Will we see lasting change?

We live in a time of riots, protests, and demonstrations. We live in a time when people demand change -- lasting change. And there is an election coming up. Surely the time is ripe for something different to surface in our political world. Will it?

Probably not.

Of course I have no idea for sure, and it's always possible. After the catastrophe of the Great Depression, the New Deal laid the groundwork for a period of middle-class prosperity that wasn't dismantled for another fifty years. In political terms, that's significant change. Not that Franklin Roosevelt did it all by himself. The tooling up of our industrial plant for the Second World War, and Eisenhower's building of the interstate highway system all helped. The fact that ours was the only major industrial plant in the world that had not been bombed into rubble helped as well, because it meant for a while that the whole world was a market for our goods. So yes, events helped. But so did strong unionization and a government regulatory apparatus that was suspicious of economic centralization. So did a 90% marginal income tax rate. It all helped, and yes, that counts as lasting change.

Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation also ushered in a kind of lasting change -- at least for a while. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did make a difference in how we played the game of citizenship.

Lasting change of another kind was ushered in by the "movement conservatives," who initiated a long-term rightward shift in the American political spectrum: starting with men like Barry Goldwater, achieving national power with Ronald Reagan, and proceeding straight through Newt Gingrich to our own time. This rightward shift has been so pronounced that from a modern perspective, even a dogged anti-Communist like Richard Nixon -- who founded the Environmental Protection Agency, integrated public schools across the country, and imposed centralized wage-price controls to combat inflation -- comes across looking like a flamboyant socialist.

So what about the unrest in the country today? Why do I say that I don't expect to see lasting change come from it?

Because we've seen it before. The city of Los Angeles burned when the police who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted by a majority-white jury. There have been demonstrations and protests after many other instances of apparent police brutality, especially when there seems to have been a racial motivation. There have been demonstrations and protests after mass shootings. In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zuccotti Park as well as banks, churches, and other local buildings. And all of these movements have accomplished exactly nothing.

Zero. Nada. Bupkes.

There is a reason they accomplished nothing, and it was first identified by Publius (James Madison) in Federalist No.10. He wrote about "faction" which had sooner or later killed every classical democracy or led it to be subverted by tyranny. And his argument was that "faction" would never be a serious problem in America because the country is too damned big! No matter what dramatic events happen here, they will be outweighed by the undramatic inertia of commonplace life everywhere else. Demonstrate and protest all you like: barricade the streets, set fire to cars or buildings, march, sing, wave signs. Knock yourself out. In the grand scheme of things it will barely ripple across the surface, and life will go on.

It is worth noting that, to date, he hasn't been far wrong. Factions ripped us apart during the Civil War, but they were factions that spanned whole regions, so that (nearly) everyone who lived in, say, Georgia or South Carolina belonged to one faction; while (nearly) everyone who lived in Michigan or New York belonged to the other. Splits like that are rare, and the uniqueness of that war in our history proves as much. (Factionalism sure looks strong today too, but all it seems able to do is to prevent Congress from legislating. I think we are unlikely to see anyone fire on another Fort Sumter.) 

What about the "lasting changes" that I list above? The New Deal became possible only because so much of the nation's economic infrastructure had collapsed. The War came to us through events outside our control. And all those other changes I list happened through the ordinary course of politicking ... a route that seems largely unavailable these days, since Congress can agree on so little.

The one way that I might be wrong is if the dramatic events of the last couple months drive changes at the state and local levels, and if those changes finally grow heavy enough to shift the center of balance in the country as a whole. It could happen. James Fallows has argued as much, over the last few years.

Maybe I'm prejudging events too rapidly. But it sure looks like we've all seen this movie before and know how it ends.