America’s Inertia And Incrementalism Crisis

Crisis Blizzard 

Essay first published on Medium.

Consider first the French Revolution. Today, many American conservatives demonize it, and denigrate the Age of Enlightenment because of the mob mentality excesses in its last few years, and final grisly outcome as well as the status-quo upsetting ideas the philosophes produced. In the late 18th century, Sir Edmund Burke feared their radical ideas, also propagated by Thomas Paine, could spread across the channel, but thought incrementalism was the best way for Britain to avoid such tumult, and that the nation’s generational continuity held the answer to its future thriving. 

However, it was his almost servile linkage to this institutional progression, derived at that time from an aristocratic “DNA” that we are concerned with here. He figured minor tweaks indicated by a proper structure of the forefathers’ inheritance or knowledge-base is basically all that is ever needed.

Inertia: the property of matter by which it retains its state of rest, or its velocity, along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force.

And somewhat convincingly, Burke’s assessment could be seen as correct for another century. Then the British empire completely collapsed into a moldy mess within a couple decades as the mid 20th century approached and WWII ended. Incrementalism is a great idea until it is not. Confusing continued success with inertia is likely how the previous 69 empires collapsed. 

The United States has not learned anything substantial from these lessons of empire dissolution. Strict-constructionist conservatives discredit the idea of a living constitution, yet such a dismissal is a sign they are susceptible to “living” off inertia until rigor mortis seizes up, us.

Incrementalism: a policy of making changes, especially social changes, by degrees; gradualism.

The status quo life is the easiest life to live if it is currently going good for your nation or clan. Societal change requires a lot of energy, much of it seemingly wasted because the new direction is often hard to locate. That said, looking toward our future also seems to be an underdeveloped part of our national psyche. Conservatism has bent the mental universe too much towards a reverse direction, lining up too closely with an 18th century Burke.

For another few moments, let us all return there with the French and their guillotine revolution. The ideas developed, discussed, and disseminated by French intellectuals evolved faster than the monarchy and the church were willing to implement. The church had a considerable interest in the monarchy surviving, and keeping control of the people.

These calcifying entities were being outdone by the technology of the day, printing. The Brits were merely closer in their development toward rule by the people, a.k.a. democracy, when these radical ideas were disseminated. Therefore, it was luck not incrementalism that saved their government and empire at that moment.

A century and a half before the royals were beheaded, the French monarchy and the Catholic church were obliviously engorging on inertia. Their entire world was falling apart, and they mostly stood by as it happened, without doing what needed to be done. René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, was the first salvo of The Enlightenment in 1637. 

Change was required, but instead the generational-continuity folks choked on all that inertia. Consider “new ideas” the change agent, or external force noted in the inertia definition. And as I mentioned earlier, the Brits would not see their way out of a collapse as well, just over a century after the French Revolution ended in 1799.

Now it is our turn to watch an empire self destruct because the U.S. is engorging inertia in a constant, and nearly overwhelming terra-byte torrent. While you might not see the U.S. as an empire, most residents of other nations see us that way partially, or in totality . Alas, we are not likely to see our way out of collapse. Incrementalism is our only salvation. Somewhere in our history we have the right stuff to get through this, according to the author of The Great Debate: Burke And Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Yuval Levin. Not true. The future cannot be seen and approached in such a way.

The future has its own dynamic that can thoroughly undermine what was thought, and done before. Our founders proved it, as did the Brits, and the unenlightened French monarchy. Our Civil War showed that slavery was not permanent, even though a few decades before no one would have predicted its demise possible. 

Since we were not making the necessary changes, at least by the early 1800s, the nation imploded. Up to 15 times as many Americans died due to the ravages of our brutal, internecine conflict than in the supposedly more tragic horrors and slaughter of the French Revolution. We allowed our nation to implode while hoping that incrementalism would save us.

Disturbingly, incrementalism has no ability to “kick in” because it is constructed to consider radical changes as never warranted. However, at some point in time, it will peter out in the midst of a paradigm shift, unprepared to see or stop a collapse; as inertia pushes everything off a cliff. Inertia velocity, as noted in the definition above, without a considerable directional change at an early enough stage, makes empire collapse possible.

