If you spend enough time in Washington D.C., you come to realize that activists of left and right, for all their mutual enmities, unanimously agree on the need for radical and even destructive change. They agree that gradualism is boring, compromise is betrayal, and that the finest thing in life is, as the notable political philosopher Conan the Barbarian once observed, to crush your enemies and drive them before you. But as Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue in their terrific 2023 book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age, bold and sweeping policy proposals rarely come to pass and usually fail when they do. What does succeed is unsatisfactory but pragmatic compromise and gradual, sustained change. As the authors put it, “Over time, incremental reforms can add up to something truly transformative.”
Berman and Fox came to this view over the course of decades of work in criminal justice reform, principally in New York City. They witnessed first-hand how homicides fell by 82% between 1990 and 2009, while the rate of car thefts plummeted by 93% — not because of heroic leadership or sweeping reforms but because of incremental and often small-scale changes that, over time, made New York into one of the safest big cities in America. They identify a similar dynamic at work in the evolution of the Social Security program, which when it was created during the 1930s lacked the popular appeal of contemporary proposals for radical reform but developed in ways that would make it the country’s most popular government program. The cautious and small-scale initial approach of Social Security’s architects allowed them to learn from their mistakes and correct them. And the method of funding the program through a payroll tax meant that it paid little in the first years of its existence but gained long-term sustainability since workers came to see it as a benefit they had earned through lifetime contributions, not big-government welfare.
In this podcast discussion, Berman and Fox talk about how radical change is sometimes necessary — as with the abolition of slavery — but that modest changes are likelier to succeed in the long run in a country as polarized and partisan as our own. They talk about why the “Secret Congress” makes our national legislature more successful than most observers usually realize, why implementation matters as much or more than policy conception, and why supporting gradual but sustained change is not at all (as radicals frequently claim) mere acceptance of the status quo.
Transcript
Greg Berman: We have serious problems in this country, and we should relentlessly try to attack them, and the best way to do that is through a spirit of pragmatic optimism and incremental change. … The crisis of 2020, I think, forced some of us to articulate things that we had just taken for granted.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. It’s a great pleasure to be joined today by Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox. They are both distinguished criminal justice reformers. Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and coeditor of Vital City — great name, by the way — which is a New York-based civic affairs journal. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation. Aubrey Fox is the executive director of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, and previously held a number of senior-level positions at that same Center for Court Innovation.
Together, they are the co-authors of two books: Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure, which was first published in 2010 and republished in a revised edition in 2016, and last year’s Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. Welcome, Greg and Aubrey!
Aubrey Fox: Thanks for having us.
Geoff Kabaservice: Gradual is not only a thoroughly intriguing work of analysis, it’s one of those books that, if it were a mixtape, would sort of be the soundtrack of my life over the last few decades. You two not only discuss most of the critical concepts that have revolved around political moderation and policymaking in recent years, you also manage to name-check half of my podcast guests and a considerable number of my Generation X cultural touchstones, from Billy Bragg to David Foster Wallace to Chuck Klosterman to Snake Plisskin. And all of this in under 200 pages! So, congratulations!
Aubrey Fox: Yeah, we like to think of ourselves as the High Fidelity of public policy books.
Geoff Kabaservice: It was that. I have to admit that Gradual escaped my notice when it first came out. I then heard positive mutterings about it from some of my friends and also from Niskanen’s Greg Newburn, whom you know, the director of our Criminal Justice division. But I really took notice when the Economist magazine named Gradual one of the best books of 2023.
The magazine’s review says that, in a nutshell, your argument is that incrementalism works. “Revolutionaries promise paradise but tend to bring about bloodshed, breadlines, and book-banning.” Humanity has grown more prosperous by making a long series of often modest improvements to an unsatisfactory status quo. The review cites as an example the Industrial Revolution, which contrary to its name was not actually a single transformative event but rather “thousands of cumulative innovations spread across nearly a century.” The review further notes your contention that incremental reforms over time can add up to something truly transformative. How else would you describe the main arguments of your book?
Aubrey Fox: Actually, the Economist article was incredible just for the headline they gave the book, which was in some ways a better title than the title that we gave the book. Their headline was: “The Evolution Will Not Be Televised.” Is that right, Greg? Am I getting that right?
Greg Berman: I think that’s right.
Aubrey Fox: I love that because it does get to a core theme of the book, which is that these evolutionary principles that we’re writing about that apply to public policy — that change is often hard to achieve, it can happen slowly and gradually but can add up to a lot over time — are precisely the kinds of things that don’t get a lot of attention, particularly in the time we were writing the book in the summer of 2020, when there seemed to be this zeitgeist sense that only radical change was even permissible to talk about, let alone the thing that could actually make progress in our society. That was not our experience as criminal justice practitioners for over 25 years in New York City.
So we had something useful to write against, but it felt at that time urgent to articulate a different perspective. As people who work for agencies that have on-the-ground presence, it felt like we were defending almost like practitioner craft values that we didn’t know needed to be defended in the first place. I don’t know what you would add to that, Greg.
Greg Berman: As Aubrey says, I think we were very much aware that we were writing not as intellectuals or professors, but really as people that had spent a while in the trenches trying to work with government to achieve change. I think the enduring lessons that we learned from that experience were that change is really hard, in fact, and that government — contra to the critiques on the right and the left — is not comprised of Deep State radicals or anarchists or virulent racists who want to oppress people. Most people working in government are just decent people trying as hard as they can to move the ball forward, and they’re succeeding largely in all sorts of ways that don’t make it onto the front page of the New York Times. I guess we wrote the book in an effort to try to honor what we had seen from our two decades-plus work in the trenches in New York City.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you do, in your book, cite any number of people who have written about gradualism and how government actually works as opposed to how people might think it works. For example, you cite Edmund Burke (who’s the original patron saint of incrementalism), Karl Popper, and other less well-known academics who’ve written about the subject, like Ed Lindblom and Aaron Wildafsky. But just to pick up on what you’re saying, what interested me about Gradual is that most of your observations about incrementalism don’t really proceed from an academic or philosophical position. In fact, your book really reminded me of something like Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, in that much of your analysis seems to come from lived experience and deep practical knowledge and the hard-won wisdom of the practitioner.
