Suffer or pay—the same old choice in a two-tier Tory NHS. We’ve got to wake people up to what is happening now. These are the first steps towards an American healthcare system, [with] English hospitals now asking for credit cards before they give care.
—ANDY BURNHAM, LABOUR SHADOW HEALTH SECRETARY
When we talk about public language and the health of our democracies, the significance of the politicians and the media is obvious. Democracy is a conversation between leaders and people, and whether we like it or not, it is the politicians who generally break the ice. Because only a tiny fraction of citizens ever hear politicians speaking face-to-face, journalists play a critical role in mediating the dialogue. They do not enjoy a monopoly—on the Web anyone can read a policy document or political statement and broadcast her opinion about it to the world. But even the most gung-ho digital insurgent must admit that, for the time being at least, professional media conditions much of the political discourse that actually reaches the public: both what we hear and how we are likely to hear it, through the way it is filtered, framed, and (depending on one’s point of view) distorted by political bias or some other overt or hidden influence. But I want to turn now to a third group of people whose interaction with the first two is also an important part of the story: the technocrats.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the social, economic, and military ambitions of advanced Western governments grew, and so did the scale and complexity of the duties they undertook. They also came to believe that, at least in principle, public administration should be carried out to a new, higher standard of legality, rationality, and accountability. They would need much larger government departments, and those departments would increasingly be filled not, as of old, with the untrained beneficiaries of patronage but with a new tribe of professional civil servants.
It was the German sociologist Max Weber, who was born in 1864 and who died in 1920 of the influenza pandemic that swept the world after World War I, who first developed a systematic account of the bureaucratic state, by which he meant an administrative system in which responsibility for devising and implementing public policy was put in the hands of specialists, with each expert working on policies and activities where he or she could best bring their particular knowledge and skill to bear.
The term technocrat is often used to describe the experts in Weber’s model. The word summons up an image of highly trained advisers and implementers, but I want it to apply to a broader group of people. Contemporary political office is itself largely managerial and requires ministers and other elected officials to master the language and the ways of the technocrat, even if they have never had the training that a “pure” technocrat would have undergone. In modern democracies, policy formulation—and the language in which the resultant policy is expressed—is typically the product of work by politically impartial experts, ideologically committed policy advisers, and generalist politicians. In this chapter, I will generally use technocrat to refer to politician-managers as well as experts, though I will distinguish between the two where necessary.
All contemporary policymaking in the West takes place in the shadow of two centuries of astonishing social progress. At first in Great Britain, other Northern European countries, and North America, but ultimately across the Western world, policy makers achieved unprecedented feats of development and societal improvement: population health transformed through clean water, better nutrition, medical advances, and the building of communitywide health services; transportation, energy, and communications infrastructures conceived, designed, and constructed; universal education mandated and delivered; economic and monetary frameworks and institutions devised and implemented; basic pensions and welfare benefits provided for the old and the poor; and so on.
Problems remain, of course, as well as challenges that are either new, or at least give that appearance—cybersecurity is an example of the first and climate change of the second. But the contemporary technocrats do their work with both the benefit and burden of knowing that in most areas of public policy, vast strides have already been made. The benefit is the ability to build on prior success. The burden is that further progress is much harder to make. The law of diminishing returns applies, and the net benefit of a new investment or intervention is likely to be more marginal than what went before. And because in most Western countries the level of taxation and the percentage of GDP devoted to the public sector are themselves live political and economic issues, departmental budgets are already stretched and in much of the developed world are actually shrinking. As a result, the absolute amount of money available for new initiatives is limited almost everywhere. Different public policy goals are often in tension with one another, moreover, and the trade-offs between them loom larger as the prospective incremental benefits shrink.
It was easier to make the case in the mid-twentieth century that London needed a major airport in the first place, than it is today to convince the public that that airport should acquire an additional runway. Now the rival demands of economic growth, noise pollution, and wider concerns about the environment pull in contrary directions. The effort required to bring this second policy decision to a conclusion—the scale and cost of the research, the regulatory hurdles, the levels of political and public disquiet and opposition, the political capital required, the sheer length of time before a resolution can be achieved—is far greater than it was when the first, far more significant decision was reached.