Inertia is a powerful drug that can even drag great nations towards ultimate destruction. Saying our nation is in decline as an economic or military superpower is a quick way to hear a strident, and angry earful from many Americans, especially those on the right wing. What I call the conservatives’ “inertia anger talking”. Conversely, Alfred McCoy’s book, In The Shadows of the American Century, is about what he perceives as a highly likely outcome, an appreciable …Decline of US Global Power.

As we all know, a lot is changing faster and faster each decade. On the other hand, keeping up is nearly impossible, and incrementalism is the worst enemy of such change. In some important areas we must change before a majority of conservatives are willing to accept the change required. How we should improve the national election process, and the need for clean energy are two examples where a majority of Americans are in agreement. But the go slow, conservatives have control, or the ability to create gridlock. That is the paradox we are currently trapped in. 

Our electoral college system has reduced every major decision to be made by a senate representing a minority of Americans, and six Supreme Court justices have been seated by this same unrepresentative senate. Their engorgement of inertia is choking off our ability to respond properly to societal, economic, and global changes. Ironically, the actual Constitutional “originalists”, were not as wedded to restricting change as today’s conservatives are.

The founders did not stop at radical change after producing the Declaration of Independence. Just a year afterwards, the Articles of Confederation were ratified; then a decade later in 1787 founders initiated the first Constitutional convention in Philadelphia. Within a few months a totally new structure of government was developed by these 55 white men, and in 1788 the Constitution was operationalized after nine states had ratified it. This radical document was written in secret, and had to be ratified by those nine states before any changes could be made, and that included adding the first Amendments, a.k.a. The Bill Of Rights.

Why were these radical actions necessary? “Madison, Hamilton, and Washington feared their young country was on the brink of collapse.” Their fears stemmed from the occurrence of small rebellions, and our inability to collect taxes to pay our debts to France, which had subsidized our war with Britain.

Realize how not having to patrol constantly, and comprehensively as the world’s police gives China advantages. See it in their roll out of more than a trillion dollars to carpet three continents with category dominating rail lines. McCoy explains how these investments will allow the Chinese to efficiently move goods by the billions of tons to 85% of the world’s population. 

The railroad system is just one of the many ways China is strategically outflanking us in economic investments. These far reaching and enduring investments include education, renewable energy, and internal infrastructure. This kind of strategy is expected to leave the United States out of the big-economic picture in the future.

That being said, by downsizing our military, or diminishing it in other ways at this time, could merely give China more flexibility to flex its muscle. The paradox gets more problematic. How do we keep China from rising in a negative way, if we are unable to check them militarily and/or economically now or later? 

First, we must check our hubris at the door, and remember how the greatest military ever was thwarted by three much smaller nations in the last 50 years: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Always fighting the last war comes to mind here. Consider how firepower and technology has not been the panacea it was during WWII. For that matter, if cyber-warfare is the future of world dominance, does it even require a superpower?

Of course, we could have used our nuclear weapons to “win” our previous debacles, but the damage it would do to our allies, or any we still had after that type of fallout, would collapse our value to them in their eyes, lives, and pocketbooks. That inability to solve problems with your power, as you had, is how inertia has likely trapped every empire. Inertia pushed our military to continually update, but with most of their knowledge perspective coming from the challenges and failures faced in the past.

With nuclear weapons likely being impotent except for mutually assured destruction, we keep focusing on, and adding more to, our highest-tech, distant as possible, military capabilities rather than fighting “fire with fire” in regional or national conflicts. For example, dropping twice the tonnage of bombs during the Vietnam War than we did during all of WWII, got us nothing but the death of over 58,000 Americans, the death of at least 3 million Vietnamese, and since 1975 over 20,000 Southeast Asians have died, and four times that number were injured after accidentally detonating our unexploded munitions. 

Whether that “fire” is face-to-face, hand-to-hand, or house-to-house warfare, or more long term, actually improving the lives of the people, we must quit allowing inertia to remove reality from our international relations or combat strategy.

