The Lesson of the Bad Cop in Two Party Democracies

Let me begin this essay with a riddle: what is the difference between Ron Paul and Ralph Nader? They are both septuagenarian advocates of extremist positions (in the context of the American political economy). They both have long and distinguished histories of political achievement in national politics, and they equally are both cranky and uncompromising proponents of their strategic approaches toward the reform of corporate capitalism. The difference between them is that, as what Paul Krugman has called the Lesser Depression unfolds, Paul is trumpeting his conceptual alternative to corporate capitalism on a national stage with an eight million dollar war chest, while Nader has been reduced to relative silence and ignominy. This difference has implications beyond the fates of the two radical leaders; Nader and Paul serve as metonymic representations of the movements they have led and of the future of movements we describe as left and right in American politics. The lesson of how Nader became pariah and Paul the quirky populist alternative is the story of American democracy told from the margins, but its implications are far from marginal. As we transition through catastrophes we once thought we would only read about in history books, it is the voice of the libertarian, not the social democratic alternative that is poised to steer us through the currents.

To make sense of how we got to this point and what might be done to move forward, we require a theory of democratic competition that is compatible with what we know about how real democracies function. I call such a theory the good cop/bad cop theory of polarized mass participatory politics. The point of departure is that the fact that elections matter and they are won at the middle of the distribution in a two party system. Therefore, the median voter becomes the most important person in the country and what he or she says goes. We can think of it as median-ocracy. And in a massively competitive two party system, in which a vast array of issues are necessarily clustered under the big tent of the two rival parties, most of what is interesting to people is either glossed over or watered down to the point that the typical voter has little concrete interest in the outcome of the race. As we all know well, politics is then reduced to a single and uninspiring dimension dividing so-called liberals from so-called conservatives.

This is part of what it is like at the median position of the ideological distribution. There are two kinds of experiences in that barren middle space: ambivalence and apathy. Some people are genuinely ambivalent about the solutions proposed by the two sides and constitute what we might call the passionate independents. These voters are either divided in their connection to the solutions of the two parties on an important set of issues, like culture, the economy or foreign policy, or they are in a place of contradiction between positions that the parties take on issue domains. For example a voter may be pro-Republican for their stance on national security, but pro-Democratic for their stance on social security. There is a second kind of person who finds themselves in the middle. These people are in between because they simple fail to recognize themselves in national political debates and have come to the conclusion that it is not for people like them to care. The apathetic often tune out because they see no authentic engagement with issues that matter to them. The apathy may derive from a frustration with proposed solutions or it may arise from a contempt for the failure for elites to recognize what they call problems.

The political independent and the functionally disenfranchised are both frustrated citizens, but from the perspective of the democrat who needs that fifty one percent, they represent a similar challenge. To take a metaphor from the crime literature, we can think of both as non-cooperative participants who, like a reluctant witness, have to be motivated to participate in big tent two-party politics. As it turns out, the mechanism for turning the reluctant participant is much the same in politics as it in a criminal investigation, and although the ambivalent and the apathetic may be motivated to participate for different reasons, in the end they are motivated by the same means, namely the threat of the bad cop matched with the reward of the good.

What I mean by this is simple. We can think of both the Democratic and Republican parties as comprised of two groups, the base and the establishment. As we note commonly in popular discussion, the base wants politics painted in primary tones and stark solutions, while the establishment prefers to work in shades of gray and to work out compromises that satisfy each side. In normal times, the deal with the median voter is that the establishment of each party (the good cop) will reward the independent with policies and programs that fall in the middle of the range of existing alternatives as long as she is willing to cooperate and come a little bit over to left or right of the distribution respectively. In exchange for this, the good cop will keep the base rousing bad cop in check and none of the threats (policy with extreme moral clarity) will be realized.

A crucial point to note is that if for some reason the good cop party establishment were to lose the threatening energy of the bad cop base, the bargain would break down and the system would fall out of equilibrium. Because both parties have their bad and good cops, if one party were to go forward with only the good cop strategy, the other would be in a great position to take advantage of both the carrot and the stick, thereby pulling the median voter in the direction of the advantaged party. This means by implication that both parties need active establishment compromisers and really scary base alternatives ready with defensible policies that could be substituted for centrism in the last resort. We might think of this as the median voter theorem of passionate democracy.

Although American political discourse (like that in any setting) is remarkably complicated and diversified, the classic distinction between left and right in the era after the revolutionary displacement of kings refers to the proper role of government and its responsibility for managing and mitigating economic inequality between individuals. Marx didn’t write that the history of all existing societies is the history of identity politics, he wrote that it was the history of class struggle. As Max Weber would qualify the concept, classes are simply regular and relatively stable positions in the bargaining chain along the route of supply from raw material to final consumer. Contrary to Marx’s tone, there is nothing mystical in this: as the business guru Michael Porter argued, people find themselves in a position of competitive advantage relative to others as they conduct their daily business affairs, and they can exploit this to their benefit (the wealthy borrow their money from their personal line of credit at low rates, while the poor borrow their money from the pawn shop). In other words, success in the past can provide advantages in the future and this creates a role for government to limit the abuse of those accumulated advantages. Once we agree that there is no divine right of kings, the major question in democratic politics is where one should drawn the line between state and economy. The Democratic bad cop would argue for something close to socialization of industries trading in public goods, while the Republican bad cop would draw the line at the simple enforcement of contracts.