To make progress, those who formulate public policy must therefore gather data and marshal their arguments with great thoroughness. Across the West, policy makers strive to assemble empirical evidence and test hypotheses against it in the manner of formal science. But this evidence-based policy making requires anyone who truly wants to understand the issues in a given area to master vast tracts of information and argument. Since the 1950s, public policy development, and the task of training future policy makers, has become a major industry spanning universities, research institutes, think tanks, and NGOs, as well as government and political parties, and it has given government departments legions of economists, scientists, planners, statisticians, and lawyers who march across the fitness landscape and identify, in each policy area, the precise grid reference that—at least in theory—represents the optimal trade-off between all the competing considerations.
Technocracy has its own language too, drawn mainly from the social sciences and the law. But mastering this tongue requires at least a nodding acquaintance with statistics, probability, cost-benefit analysis, and financial statements, not to mention a willingness to endure the weirdly affectless and dehumanized style in which many documents are written. There are exceptions—the final report of the 9/11 Commission is a model of limpid, sensitive prose1—but most public policy documents remain impenetrable to the average citizen, and despite freedom of information legislation and ever-greater “transparency,” the gap between the illuminati and Pericles’ “ordinary working people” has grown steadily wider. Yet precious few technocrats seem to regard the explanation of policy as part of their job.
Many were never trained how to do it, and even those who were may doubt whether their listeners would be capable of understanding them, given how intricate the issues have become. As their world and that of popular political debate have diverged and they’ve come to realize that few politicians are prepared even to raise the question of hard choices and painful trade-offs, some have concluded that to attempt such explanation is pointless. If the public is bewildered, then surely it is someone else’s duty—the media, academia—to put it right, while they get on with the serious business of working out what needs to be done. Few politicians are in favor of civil servants speaking directly to the public either; as far as they’re concerned, communications is a political matter best left to their own good instincts and yet another group of specialists, the PR professionals.
Cato the Elder defined the rhetorical ideal as “vir bonus dicendi peritus,” the good man speaking well. But what does speaking well consist of? Within and around government today there are two competing answers to that question, and they resemble the two different approaches to journalism we have just discussed. The modern technocrats aim to use data and logic to formulate and debate policy in the most empirical and logically coherent way possible. The politicians want to frame those same issues in as sharp and politically compelling a way as they can. While the first see no rational need for ideological differentiation—just follow the facts—the second are understandably obsessed with it. Both may regard public understanding of the issues as a good thing in principle, but neither is likely to see it as an overriding priority. When urgency is high and the potential for partisan advantage low—following acts of God, say, or population health emergencies—technocratic and political priorities may align around simple, clear information and advice to the public. But such moments are rare.
There is a further important complication to introduce. When politicians enter office, they are liable to find themselves shifting from an approach that emphasizes partisan persuasiveness to the exclusion of almost all else, to a position somewhat closer to that of the pure technocrat. Now our once bold campaigners have complex policies to propose and defend, statistics to marshal, above all problems and limitations to confront and excuse. As a result, even if they continue to try to score partisan points where they can, their language tends to become more like that of the professional drafters of those same policies, less vaunting, more expert, more circumspect. We can think of the language of a given politician zigzagging between the campaigning/opposition mode to the governmental/technocratic and back again as her career unfolds.
I am close here to Gutmann and Thompson’s idea of the “compromising” and “uncompromising” mind-sets, though note that I am contrasting two modes of political discourse rather than two states of mind, and suggesting that each mode arises from a different rhetorical need. The crowd listening expectantly to the candidate requires one kind of public language; an audience of experts discussing an arcane matter of policy quite another. Politicians respond differently to each, not because of a given “mind-set,” but rather because they are professional communicators and it is clear to them what the context and pathos of each occasion demand.
And so it is that even successful contemporary politicians find themselves trapped between two rhetorics. Often it is not their opponents’ words but their own that seem to mock them. How easy is it to limit immigration or to reduce the inequality between rich and poor? During the campaign or in opposition: simple! In government: not so much. Due to the pressure of modern politics and 24/7 media, the temptation to promise the earth grows even as the room for maneuever in the tough world of real policy choices narrows. Those politicians who insist on sticking to the possible are inevitably accused of “lacking vision.” Thus Mario Cuomo’s celebrated dictum that “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”2
Barack Obama is perhaps the most obvious example of the two rhetorics, “the change we need” giving way almost overnight to tight-lipped and sometimes testy managerialism. The word-worlds of Obama the campaigner and Obama the president turned out to be so different that it was almost as if they were twin brothers with contrasting personalities—the electorate voting twice for the passionate rebel, yet each time finding themselves stuck with a professor who, despite his undoubted intelligence and command of the issues, seemed somehow to have mislaid the unbounded sense of possibility and hope which had made him so attractive in the first place.