Was it not a red-clad, mighty world power that did the same thing to a nation striving for independence a couple hundred years ago? The addiction to intimidation and violence rather than concern for the plight of others left that imperial island nation without a colossal colony. Their combat strategy was also less viable in a nation of people determined to win their independence. Unfortunately, it still saw its empire as indestructible for about 150 years until it was destroyed.

Our insularity from reality has been effectuated by many activities and arguments over the last one hundred years. From putting boots on the ground avoidance, and being disengaged from reality warfare to overuse of intimidation against entire regions to arms sales for dictators, and other bullies, we cannot continue to think employing the same tactics will work in this crowded and connected world. Reducing investment in the people here and abroad, and an undermining of diplomacy have greatly sullied our prestige, and weakened the trust of others.

Our typical arguments also fail us, like the commie fear mongering of old, and tired. Constant hyperventilating in this anti-internationalist, and xenophobic caricature kept us from getting closer than geosynchronous orbit to see what was really going on throughout the world. The dominoes only fell on our faces; as we failed to seek real answers, and destroyed the lives of others, and our own. In Vietnam, we never really saw, cared about, the common people who lived there, just as the British ignored our plight. 

In Afghanistan, we only saw the horrors the Taliban caused, and never thought about the horrors we would perpetrate on real people there. We underestimated their determination to protect their homeland. Remind you of a red-coated occupier? In Iraq, gutting their government, and creation of the green zone revealed that we had given up seeing our future, and theirs. Inertia was securely tucked under our arms.

Moving the military to a purely defensive, and protective mode is unlikely because of our longstanding inability to truly connect with the world. The continual reprise of the police-state, a.k.a. the law and order mentality, as well as the 2nd Amendment is the solution-to-nearly-every-problem belief, makes another significant reduction of violence in America implausible. 

Harboring internal armed camps, and blessing gun toting vigilante types, is a sickness rather than an argument to justify anything constitutional. Yet we brag about our macho as we not only fail to win with this tragic logic, we waste away our future, and diminish our standing in the world through wild war activities, and a stupefying number of homespun gunslinging deaths. Thousands die here, and millions in other nations due to our twisted constitutional tales, and a tyrannical superpower sanctimoniousness.

Our unmoored fear of foreigners, and overstimulated economic selfishness also play a role in our disconnection. Other nations are merely on some game board that we are trying to win control of. Economic abuses assisted by war and created by unchecked pollution must be eliminated from the “free” market’s bailiwick. 

The general value competitive business enterprise has generated throughout the world is woefully out of sync with our current climate science knowledge. The “free” part of a “free” market must now free more people from its negative excesses. A truly advanced society should be able to do both much better; increase wealth and reduce harms, not merely pile its trash and trauma up in a heap behind it as it moves along. We must make this radical pivot comprehensively, and in short order, to profoundly convince the citizens of the world we are still their best chance at better lives.

If we shoot dead and imprison enough Americans, we will at some point have fewer in prison and fewer gun deaths.

Continuing on a worldwide, two trillion dollar per nation, warpath the U.S. will make so many more friends, and improve our economy so much, we need never worry about it negatively effecting our debt.

Aggressive economic exploitation of other nations should be our prime focus since non-white foreigners are too stupid and ignorant to know what we are doing to them. So what if we are wrong about the climate crisis? We one percenters have already made enough billions off those foreigners, and non-plutocratic Americans, to build our mountain bunkers, and avoid all the heatwaves, hurricanes, sandstorms, sinking islands, and floods. Unsurprisingly, American consumers are actually cheering for plutocrats to screw them over. They love us that much.

Understanding the difference between the military as protection, and the military as a problem solver has been the achilles’ heal of every empire. Once WWII was won, we had a choice, get stuck in an inertia rut, or make other plans? Then after the Cold War ended, we had another chance to look at things anew. The September 11th attacks put us in a third hunker down mode; we saw half the world as a threat, even many other Americans, and in many ways have expanded the scope of those fears. When we see every other neighbor as the enemy, inertia reliance increases, and the chance for effective change is reduced significantly.

