Too many smart people make the mistake of saying that politicians “lack courage.”  Usually when they say this, they mean something like the following:

1) There’s a significant public policy problem on the agenda; and

2) The politician has to choose between policy X, which is normatively desirable but unpopular, and policy Y, which is normatively sub-optimal but popular; and

3) The politician chooses Y over X.

There are several variations on this, the most common being the rather famous J-curve  I’ve written about before, in which X is a good long-term policy that incurs short term pain, and Y is good short-term policy which produces long-term problems.

In any case, the usual “smart” takeaway is that politicians are risk-averse, care more about re-election than good public policy, and are unlikely to “do the right thing” when “the right thing” conflicts with the perceived results of the next election. Other euphemisms (singular and collective) include “lacks leadership,” “failure of the political class,” and any variation of “hack.” As suggested, this can be applied to individual politicians, or Congress/Washington as a whole.

I think the above is basically the conventional wisdom. But I think it is quite a bit off. I’ve got five point to make.

First, I think people strongly underestimate the evolutionary development of public policy. People love to complain that no one in Washington will talk seriously about certain topics (cutting social security; cutting military spending; raising taxes; etc.), and this is proof that politicians lack courage. But that’s not really what’s going on. What happens is that anyone who does talk about these things tends not to be back in Washington two years later. It’s natural selection at its finest. Congress is the species, the elections are the generations, and the shape of the beak of this finch is not due to intelligent design.

The underlying problem is that the voters don’t want certain policies, especially policies that cause observable, immediate pain. It drives me absolutely up the wall when people say that Congress in not responsive to the people’s wishes. Whatever shortcomings you might ascribe to America democracy, that the Members of Congress are ignoring a massive pubic outcry  is not one of them. As if somehow the problem is that all the people want nice balanced budgets and a reduced public debt, it’s just that the politicians won’t deliver it to them. It’s doubly annoying because when people make this charge, what they are really saying is the opposite: Congress is too responsive to the wishes of the people. (And not responsive enough to what I, smart-observer, think is best for the people!).

But wait, you say, that’s the whole point, Matt: if politicians had courage, they would vote for unpopular legislation, consequences be damned. Haven’t you read Profiles in Courage?***

This leads precisely to the second point: usually, the people making this charge are asking politicians to do something they would not do themselves. Take a minute and think about the following question: is there a single piece of legislation that you would knowingly give up your current job in order to have it pass?  That is, would you be willing to abandon your salary and benefits and start looking for work in an unrelated field to the one you currently work in, in exchange for one federal law. It’s doubtful.

But wait, you say, doing the right thing doesn’t automatically mean you will lose re-election. You could convince the voters of the merits of the policy. If you believe in something, you’ll have a passion to defend it. In any case, your chance of losing re-election isn’t 100%.

True, but this leads us to point three: the calculus of a profile in courage is more complicated than most people want to believe. In fact, I firmly believe that — in a vacuum — many politicians would give up their seats in the House in order to pass a certain public policy. But there are two constraints: the first is that politicians don’t arise via spontaneous combustion of hay; they are themselves the product of an ideological profile of their constituents. Therefore, the politicians most willing to give up their seats for a particular policy are exactly the politicians who will not have to give up their seats for that policy. For example, I would think that Lynn Woolsey or John Dingell might have been willing to trade their seat for the original House health care bill. And I think that there are numerous conservatives in the House right now who would trade their seat for a Balanced Budget Amendment. But they’ll never have to in practice — their constituents love these ideas!

But take the set of people who do fit the practical description, say blue-dog Democrats or moderate GOPers on the health care bill. While it’s true that they may have been able to win re-election after voting for the bill, and even further it may have been true that some of them would be willing to lose their seat for the bill, what no one wants to do is to lose their seat and not, in the end, get the policy. That’s not courage, that’s idiocy. But it’s all too possible, because if you do lose your seat over a particular vote, there’s a large chance that the person who takes over for you is going to be promoting the repeal of your work. Or, in any case, is not going to obstruct such a repeal. So, would you give up your job to pass a public policy? How about this: would you take an 80% chance of having to give up your job, for an 80% chance that you get your public policy? Yikes.

But wait, you say, those numbers are insufficient, Matt. Politicians might lose re-election anyway. And it’s pretty darn hard to reverse public policies like the health care law.

Perhaps the numbers could adjusted. But on the other hand, the numbers don’t take into account that you could get your desired public policy while still voting against the bill, if enough other people will vote for it. That’s a strong incentive the other way. Still, the second half of the retort  speaks straight to the structure of the courage calculus. And this is point four: Not all public policies have the same potential to be reversed. Given that, the courage calculus looks different across different policies. For example, it makes Ross’s vote to acquit Johnson in 1868 look a lot less courageous (and, similarly, a lot less idiotic). Regardless of whether he lost re-election following the impeachment vote, there was no way Congress was going to try to impeach Johnson again.

In effect, he took the strong risk of losing election, but he got his policy, 100%. Compare this to something like the so-called medicare “doc-fix” or the extension of the AMT patch. Any set of politicians who do not extend the “doc fix” or patch the AMT are unambiguously taking an electoral risk (not as much as Ross, but still, a marginal risk). But the likelihood of reversal in a subsequent Congress is not trivial, and in any case is infinitely higher than the likelihood of Ross’s vote being reversed. And as it so happens, the very issues that are arguably easiest to reverse — the ones related to annual spending — are the ones that sit on the other side of the teeter-totter from the allegedly courageous moves — raising taxes, cutting long-term spending, etc.

The upshot of all of this is point five: I don’t think political courage means much as a term. It strikes me more as a bullshit dump for pundits and observers who aren’t happen with public policy outcomes. It’s easier to blame the outcome on the failure of individuals or a lack of character than it is to accept the unpopularity of one’s preferred outcomes. What makes this worse is that the an honest assessment of these sorts of politics often leads to a conclusion that the voters’ preferences themselves are the problem. But such a conclusion itself, although reassuring about the responsiveness of the representational system, is unlikely to win many friends if trumpeted for all to hear. And thus most serious attempts to deal with intractable public policy problems tend to head down one of two roads: either a campaign to “educate” the voters, or an attempt to institutionally restructure the politics.

We’re seeing both of those things right now in the debt-limit debate, but that’s another post for another day.

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*** By the way, Profiles in Courage is not a book I recommend reading, for two reasons. First, it’s wildly inaccurate — the quintessential chapter about Ross’s vote on the Johnson impeachment is basically fiction. Second, it makes it seem like the only way to have political courage is to do something that’s both normatively right, as well as unpopular in your district or with your party. But that makes political courage a very narrow idea. For example, I think the Republican stand against slavery expansion between 1854 and 1861 was very politically courageous, not because those GOPers risked losing their seats to hostile constituents, but because they were willfully placing a moral cause ahead of the stability of the nation. That takes a certain kind of courage too.