But the same cycle, brave promises followed by bitter disappointment, recurs in all Western democracies. It’s not new; indeed, it has arguably been the narrative of most executive political careers since Pericles. But the character of modern politics—the competitive bidding on emotive policy issues, the intense pressure to oversimplify to get the headline, the sheer complexity of government, the furious media scrutiny that greets any shortcoming—seems to have increased the amplitude, by which I mean the distance from the peak of expectation to the trough of disillusion.
When we think of political failure, we tend to think of failed actions, the policy that didn’t work or the economy that didn’t revive. But much of today’s sense of betrayal is focused on politicians’ words and the gap that often opens up between those words and reality. And when the public finally tires of all those broken commitments? People are likely to turn from the discredited incumbents in search of fresh faces and voices and a new promise of change. The cycle begins again.
But something important is getting lost in the wash. It is people’s ability to understand exactly what a given policy proposal consists of, how long they will need to wait before they see results, and how they should judge its success or failure. I want to illustrate the problem by returning once again—this time in a different political culture—to the rhetorical challenges involved in introducing, debating, and explaining health-care reform.
Health provision in most Western countries is under strain. The burden of meeting the medical needs of an aging population and paying for new drugs and procedures, the debate about whether health care should be provided universally, and if so, to what standard—these questions exercise health professionals, policy makers, and politicians almost everywhere. The character of the debate varies widely, however, given the differences in provision and political expectation in different countries.
Twitter and Twist
In chapter 1, we witnessed a battle by conservatives to prevent universal “Socialist” health-care provision coming to the United States. Now we will explore a British debate in which the political polarity was reversed. Britain already has a universal health-care system in the form of the much-loved NHS. The attempt to reform it was led by a Conservative health minister, Andrew Lansley, who was a member of the Con–Lib Dem government that took office after the 2010 general election. The reforms were opposed by the Labour Party, health sector unions, and some health policy academics and specialists. But the same pressures were at work in the UK on public language as those occurring in the United States, albeit not yet to the same degree, and these generally leftist British opponents of health-care reform found themselves facing a very similar rhetorical challenge to that of their right-wing American counterparts.
First, the policy area is fiendishly complex. To enter fully into the debate, one would have to know how the current NHS system of commissioning and providing health services functioned; what the perceived strengths and weaknesses of this system were, itself a deeply contentious subject; the range of possible reforms or alternate systems and structure (to include the approaches adopted in other countries); the details of the Lansley proposals; and the evidence and main lines of argument with which to assess the Lansley proposals against both the status quo and the other alternatives. I asked one of the leading experts at the King’s Fund health-care think tank (a “pure” technocratic institution) how long it would take an intelligent layperson to understand the issues behind the 2012 Act, and she replied, “What sane person would try?” The task would become harder as amendments stacked up. There would be more than a thousand by the time the bill became law.
Second, just as in the United States, some of the critics would find themselves having to argue against ideas and positions that were in important ways similar to ones previously promoted by their own political side. For years, successive British governments of the Left as well as the Right have concluded that the best way to improve the quality and allocation of resources within the NHS is to inject greater choice and competition into the commissioning of health services—though, to respect sensitivity on the Left about anything that smacked of marketization, the word competition was often replaced by the term of art contestability when Labour was in power.
Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin had seized on Section 1233 and their spurious claims about end-of-life counseling because, even though it was peripheral to the Obama plan, it was easier to understand than the world of individual mandates and health insurance exchanges and therefore easier to distort. Better, it could be made to speak to wider—and more emotive—ideological differences between liberals and conservatives, and to what McCaughey and Palin claimed were the true intentions of the Obama administration. All in all, it was a much safer way of discriminating between the two political sides than the central proposals of Obamacare.
In the same way, the opponents of Lansleycare knew that although the finer points of GP-commissioning as a replacement for primary care trusts (you don’t want to know) might provide hours of delight for MPs, peers, and the charmed circle of health policy experts, they were unlikely to catch fire with the public. So they too were on the lookout for aspects of the draft legislation that—even if they were at the margins—could be used to reveal what they took to be the Tories’ real agenda.
In their view that agenda was privatization pure and simple. So their goal—at once rhetorical and political—was to convince a significant proportion of the British public that privatization was the true meaning of the Lansley bill. For them, it was a battle over a single word.
Let’s look at one of the tactical battles in this wider war. This revolved around not an argument, nor even a word, but a number: 49 percent. The trigger for this debate was Clause 163 in the emerging draft of the Health and Social Care Bill, which read:
[an] NHS Foundation Trust does not fulfill its principal purpose unless, in each financial year, its total income from the provision of goods and services for the purposes of the health service in England is greater than its total income from the provision of goods and services for any other purposes.