This threat exaggeration and proliferation, and inertia clutching can lead to, for example, the revival of Medieval torture methods. That is due to the regressiveness fear produces, and how incrementalism and inertia often make it impossible to see any other way out. And in a 9–11 type attack, there must be a reaction; leadership either does what its ideology is generally acclimated to, or it regresses towards primal responses. When incomprehensible anger, and national humiliation are added to the mix, going in an unfortunate direction is the likely answer to most of the problems seen in a war-footing fog, whether here, or on the other side of the planet.

We can no longer allow the use of the military to determine how we react to the world, or even how we approach war fighting. The future is much more complex than the last war. That manner of incremental, backward-looking progress further entrenches inertia, makes complacency more likely, and fogs up our future seeing. China has been utilizing its underdog status to discover our vulnerabilities as we bulk up to fight a war we cannot win by menacing the world, and distancing ourselves from the real people in it.

In the last two decades, our use of force has made more nations worry about us, others more fearful of us, and fewer world citizens trust us than we have made allies who respect us, created more who are economically connected to us, or provided reasons for the average foreign citizen to admire us. These stressed, traumatized, and broken relationships are likely to be serious and long term casualties due to inertia. It is extremely difficult for incrementalism to reverse such deficits; at best it will frantically attempt to reinsert the toothpaste in the tube inertia has emptied “all of a sudden”.

The best defensive and offensive military strategy should always be available to us, but the greatest military in the world will never solve any of the problems we have already self inflicted. Inertia tends toward war because social and political consciousness is mostly inflexible. The military requires continuity. Continuity is where incrementalism thrives. Today, however, communication is instantaneous, and there is no hiding from an empire’s mistakes; Edward Snowden is the poster boy for this reality.

Like Edmund Burke feared Thomas Paine’s radical ideas, data releases like Snowden’s show how precarious empires can be during their decline. Mere truths, and open communication cause our government severe headaches, and cost us the trust of many allies. Unfortunately, rather than opening up the valve to reality and societal change, after disclosures (or the development of new ideas as to Paine), the incrementalist usually tightens the screws of security, demands harsher sentences, and requests more surveillance as we creep closer to a Chinese police state.

Blundering around in other nations, and harming others in our own nation, opens us up to ridicule, and greatly reduces our influence. Either we are the “better” nation, or we are not. If we are, the 21st century is not the place for J. Edgar Hoover, Bull Connor, or George “slap sick soldiers” Patton. Our military leaders, intelligence agencies, and internal data gathering services are racing towards ignominy, irrelevance, or implosion without considerable restraint being placed on them. Law enforcement, and the courts must shed their racist, anti-worker, anti-voter, and anti-democratic proclivities, otherwise We The People will continue to lose respect for their decisions and actions.

Our politics has been frustrated and taken hostage by the fear of change since the mid-1960s. Inertia has become regression. This has led to the austerity of civic interaction. Ideas for national societal change and international relations are restricted and perverted by the powers of incrementalism, fundamentalism, extreme conservatism, cronyism, and police statism. 

The christian conservative fundamentalists seem to welcome the downfall of our democracy; it will validate their predictions of societal decay. They have a huge stake in archaic incrementalism and inertia because these are the mechanisms of eventual collapse of our advanced, multicultural, pluralistic society, so they can finally create their theocratic, supposedly christian, state.

While there are some on the left who may also desire our loss of empire, they must ask themselves what is on the other side? Appropriate radical change is not anarchy. It is not military based. It is not about politicians. Corrective radical change must break free of inertia, and flip to a strategy that provides We The People with the power to place this diverse nation on a new plane, and hopefully become a real beacon of freedom throughout the world.

Our calamitous militaristic adventures, and internal police-state abuses must end. Otherwise we look more like China as they look more like us, especially economically. However, we already look worse than China in war making, and are doing a good job of the harsh treatment of the “other” in various ways. Maybe both a falling and rising empire can justify the gathering up of Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps , and in America black men mass incarcerated in prisons, clandestine torture chambers, asylum seekers forced to live in squalor, and undocumented migrants separated from their children, as merely part of doing empire business?

