This cuts. But what I've increasingly realized is we can all be in favor of FDR's "try something, and if it doesn't work, try something else". The poison to that approach is holding on to the status quo. Status quo politics prevents change, and status quo politicians make doing politics hard.
We can't know what will work, no one has a crystal ball. But what we do know is that people who don't try anything are guaranteed to not drive change.
the right's donor class has figured this out by spreading money around. They'll cut a $15,000 check to almost anyone who has a new rightwing idea. And if it gets traction, they'll put more money in.
In a wealthy & wildly inequitable society, the forces lined up for the status quo, against change, are the strongest! "Just do a bunch of experimenting" is easy to say but literally everything in our system is aligned against it.
"Bold, persistent experimentation"
right. I don't know what the correct thing to do is! I have some ideas but I'm not foolish enough to think they are guaranteed to work. The real world is messy. But we can all be in favor of trying new things to create change.
One of the biggest challenges to this is recognizing when something actually doesn't work, rather than doubling down on it.