In other words, a foundation trust (again, don’t ask) cannot make more money from non-NHS—presumably private—sources than it does from the NHS itself: commercial income in any given year cannot exceed 50 percent. In the shorthand of the debate, that quickly became 49 percent, and it was this 49 percent limit on commercial income that, although never actually mentioned in the bill itself, spread like wildlife on Twitter and the Web.
But what does the 49 percent actually mean? It is hard to believe that a raw percentage, that basic building block of the technocrat’s art, can have multiple meanings, but in reality numbers can carry a cargo of meaning every bit as rich as words.
To a Conservative, the 49 percent might indeed be seen as a long-term stake in the ground for the economic liberalization of the health service—though given that the bill maintained the universal right to NHS care, it was unclear where the new army of private patients to consume those 49 percent of health resources was ever going to come from. To a Liberal Democrat, the 49 percent was unintelligible in isolation from the system of checks and balances that they claimed they had won from their coalition partners. In reality, they asserted, foundation trust hospitals could not increase their private income above 5 percent without a vote from their governing body, not to mention scrutiny from the regulator. The 49 percent was just a backstop that in practice would never be needed.
But to Labour and many of the other opponents of the reforms, the 49 percent was of great significance. On March 8, 2012, under the expansive banner “With Surgical Precision, the Tories Are Disembowelling the Welfare State—Sheep-like, Decent Lib Dems Can Only Watch,” the noted columnist and social affairs expert Polly Toynbee wrote: “On Thursday Shirley Williams led her erstwhile rebels into the government lobby to vote for hospitals’ right to use 49% of beds for private patients.”3 Polly Toynbee has simplified Clause 163 into a new “right” that hospitals are being granted, and she’s reified the 49 percent and brought it to life by making it 49 percent of hospital beds. Some of the tweets that followed this column took this literally and assumed that the privatization of half of the NHS’s facilities would happen as soon as it became law.
A few days later, she used different language, suggesting that the government was “fencing off 49% of NHS facilities to private practice” in a way that “risks denying NHS patients their scans, services or beds.”4 Now the 49 percent is no longer a theoretical right but a compulsory minimum, a curtain about to be drawn around half the beds so that ordinary NHS patients cannot use them. We see again the concentration of the claim, the collapsing of a possible future into a certain present. And of course there can be no doubt about the intentions of the people who are closing the curtain: whatever they say, they are privatizers.
But meanwhile, Lib Dem Shirley Williams was stoutly defending her efforts to, in her words, “make a bad bill better.” She quoted Polly Toynbee’s first article to delegates at the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference and went on to say, “The so-called 49% is a myth or, to put it in non-parliamentary language, a lie. Either [Polly] just did not look at the detail and therefore is able to say that in the Guardian, or she did look at the detail and decided that tribalism should trump truth.” And she went on to offer this ringing denunciation of not only her critics but also of the new forms of media that had apparently helped them: “We are fighting an uphill battle for the truth, to be able to base people’s opinions on facts, and not on the stuff they have presented on Twitter and tweet and, dare I say it, the new social network, which is known as twist.”5
So what is the truth about the 49 percent? People often appeal for someone—the UK Statistics Authority, the BBC, one of those self-appointed fact-checking organizations, someone—to adjudicate definitively on arguments like this. But although it sounds as if it should be objectively determinable, the meaning of the 49 percent is actually a matter of political opinion:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
The case of the 49 percent is different from that of the death panels. The desire of many Tories to see significantly greater commercial activity in the NHS was, and remains, real, and the debate between the bill’s opponents and the Lib Dems, on whether or not the other safeguards that the latter claimed to have won were or were not sufficient, was a question of political substance. For these reasons, to this day Polly Toynbee vehemently defends the language of the 49 percent as a legitimate way of bringing a real political issue to life.
She has a point. We can follow a more or less straight thread between the 49 percent and a hard knot of political disagreement, and the arguments about the meanings of words turn out to a significant degree to be political arguments about fundamentals—above all about rival philosophies about how best to run and protect public services. Unlike in the example of the death panels, the compression and maximality of the 49 percent are grounded in the kind of debate that policy makers have to engage in and where, in the absence of certainty of argument or (because intentionality is itself in question) even of meaning, listeners must judge between the competing speakers on the basis of their assessment of the speakers themselves and their own orientation to the issue: ethos and pathos. We certainly encounter the imagery of the conspiracy theory—all those curtained-off beds—but at least the theme of the conspiracy, the Tories’ desire to see more commercial activity in UK hospitals, sits in the mainstream of the political debate.
