Previously, I talked about how, in the ideal case, a practical progressivism and a moderate, thoughtful conservatism act to complement each other, so that moderate, useful reforms can be achieved, and social order and harmony can be maintained, while gradually making things better for everyone. However, what we have right now, in the West in the 2020s, is far from this. Instead, we have extremists dominating the conversation on both sides. I have talked about how the unwillingness to compromise on both sides has led to division and polarization. Importantly, it could also lead to continuous cycling between radical and reactionary policies, which would be a tragic course of political and cultural development, leading to many people being needlessly harmed, as well as unsound policies being enacted and entrenched.
In economics, there is a thing called the business cycle or the economic cycle, where the economy predictably goes through alternating periods of growth and recession. Given that severe economic recessions can lead to economic hardship for many people, in the form of businesses going under, massive job losses and bankruptcy, and the mental health and social implications of these events, it is generally agreed that the economic cycle should be responsibly managed so as to smooth out the cycle as much as possible. This way, both the peaks and the troughs would be less prominent, the economy would be more stable, and less people would be harmed by the fluctuations of the economic cycle. It would also make the economy more fair and just, in that people would be less likely to lose their hard earned savings through no fault of their own, because of events like long-term unemployment or mortgage default in the context of severe recessions.
I believe a similar concept can be applied to our politics and culture. In this analogy, moments of change and progress are similar to peaks, and periods of relative conservatism are similar to troughs. Overall, social change happens at the pace that society can take it, and there appears to be hard limits to this, just like the pace of economic growth. In this view, we can't really accelerate the pace of social progress beyond those limits. What we can do, however, is firstly to smooth out the cycle so as to have sustainable progress over time, and secondly to prioritize the more important and beneficial changes.
I think the history of the West in the past century actually provides plenty of evidence to support this model. The 1920s saw unprecedented social progress, especially in some parts of Europe, and the 1930s brought a more reactionary mood. The post-war 1950s was very conservative, but the 1960s saw another period of radical change. In turn, the radicalism of the 60s and 70s led to another conservative period ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher, which basically lasted three decades. Over time, the pendulum swung further towards reaction, leading up to the religious right's brief 'awakening' around 2004, which was met with progressive and libertarian backlash. Following this, the 2010s saw the rise of wokeism, which in turn was met with the election of Trump and the rise of the populist right afterwards.
Just like the business cycle, this social change cycle led to numerous negative outcomes: the reactionary mood of 1930s Europe provided fertile ground for the rise of fascism. The conservatism of the 1950s was too stifling for many people, particularly women who wanted to have careers. Some of them later divorced their husbands in the freer climate of the 1970s, to pursue what was denied to them when they were younger. The radicalism of the 1960s brought about a massive increase in social problems like drug use and broken families that have stayed with us to this day. The conservatism of the 1980s-2000s brought with it a prolonged period of homophobic sentiment. This sentiment, coupled with the AIDS crisis, meant that many lives were prematurely lost in the 1980s and 90s. 2010s wokeness brought cancel culture, which ended the careers of some people, and terrified many others into silence. The populist right moment, well, I think I don't need to elaborate (plus it's still ongoing). As you can see, the peaks and troughs of the social change cycle are clearly harmful, just like the peaks and troughs of the economic cycle, and we should therefore try to smooth it out as much as possible.
If we want to smooth the cycle out so we get sustainable and rational social change, where should we start? Going back to the economic cycle analogy, we can see that monetary and fiscal policy is used to smooth the economic cycle out, by managing demand in a countercyclical way. For example, when inflation is too high, interest rates are raised to bring demand down, and when economic growth is too weak, interests rates are cut to increase demand. We can apply this philosophy to social change too. For example, when things are getting too radical, society would need more voices calling for caution. Indeed, Edmund Burke, often regarded as the father of conservatism, was actually mostly a liberal, who broke from his fellow liberals to call for caution in the face of numerous aspects of the French Revolution going too far. I think there is a clear analogy to the anti-woke liberals of the 2010s here. On the other hand, when things are getting too reactionary, society would need more voices championing progress. The picture is actually more complicated in reality with our divided and polarized society nowadays, because things could be simultaneously getting too radical and too reactionary in different geographical areas or different sections of society. In this case, we would have to simultaneously call for more caution in some places (e.g. on college campuses and inside the LGBT community), and more open-mindedness in other places (e.g. in anti-woke circles).
There is also another, more fundamental way to smooth the cycle of social change. Radical ideas lead to attempts at radical change, which then provokes a backlash that empowers reactionary politics. Therefore, if we dissuade people from adopting radical ideas in the first place, it would have a smoothing effect on the whole of the cycle. What we need to do then, is to encourage progressive-minded people to choose a moderate, gradualist path to progress. In particular, we should argue against theories that promise a short cut to radical change, especially those that are not grounded in real world conditions. Such fantasies of almost overnight revolutionary change inevitably lead to radical demands that set off the whole cycle, and they need to be abandoned if we want to smooth the cycle.
In our arguments against radicalism, we also need to argue for an alternative. I think we should advocate for gradualist, liberal reformism as the alternative, and point to its track record of success in improving society as justification for choosing this path. This could win over those who are receptive to evidence-based arguments.
