Supporting the Status Quo Doesn’t Have to Mean a Rejection of Radical Ideas

In Roman civil society it was decreed that each day should start at midnight, which made sense at the time as noon, the zenith of the sun, was the only way to reliably track the hours of the day. This remnant of ancient society, along with their calendar of debatable organizational efficiency, remains in place throughout the world. Despite our technological and social advancements, we seem to be stuck with inefficient systems for which no one has the simple audacity to propose a replacement. And I, for one, am not a fan.

Comedian John Mulaney, in his recent special “Kid Gorgeous,” compared a boisterous debate partner with “…the kid at the sleepover who, after midnight, is like, ‘It’s tomorrow now!’,” to which Mulaney responds “Get the fuck out of here with your technicalities.” The fact that the day starts at midnight has surely been an undue burden in plenty of people’s lives from bothersome upstarts at sleepovers to confusion over deadlines or flight times. Clearly, the day should begin at what is now 6 A.M. instead, approximately sunrise, so that we have twelve hours of daytime followed by twelve hours of nighttime.

Sure, this seemingly pedantic time jump would require an entire generation to get used to the change, not to mention countless computers running countless more pieces of software, and most people I’m sure would argue that it’s not worth the time and effort. However, when it comes to more controversial temporal trifles, such as Daylight Saving Time, it’s clear that the hassle of moving clocks back and forth decreases productivity and has no measurable benefit for electricity costs. Still, the American people seem resistant to demand an end to this inconvenience, as a Princeton survey found that 55% of Americans have no desire in demanding a change from this archaic system.

Of course, this essay is not solely about timekeeping but rather about the apathy of the American people to consider radical change as a possible solution to ingrained systems. In recent years, despite well reasoned pleas from academics and professionals, few radical policy ideas have gained traction in the government. A well-intentioned 1968 study commissioned by Congress laid out a plan for switching the U.S. to the metric system, like the rest of the industrialized world, though no progress has been made since. Most economists believe that the U.S. should implement a Value-Added Tax (VAT) instead of taxes on income like the rest of the industrialized world, but again the idea fails to take hold. These propositions are generally non-partisan and certainly achievable, but they seem to have no place in our American discourse.

A recent article by John Paul Stevens, a former Supreme Court Justice, in the New York Times argued that the Second Amendment should be repealed in favor of making the United States indiscernible from other countries by removing the nearly unlimited protection of gun sellers by the Amendment. The Second Amendment is a relic of history that has no relevance to the modern day, as no standing militia exists and most people would (hopefully) agree that Americans should have equal rights, regardless of skin color. Furthermore, the sale of no other goods are protected by the Constitution, not even alcohol or drugs, and many argue that guns should be regulated by a combination of state and federal law, just as the aforementioned illicit substances are.

The repeal of the Second Amendment seems like a radical proposal, especially given the reverence of conservatives towards the Constitution and the gridlock nature of the gun debate. However, neither that action, nor those less radical proposals like switching to metric or implementing a VAT, are impossible in the current political state or incompatible with upholding the status quo of liberal democracy. While critics of the United States government have pointed to its history of neoliberal capitalism as a justification for advocating for its overthrow, perhaps it’s the resignation of the citizens to incrementalism that better justifies its unbecoming. In an age where nearly half the voting age population doesn’t even deign to vote in Presidential elections and ‘change candidates’ pick up more and more steam, the simultaneous and contradictory thirst for change without the ability to believe it can happen has defined our political landscape.

Often these radical changes could be justified given the past radical policies that created radically bad situations. The legacy of slavery and the wide range of antiblack policies that have characterized American government for most of its history has resulted in a gigantic discrepancy between black and white household wealth, a gap that was built up over decades of redlining, school segregation, and mass incarceration and seems to be trending away from eventual equality. Any form of reparations that seeks to target this gap specifically is absent from government; even the most radically leftist Senator, the Independent Bernie Sanders, fails to make mention of the distinction between the white poor and black poor in his policy proposals. It’s here that a paradox comes into play; many activists shrug off any form of reparations as politically infeasible, thereby making them politically infeasible in a democratic system. It seems unfair to commit to incremental change now given the radical ways that black people in America were targeted for plunder in the past, yet even progressive activists shrug off race-targeted policy in favor of one-size-fits-all solutions like expansion of the EITC or more robust access to healthcare.

Perhaps starting with smaller radical changes, like maybe, just maybe, shifting every day forward six hours, will allow the American people to believe that the government has the ability to respond to ingrained problems with appropriate, if uncomfortable, change. Furthermore, by advocating for legitimate radical change, politicians could undercut certain candidates whose brands are built around vague changes with few, if any, specific policy proposals. The belief that radical change requires an overthrow of the current system exists only within our minds, just as the separation between dates exists not in the darkness of the night sky but only on the page of the calendar.