Greg Berman: I think that that’s really true. I have to confess, Aubrey and I both together and separately have written I don’t know how many hundreds of things, and in some respects this was the scariest thing that I’ve ever written — in part because we were trying to enter into an intellectual conversation that, to be frank, we’re not raised in. I just have an undergraduate degree. I’m not an academic. I’m an autodidact at some level. But I do think that it’s important to keep faith with practice. I think it reminds me of another guest on your show… And I should say that your show has been so great for us, because it really charts an intellectual community that we’re trying to be a part of. So many of the people that we admire and that have influenced us — Jonathan Rauch, and Rachel Kleinfeld, and I could go on and on — have appeared on your show.
One of them, Jennifer Pahlka, came out with a book, I think it was last year, that I thought was a great book. I think Aubrey would agree. My takeaway from that book was that we talk a lot, of course, about politics, and that’s appropriate. We even talk a little bit about policy. But practice on the ground? How do you actually implement things? How do you actually get things done in this kind of complicated social and government space that exists in the United States? I think that there is not a particularly strong… You’re more well-read than me, Geoff. you can correct me, but I don’t think there is a particularly strong literary tradition looking at that.
So I guess we were trying to in some ways enter into an intellectual community that you have charted in your show. In some ways, we were trying to create a new literary canon, if you will, focused on the challenges of implementation. Does that make sense?
Geoff Kabaservice: It does make sense. And thank you very much for your kind words about the podcast. I should add that Jennifer Pahlka is now a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. And her book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in The Digital Age and How We Can Do Better was a book that you reviewed, Greg. I think you are completely right to say that that book would enter what really is a tiny canon of books written about the nuts and bolts of government by system insiders. I also agree with what I think is a very high compliment, which is that Jen’s book is a worthy successor to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding.
It does seem that there is a community taking shape which is not explicitly identified as moderate but which is concerned, I think, more with the implementation of policy even perhaps than the conception of policy, in that the big flashy ideas of this world increasingly have a tendency to run aground on the rocks of implementation. This is, I think, the commonality between your book, which draws on your own experiences, and a book like Jen’s.
Greg Berman: And my sense is that there is… I don’t know how you would describe the playing field, but my sense is that there is this active defense happening of liberalism with a small-l and liberal democracy. I’m thinking about Jonathan Rauch, I’m thinking about Yascha Mounk. Other names are escaping me off the top of my head. But I feel, to return to what Aubrey was saying, that there was this moment in 2020 where it felt like the center really was not holding, and you heard these cries to tear it all down coming from both the right and the left. I do think there has been a healthy response to that over the last three or four years, and I’d like to think that Gradual is part of that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. Aubrey, would you add anything to that?
Aubrey Fox: I think that the idea that we practice through our work a form of gradual incrementalism felt like the air that we breathed. It wasn’t even something we had to question. It just was how our lives worked. And because we’d been in this field in New York City — and we wrote about it in one chapter, but the book goes far beyond the New York City crime story — we’d seen what amounted to radical change unfold over a couple decades: plummeting use of jail, sharply reduced crime rates, and just a transformation of New York City.
But in that summer of 2020, a lot of what we took for granted as the way we did our work, which we assumed wasn’t under threat, was under threat. I guess that’s probably true for any generation: that you benefit in a way when your core assumptions are being challenged. That’s what it felt to us in that summer of 2020. It wasn’t just that people named problems. There are always going to be problems that we want to solve in our society, and make improvements. It was almost that the sense of believing in incremental change was itself a betrayal; that the only way to make progress was, as Greg said, to throw everything out and start over again. It just felt on some basic level wrong. The version of reality that these articles and stories and Twitter comments painted was just so at odds with our own (to use the currently fashionable phrase) “lived experience.”
So it was good for us, I think, to have to articulate those values, in a way. Greg said the book was scary… It was partly scary because we were trying to connect our practitioner craft values to larger philosophical movements and trends, but also scary because having to write down how you do your work and what your philosophy of work is — it’s exciting in a way, but it’s also very challenging to try to articulate things that you take for granted.
If there’s one message that we want people who read this book to walk away with, it’s that we want them to feel that the philosophy we’re espousing resonates with them, and it’s kind of okay. It’s like, “It’s okay to be you. It’s okay to be a believer in gradual, incremental change.” After all, think of all the things in our life where those laws of gradual, incremental change apply: trying to lose weight, trying to improve your relationships… We all live and breathe gradual, incremental change. So why would it be different when it comes to the work we do, our commitment to positive social change?
Geoff Kabaservice: I’d like to believe that this is a safe space for moderate and incrementalist acceptance.
Aubrey Fox: We’ve come to the right place. I feel safe. I feel safe right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: Welcome.
Aubrey Fox: Thanks, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: So before we get into the subject of particularly your experiences in New York City, can you just tell me something first, Greg, about where you come from, what some of your principal influences have been, and then how you came to the field of criminal justice? Then I’ll ask you the same, Aubrey.
Greg Berman: I really fell into the field of criminal justice. I went to a liberal arts college in the 1980s, and I was surrounded by people who were very passionate about some given issue: race, gender, housing, what have you. I spent the first part of my career, in my early twenties, trying to find the one true passion that would excite me. And it was really hard. It turns out I’m not that passionate a person, Geoff.
I actually fell into criminal justice. I was doing a public policy fellowship called the Coro Fellowship in New York in the early 1990s, and I met this guy named John Feinblatt who was planning something called the Midtown Community Court. I went to work for him, and it was just an eye-opening experience on many levels.