This brings us back to Ron Paul and Ralph Nader. Ron Paul is the Republican bad cop. He confuses people because he is not supportive of an American empire of cultural caste system, but there is nothing surprising in his perspective when viewed through the lens of the clash of economic systems. In the long twilight struggle between the banks and business on one side and the worker and consumer on the other, Ron Paul is advocate of economic laissez-faire—leave it alone. He believes that there are no unfair competitive advantages that accrue in the course of economic competition. He sees the marketplace as an aggregation of freely coordinating individuals, not the development of functional institutions. As bad cops go in this battle between private interest and public purpose, Ron Paul is really bad. He is the functional equivalent of Karl Marx on the other side, because he takes as extreme a position as one can in this debate, much as Marx did on the other.

In contrast, the left has no bad cop. For a while the bad cop role was played by Ralph Nader. Nader believed in capitalism and market competition for private goods, that is goods that in the economists Paul Samuelson’s distinction were “rival” and “excludable,” but he also felt that organized industry could use their accumulated advantages to push off uncompensated costs on to the consumer, the borrower and the worker. Unlike Marx, he drew the role of government line far over on the limited versus activist side. Transported to 1890’s Vienna, Nader would have been labeled a capitalist tool, a reformer who stood in the way of revolution for the likes of Rosa Luxemburg. He also had a theory of electoral competition in a two party duopoly in which he recognized his role as the bad cop. He argued that if you (the base voter type) play by the rules of the Democratic Party establishment, you would never be successful, because the big money players—the fat cat Democrats—would alienate you from the process. And this temptation to alienate and isolate was rather strong after the debacle of the 1968 uprising and election. The fat cats were so terrified of the bad cop proponents of economic democracy after the turmoil of the 1960s that they created institutional systems like the so-called “super delegates” to permanently marginalize them. Nader’s decision, which looks like to many like folly in retrospect, was to break with the good cop established Democrats altogether. He became his own bad cop and was so successful at it that we now universally praise or blame him for the election of George Bush in 2000.

The lesson of the Nader Factor and the tragedy of the Nader legacy is that the American liberal has no stomach left for the politics of the bad cop. The cautious and prudent “new politics” liberals (a term that refers to their professional class status and culturally focused issue preferences) are unwilling to risk losing the cooperation of the median voter by resorting to implementing the policies that would appeal to their political base. The reasons for this are complicated and have much to do with the way that base politics was framed in terms of cultural difference in the 1960s, but the result is the same: the Democratic Party has slowly been losing the argument about the role and scope of government to the right.

As inequality soars and the Democrats seem powerless to stand up for their convictions in the face of catastrophe. I think we are now in a position to recognize that they are losing the American argument and part of the reason for this is that the right has not been afraid to risk defeat through resort the bad cop. This has been true from Barry Goldwater to the Tea Party. By mixing a credible threat of base politics with prudent deployment of center sensitive solutions, the Republican Party has cajoled the median voter toward an ever more conservative (read neo-liberal) mix. We are almost back to the days of Herbert Hoover, but because of the vagaries of history, the tent cities popping up in the Occupy Wall Street movement may well be remembered as Obama-villes. Because the Democrats can’t do bad cop while the Republicans can, the median voter has been drifting away from the common sense controls and tax policies of the Kennedy era toward the once extreme position of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement. We might think of the current Occupy Wall Street movement as Nader’s revenge. He would be in a good position to say I told you so. Without the threat of a Democratic bad cop, the window of plausible positions has shifted away from Democratic principles, and we now have a political system that is “off center” with respect to American views on the distribution of market power and competitive advantage in the country.

Much of what I have said applies primarily to the ambivalent independent who can’t choose which side to side with, but the bad cop strategy also works on the apathetic over and above its effect on the ambivalent. What keeps the 40% of Americans, who choose not to vote in national elections out of politics, is what they see as a lack of moral clarity and a perception of inauthenticity in the ranks of the professional politician. The bad cop strategy helps here as well, because what it provides is the theater and clarity that seems so often to be missing in good cop politics. Bad cop politics is a style as much as it is a substance: it gets people involved through populist appeals that motivate the unmotivated. Here too the Republicans have benefitted from the red meat politics of the conservative bad cop. The Tea Party speaks to this inchoate sense of outrage, just as the Occupy crowd is starting to do. Insofar as the base strategy and liberal weltanschauung of the Occupy crowd has brought back the theater of authenticity along with the threat of off center policy back to Democratic Party debates, they have done the Democrats a big favor. By creating an extra-electoral political movement to pressure the median voter to their side, the Occupy movement has in a flash of history begun to awaken the forgotten convictions of the American left. The truly apathetic will be as slow to react to this as they are to anything else, but those whose apathy derives from the idea that there is “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties will find a reason to tune in and perhaps even to vote.

Let me close with a few thoughts about where al this bad cop/good cop strategizing has left us. Although few liberals understand that by participating in the denigration of Ralph Nader the way they did in the mid-2000s, they were setting back progressive politics for a decade or more by further delegitimizing the bad cop role of American liberalism, now that that period is coming to a close through crisis, the left is now positioned to benefit from that episode. To be effective, the aroused energy of Occupy Wall Street will have to be channeled to follow the conservative lead. Its leaders should form an ideological wing within and alongside mainstream Democratic Party politics. At least in the short run, they should not try to create a new political party, nor should they overtly attempt to destroy the existing Democratic Party as protesters did back in 1968. While third parties in American politics are like honey bees (they die when they sting), ideological factions leave lasting institutional legacies behind them when they fade away. In this sense it is better to rust than it is to burn out.

The future Ralph Naders out there have to be more like Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann. This also means that the future Al Gores have to be more like George W. Bush. They have to accept and even cultivate relationships with their bad cops to win over the ambivalent and to energize the apathetic. In a two party system, the good cop is never enough. That is the lesson of the bad cop.