Nonetheless, as a way of helping the public understand the thrust of the Lansley bill, the 49 percent argument fails miserably. The imprecision of the 49 percent sits squarely within a wider ambiguity in the NHS debate that the opponents of the bill used ruthlessly to their advantage—woolliness about the meaning of the master word privatization itself.
Despite the strong public service spirit of the NHS, the reality has always been universal public provision, mixed public/private supply. In practice, the NHS has always relied upon supply from both publicly owned institutions and private contractors: the UK’s army of general practitioners may well think of themselves as devoted public servants, but from a legal point of view what they run are effectively small businesses. In recent decades, numerous other services in the NHS have also been outsourced to private contractors.
Since the foundation of the NHS, no major British politician, let alone party, has proposed abolishing universal provision; what has been at issue is the question of supply and the mechanisms by which that supply can best be commissioned to deliver the universal provision. As we have seen, successive British governments have taken the view that supply could be improved both in terms of quality and value for money if the system were progressively transformed from a planned economy into an internal market; if, for example, different publicly owned NHS hospitals were made to compete with each other (and sometimes with private providers) for NHS work, or if GPs could be financially motivated to deliver treatments and services to their patients in a more cost-effective or qualitatively better way.
But over decades, opponents of these reforms have tried to persuade the public that these kind of proposals are in fact preliminary steps toward the dismantling of universal provision itself and the switching of some or all of the population from the existing tax-based system to a large-scale (presumably insurance-based) private system. These critics often use the word privatization, politically charged since the Thatcher era, to mean (1) market-derived competitive practices or fully-fledged “internal markets,” even when they do not involve private players; (2) a (further) switching of health-care supply from state-owned to private contractors; (3) the long-range perceived threat of the UK abandoning its commitment to universal access to health care regardless of income in favor of a wholly private system or a two-tier system with high-quality private medicine for the better-off and an impoverished state system for the poor; or (4) some or all of the above. The use of the one word to bridge these different meanings implies that they are all necessarily connected and naturally lead on one from the other—even though experience from other European countries demonstrates that, at least in principle, that need not be the case.
How does the 49 percent fit into this NHS privatization schema? In two ways. First and most obviously, it is an example of (1): the idea being that NHS hospitals should seek as many sources of income as possible, and if they have marginal spare capacity, they should rent it out and use the resulting commercial income to invest in better facilities or services, or to offer lower unit charges to NHS commissioners for their “public” work. In this sense, the 49 percent belongs clearly in the supply half of the equation. But the thought of a greater number of NHS beds being filled with private patients can also spark a thought about provision—don’t these extra private patients imply that the government secretly plans to make changes on the demand side and, specifically, that it intends to abolish or limit the right to universal health care? Nowhere in the Lansley bill is this even hinted at, but the thought of those 49 percent of beds and the vague specter that the word privatization conjures up make the claim credible to many.
What it doesn’t do is help the public understand the actual provisions and policy questions raised by the Health and Social Care Act 2012—any more than the spectacle of an elder stateswoman and a distinguished journalist, both known for the seriousness of their thinking on social policy, trading insults about a number that does not even appear in the act. It’s worth noting that this was a bitter battle that took place not between Left and Right, but within the Left, and between protagonists who had previously been in ideological accord on many social issues. Just as with Obamacare, there were two parallel debates about Lansleycare: a crude ideological one that proceeded with little or no regard to the specific proposals in the bill and that ended, as such debates almost always do, in an angry standoff; and a sophisticated technocratic one that remained largely within policymaking elites and that ended with the view not that some fundamental point of principle had been breached, but that the political process had so jumbled and weakened the legislation that it might now prove difficult or impossible to implement coherently, whatever its merits. Some of their American counterparts had already begun to fear that the same might be true of Obamacare.