First of all, John was incredibly… You asked who’s been influential in my life? John is someone who’s fifteen years older than me, much smarter than I am, much more savvy an operator than I am. So I apprenticed myself to him for about a decade, which was a transformative experience. The lightbulb thing for me, going to work at the Midtown Community Court, was that I was curious about a lot of issues — I named some of them: gender, race, housing, poverty — and I was having a hard time choosing just one. I guess I came to find that in criminal justice. While criminal justice is at some level a narrow niche, all the issues that I just mentioned (and many more besides) find their way into the justice system in one way or another. So, in some respects, it was a way to not choose. Choosing criminal justice for me was an effort to not choose. And so I’ve just stuck with it for the bulk of my career.
Geoff Kabaservice: Can you tell me, Greg, what the Center for Court Innovation is and what it does?
Greg Berman: Sure. The Center for Court Innovation is a nonprofit organization that now has grown… I no longer lead it. It’s run by a woman named Courtney Bryan, and it’s changed its name to the Center for Justice Innovation. But I believe it’s one of the largest criminal justice reform nonprofits in the country. It has a budget of more than $100 million dollars per year, and I don’t know how many hundreds of staffers. John Feinblatt was the first director, and I helped him create the organization with a handful of other people like Eric Lee and Mitchell Sviridoff. It really is dedicated to this idea that courts shouldn’t just process people like widgets in a factory in this kind of mechanistic way, that they should actually look up and see the person in front of them and actually try to solve their problems.
I think that the other core idea at the base of the Center for Court Innovation was a real concern that there had been a catastrophic erosion of trust in the justice system. I saw polling back in the day that saw people’s faith in courts in the teens — and this is in fact one of our most important democratic institutions, the courts, and so intrinsic to any kind of law and order that we want to have in society. So the Center for Court Innovation was really created to try to address those two problems, not by doing social science research, not by writing white papers or engaging in think tankery, but by actually creating demonstration projects on the ground, primarily in New York City (although there’s a handful of exceptions that the center has created in other places), that actually test ideas in practice.
So can we massively reduce the number of people receiving sentences of incarceration by upping the number that receive mental health counseling or job training or drug treatment instead? Those are the kinds of questions that the Center for Court Innovation was and is trying to answer.
Geoff Kabaservice: Terrific. Aubrey, I believe you and Greg met at the Center for Court Innovation in 1999, is that correct?
Aubrey Fox: Yes. My story… I think you can come back to that great moment in history, because what’s now called the Center for Justice Innovation really was a remarkable institution. It’s a nice story, I think, about how government can work. I work now, I run another nonprofit. The Center for Justice Innovation is a nonprofit, so it’s not the traditional public sector. But in New York City, you can attract really talented, bright people, and the Center for Justice Innovation just brought together some really remarkable folks. I mean, I think about Feinblatt… If you were using a National Football League analogy, he would be a little Bill Belichick with ten assistant coaches who’ve gone on to coach NFL teams. He really brought a bunch of people to the agency.
Part of the commitment there, which is a really interesting comment on the vitality of the institution, was attracting people who might not go into traditional government service to work for this exciting nonprofit that had “innovation” in its title and was trying to do such interesting things. I spent, like Greg, a long time at the agency — as an apprentice working for Greg, working for other people. I think there’s that great Yuval Levin quote about how people should see institutions as molding them, not as platforms for their own personal brand. I think that was what we all experienced at the center, that we all became so much smarter at the day-to-day work of government. So I’m very grateful for my time at the center.
I think all along, I try to root myself in the practice of criminal justice, which is great, because it keeps you from floating away into the sky in terms of political theory and philosophy. But I always had an interest in those ideas. You wouldn’t know this, Geoff, but you didn’t mention Albert Hirschman — he’s my favorite intellectual from the book — I have a cat named after Albert Hirschman, such is my devotion to Albert Hirschman. So just the ability to combine the sometimes pretty ruthless and rigorous day-to-day practice of trying to change a large criminal justice system in New York City and make it better, with an interest in larger ideas and political philosophy — that’s the sweet spot for us. I’ve just been very grateful for the chance to have the job I have and to be able to do work like writing this book and some others on the side.
Geoff Kabaservice: How had you come to the path of criminal justice reform?
Aubrey Fox: Well, it’s sort of like Greg. I mean, it really comes down to that in graduate school, I TA’d a class on criminal justice. I applied for a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation, and I used that experience to give myself an angle in terms of “Why you should bring me to New York to work for Rockefeller.” When I was there, I was connected to the Center for Court Innovation, and the rest is history.
Geoff Kabaservice: Aubrey, what is the New York City Criminal Justice Agency?
Aubrey Fox: We’re a nonprofit, but we’re the city’s main pretrial services and research agency, so we work with the roughly 120,000 people a year who are arrested and prosecuted in New York City. We provide the courts with data and information to support the safe release of people pretrial. We also help create this pretty massive pretrial release infrastructure. New York City is very unusual in that for every ten people arrested and prosecuted in the city, nine of them are released pretrial. I said earlier that what we experienced in New York City was this incredible drop in the number of people held in jail in the city at the same time that crime went down. So it turns out, spoiler alert, you can do both at the same time.
The reason that jail drops so much in New York City — and almost all the people held in New York City jails are held there awaiting trial, they’re held pretrial — is because there’s this infrastructure in place to allow judges to safely release people to the community and have them come back for all their court dates. The institution I run, which has a fifty-year history — I joined it seven years ago, but it goes back all the way to the 1970s — has been the institution that provides this core public service. It creates this excellent set of resources to support pretrial release of individuals in New York City.
