The establishment knows what to do in these rare moments of peril: Say the right words, but leave the underlying structures alone. The official response whenever revolution looks somewhat likelier than usual is to soothe and sympathize and assure — to turn the temperature down, without letting anything catch on fire. Rather than tearing down the house, the powerful people just stuck their heads out the window and told the angry crowds that they were on their side. Barack Obama gave populist-sounding speeches about inequality, and Mitt Romney walked in the Black Lives Matter march, and then they went back and ensured that any changes more substantive than that did not happen.

The tragedy is not just that the voices of justified rage didn’t win. (That, after all, is something the Left is used to.) It is that these moments when the powerful actual feel the foundations of their power slipping beneath their feet represent leverage, and that leverage was squandered. Only rarely is the power structure scared enough to bargain away meaningful things. Wall Street banks would have acquiesced to real regulations if they had been pressed hard in 2008, because they weren’t in any position to refuse, and also they didn’t want to be pelted with bottles whenever they appeared in public. Police departments in 2020 could have been shrunk, and had their grotesque budgets reallocated, and been subjected to civilian oversight. Politicians in major cities could have done that, had they had the courage, and they would have had the support of all the people in the streets. The reason that neither of these things happened is that the anger of the public fell prey to the paralyzing sludge of bureaucratic inertia, like a runaway truck coasting to a stop in a long, muddy pit.

In very special times, radicals will have public opinion on their side. These times will not last. Focused and useful public outrage will inevitably dissipate, faster than we think. As soon as these very special times begin, we need to go directly for the structural change first. Before the press conferences and the DEI consultants and the panel discussions and the Big Mural of Social Justice Heroes sponsored by JPMorganChase, we need the substance. ​“Break up the banks” and ​“defund the police” are, contrary to conventional political wisdom, excellent goals, because both of them aim at dismantling the underlying structures that enabled things to get so out of hand in the first place. That is exactly why they are so ridiculed by those who might be charged with doing them. They don’t want to do that. Politicians want to pose on one knee while wearing kente cloths and paint ​“BLACK LIVES MATTER” in big letters down the middle of a street. That is easy. They don’t want to defund the police. That would be hard. After all of the marches and corporate symbolism and the ​“END RACISM” stickers affixed to NFL helmets, the Democratic Party is now poised to brand itself in 2024 as ​“tough on crime,” the very attitude that brought on overpolicing and mass incarceration in the first place. That the system will try to perpetuate itself is not a surprise. The question worth mulling over is, ​“Why do they get away with it?”

They get away with it because stalling, distraction and performative sympathy are tactics that work. We think to ourselves, ​“At last, public opinion on inequality is turning. At last, public opinion on police violence is turning. Soon it will turn definitively in our favor.” We mistake the pendulum of mainstream sentiment for a one-way road. But there is a simple heuristic that everyone on the Left can use to minimize the chances of falling into this trap in the future. 

Instead of thinking of our goal as shaping public opinion, think of public opinion as something more like the weather — an outside force that we don’t control. Usually, the weather is bad. We spend that time inside, getting ready. And on the rare day when the weather is perfect — when, thanks to some unpredictable crisis, public opinion aligns with our goals — we run outside, plan in hand, and get everything we can get. Knowing that the nice weather won’t last, we go directly to the fundamental structures that need to be broken down and rebuilt. We focus on those things. We do not, under any circumstances, focus on public opinion itself. We do not spend these precious moments trying to magically extend the window of nice weather. We just do the work while the sun is out.

You don’t change the world by first convincing everyone you’re right. You seize the structures that produce the world, change the material reality and watch public opinion follow in the wake of the new world you’ve made. Temporary gains are for suckers. The next time the stalwarts of the system get scared, demand permanent changes immediately. Don’t settle for less. History tells us that their fear will always ebb. The only question is whether you knocked down their fortress in the meantime.