Change: Getting From Here to There

“I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” The words of Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 still resonate.  

We want change. We work for it. It motivates us to get involved. Become active. But it is slow to show up, and when it arrives it is not quite what we wanted.

Why is change so difficult? The short answer: there is no magic wand to align all the people necessary to make change happen. We discover for ourselves what Machiavelli pointed out 700 years ago, changing the usual way of doing things is the most difficult of all political acts.

Change starts with a dream, a vision. A vision that captures the imagination and draws support because it points the way to fixing something that is broken. Someone understood that things could be different and imagined an alternative. The vision comes embodied in a person. Think Bernie Sanders and “Medicare for All”.

A vision has power to the extent it is simple, tangible, easily understood and important enough for people to rally behind. It is only the first step, possibly the easiest, toward achieving change.

To have political traction, the vision needs advocates and those advocates have to win elections. . The change and its advocates are inseparable in the public mind.  

That identification can be a strength or a weakness. The reputation, experience and past activities of the advocates get attached to the dream. Some voters may support the dream but can’t bring themselves, for any number of reasons, to vote for its advocates. The dream is not on the ballot, only a person and a party.

Two years ago in the French presidential election, there was this headline, “France cares about its green causes, but not its Green Party”.  One reason cited was the Party’s attitude. “You feel like you’re constantly being told off.” The Party also lacked “a clear, coherent platform that goes beyond their core issues” and was not seen as “capable of dealing with issues like diplomacy and defense”. Reputation matters. Competence matters.

Advocates and a compelling vision are the start of change. Then comes the difficult part when the vision has to take on flesh and bones and become specific policies, programs and actions. The visionary words translated into the dry legal language of legislation. Who is going to do what and how. What structures will be created to make it all happen. What procedures must be followed. How many employees will be needed. What will it cost. How will it be paid for.

What are the downsides. Who and what will be negatively affected. What might be the unintended consequences. How can they be avoided.

To build and keep public support, to get legislative approval, answers are needed. That takes people who know the law, the policy and the politics (to write the legislation and get it passed) and people who know the practical, everyday reality of delivering a service (to shape the program and its details). You can’t do education without teachers. Or public safety without  police. Or health care without health providers. They may not agree with the vision, but avoid labeling them the enemy.

The difficulties in transforming a vision into policies, programs  and legislation played out in Vermont’s effort to  establish a single-payer  health care system. Peter Shumlin, elected governor in 2010 had made single payer an issue in the campaign. The next spring the legislature passed Green Mountain Care, “the most comprehensive attempt to achieve universal single-payer health care in the history of the United States.”

Act 48, however, was more aspirational than specific. There was no financing plan. A Board was created to address benefits, coverage and premiums.  Launch date was set for 2017.  The effort to pull everything together into a cohesive, comprehensive program kept running into problems and the Governor withdrew the plan in December, 2014.

The Cornell University Institute for Public Affairs, in one of its Policy Reviews, described some of what contributed to the failure. “The biggest issue was the unresolved matter of paying for the reform, which turned out to be a far more complex issue than anyone in Shumlin’s administration had realized when they put off designing a financing plan.”

Another was the authority of the Board. The original vision was  a public-private partnership with input from stakeholders. Instead, authority that had been spread across state agencies was centralized in the Board and the governor given control. What was originally to be a public-private partnership became a regulatory body with a quasi-judicial  policy-making role.

There was little effort to engage the public in the discusion. Although “Shumlin’s team worked hard to develop the policy … (they) neglected to launch a serious and sustained effort to educate the public about what the act did and how it impacted people’s lives.”

An unrelated event, “the disastrous launch” of the state’s Obamacare  insurance exchange website eroded “trust in the state’s capacity to assume management of Vermont’s healthcare system.”

The Cornell authors  concluded that the failure to keep the public informed, the mission creep of the Board and the breakdown of trust “turned a politically steep climb into a politically insurmountable one.” Green Mountain Care was “a sound idea scuttled by political barriers and poor management of the reform effort.”

A compelling vision is the beginning of change. Capturing that vision in coherent policy and making it law, is about the midpoint. Change has not happened until the new is operationalized and becomes part of everyday life.

Kennedy recognized that the “dream” of ending racial inequality was not realized when desegregation laws were passed. “It is one thing to open the schools to all children regardless of race. It is another to train the teachers, to build the classrooms, and to attempt to eliminate the effects of past educational deficiencies. It is still another to find ways to feed the incentive to learn and keep children in school.”

Change is always incremental as new structures are built and problems addressed. Phasing out fossil fuels can’t take place any faster than the increase in renewable energy. The sale of electric vehicles depends on consumer demand. Building out a network of charging stations is a process. Windfarms can’t expand faster than the industrial capacity to manufacture parts.

At every step of the process, from the initial vision to implementation, the support of the public is the one constant that keeps change moving and makes it happen. The public has to buy into the vision. Vote for its advocates. Support the implementation. Approve the result. Without continuing public approval, the status quo reasserts itself.

To become a force, a vision has to hold up common human aspirations that transcend ideology and narrow interests. If the change we want primarily benefits us and our friends the vision will not be widely shared. Or, if a widely shared vision for change is bent to achieve partisan goals, public support evaporates.

In October, 2020, 78 percent of voters in Chile approved the writing of a new constitution to replace the one that had been in effect during the authoritarian Pinochet regime. It was going to be a new start, a new contract between the people and the government that included people’s rights. There was hope and excitement. The body chosen to write the document was dominated by progressives who included their whole wish list. In the ensuing referendum 62 percent of the voters rejected the draft.

Conservatives dominated the second body chosen to write the new constitution. Learning nothing,  they incorporated all of their conservative ideology which was rejected by 56 percent of the voters. A political scientist at the University of Chile observed, “Both the left and the right, when given the chance to finally write a new charter, shunned compromise and instead wrote texts almost completely based on their worldview.” The old constitution remains in force.

On the other hand, change can be accelerated when a vision is expanded to resonate with more of the public. It happened with same sex marriage. Prior to 2009, statewide ballot initiatives that banned same-sex marriage routinely passed. By 2015, same-sex marriage was legal across the country. What changed?

In its account of the process, Freedom to Marry describes the change in vision  by advocates from one focused on  the rights and benefits denied to same sex partners, to a vision that emphasized the love and commitment shared by both straight and same sex couples. “Marriage mattered to gay and lesbian couples for the same reasons that it mattered to straight couples.” That broader vision resonated. Voters responded.

Walking the road to change, getting from here to there, take the people with you. You need them. Don’t leave them behind. They make it happen.