It invented the concept of release and recognizance, which is such a part of the parlance now that nobody remembers that it was invented in the first place by my organization. But that essentially means releasing people without any conditions other than the simple promise to return to court, which works quite well for most people in New York City. But my agency has worked with the city to create additional services to allow more people who might need more help and support to be released at the same time.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ve never lived in New York City, but I’ve been going there regularly since I was a child. It is true that the reduction of crime in New York City, along with the reduction in incarceration, is one of the great success stories of recent decades. You both saw it from the inside. And it’s true that some of the gains have been reversed in recent years, but the change from four decades ago is truly remarkable. I couldn’t agree more with your observation that fear of crime was like a fog that used to hang over the city, and it affected almost every decision. I mean, people used to walk differently in New York City than they do now. Women used to carry their purses differently.
You write that “While it is tempting to look for silver bullet answers and heroic political figures, the truth is less dramatic: the reductions in crime were the product of dozens, if not hundreds, of changes made by police, courts, civic groups, non-profit organizations, and other key stakeholders.” Can you give us a bit more of a picture about this multiplicity of sources and causes for the reduction in crime and incarceration?
Greg Berman: Sure. I think that the policing part is probably the best understood and the most well-researched, well-documented. Clearly over the course of, starting in the 1990s, you had both an increase in police officers starting under Mayor Dinkins with the Safe Streets Safe Cities program. And then, famously, you had Bill Bratton come in and really try to tweak the philosophy of the NYPD to be more of a problem-solving, less of a reactive organization; to aggressively use CompStat and aggressive management techniques to really drive performance, and really focus in an evidence-based way on where the crime was happening: “Let’s send the police to where the crime is.” It sounds obvious in retrospect, but that was not the governing philosophy before then.
So I think the police do deserve an enormous share of the credit for the reductions that we’ve seen in New York. But as we tried to document in the book, it wasn’t just police. Courts started behaving differently. Nonprofits started behaving differently. You had an enormous investment in these quasi-governmental organizations called Business Improvement Districts here in New York, which engaged in street cleanup and beautification projects. I don’t know if you’ve read Patrick Sharkey’s work, but Patrick Sharkey was able to document that neighborhoods with vibrant nonprofits in them had outperformed neighborhoods in terms of crime reduction with neighborhoods that didn’t have vibrant nonprofits in them.
So I think it was a lot of things, as we tried to document in the book. We call it “accidental incrementalism,” because there was not one great wizard summoning all these things and orchestrating them. But I think that there was a real sense of crisis, coming out of the ’70s and ’80s, where you had a lot of people deeply concerned about the trajectory of New York and wanting to move in a different direction. And they all ended up pointing more or less in the same direction. I think that we’ve reaped the benefits of that for the last generation. Anything you want to add to that, Aubrey?
Aubrey Fox: I mean, even like a callback to Jennifer Pahlka’s great book, a lot of good can be done just with basic, common-sense implementation, just getting things right. I think sometimes we get in our heads so much about the sort of magic bullet policy solution that we just forget the value of having institutions run by competent people who are committed to their mission. It does feel like, across all these different sectors that Greg cited, you had people who were able to execute on their organization’s mission in basic and thoughtful ways.
I agree with you, obviously, Greg, that the point about accidental incrementalism is really important. There was no one at the control panel managing all of it. It was a bunch of loosely coordinated work. To me, that’s an inspiring story, because it both suggests the limits of that kind of top-down engineering — anyone who wants to copy New York’s “crime miracle” will be limited in that way — but it’s also a heartening story because I think it allows people to start without having the full map in their mind before they begin, if they want to make progress.
Geoff Kabaservice: I am an admirer of Patrick Sharkey’s work. I’m actually more familiar with his studies of Baltimore than New York. But I was struck by the passage you cited in this book, which is that he found that in a given city with 100,000 people, every new organization formed to confront violence and build stronger neighborhoods led to about a 1% drop in violent crime and murder. That’s quite a finding.
Greg Berman: Yes indeed. I do think it’s important to… I think it’s been in the background music of what we’ve been discussing so far, but writing about the success of New York City was important to us because there’s just so much crisis-mongering right now, and so much threat inflation and pessimism out in the Twittersphere, for lack of a better expression. I confront it in my own house. I have two twenty-something daughters who can be very pessimistic about the prospects of anything improving. So I think it’s very important to remind people, as you say, Geoff, that the fog was so intense. In the ’80s, I would walk around with money in my sock, because I knew I might have to give up my wallet. I don’t do that anymore. Kids don’t do that anymore. It’s a profound difference.
Geoff Kabaservice: Obviously there are these currents of hyper-partisanship and affective polarization that you write about, but curiously a commonality of both the left and the right now seems to be that they like the idea of a top-down solution that will solve everything. Yet you point out that people like Patrick Sharkey are actually in the tradition of Jane Jacobs against the Robert Moseses of the world, the practitioners of heroic incrementalism against centralized planners of all sorts.
Greg Berman: Yes. I think that there is a growing skepticism that change is possible, and thus this desire to swing for the fences. I don’t know if you’ve read Megan Stevenson’s Boston University Law Review piece — I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head — that’s been reverberating in the circles that Aubrey and I travel in.
She points to the same thing. She looked at the same fact pattern that we look at, that our expectations about the success of any given social reform should be modest, that we can only move the dial modestly. I think Aubrey and I look at that result and say, “Yes, we should be honest about it: that’s pretty good. If we can make modest improvements year-on-year-on-year, we will eventually end up transforming given problem X.” But Stevenson looks at the same fact pattern and says, “We need to get rid of evidence-based reform, and swing for the fences, and try to institute systematic change.” She’s arguing from the left. You see that, as you say, Geoff, both from the left and the right these days. I think it’s a very dangerous trend, and we’re obviously trying to push back against that argument with this book.
Aubrey Fox: The paper has a somewhat grand title: “Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World,” and it is an interesting paper that’s been circulated. It’s interesting because I feel like the world is so complicated that you can produce evidence that… Let me back up for a minute. We do a lot of research here at our agency. We do RCTs, randomized control trials. We try to measure the effectiveness of various programming. Inevitably what you find is that even the best-designed research project comes back with results that are somewhat ambiguous. I mean, they can be positive, but often they’re ambiguous. Megan’s paper takes a grand tour of a lot of findings of this kind.
