When this is over
Recently, I’ve had a couple conversations about threats to child care, children, families, and educators abruptly cut short by someone interjecting that it is equally important to lay the groundwork for what “we” will want to talk about in 2029 “when this is all over.” When they say this, it’s not to assert the importance of establishing big picture visions to counter authoritarian populism. Instead, without fail they proceed to list wonkish policy debates and conversations that are on hold right now that “we” can resume once the threats “have subsided,” passive voice intended. I have to admit, I tend to find myself looking for an exit from the conversation when this happens.
I feel like I am living in Groundhog Day. I entered professional policy and advocacy as a grad student in 2016. I observed this cycle and listened to these same panels through the entirety of the first Trump administration, then again in the first year of the pandemic. The first time around, these conversations occurred alongside a field in fighting posture, resisting overreach and demanding what was needed. Now, I see this yearning to get back to debate paired with fear — perhaps a hope that silence will be protective, embracing the historical precedent of child care and early learning being forgotten and overlooked — or worse, complicity.
Narrowing in on the details when facing an uncertain future can be a helpful coping mechanism on an individual level, and it is one I have fallen prey to from time to time. When you’re feeling lost, powerless, and like everything you’ve learned about policymaking no longer holds true, it helps to remember that this will not be forever. However, a pleasant, engrossing distraction is nonetheless a distraction, and the desire to continue the work of incrementalism undeterred has reached a level of mass maladaptive daydreaming.
The fever will break
The biggest fantasy of all is that “when this is all over” it will be important to understand, debate, and compromise with the surface level ideas of so-called “family values” conservatives. The conservatives who idolize JD Vance — a man who spent last week defending the violently antisemitic, racist, and misogynist group chats of 35 year-old “kids,” including elected Republicans. The conservatives who are telling you right now, through their continued allegiance to this administration, that they are fine with the complete destruction of the state, do not believe women should have autonomy over their own bodies or that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people deserve rights, and will do whatever it takes to reassert racial and gender hierarchy.
Family values conservatives are at home in Trump’s Republican Party. Russel Vought is their guy. They have learned to talk around their full beliefs, put a veneer on them, distance themselves just enough to maintain friendships and working relationships with liberals. They either privately agree with the horror or do not disagree enough to break from it.
For my entire adult life, I’ve heard people who believe themselves to be serious pragmatists repeat the delusional assertion that “the fever will break.” With every passing year and every authoritarian action, it is more comically absurd. We cannot manifest a Republican party that does not exist and does not have any buy-in from Republican primary voters.
Still, so much effort goes into carefully curating and inviting “reasonable” voices to launder the views of their own think tanks and institutions. The endless panels and equivocating policy reports only serve to raise their status and normalize ideas that are further and further to the right to a liberal audience. While this effort to find a common ground seeks to nudge the right back towards the center, it does not meaningfully shape incentives for conservative infrastructure or Republican party operatives. Thus, any superficial successes at finding common ground are reflected in the modulation and capitulation of liberal policy documents reflecting the right in good faith, but never reflected in kind in the goals or actions of right wing think tanks or policy advisors.
Research demonstrates that efforts like these have ultimately achieved the opposite of their intended purpose, moving the public to the right and normalizing far right ideas in Europe. It is not a stretch to extrapolate that the same effect has taken place in the United States, especially when paired with austerity via the expiration and rollback of pandemic welfare expansions as inflation, climate disasters, private equity, corporate consolidation, and inequality push Americans further and further into precarity.
Finding common ground has not prevented Project 2025 — only unwavering and determined opposition has been able to slow its progress. If you believe in a time “when this is all over,” you must believe in a time when far right infrastructure is dismantled and its ideas are marginalized. Civil society and nonpartisan organizations cannot conjure the reasonable opposition it wishes to debate from thin air. We must confront the enemy in front of us.
Incrementalism as an end
Part and parcel with finding common ground with the “reasonable” right is the assertion that incrementalism should be the top priority of advocacy. The dream that “we” will be able to resume conversations about credentialization and tax credits “when this is all over” is a small, toxic dream in a moment of destruction and destabilization. When these contemplative exercises are prioritized, a person of authority is deliberately insisting others take a break from putting out the forest fire for the studious examination of one tree not yet engulfed by the flames.
Putting incrementalism on a pedestal got us to this point. Incrementalism became an end in itself, rather than the continuous pursuit of an overarching goal for a future where systems work. Instead, goals were narrowed to adding onto existing dysfunctional systems, subsidizing them to be modestly less bad. In the place of a large coalition pushing incremental steps of a journey that some members depart from when they no longer align, incrementalism has been weaponized by so-called pragmatists as a way to enforce the narrative that others are to blame for setbacks because they dared to strive for more. It is the dream of someone who prefers to debate minutiae because they don’t want you to notice that they don’t agree with large scale change, and especially not with the necessary reorientation of care and education as not a marketplace but a right.
Devotion to incrementalism has driven a public that sees only surface level outcomes towards populist nihilism and false ideas that undocumented immigrants are being given resources that are withheld from citizens. The valorization of incrementalism for its own sake by Democratic party leaders and elite voices in the media has created a culture of pessimism and resentfulness. Its proponents were either unable, unwilling, or uninterested in stalling the creep of each phase of our lives being squeezed by private equity, underfunded public goods, subscriptions, and mergers.
More generously, incrementalism is comforting to those wishing to exert a feeling of control — however small — in a world with too many variables we cannot control. Just one more panel about the power of unfunded credentials, one more round table with employers, one more article touting a company that is “getting it right” by partnering with a venture capital-backed app to find gigified care for desperate families. In this way, incrementalism serves as self care to the policy professional that is trying to limit their own anxiety about actions that feel out of their power to change.
Incrementalism in a time of compounding crises prioritizes the comfort of the policy wonk over the urgent needs of the child whose family lives with the curtains drawn because they are terrified of ICE, the child care provider whose body is worn down by hard work and poverty who may now lose her health insurance completely, the baby whose cries go unattended because deregulation means they are one of twelve or more.
There is no “when this is over” unless incrementalism is knocked down from its place as an inherently virtuous pursuit. There is no “when this is over” when hedged promises are all that is on offer, and even those are defeated by deference to parliamentary norms that were immediately discarded by those who are dismantling our government before our eyes.
When I write about the urgency of universal child care, I do so because I believe it is something that can unite and motivate, something for people to believe in, a future with a light at the end of this long tunnel. When I vociferously push back on those that try to strategically obscure what universal child care really means, it’s because I have seen the danger of unchecked hedging by the people who are supposed to be our leaders. A dream of slightly improving yesterday’s status quo will only prolong precarity.
There is no dream of tomorrow without fighting for today.