Jim Webb's Courage v. the 'Pragmatism' Excuse for Politicians

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by
his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American
citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under
extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession.
After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly
irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal
as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and
virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown
University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."

What's most notable about Webb's decision to champion
this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn't just attempting to
chip away at the safe edges of America's oppressive prison state. His
critique of what we're doing is fundamental, not incremental. And,
most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal
causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we're not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama's adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed "pathetic." Here are just a few excerpts from Webb's Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We
have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known
prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States,
the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the
average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are
only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on
earth living in the United States; or we are doing something
dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal
justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many
discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in
drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000
drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase
of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks
represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In
many cases these issues involve people's ability to have proper counsel
and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to
drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about
12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their
drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as
all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37%
of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of
those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons.
. . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison
violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must
get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our
prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many
suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of
treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Webb added
that "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point
that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people
who do not belong in jail."

It's hard to overstate how politically thankless, and
risky, is Webb's pursuit of this issue -- both in general and
particularly for Webb. Though there has been some evolution of public opinion
on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized
constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself
vulnerable to accusations of being "soft on crime" has, for decades,
been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask
Michael Dukakis). Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.

Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an
invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue
state (he's not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he's a first-term
Senator from Virginia, one of the "toughest" "anti-crime" states in the
country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the
number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate
by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen's
macaca-driven implosion. As Ezra Klein wrote,
with understatement: "Lots of politicians make their name being
anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name
being pro-prison reform."

For a Senator like Webb to spend his time trumpeting the
evils of excessive prison rates, racial disparities in sentencing, the
unjust effects of the Drug War, and disgustingly harsh conditions
inside prisons is precisely the opposite of what every single political
consultant would recommend that he do. There's just no plausible
explanation for what Webb's actions other than the fact that he's
engaged in the noblest and rarest of conduct: advocating a position
and pursuing an outcome because he actually believes in it and believes
that, with reasoned argument, he can convince his fellow citizens to
see the validity of his cause. And he is doing this despite the fact
that it potentially poses substantial risks to his political
self-interest and offers almost no prospect for political reward. Webb
is far from perfect -- he's cast some truly bad votes since being elected -- but, in this instance, not only his conduct but also his motives are highly commendable.

Webb's actions here underscore a broader point. Our
political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but
to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders.
When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large
numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also
huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and
justifications: well, they have to take that position
because it's too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it's
the smart thing to do. That's the excuse one heard for
years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually
every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and
warrantless eavesdropping; it's the excuse which even progressives
offer for why their political leaders won't advocate for marriage
equality or defense spending cuts; and it's the same excuse one hears
now to justify virtually every Obama "disappointment."

Webb's commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates
how false that excuse-making is -- just as it was proven false by Russ
Feingold's singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act
and Feingold's subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush's
assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state
of Wisconsin. Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion
by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy. Any cowardly
politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the
majoritiarian consensus. Actual leaders, by definition, confront
majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and
politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion
than they want the public to believe they have.

The political class wants people to see them as helpless
captives to immutable political realities so that they have a
permanent, all-purpose excuse for whatever they do, so that they are
always able to justify their position by appealing to so-called
"political realities." But that excuse is grounded in a fundamentally
false view of what political leaders are actually capable of doing in
terms of shifting public opinion, as NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen explained when I interviewed him about his theories of how political consensus is maintained and manipulated:

GG: One of the points
you make is that it's not just journalists who define what these
spheres [of consensus, legitimate debate and deviance] encompass. You
argue that politicians, political actors can change what's included in these spheres based on the positions that they take.
And in some sense, you could even say that that's kind of what
leadership is -- not just articulating what already is within the realm
of consensus, which anyone can do, but taking ideas that are
marginalized or within the sphere of deviance and bringing them into
the sphere of legitimacy. How does that process work? How do political
actors change those spheres?

JR: Well, that's exactly what leadership is.
And I think it's crippling sometimes to our own sense of efficacy in
politics and media, if we assume that the media has all of the power to
frame the debate and decide what consensus is, and consign things to
deviant status. That's not really true. That's true under conditions of
political immobilization, leadership default, a rage for normalcy, but
in ordinary political life, leaders, by talking about things,
make them legitimate. Parties, by pushing for things, make them part of
the sphere of debate. Important and visible people can question
consensus, and all of a sudden expand it. These spheres are malleable; if the conversation of democracy is alive and if you make your leaders talk about things, it becomes valid to talk about them.

And
I really do think there's a self-victimization that sometimes goes on,
but to go back to the beginning of your question, there's something
else going on, which is the ability to infect us with notions of what's
realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites
have. Whenever we make that kind of decision -- "well it's
pragmatic, let's be realistic" -- what we're really doing is we're
speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what
they're likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they
respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is
in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest
lessons we've learned from the media even if we are skeptics of the MSM.

And
one of the things I see on the left that really bothers me is the ease
with which people skeptical of the media will talk about what the
masses believe and how the masses will be led and moved in this way
that shows me that the mass media tutors them on how to see their fellow citizens.
And here the Internet again has at least some potential, because we
don't have to guess what those other Americans think. We can encounter
them ourselves, and thereby reshape our sense of what they think. I
think every time people make that judgment about what's realistic, what
they're really doing is they're imagining what the rest of the country
would accept, and how other people think, and they get those ideas from
the media.

We've been trained how we talk about our political
leaders primarily by a media that worships political cynicism and can
only understand the world through political game-playing. Thus, so
many Americans have been taught to believe not only that politicians
shouldn't have the obligation of leadership imposed on them -- i.e., to persuade the public of what is right -- but that it's actually smart and wise of them to avoid positions they believe in when doing so is politically risky.

People love now to assume the role of super-sophisticated
political consultant rather than a citizen demanding actions from their
representatives. Due to the prism of gamesmanship through which
political pundits understand and discuss politics, many citizens have
learned to talk about their political leaders as though they're
political strategists advising their clients as to the politically
shrewd steps that should be taken ("this law is awful and unjust and he
was being craven by voting for it, but he was absolutely right to vote
for it because the public wouldn't understand if he opposed it"),
rather than as citizens demanding that their public servants do the
right thing ("this law is awful and unjust and, for that reason alone, he should oppose it and show leadership by making the case to the public as to why it's awful and unjust").

It may be unrealistic to expect most politicians in most
circumstances to do what Jim Webb is doing here (or what Russ Feingold
did during Bush's first term). My guess is that Webb, having succeeded
in numerous other endeavors outside of politics, is not desperate to
cling to his political office, and he has thus calculated that he'd
rather have six years in the Senate doing things he thinks are
meaningful than stay there forever on the condition that he cowardly
renounce any actual beliefs. It's probably true that most career
politicians, possessed of few other talents or interests, are highly
unlikely to think that way.

But the fact that cowardly actions from political leaders
are inevitable is no reason to excuse or, worse, justify and even
advocate that cowardice. In fact, the more citizens are willing to
excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of "realism" or
"pragmatism" ("he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because
Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he
needs to be re-elected"), the more common that behavior will be.
Politicians and their various advisers, consultants and enablers will
make all the excuses they can for why politicians do what they do and
insist that public opinion constrains them to do otherwise. That
excuse-making is their role, not the role of citizens. What ought to
be demanded of political officials by citizens is precisely the type of
leadership Webb is exhibiting here.