So you’re left with a difficult choice, because there is no slam-dunk answer, really, as to whether something “works or not.” So you’re not left with a clear roadmap of how you should interpret that reality. There’s a little-c conservatism to research the more you know the nuances of it. You’re left having to decide, essentially, where your priors are in terms of how you view the world, and are you comfortable, in a sense, with the limits of your own knowledge and your inability to know whether a lot of little things add up to something grander, like they have in New York City.
So it’s a good debate to have, because I think it does point to something true, which is there aren’t a lot of slam-dunk interventions in our world. But what you do with that reality, where you take that reality is an entirely different question.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s interesting that you mentioned nuance. One of the last chapters of your book is entitled “The Four Core Values of Incrementalism.” And these are, if I’m remembering correctly, honesty, humility, nuance, and respect. In the nuance segment, you have that great story of Derek Walker, who became the president of the Ford Foundation in 2013, and wrote this essay about why Rikers Island jail should be shuttered in New York City. He actually used the n-word — which is “nuance” — saying that “You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” This then produced a counter-demonstration against him, with protesters at his office marching under the banner “F— your nuance,” because of course the idea that you would actually have any kind of jails built to replace Rikers Island is anathema to the present generation of prison abolitionists.
This to me actually seems very much a case of what Lenin — I can’t believe I’m quoting Lenin favorably here — but what Lenin used to refer to as “infantile leftism,” the idea that there can be no compromise of any kind and that this is actually what distinguishes the serious people, the serious reformers, from the charlatans of this world.
Greg Berman: Again, I think that that’s in a way what we’re writing against. In the world that we inhabit — the world of nonprofits, New York — I think there’s a lot of the perfect being the enemy of the good, frankly. I think that the No New Jails movement — I don’t want to be too harsh about it, because some of my friends are a part of it — I think that’s a classic example of wanting a purity of vision that is just not, frankly, possible in the real world. I think that there was a moment in around 2020 — I don’t know how long it lasted before and after 2020 — where it felt like you couldn’t say that, or at least I’d felt like I couldn’t say that in a full-throated way.
So I think that we wrote the book in part… I mean, I’d love for it to convince some of my radical friends to be a little less radical, but honestly I think we mostly wrote it to preach to the chorus. Because I think there’s a lot of people that believe the way we do: that we have serious problems in this country, and we should relentlessly try to attack them, and the best way to do that is through a spirit of pragmatic optimism and incremental change. But I think that those voices were feeling cowed in 2020, in 2019, 2021. I think more and more are coming out of the closet now. But I think it’s important to state, as Aubrey said, the crisis of 2020 forced some of us to articulate things that we had just taken for granted. And there’s value in articulating these principles.
Aubrey Fox: But Greg, we shouldn’t pass up the chance to ask the host of the Vital Center Podcast how to make these values sexy. Is nuance, humility, honesty, and respect, is that… Can we put that on a T-shirt? How do we market this? I’m sure you’ve thought about this. What are your core values that you’re selling?
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, it’s been a joke from time immemorial that revolutionaries have all the best slogans, and moderates are reduced to chanting, “What do we want? Incrementalism! When do we want it? As soon as is feasibly possible!” So there is a problem, and a lot of these moderate solutions don’t necessarily stir the blood. That is actually a drawback of moderation when it comes to trying to get public support in some cases for these plans.
But the great appeal of incrementalism is that it actually works, whereas utopianism does not. You mentioned your cat’s namesake, Albert Hirschman. He also was on the mind of my friend Aurelian Craiutu, with whom I did a Substack interview recently, because he is just so struck by the fact that Hirschman was actually operating in the world as it is, where humans are imperfect and they make mistakes. And that’s okay if they correct them and learn from their mistakes.
But that is completely antithetical to the vision of utopianism. There’s a figure who we haven’t quoted here, and I don’t think appears in your book, but Isaiah Berlin used to quote Immanuel Kant’s saying that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever formed.” Berlin, for this reason, equated utopianism with totalitarianism and the top-down solution that inevitably gets frustrated with imperfect human beings and has to destroy them to build the more perfect foundations of their grandiose structures.
So like I said, there’s a lot to be said for starting with reality. That ultimately can, I think, be a winning political strategy if either party were to actually embrace it. But, you know, this podcast always starts with this same introduction in which I refer to “the muddled, moderate majority of Americans.” I’m sure that most of my guests would vehemently deny that there is any such thing, but they’re too polite to say so, and also it would interfere with their introduction. But I take it from your book that you would in fact agree that there is something like a moderate American majority.
Greg Berman: Yes, I think that that is our read of the polling. I’m thinking about the More in Common research, some of the research out of Pew. My read of the research is that most Americans are not ideologically polarized. We have, obviously, very vocal and passionate voices at both the right and the left extreme. But I think in a whole host of policy areas, you see pretty broad 65-70 percent support for modest reformist ideas. Just because we’re criminal justice people, I always default to criminal justice things. You see very, very low levels of support to defund the police, even in the Black community, which has understandably the most grievance with the police. But you do see, across a fairly broad political spectrum, support for a range of concrete reform ideas including civilian oversight, recruiting more black officers, and preventing officers with a history of abuse from getting hired in different departments.
That’s just one example. I think that the problem from my perspective — and correct me if you think this is wrong, Aubrey — I think the problem is that our politics have gotten disengaged from where the public is. I think that there’s broad public support for a range of legislative change, but our politics doesn’t seem capable of delivering it right now.
