Every election is a trolley problem.

There is no “it can’t get worse” and no “it won’t get better,” there’s a huge distribution of incremental yes, it can possibilities. Human constructs—like law, ethics, and what constitutes good order—have no solidity, are infinitely mutable, and can be completely hollowed out even as the word itself is used to conjure legitimacy and respectability.

Your wins won’t stay wins because no concept is truly solid. We see this every day with both the formal transformation by precedent of civil liberties, but also in the ways “rights” are evoked informally to justify shit that it clearly take away other people’s rights. The fight never, ever ends.

Every policy struggle is a trolley problem, with the same parameters.

But here’s the rub…even when you make a sweeping change, it has to be propped up by bureaucracy and operational parameters. So there’s increments built into the revolution, and people that don’t have a plan for increments, or otherwise eschew their importance, make failed revolutions.

_{(That last bit is true of heads-on-pikes revolutions, too)}

And opponents of revolutionary policy can, will, and do fight change by undermining those necessary sub-components and increments. We’ve been watching that since…well, since the 3/5s rules or so. The fight never ends.