Reform or Renewal

We need to pick renewal.  Tear it down!

While professional sports are inane “bread and circuses” distractions, they sometimes provide useful analogies for serious real-life political and social questions, or reflect problems extant in the broader society (e.g., racial conflict, drug use, etc.). As Griffin likes to use baseball analogies when writing for TOO, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so I’ll do the same here.

Team success goes in cycles. A team will have a “window of contention” in which they are successful, but inevitably fall on hard times. Big name veteran players get old, the “trade promising youngsters for established veterans that we need for our pennant push” strategy catches up to them, and the team finds itself mired in mediocrity (or worse), with aging, inept players and an empty “farm system” devoid of young talent.

What to do? Teams in this position have two strategic options, which I term “reform” or “renewal.”  Reform means that the team continues to try to stay in contention with piecemeal, ad hoc, half-measure approaches, trying to patch holes, trading, signing free agents, attempting to push off the inevitable collapse for a few more years and extending the window of contention.  This can be temporarily successful, particularly for richer teams, but kicking the can down the road cannot go on forever and at some point a price has to be paid.  Delaying the inevitable does not prevent the inevitable.  And, often, teams that try this approach are not only not successful in the short run, but their “crash and burn” in the long run ends up being longer and more painful than compared to what would have obtained if they had opted for the renewal option.

Renewal means taking some steps back in the short run to position yourself to be more successful in the long run.  So, the team accepts it needs to rebuild completely.  It trades fading veterans – and even gets rid of veterans still in their prime – for young players to stock the farm system, youngsters who can become future stars.  Even more fundamentally, teams engage in the somewhat controversial, but effective, approach of “tanking” – they “tear it down,” stripping the team of most, sometimes all, of its established star players, and intentionally field bad teams for several years, because those teams who perform worst get the top draft picks in succeeding years.  So, the team gets rid of their star players, tears itself down, gets new talent, and accepts a quiet period of low performance in order to restock and rebuild, and prepare for a new ascendance.  

The renewal strategy, although painful in the short term, is usually highly effective, leads to longer-term success, and is particularly suitable for those teams of more limited resources. Eventually, these cycles occur again but the proper strategy is obvious.  And, I may add, one way of getting around the cycle is to start the renewal/rebuilding stage BEFORE you are in obvious decline.  A team may have had success and may still be able to contend for several more years, but they look ahead and see that if they don’t rebuild now, things will get worse later on.  So they start “tearing it down” while they still have some success, sacrificing immediate success for greater success a few years down the road. That’s sort of like the psychometric experiments testing delayed gratification, long-term thinking, and time preference – does the child want one candy bar today or two tomorrow? Renewal means having the discipline to accept sacrifices today for success tomorrow.  It’s the wise approach.

At this point readers should realize I’m talking about Der Movement here. Even those in the “movement” honest enough to admit it has serious, fundamental problems typically stop short of supporting renewal.  No, they only want piecemeal reform – either they don’t want to put their own status as “leaders” in jeopardy, they are delusional to believe the problems (despite being serious and fundamental) can be fixed at the surface level, they think short-term and cannot accept the need to take a step back in order to take many steps forward, or some other excuse or rationale prevents them from accepting the full scope of doing what is necessary.

In fact, the situation for Der Movement is even worse than that of the hypothetical baseball team described above, since the “movement” never even had any prior period of success; it has been a failure all along.  So, it is not even at the point of trying to stretch a period of contention past its expiration date; Der Movement has never been a contender at all.  So, real and meaningful excuses for avoiding renewal fall flat, and one can speculate that opponents of required renewal have selfish or ideological reasons for their opposition.

However, those tired of seeing a “movement” that goes nowhere fast, that wastes years and decades with unremitting failure, which is on a treadmill to nowhere, such people should act in favor of the renewal approach.  Der Movement needs “tearing it down” – it needs all the fading quota queen “superstars” and fading “rock stars” to be out to pasture, it needs the dust swept away and years of festering mold growth disinfected, it needs fresh faces, fresh ideas, and new directions.  

Of course, if some elements of the “movement," some faction, want to continue on the path of “reform” that's fair enough, they can do so; it is always good to hedge your bets against problems with renewal, it is never good to put all your eggs in one basket, and it may be useful to have some minimal public “movement” activity ongoing, even if the real work of renewal goes on in the background 

But, regardless of the existence of reformist factions, there must be a major push for renewal, and deconstruction and reconstruction from first principles. Otherwise continued failure is guaranteed.