Aubrey Fox: I would even go a little deeper. I completely agree with everything you said, Greg, but I came away after writing the book with a deep respect for the fact that most people don’t care about politics that much at all. I think that’s actually a principled view, even if they don’t articulate it as such. What they care about is their day-to-day life, their families. Can they support themselves? Their decisions that they make are more based on things that they have skin in the game, that they’re actually deciding on. Politics for them, for a lot of people, feels like a distant thing that doesn’t impact them very much. And I think we don’t… Because we tend to live in communities that talk intensely about politics and follow politics, it’s hard to understand the opinions of the vast majority of Americans who don’t follow it.
I think what they are saying underneath it is, “You know what? Take it slow. We don’t want things to change that much. We don’t even trust that if things change, they’ll move in the direction we want them to move.” I think that it’s part of the… Geoff, you said the word “reality” a couple times. I think, in a way, the fact that incrementalism doesn’t lead to good sloganeering is almost a feature, not a bug, in the sense that we’re moving in line with reality as opposed to against it. So there’s less that has to be done, I think, to move the world in incremental directions with some basic stability in place in our political and economic systems. Thank God, I think we have that for the most part.
So I guess I came away… There’s that old phrase about the seen and the unseen. There are forces in American life that have real political implications that are less seen. And yes, people by and large are more moderate than is commonly understood. But the disengagement with a certain way of talking about politics and interacting with politics is in itself another form of reality that I think supports the incremental story, if that makes sense.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree that people like me spend way too much time in a kind of hothouse of political engagement, and the average American thankfully does not. But I was really struck by the distinction you made, drawing on Daniel Yankelovich, the public opinion researcher, between public opinion (which is superficial and inconsistent) and public judgment (which is more stable but takes longer to emerge). I think that’s actually very relevant to some of these questions relating to crime and policing, for example.
Greg Berman: Yeah, I think that’s right. I can’t remember — maybe, Geoff, you’ll remember — who is it that made the observation that at a 30,000-foot altitude around the big question: “Are you pro-capitalist or pro-socialist?,” the American public is pretty conservative. But then if you go a level down and ask about concrete policy initiatives, they tend towards more liberal solutions. I think that that’s an example of the wisdom of the crowd and of public judgment emerging in the American public.
I think the other thing that I learned from writing the book… There’s so much frustration (and I just expressed some of it) that our politics can’t seem to deliver legislation that has broad public support. But it is also true that our politics is on a knife’s edge right now. It’s finely balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Sometimes when Congress does nothing, in fact it’s reflecting the will of the public that there is not will for major change. I think that that’s where we are right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: I noted, though, that you cited my colleague at Niskanen, Matthew Yglesias, and political scientists Frances Lee and James Curry, who generally feel that Congress is not in fact “broken,” as we hear all the time in the media, but actually that it’s working more or less the way that the Framers intended. Would you care to broaden on that theme?
Aubrey Fox: Yeah, huge fans of Frances Lee and James Curry and their amazing book [The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era]. What they did, which was so cool, is they said, “Let’s subject this critique of Congress to an empirical test.” When you actually look at their output — which they defined as how often the party in charge of a house of Congress is able to move forward legislation that represents its priority policy issues — how often are they successful? They draw on longstanding work by David Mayhew and others who’ve looked at this question of congressional output. They find it’s relatively stable: that about half the time, the party in charge of one branch of Congress or another is able to pass their priority legislation. There are downturns, there are dips.
What tends to happen is the kind of shape this output takes changes. So you might have not so much individual bills getting passed, a lot of them, but like an omnibus bill that has a bunch of legislation contained within it. So what’s stable is the amount of output, even if the form that the output takes changes. I just thought it was such a brilliant thing to do on their part, to look at congressional output and subject it to any kind of empirical tests. When you look at people who work within Congress, obviously, they have the same frustrations that anyone has in their daily life at a job. But the place just works very differently than the way it’s described.
Matt Yglesias, of course, coined the great phrase “secret Congress,” which we used in the book. You can literally see this in the paper, the New York Times. We cited this in the book. The front page, above-the-fold article is “Congress in Chaos Over Trump, blah, blah, blah.” But on the inside page, it’s “Congress Authorizes Reorganization of the U.S. Postal Service.” There’s a good reason that isn’t on the front page — that story isn’t as exciting as the other one — but it does represent actually what Congress is meant to do. Now, whether you could continue that empirical finding in the last couple of Congresses, who knows? It still has to be put to the test.
But I like Greg’s point. I think it’s certainly true that right now people don’t feel that settled on, “Here’s this bold new direction that we should move in.” So even if it’s true that Congress is less productive, in the terms set up by Frances and Jim, that in itself may reflect something important about our democracy and how its institutions operate in a particular moment in time.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was really struck by the finding by Lee and Curry that of those 256 top party priorities, like you said, half of them passed, and almost all of them passed actually with significant bipartisan majorities. Yet the model that the activist class has in mind — and the donor class, in terms of foundations, people who actually are pushing for political change — the model they have in mind is one where the party in power just pushes its way through and gets no buy-in whatsoever from the opposing party, but they implement it nonetheless. Ha, take that! Yet Lee and Curry found that that happened only in nine of those 256 examples, which is a success rate of about, what, 3.5%?
I saw personally the complete failure of voting rights reform efforts despite millions of dollars and countless hours of activism put into it. Again, it seemed a failure of the model, which is that you achieve success by being loud and proud and threatening to tear down the system and confronting people; that’s how change comes about. But that’s actually not how it comes about. The rejection of compromise is also, I think, baked into the model of activism that we have now, and it’s just completely wrong, utterly invalid.
Aubrey Fox: Well, it’s fascinating because there’s this political stratum and then there’s the policy implementation stratum. Frances has a previous book where her claim is essentially that things are so on a knife’s edge in terms of who will control Congress and the presidency, that whereas before you had decades or even generations of stable one-party control, that there’s this political incentive to make enormous hay out of differences in policy views. So the controversy which gets press attention is based on that very competitive sense that a few thousand votes here and there could change control of Congress one direction or the other.
