the continuum of pure maximalist to pure incrementalist–investments in power-building are crucial. That’s a topic for a separate post. The question of incrementalism vs. maximalism relates more to what one is doing in the meantime to prepare for the opportunity. I encourage you to use these frameworks to think about how you approach family policy topics and the steps you can be taking not just over the next four years, but over the next twenty.

1. A classic example from a recent ProPublica piece: Illinois still has a regulation on the books requiring providers to carry coins when on walks with the children in case there is an emergency and they need to use a pay phone.

2. This misalignment can also lead to downright weird outcomes – I’ll talk about this in a later post, but it remains bizarre that we have segmented out paid family leave, early child care, and school-aged child care as both policy and advocacy areas.

3. A search for alignment can and should be open to nuanced bipartisan approaches, by the way. However, as you can hopefully see by now, efforts should not be bipartisan in a feeble fashion that leads away from the mountain – or merely marks time – simply in the name of being able to claim a bipartisan victory. It may indeed be the case that the other side is simply not prepared to play ball in good faith. In the upcoming Republican trifecta, for instance, there may be real opportunities for reform around items like the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and how reimbursement rates are calculated under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). The particulars of those reform proposals will determine which path they push the sector down. If I were advising a Democratic Senate office, I would tell them to engage around things like CCDBG reauthorization, see what a negotiation may yield, and fall back on the filibuster if there is no reasonable deal to be made.

4. Political scientist John Kingdon described this in his “streams and windows” model.