Long-term commitments

I listened to a recent installment of Citations Needed about "the rise of the war on drugs 2.0" that was usefully recalibrating. Citations Needed is on my list of "priors confirming" listens, but this installment was  interesting because it spent some time talking about Measure 110.

I'm thinking about it this morning because I've been paying closer attention to the county DA primary campaign. The Oregonian has a report this morning that it's a "tight election battle" (its own polling says it's 50/31, Vasquez) and that voters are sour, grouchy, etc. 

The Citations Needed take is largely that liberal politicians are the wild card in decriminalization efforts. You know what conservatives and reactionaries are going to do and say, and it doesn't change much. But liberals vacillate in their commitments, and when something "doesn't work" they'll get to work on a "fix" that they can't outright call repeal because of the nature of the center-left political coalition in the US.  The clips from people like Chuck Schumer that CN played struck me because they leaned heavily on the word "new" to describe the problem they've decided incarceration will actually help with this time. Calling it "new" sounds like you're just being wise and revising your position.  And you're giving people permission to change their position, edging out part of the coalition to retriangulate on its fickle center. 

As Al and I drove along the coast listening to the episode, we talked about what it meant to say "Measure 110 didn't work." Like, for what value of "worked"? Or is it better to say "it had unintended consequences," or "was implemented in a state with some of the worst access to the supporting services a measure like that needs to not only achieve its formal goals, but the necessary outcomes that will sustain political support for it"? 

Measure 110 doesn't exist in isolation. It sounded worldly and informed to make all the comparisons to the Portugal decriminalization measures that 110 was spiritually connected to. But it also presumed a mass of infrastructure and access to services that Oregon is particularly bad at, and that we chose not to fund. We don't live in a social democracy, and even if Portland's state assembly had a DSA super-majority, the Federal government is not a social democracy. 

So now we've got a DA race where the reformer DA is tacking toward "law and order" rhetoric to offset a perception that he's more of a policy guy using his office for social experimentation, and where local PACs are sending out bonkers campaign flyers trying to claim his opponent is some sort of MAGA crypto-fascist. Why? So people can stay comfortable, even if they're content to revert to the mean they were out in the streets protesting just four years ago.