Winners and cynics

-- By MikeCarson - 12 Mar 2017

“Some people call politics fun, and maybe it is when you're winning. But even then it's a mean kind of fun, and more like the rising edge of a speed trip than anything peaceful or pleasant. Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.” 1 Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers 120 (1979).

I. Grim words from malcontents

Whether it's an act of accurate sociological reproduction or simple storytelling choices, in his first three chapters Joseph gives us malcontents for lawyers. They're self-consciously vulgar and sharply critical. They have unkind words for other lawyers, and skepticism about the profession as a whole. It all gets a bit grim at times. The criminal law is “civilization's pathology.” The law is “chaos.” Lawyers are “liars.”

“It's an inherent part of the process,” Judge Celia Day tells us. “Lawyers know too much. If you know too much, how don't you lie?”

II. Marginal powers, absolute consequences

What makes Joseph's lawyers cynical (if not, one insists, cynics)?

The lawyers Joseph presents do different work, although each is “never far from evil.” Carl Wylie's deals are “going to ruin the lives of thousands of people and their families.” Robinson and Day's courtroom stories are full of murderers, callous defendants, unsympathetic plaintiffs—and lawyers eager to be positively vicious in retaliating for personal wrongs against them.

Certainly some of the tough talk and gallows humor comes from these intimate brushes with “evil.” But if they need to take a hard-bitten stance to cope with evil—to dissociate it, perhaps—I don't believe it's just because they brush up against the bad folks and their victims.

“Robert Jackson had it right—what we do is by force of our commission,” Day tells us. “We are forced to discern the law as we see it. We are forced to enforce it.”

Wylie points out that lawyers like him do whatever their clients want them to. But even for the ones who aren't “pigged-out on cash,” the roles Joseph's lawyers play are still dictated. Day points out that even if she wants otherwise, there's “not much room for mercy” if she holds up her end of the bargain as a judge. Even Robinson, the iconoclast, the weirdo, is left by the system to wait, to plead out, to brag because the mostly-harmless kid he's representing “only” gets a year in Rikers. Joseph's lawyers fill roles dictated by their legal surroundings while operating in a world with high stakes for the parties, and relatively low ability to bend the system of justice to fit any particular moral sense of their own.

One expects that can be bad for the psyche. Being a lawyer is deeply embedded in the identities of each the main characters Joseph gives us. How could it not be? But gifted “elites” though they might be, Joseph's lawyers use their considerable skills to wield marginal powers, in a world of absolute consequences at the hand of the system.

III. Love winning, hate losing

Before law school, I spent five years as a manager and consultant on political campaigns. I was good, in a small-pond sort of way.

If the only good reason for a career in law is because one loves justice or hates injustice, then I'd suggest that the way to make a career out of politics is to love winning, or else hate losing. The back-and-forth of political discourse around elections is mostly nonsense. (And rarely well-mannered enough to be transcendental). The candidates range from well-intentioned but imperfect, to mean and stupid and horrible. The methods of delivering the messages are mostly blunt and crass; and even worse, they sometimes work.

But if the old saw is that elections have consequences, campaigns often don't. It's the exception and not the rule where the forces of demography, partisanship and incumbency allow for an election to be close enough where the staff or strategic choices can hope to make any difference in the result. Of course when you lose, then real people get pounded, and lose their healthcare, or get deported, or are sent off to fight in wars.

In that environment, it's important to focus on marginal victories. Good campaign staff focuses on “winning the day,” and hopes that when the time comes, the capricious political winds puts a win within spitting distance on election day. Mostly that means blowing up the other guy, in a hope those inclined to support him skip his name in when going down the ballot. In the best case, it's worth a percent or two. Which might be enough.

For those staffers, the larger issues are beside the point. Good staff makes every dollar and every second of airtime do the work of hammering the negatives. Your worth is measured in large part in how effective you are at landing your punches.

IV. Not beanbag, but not combat

If you talk to most campaign staff lifers, they sound a lot like Joseph's lawyers, the same sardonic smile and ready bite.

There seem to me to be similarities in the high-stakes adversarial nature of the two jobs. Sometimes your client will lose when they deserve to win. Sometimes, you work for the bad guy. But every time, you know the outcome will have big consequences—and that there's only so much you can do to change it.

In a professional word with clear winners and losers, it's easy to love to win. Even Robinson, thoughtful in his way, suggests a love of the practice as pugilism. Good practitioners love to do the thing. Respect goes to the ones who get wins.

In Chicago, they say “politics aint beanbag.” But it's also not combat. Neither is law. This seems to me a challenge to a lawyer's theory of social action, though—to be first a trench fighter, instead of an actor with higher purpose. Surely it will make you a cynic, if you let it.

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