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Presidential Elections and the Politics of Change

Is Change Always Good?

If the current election cycle has a theme, it seems to be "change." Candidates from both sides of the aisle talk about it frequently and with rather striking confidence. But they should not.

In the pursuit of wise governance, we must not confuse the idea of "change" with the idea of "improvement," because not all changes — indeed very few of them — are changes for the better. Most schemes for large-scale political and economic improvement introduce as many problems as they solve, a phenomenon now widely recognized as "the principle of unintended consequences."

In other words, while change is easy, improvement is difficult. Improvement requires a delicate touch. Most persons, certainly most governments and government bureaucracies — as well as the politicians who seek to control them — lack that delicate touch. Unlike mythical King Midas, so much of what real politicians and real governments touch turns to garbage, not gold.

Despite our unimpressive track record on political improvement, we arrogantly continue to seek and to promise change. We campaign, and vote, as though we thought that if we studied very hard, if we just pulled an all-nighter, we could figure it all out. We could end poverty, end racism and end crime if only we found the right political solution — as if our problems were systemic, not innate, as if evil were outside us more than inside us.

But here's the painful truth: Most of what ails us has no political solution, no matter how many changes we make or promise, and no matter how much fine tuning we advocate. No matter what we do, no matter what policies we put in play, we cannot solve the problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and age. We can, and we sometimes have, made those problems worse. But we cannot make them go away. All the cleverness of all the policy wonks in the world will not, cannot and has not done the trick.

Nevertheless, we vote for those who promise change, who assert that somehow they and their ideas will be different. Somehow they will succeed where all others have failed. But the most we can reasonably hope to accomplish is to soften these perennial problems at the margin. Politicians who promise more, and voters who vote for them, are discharging their citizenship duties in a foolish manner.

Honor Your Forefathers

What those who promise change and those who vote for it fail to recognize is precisely this: Given the unrelenting presence and influence of human depravity and human ignorance, the path of highest wisdom normally entails not change, but the prudent preservation of the moral, economic, and political traditions of our ancestors. Those traditions grew up over decades, sometimes even centuries.

The wisdom of the tried and true is wisdom born in the crucible of real human existence in a fallen world, and not in the unreachable fantasies of arrogant idealists whose schemes are not tied to any reliable historical indicators. Those historical indicators are fundamentally important. Without them, we often go wildly off track. If you cut your ideas off from the lessons of the past, you are free to be foolish. Political theorizing not securely tied to history is too happy a hunting ground for private predilections and political fantasy. That's another way of saying that you must not trust the future to someone who ignores the past, someone who wants to build a bridge to the future without holding on to the bridge-building techniques of those who came before us.

I am advocating here what might be called the political application of honoring your father and your mother — indeed all the strong hearts, soaring intellects, and courageous spirits who came before us and whose insights gave us the world we now have, deeply flawed though it still is.

In other words, a policy for the future will not likely treat your grandchildren well if it mistrusts or maligns your grandparents. Never mistake "modern" for "better." They are not synonymous. The old should be discarded slowly, if at all, because "new" is not necessarily "better." Of course, I am not saying that improvement is impossible, or that we have never produced. Nearly everyone agrees that the extension of voting rights to women and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s were obvious improvements. My point is not that improvement is impossible, only that it is more rare and more difficult an accomplish than some folks seem to realize.

Slow Going

In that light, we normally are better served when we defend the established order against those who seek to undermine it or to radically reform it. This does not mean that we ought to oppose change as such. It means we need to distinguish carefully between changes directed toward developing what already is and changes designed to transform what already is into something it is not. The difference is between development and change, between growth and revolution. We must be exceedingly wary of those changes that undermine or ignore the inherited principles of wisdom and of prudence that grew up over the centuries. Except for the details, the problems we have today are problems we have been facing for centuries.

Our ancestors — who did not lack wisdom, insight, or virtue — worked long and hard at these issues. What we face today is the legacy of their wisdom and work. Remember that it took centuries to get us this far. Remember that these hard-won gains might be lost in but one short bout of self-indulgent, self-congratulatory arrogance, when we stupidly act as if no one before us really understood the challenges of life in a fallen world, and as if we can do what no one else — no matter how wise, how prudent, or how insightful they were — has ever done. Political improvement is a tortoise-and-hare affair: It's often faster to go slowly.

Slowly, over centuries, we have come better to understand what things are for, to understand that, despite their pretensions, governments and political parties cannot substitute for families, for churches, for communities or for schools. If you ignore that truth, you begin to think that evil is "out there" in the world and its institutions, not "in here" in the human heart. You begin to conclude, for example, that the failure of a government to educate its citizens, to provide for its poor, to care for its sick and aged, is the main source of crime, and that if you eliminate the inequalities in social institutions and in economic classes, most of the evil in the world will be handled.

Not so. Where there are human beings, there are problems — always — problems of ignorance, poverty, inequality and age, problems that cannot be fixed. We have it on the highest authority, for example, that the poor will always be with us.¹ To banish poverty, ignorance and inequality is to banish human nature. Indeed, we human beings ourselves are the problems. We have seen the enemy — every time we look in the mirror.

Intractable

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How productive is all this talk of “change”?

Join the discussion!

We are resolutely resistant to improvement. But by trumpeting change, contemporary politicians seem undaunted by that fact. The current crop of candidates seems to me far too confident that things can be changed for the better, and that our condition can be dramatically improved by education, legislation, public policy and alteration of environment — a confidence I take to be a denial of any large-scale human intractability. Governments, and political "change," no matter how well intended, cannot cure what ails us.