From Western Horseman Magazine, August 2010, page 59:

“People get to a point where they’re just pestering the horse,” he says. “The horse gets confused about what he’s being asked to do, and stops responding as the rider expects. The rider gets after the horse, and a fight starts.”

To counter that tendency to overdrill, [Montana horse trainer Jon] Ensign encourages his students to set aside overly ambitious goals for each ride and instead emphasize small steps — little victories that can build upon on another. This approach, he says, helps ensure that a horse has adequate time to mentally process new experiences, and helps a student learn to recognize the best possible moments to stop work on a maneuver and either move on to a new challenge or call it a day.

“As humans, we’re greedy. We always want more, Ensign says. “If we could take our human tendencies out of this and see things from the horse’s side, progress in the saddle would come easier.”

…

The manaña principle … tomorrow (manaña) always holds the promise of further progress.

Manaña. Not just tomorrow, but an indefinite tomorrow, somewhere down the road. Jimmy Buffett put it this way:

Please don't say manaña if you don't mean it
I have heard those words for so very long
Don't try to describe the ocean if you've never seen it
Don't ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.

Capt Buffett and the horseman are addressing different issues — being a friend and training horses — but at the heart is the same principle, one that we progressives need to take to heart: The whole world is not wrapped up in today. And the more we invest in making today The Most Important Day in the History of Forever and Ever, the less we’ll accomplish and the more angry, bitter and hopeless we’ll become.

And the more we’ll piss off and alienate the people who don’t agree with us. That’s a lot of people.

Manaña. Do what you can today, be honest about your commitment for tomorrow, and let today go with the setting sun. This day, this opportunity, is not your last. That noise telling you it is? That’s you screaming at yourself that you have to get everything fixed today or the world will end.

(The Buddha would add that you can’t tell the world what it needs to be anyway, today or tomorrow; it is what it is, regardless of your demands.)

Progressives hate hate hate incrementalism. Of all the sins of neo/liberalism, the small-step-by-small-step approach to government is among the worst. Incrementalism, in the eyes of the more fanatic, is a sellout to the forces of evil, a perpetuation of institutions and practices of injustice and inhumanity that bring death and suffering to millions. Put that way, of course, not doing everything we can do right now makes us accomplices in these crimes against humanity. But that’s not how the world is actually functioning, even for those on the side of the angels.

Take the issue of civil rights for GLBTQ Americans. For many of us, this is a no-brainer: any law, regulation or sanctioned practice that condones or enables restrictions on those rights is wrong. Period. No discussion. The inability of gays and lesbians to marry in exactly the same way as heterosexual couples? There is no justification for that. We must end that and other injustices.

But when? Today, of course, is the blithe and heart-felt answer. The response to that, of course, is how? What are you going to do today to change the laws? If injustice has to end immediately, then what can be done to make the change immediate? In this case, the answer is pretty simple: Nothing. In Oregon, an election will be needed to overturn Measure 36, but this won’t see the ballot for two more years. Even if it passes, it only resolves the issue in Oregon. Federal law still blocks the recognition of “gay” marriage across state borders and by the U.S. government.

Got a plan to change that immediately? Yea, I didn’t think so.

We have an over-abundance of issues requiring immediate resolution for the sake of justice, peace, even the planet’s survival. I do not want to be the one telling people who are suffering as the result of laws, institutions or proscribed practices that their condition does not warrant the immediate marshaling of all possible forces to make the necessary changes today. “You must continue to suffer while we craft careful changes to law and implement them bit by bit.” That sounds as horrible as it would be.

And that’s exactly what incrementalism is not.

Incremental change is about getting done today what is possible today. We see the end in sight for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; we can push on that and know it’s going to happen very soon. DOMA? The federal “Defense of Marriage Act”? Not gonna happen. It’s a horrible law, one of the lowest moments of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and overturning it will take years. It will require constant effort, month after month after month. States will need to approve, and then uphold, same-sex marriage. Other states will need to reject or repeal constitutional amendments against the same. ENDA will have to go into affect. More and more Americans will have to “get used” to gays, lesbians, transexuals and other queer people; not being straight will have to become normal to a lot more people. Finally, overturning DOMA will require shifting the votes of some of the most powerful and conservative people in America: U.S. Senators.