Frances wrote an entire book about that. Interestingly enough, Ezra Klein, who’s someone I admire, had her on the podcast, and said, “Your book changed my life. I now know why Congress is so dysfunctional. It’s because everyone’s fighting over the politics of it.” Did he have her on his show to talk about her next book, which basically makes a counterargument about how Congress is more effective than people realize? No, he did not — because it challenges the dominant narrative. And there’s a reason the narrative exists. It’s not like it’s being completely manufactured out of thin air. But there are real incentives — turtles all the way down — there are real incentives to make more of this symbolic fight.
It’s also easier to write and think about. I mean, that’s going back to the whole idea of who we are and why we’re different. We’re practitioners, so we have a different perspective. But if you’re someone, God bless, like keyboard warriors sitting in a coffee shop writing, then it’s a lot easier to write about symbolic battles, political battles than it is to get in, open the hood, and understand what work looks like from our perspective on a day-to-day basis.
Greg Berman: I do want to say that we worked really hard in writing this book for it not to come across as a culture war screed. Hopefully you saw this, Geoff, in the book. I think we nod in the direction, appropriately, that there is a time when radical change is necessary. It comes around very infrequently. We don’t think we’re in such a moment now. And there is value in activism. Activism in the United States has accomplished a great many things that are incredibly important including abolishing slavery, including advancing the civil rights of untold numbers of vulnerable populations. I want to acknowledge that.
At the same time, I do think that we have tipped too far in the direction of saying that activism is the only way to make change, and that that is the lesson that’s being broadcast to our children over and over again. I don’t know if you could ever make incremental reform sexy, or working within a government agency feel super-attractive, but that is the way the change mostly happens. That’s the way change mostly should happen. And we need to somehow figure out a way to energize our young people to want to engage in those kinds of behavior instead of the dramatic, out-in-the-streets activism that I think is sucking up a lot of oxygen right now.
Aubrey Fox: Just to piggyback on that theme… We wrote a chapter on Social Security, telling the story of how the world’s largest single government program developed incrementally and took so long to flower. It’s really a remarkable story, actually, given what people now think is the Social Security story, how different it is in practice. One of the things that feels odd to me about certain aspects of the left’s beliefs about incremental change is that in fact harnessing incremental change should be a cheat code for the left. It’s actually a way to accomplish your goals.
If anything, if I’m giving myself a self-critique, we have a bias towards government action and reform that would be identified more with the left than the right, right? So while we wrote the book as a counter-position to certain voices in the left, you could make a conservative critique of our book that we’re just talking about the relentless growth of government. You can even make a Hayekian argument about The Road to Serfdom, God forbid, of the kinds of programs and policies we’re promoting.
We talk about the endless need to change the world and make improvements. We’re believers in that. So in some ways, it feels like an own goal for people on the left to not embrace the potential benefits of incrementalism for advancing their own policy priorities. It seems like a strange thing to leave a tool or a strategy on the table that could be used for their own benefit. But here we are.
Geoff Kabaservice: On the conservative side, I was delighted to see that you did reference Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard and his theory of gattopardism, which is that if we want things to stay the same, things have to change.
Aubrey Fox: No book is complete without a reference to that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely. But that’s actually, I think, the Burkean sense of continuity with change, which is inevitable, and wise conservatives tend to understand that. But the flavor of the right, right now, is Donald Trump’s idea of Schedule F, which he did implement in a very half-hearted way at the very tail end of his term. But the Heritage Institution has come up with a plan to implement it on a grand scale in a second Trump administration. That would involve firing or at least marginalizing tens if not hundreds of thousands of career civil servants, and replacing them with Trump loyalists. Given everything that you wrote about your book, I think it’s clear that that would be disastrous, but also that it might not work because there’s a thing you call “the practitioner’s veto.” Can you tell me a little more about that?
Greg Berman: Sure. I think that this is… We love all of the book, but if I had to make people read just one chapter of the book… This is an interesting question for you, Aubrey. Which chapter would you choose? I might choose this chapter, because I think it really is very important. I think our pathway into this was through the book Street-Level Bureaucracy, which really focused attention on the fact that the street-level government workers — be they cops, judges, social workers, teachers — are not automatons who just mindlessly do what the lawmakers in D.C. or Albany or what have you tell them to do. They have minds of their own, and they make decisions that affect people’s lives.
Sometimes those decisions are driven by high-minded ideals. I think there’s lots of examples during the Trump years of government workers essentially refusing to implement ideas that they didn’t believe in, because they thought that they were contrary to the Constitution or their ethical beliefs. Sometimes the street-level bureaucrats are acting purely for selfish reasons, because they want to move through the day with a minimum of hassle and get out the door by 5:00. So I don’t mean to say that the frontline government practitioners are always right or that their behavior never needs to be reformed, because sometimes it does.
But I guess what we were trying to articulate was that if you have an idea for changing the practice of government, and you don’t concentrate on winning the hearts and minds of the people who actually have to implement that change on the ground, that is a recipe for failure. That’s true whether your ideas are right-wing ideas or left-wing ideas or moderate ideas.
Geoff Kabaservice: I should add that Michael Lipsky was the author of the book Street-Level Bureaucracy in 1980.
Greg Berman: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: He was somebody who very much was looking at frontline government officials and how they actually behaved in practice. It seems to me that what you’re saying is that because bureaucracies are the way they are, and bureaucrats are the way they are, gradualism is actually the only successful approach to solving problems in government. Is that too broad of a statement to make?
Greg Berman: I don’t want to back into something that I’ll regret later; I’m sure someone smarter than me can come up with an example. But yes, I think that that’s what we’re saying. To do anything at scale means engaging hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of frontline workers — again, depending upon the fields. If it’s public health, it’s nurses. If it’s education, it’s schoolteachers and principals. And inevitably that pushes in the direction of gradualism. That means that gradualism is in fact the only way to achieve the kind of change that we’d like to see in the world.
