No Matter How Good the Intent, Only Results Count

Progressive policies took two hits in the last month.

In San Francisco, voters approved ballot measures that gave increased powers to the police and required welfare recipients with a drug addiction to enter treatment as a condition for continuing to receive benefits.

In Oregon, the law to decriminalize the use and possession of hard drugs was repealed.

In each case, the action was framed as a reaction to the results of progressive policies in place. An unhappy public was becoming more conservative. After the ballot measures passed, the headline asked, “Has San Francisco Lost its Liberal Soul?”

Some progressives blamed billionaires who “bought the city” by throwing money at the campaign. That explanation, however, which relieved them of any responsibility, is too simple.

The executive director of an agency that provides services to the homeless and who herself opposed the measures, had a more persuasive reason. It was not so much the general policy that was at fault as the inability to deal with problems as they occurred. “People simply were exhausted by the drug epidemic and by City Hall’s lack of a coherent solution, and were eager to back anything that sounded like a real plan.”

When things go bad, however, regardless of the reason, the public blames the policy. Everything else is just an excuse. The policy has to go. That mind set also played out in Oregon.  

Three years ago, Oregon voters by a 60 to 40 margin approved decriminalizing the use and possession of hard drugs. Supporters saw the victory as the leading edge of a movement that would catch on nationally. It was celebrated as the first-in-the-nation law to recognize drug addiction as a health problem, not a crime. This March the law was repealed.

What happened? The expected results didn’t happen. Portland continued to experience “surging unsheltered homelessness, turbulent street protests, an exodus of downtown businesses, record numbers of homicides, the rapid spread of fentanyl and soaring overdose deaths.”

Why the failure? The mayor of Portland who had supported decriminalization, backed the repeal, and still supports the concept, pointed to a “botched” implementation. There was neither a funding source nor alternative services in place when the change in law took effect. “To decriminalize the use of drugs before you actually had the treatment services in place was obviously a huge mistake.”

It was one more act in a continuing play that goes back to the 1960s and 1970s when there was a nationwide movement to close state mental health hospitals and shift the care and treatment of those with severe mental illness to a community based system.

The National Health Planning and Development Act signed into law in 1975 was intended to assure there was an integrated national health policy and resources were aligned with needs. But, that effort ended six years later during the Reagan administration and a community based system was never adequately created.

Instead, many of those with mental illness and drug addiction have ended in nursing homes, intermediate care facilities, prison, or homeless and on the streets. According to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections approximately 40 percent of inmates have mental health issues, eight percent have a “serious mental illness”.  As the population of mental health institutions went down  with their closures, prison populations increased.

We haven’t learned much in 50 years. Similar progressive and humane policies have been proposed – support instead of institutionalization; treatment instead of incarceration – with the same failures . Regardless of how good, or rational, or moral, a policy, results matter. Implementation is everything.

It is easier to end an existing program than to envision and put in place all of the supports necessary for an alternative to be successful. That is one reason to implement the new in steps. To have alternatives in place before handing off responsibilities. Unforeseen difficulties can be addressed and adjustments made before they become problems. Incremental change creates a space for learning.

But we are impatient for the new. Boldness is required.

When things don’t go well, when a policy doesn’t produce the promised results, regardless of the reasons, not only does the particular policy lose credibility, those who advanced it also lose credibility. Their judgment and the other policies they support are questioned. There is a spillover effect. Public trust in everything a political party stands for is eroded.

Delivering on promises of change is more important for Democrats than for Republicans. Democrats want government to make things better. Government is necessary. Government can provide the supports we need, protect our rights, offset the ability of those with economic power to impose their will, and create communities we want to live in.

Public support for the Democratic vision depends on government being competent and making life better.

Republicans, on the other hand, just want government to get out of the way, stop interfering in the market, repeal the rules, and end the supports and handouts that sap people’s incentive to work. Two quotes sum up the Republican vision.

President Ronald Reagan: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform: “Take government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Every failure of a program, every demonstration of government incompetence, advances the Republican vision.

The media, rightly or wrongly, identifies ideas, proposals, policies as progressive or conservative. Every success, every failure, is a win or loss for a way of looking at the world and understanding how it works.

It is essential for those who want to change the world to give thought to the mundane daily details that enhance performance. To pay attention to the nuts and bolts that hold together the programs that implement policy. That make them successful. That deliver the expected results.

A vision is not enough. A law passed is just words on a page. Even a program in place is only activity. We declare victory too quickly.

Over the last five or more years there has been a movement to change the way reading is taught to children. A cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin pushed back on a recent post claiming the reading wars were over and science had won. “Nobody has won until we’ve actually seen we’ve improved literacy outcomes.”

Jon Stewart, on the night of his return to the Daily Show earlier this year, summed up what he had learned during his nine-year absence. Bending the system to get the results you want is a long, difficult slog.

“The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail [expletive] job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues until they get a positive result, and even then, have to stay on to make sure that result holds.”