It took the decimation of the U.S. military by Bush and Cheney’s two wars to make the Senate recognize how stupid DADT is. The foolishness of turning away men and women who want to serve their country, who are willing to die for a country that withholds their full civil rights based on sexual orientation, has become clear even to Bible-belt Senators. The Pentagon is on-board with the change; now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to make it happen, and that’s mostly a matter, I suspect, of paperwork and rewriting the UCMJ. But it’s going to happen soon, and it’s going to happen because a lot of different things happened over a long period of time.

It happened incrementally.

But it also happened because the goal behind the efforts has never been in doubt. And that’s the key to doing incrementalism right: not compromising on the why of the effort.

A vision for manaña

As hated by “principled” progressives as much as incrementalism is compromise. Never mind that progress in America has always been the result of compromises, the idea of accepting not merely half-a-loaf but half-a-tainted-loaf seems a mortal sin to those dedicated to Higher Principles. They are partially right, of course; the compromises that slowed the spread of slavery, for example, still consigned millions of Americans to degradation and the total denial of their human rights. But most compromises in politics are less horrific; the compromises behind the recent health insurance/care bill, for instance. The bill lacked many good things that would have helped people, such as a public option, but it does provide significant improvements in the ability of Americans to get, keep and afford health insurance. Compromise made the bill possible despite giving up elements that would have improved the bill.

The flip side, of course, is that many Americans see the bill as making the country worse off. And this gets to the crux of why both compromise and incrementalism are the most progressive routes forward: not everyone agrees with us on what is best for the country. A public option? I have no doubt it would make significant improvements to health care access and lead the way to an even better improvement: single-payer. That’s my belief and political goal; for tens of millions of other Americans, however, the prospect is horrifying. Do we simply run roughshod over our fellow citizens because we “know” they are wrong?

I hope we are not that arrogant. That’s the politics of Cheney and Rove. We must be better than that.

Go back to the words of horse trainer Jon Ensign and how a horse needs time to process what just happened and be capable of approaching a new goal. This is the part of compromise we talk about too little. The change progressives see as obvious, necessary and right, millions of Americans see as wrong. Sometimes they see it as evil, as in the case of a woman’s right to choose or GLBTQ rights. The reason we are, in fact, moving closer to the end of DADT and DOMA is that because, slowly but surely, Americans are processing the presence of GLBTQ Americans in their own lives and communities — and realizing the world isn’t ending. A decade ago, we were so much further away. But day by day, more and more Americans have seen and processed — come to terms with, if not happily than satisfactorily — the normality of “those” people.

This is not something we can rush.

If we know what we believe and what we hope and work for, we can approach the politics of an issue and determine what is possible. The Obama Administration has made the mistake of aiming low in too many cases, most notably in not pushing for a big enough stimulus. They could have pushed through a much larger package but let fears, or misguided beliefs about the markets or GOP or whatever, undermine the larger goal: getting Americans back to work. Their fault was not compromising; it was asking for too little in the first place. The got the politics wrong, and they did so by not staying true to their higher, guiding principles.

We can move the country forward in small steps; there is no other way to do so. But we can only do that if we follow the advice of the horseman and keep an eye on the possibilities manaña holds. The nation does not support full marriage rights for same sex couples, but a few states do and millions of citizens scattered across the country do. It is going to take years to achieve the goal of full marriage rights for all Americans, but because we won’t compromise that vision and because, necessarily, we will make changes step-by-step, where and how we can, we will achieve this goal. Incrementally.

I want to make the world a better place today. I don’t want to live another day in a country that discriminates against GLBTQ citizens or brown-skinned people, a country that accepts war and vast, deadly pollution in order to keep automobiles rolling, a nation that will spend days hand-wringing over a jock or single missing child but ignores the daily suffering of millions of children. The United States can and must be better.

Yet lacking godlike powers, I cannot make these changes happen today. Or tomorrow. But with patience, vision, constant pressure and taking whatever successes are available, these changes will happen and the country will get better.

Manaña.