Aubrey Fox: Just piggybacking on that very quickly, we like to talk about federalism or decentralized systems, but I think what Greg’s pointing to is that the actual authority to carry out change is fractured in such profound ways all the way down to the street level, to the person actually doing the work. We don’t like to recognize that. It feels uncomfortable, I think. Certainly, if you’re the top-down engineer, it feels uncomfortable. But it’s so important to remember, and it is true.
Greg Berman: One last point on this… Geoff, you’re more well-read than I am. I’d be curious if you could point me in the direction. I guess I feel like what we don’t have an honest conversation about, or I haven’t seen it at least, is the reality of discretion in whatever system we’re talking about. I think that there’s understandable impulses to want to limit the discretion of government, because we want to prevent racial bias, or we want to prevent corruption.
But the reality is… There are two realities, I think. One reality is that in any system designed by humans, you can’t bleed all the discretion out of it, that that’s an impossible goal, number one. And then number two, that we actually want some measure of discretion, right? Because no matter how well-written the law is, the policy guidebook, the rulebook by centralized planners wherever they sit, invariably it cannot actually conceive of every idiosyncratic fact pattern, every special case that people are going to have to confront on the ground. So we actually want to arm our frontline practitioners with discretion to make wise, commonsensical decisions based on the people and unique cases that they have in front of them.
I guess I just don’t see us having an honest conversation about that. One intellectual that we haven’t mentioned so far that I think does have a profound influence on the book is Thomas Sowell. These are trade-offs, in fact, and we should talk honestly about the trade-offs: that less discretion means also less commonsensical action on the ground.
Geoff Kabaservice: Of course, you actually do cite Philip Howard as well. One of his main causes is the idea that the average citizen and the average government worker has less discretion than he or she used to have in the past, and that limiting the discretion of such people means that we get less effective results.
Greg Berman: Yes, I think that’s right. James Q. Wilson also wrote about how an overregulated organization or agency tends to be a demoralized agency. If you go to work every day and feel like no one trusts you to do the job at hand, I can see that having a corrosive effect on someone.
Geoff Kabaservice: Again, talking about the effectiveness of politicians who understand these realities, I think FDR comes across quite well in your book. Because Franklin Roosevelt understood that the idea of the Townsend Plan — of giving every person over sixty a generous monthly pension, in effect, requiring them to quit their jobs and then spend that money by the end of the month to stimulate the economy — that was a very appealing idea to millions of Americans. There was real political juice in that idea. And yet he understood, he was persuaded by the architects of Social Security as it evolved, that that was a disaster that had to be avoided. And he knew well enough to actually campaign against that person on his left, so to speak, or that idea on his left, toward a more realistic vision of government. I was struck by that.
At the same time, it seemed that Lyndon Johnson didn’t avoid that trap when it came to the vision that was laid out first for the Model Cities Program… oh, excuse me, first for Community Action, and then for the Model Cities program. They both failed, again, through some failure to grasp the way government works in practice and the way that humans work in practice.
Aubrey Fox: The FDR story is really remarkable. Because not only did he push aside the Townsend Plan, which parenthetically was the largest social movement of the twentieth century, if you can believe it — the local clubs that promoted this very utopian forced retirement scheme — but the Social Security system that he set up didn’t only tax people, and didn’t produce benefits for about fifteen years, in the middle of the Great Depression, if you can imagine that. Imagine a politician basically starting a new program in the middle of a huge crisis and saying, “Well, we’re going to tax you, but we’re not going to pay anything out for fifteen years.” It’s a remarkable aspect of social security’s history.
As you say, we do write about the Great Society programs. Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was seeing there was this window of opportunity to cram a lot of things through in a quick period. But be careful what you wish for. There’s a lesson in that, too. Even when the stars align… I think a lot of people on the left or the right feel frustrated now because of the sense of endless conflict. If only one side could win! Not to pick on Ezra Klein, but that was his book about polarization. His answer to the problems of polarization was to let one side win and just run riot.
When that happens in American history, it doesn’t always produce negative results. You can think about the Reconstruction period and the immediate post-Civil War period. But LBJ and the story of the Great Society has some important parts to it and positive parts to it, but you can see the downsides of letting it rip.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a last question, this is going to be a little bit more of a difficult one. I heard you saying that extraordinary historical moments do require radical change, but we are not living through such times. But something that I think a lot of us on the center-right are grappling with right now is the prospect that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, would actually try to change the American system in fundamental ways, perhaps even moving it toward authoritarianism. So the question does come up that if you believe that, should not radical actions to counter that possibility be something that would seem necessary or at least that you ought to consider?
Aubrey Fox: Oy vey. You want to start on that, Greg?
Greg Berman: I do agree that I view the prospect of a second Trump administration with real trepidation. I do think that he’s making scary authoritarian noises. But I guess I don’t believe that you can… I guess I’m just very skeptical that you can defeat radicalism with radicalism. And I’m very, very wary of throwing out the rules of engagement along the way. I think a large part of what we’ve been talking about today, the backdrop is that a number of institutions from the New York Times to universities to nonprofits over the last couple years, in reaction to Trump, dispensed with things like an effort to be neutral and apply rules neutrally. They dispensed with due process, dispensed with trying to behave in objective ways — at enormous costs to their public credibility and legitimacy. I think it’s going to take a generation to reclaim that legitimacy.
So I don’t have the answer for you, Geoff, but I guess my visceral response is to be very careful with saying that the threat is so radical that that authorizes us to engage in rule-breaking ourselves.
Aubrey Fox: Amen.
Geoff Kabaservice: Amen to that. I think that was a very nuanced answer, but one that I think is actually also the most sensible answer in the current circumstances. Well, Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, congratulations again on the publication of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. I think it’s a real contribution to this community of us who are grappling, we know not quite how, toward what I think would be a common consensus. And it has been a real pleasure to talk to you today.
Greg Berman: Thank you so much.
Aubrey Fox: Thank you. Thanks, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.