Fighting firepower with firepower should also be discontinued in this smartphone-video connected world. This is not a justification to return to boots on the ground, but that concepts like the draft, show our commitment. If we cannot put our troops in harms way in large numbers, then we should not be involved militarily. Unless we can change their mission designations to mercenary, mendacious, and meat-headed.

Killing, via a “pinpoint” strike, dozens or hundreds of noncombatants by “accident” in Asia or Africa from a strip mall in Nevada is the epitome of cowardly, racist aloofness. As of 2020 for sure, any wars America fights in will be considered bullying, and done out of weakness. Militaristic applications by a long standing empire are employed when its position of power is minimal or declining. It has lost the respect of its allies, and its lack of “invincibility” is exposed to its antagonists.

There are two reasons why military actions are likely to be carried out by an antagonist or belligerent in the 21st century: discontent within that state, and disunion of its national alliances.

As the Arab Spring, and its obvious discontents made plain in the early 2010s, tyrannical world leaders are precarious pawns to bet the farm on. The people, not the belligerent bully, have much more power than ever before. Inertia ran those societies off a cliff in many ways, and incrementalism offered them squat in their time of need. We must, therefore, create different and much deeper ties that go beyond economic and military ally. Allying on the cheap and dirty with grifting goons and ideological ancients is much more costly now. Winning over the people is a necessity.

Russia, Iran, and China are also restricted in their use of force externally. Yet it is not the strength or size of their military that makes them dangerous in the 21st century. They are able to feed off the disunion and discontent in neighboring states, and other more distant “relations”. Isolating nations without the ability to militarily intimidate them is not effective. As discussed, the threat of nuclear attack is a non-entity. Therefore, the United States is, and will be, at a continued disadvantage during economic, social, or political upheaval on the three contiguous continents without a much more amenable-to-others strategy.

Superpower threats are now nearly useless, more often counterproductive. Befriending, providing calm, and truly engaging the people of those continents has become much more important. The leaders of the nations with tighter controls on their citizens are on the precipice of dissolving into disunion. While successful uprisings may take many more decades to coalesce to any great extent, it is risky to bet on any specific nation to keep tightening controls without incident. We should be taking note of that ourselves here at home.

The urban streets, and small towns across America, even cities around the globe, quickly rallied for a man most had never been aware of until the last day of May in 2020. Within hours of George Floyd’s murder the world erupted in sympathy, anger, and protest. These incidents can all be traced to the inertia and incrementalism crisis merging with ubiquitous exposé video technology. The lack of significant progress during the last four decades within our borders was due to inertia-ignorance retightening its grip. 

Incrementalism was reimposed, and some advances were rewound after the 1960s’ transformative events. This fearful clamping down put our society in jeopardy. The Vietnam War was a pivotal point where we failed to move toward the future. Grinding up lives rather than lifting them up is obviously still ingrained. Will we advance or continue to ravage our future through death, destruction, and dehumanization? An advanced society must advance, or it implodes.

There is a way to thread the needle between being the world’s police and achieving freedom, and advancement for all, without employing an empire’s oppressively offensive traits. It will require extraordinary effort; and incrementalism is not up to the task. It means stepping off the inertia track, which includes taking chances, and working with others we have not worked with before, and in a manner we have not tried before.

Whether America can hold onto its empire or not is up in the air, but whatever happens, let us at least shed our ugly ogre skin at home and abroad. Americans, and the people of the world all want their lives to improve. An angry, belligerent, plundering, and drone-missile killing empire is surely not the answer in an interconnected world.

by Richard The Chwalek

Seeing the future, and surviving it, requires us to look much farther ahead, and not be so wedded to an incremental, nostalgic, and consistently fearful of change outlook. We must prepare for a radical, yet appropriate reset to see ourselves through to a better future. To understand the practical steps we can take, read my book, Our Democracy Requires An Update: A Transformational We The People System.