I’ve been thinking about “incrementalism” too. It’s another big word out there this year, and those who use it don’t mean it in a nice way — does anyone actually call themselves incrementalist any more? (I actually don’t know.) Isn’t it basically a slam? But I think I’m on a track somewhat parallel to Laska’s post on the idea, so this isn’t really a response to that.

I’m wondering about this: liberal incrementalism toward — slow, steady, art-of-the-possible steps toward — what? The end of capitalism?

Because I think I’ve been seeing on the left (by which I mean on my Twitter TL), and especially on the crunchy-liberaloid wannabe left (I wish Nate Silver should poll on that filter), a muddling of the goals of what I think of as two totally distinct, actually historically opposed categories: leftism and modern social-contract liberalism.

The incrementalism of a Bill Clinton, for example, as addressed in Laska’s post, seems to me to to have represented, philosophically anyway, a backing off, in the particular historical and partisan context of the day, of modern “big-government,” Great Society liberalism, widely at the time deemed to have failed — and to have threatened, hardly coincidentally to certain pols’ urgency around solving the problem, the entire Democratic Party — in favor of a more cautious approach, mingling elements of conservatism, with an intention to incrementally regain, and pragmatically defend and maintain, more modest versions of the original goals of modern social-contract liberalism, as founded in the New Deal. That process was intended to revive — again, far from coincidentally — the party, re-attracting white working-class voters who had grown skeptical, putting it mildly, of both liberalism and the party, and appealing to the young and upscale, and yet the process was also intended to refrain from abandoning — supposedly — original liberal goals.

The ways in which that approach succeeded and failed, and was ill- or well-conceived to begin with, are important for the issues raging in this election, and Laska has started that conversation for this blog here.  But when it comes to defining terms, I want to hold up a minute and begin sorting something out. And now it’s occurring to me that this does have something to do with both of Laska’s most recent posts.

It’s true that Clinton Democrats / DLC / neoliberals took an approach that they justified, anyway, as a more incremental way of achieving, in a new political and economic context, the social goals of modern liberalism. And they may have been more or less or 100% full of shit. But I sniff a feeling out there, among both some leftists and some liberals, that liberalism itself, even at its most FDR-LBJ aggressive, may be defined as an inherently incrementalist philosophy, one intended to move slowly — i.e., weakly and phonily, to leftists in this mood, and pragmatically and sincerely, to liberals in this mood — toward goals that are ultimately those of the left. I.e., evolving the country to a condition of economic equality, with public ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialism.

I think that reading of modern social liberalism is way off in so many obvious ways, but to make it crazy plain: the origins of the program put forth by FDR, and carried through (by no means always in concert) by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nelson Rockefeller, and maintained, if in a less vigorously progressive manner, by the likes of Eisenhower, JFK, and Nixon, had origins in an effort to defeat and destroy the socialist American left that, in the 1930’s, had made such strong inroads  with American workers, for many cogent reasons.

The idea was to defeat socialism, save capitalism. Not endorsing that, or saying that it can ever work — but put that way, socialism and social liberalism are in direct conflict with one another. No real leftist would ever see the New Deal as a revolution.

It’s true that there’s a parody left pov, in which the inherent opposition of liberalism and socialism is all just part of some dialectic process leading inevitably toward the end of capitalism anyway. (With great lawyers Mister Jones has discussed lepers and crooks.) I don’t know: maybe in his rabid anticommunism the hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey just didn’t know he was part of a process unfolding toward democratic socialism.

And I take some of this muddling as deliberate. The Jacobin left seems to be in a kind of Popular Front mood regarding the Sanders campaign; I suspect it wants to maneuver fellow-traveling common-cause libs into seeing their own liberalism as naturally tending toward leftism, but just in a lame and crappy way, as Clintonian liberal incrementalism will demonstrate. That mood might pull right-thinking young converts away from liberalism as a whole — once the failure of the Sanders campaign demonstrates the failures of liberal democracy as a whole — and toward the revived Marx-Leninism that the young, optimistic new-new left braintrust is into. (I like everything about them — except the optimism.)

So if it’s tactical, I get it. Attack liberal incrementalism, you also undermine liberalism as a whole, even at its least incremental. And I can’t disagree with the critique, even if it is often made too covertly and manipulatively for my taste: maybe New Deal liberalism was always just the old bourgeois political economy with a human face. But if some leftists and liberals actually think the New Deal liberalism we all claim we want to revive came along to provide a form of slow change leading, if at times too slowly for the left, toward the end of capitalism — what I see as the ultimate goal of anything I’d call left — as a kind of American Fabian socialism — then I think they (we) have had our political heads up our asses for decades, and being in that position might help explain why the country is having such a hard time talking about anything.

A question  — less for lefties like Laska than for liberals (like me?) — might be: whether incrementalist or anti-incrementalist, why are you a damn liberal at all, anyway? The kind of question a self-satisfied liberal like Jonathan Chait (a longer-winded Hodgman with no sense of humor) never genuinely asks. Maybe because, if we really look back at the New Deal, and who got left out, and how fragile that doomed coalition really was anyway, largely because of American racism, the answers are bound to be pretty bleak. It’s hard to get excited about any brand of liberalism right now, and that’s why I prefer the grim “hold the total lunatics at bay one more time” approach to anything pretending aspiring to inspiration.