The Lansley bill was eventually passed in substantially amended form. But in some respects, the bill’s opponents could be said to have won the rhetorical battle. Ipsos MORI found consistently low levels of public understanding of what was proposed—at no point did those claiming to understand the bill rise above 30 percent. By the spring of 2012, Ipsos MORI found that only 22 percent of respondents thought that “the government has the right policies for the NHS,” while the proportion of respondents who thought that the reforms were really about privatization had grown from 3 percent in December 2010 to 15 percent.6 That was always the word Andrew Lansley’s opponents were trying to land. As for Lansley himself, he was shortly thereafter shuffled away from his post at Health. One failure, according to off-the-record briefings from party colleagues, had been his inability to communicate the rationale for the bill effectively to the public.7
We should note something else. Shirley Williams mounted a spirited defense of the Lib Dem position with some sharp catchphrases of her own, that alliterative and triadic “tribalism should trump truth” line and her joke about the social network Twist. But a rhetorical asymmetry has opened up: it is becoming harder to argue in favor of compromise than against it. In my time as a journalist and editor, I’ve seen the noun compromise itself become a pejorative and the adjective uncompromising a compliment. To change one’s mind is to execute a U-turn or, in the United States, to flip-flop.
For some politicians in some situations, compromise is still possible. Everyone knows that formal coalition involves give-and-take, so David Cameron and George Osborne’s numerous policy compromises and changes passed political muster. Even after the Conservatives achieved an overall majority in 2015, the two continued to enjoy some leeway in the adjustment or abandonment of policy. There was a price to pay in credibility, though, when the UK came to vote on the EU. And when ideological convictions run high—and for many parties and for many activists in all parties, that means every issue—to meet a political opponent halfway is treason. Anything less than utter certainty can sound—and I mean literally sound—weak or false or both.
So “making a bad bill better,” though of course redolent of the give-and-take on which all democratic government is based, is now a risky thing to admit to in public. Surely the right thing to do with a bad bill is not to amend it but to abolish it? In the case of Andrew Lansley’s health reforms, this is exactly what the Labour Party is now committed to—which probably means that the NHS can look forward to further waves of reform as far as the eye can see.
The Excluded Middle
Early in 2012, as the US presidential primary season got under way, one of Mitt Romney’s advisers suggested that perhaps, if elected, he should repeal only the bad parts of Obamacare. The Right reacted with savagery. Here’s the blogger Erick Erickson:
If a Republican gets into the White House and does not sweat blood trying to repeal Obamacare in its entirety (regardless of success), I predict the end of the Republican party legitimately … If the GOP takes back the White House, it’s voters will expect a real fight, not a half-hearted attempt.8
The most interesting words here are in the parentheses—”regardless of success.” Solidarity with one’s own supporters is more important than improving a piece of legislation. It is better to fail purely than only partly to succeed. Ranged against the language of nuance and compromise, the language of radical solidarity is simpler and more powerful.
But is this really a matter of language? Many people believe that what’s playing out here is strictly ideological, and that the only reason compromise is becoming increasingly difficult in Britain on topics like health, and is virtually impossible in America across much of the domestic agenda, is that there is a gulf between policy fundamentals. But that, of course, is what an absolutist rhetoric makes one believe. For decades, the rhetoric of Northern Irish politics convinced all the parties that the substantive gap between Protestants and Catholics was unbridgeable. But once the political leaders on both sides began to see a way of selling reconciliation to their supporters, the essential substance was settled in months.
In June 2014, Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Eric Cantor were two of a number of Republican incumbents who were facing challenges from Tea Party insurgents in primaries. It was generally believed that the senator had a real fight on his hands, while Representative Cantor was in no danger. In the event, Lindsey Graham saw off his challengers without much difficulty, while Cantor, who was at the time the second most senior Republican in the House and the heir apparent to Speaker John Boehner, lost badly in his Virginia district to a rival who was considered such a no-hoper that the main Tea Party groups had refused to back his campaign.
Cantor had been considered more of a hard-liner than Graham, and analysts therefore initially struggled to explain why he had been ejected while Graham had not; the result ran counter to the assumption that degree of conservatism was a reliable predictor of vulnerability to a Tea Party challenge. Immigration reform was an important factor in the primaries, but at least on the face of it, that didn’t make the result any easier to understand. Senator Graham had been an outspoken advocate of immigration reform and had drawn plenty of conservative flak as a result, whereas Cantor’s position had always been more cautious. He had never supported more radical measures like citizenship for illegal (or “undocumented”) immigrants (or “aliens”), and though he had previously expressed muted support for more modest reforms, he’d ruled out even these by the time of the primary.
When Lindsey Graham was asked to explain why Eric Cantor had lost, his answer takes us clearly back to the world of rhetoric: “You’ve got to take a firm stance one way or the other … The worst thing you can do on an issue like this is to be hard to figure out. And I am not hard to figure out on immigration.”9
The same New York Times story that reported those words also included an interview with Frank Sharry, the executive director of a pro-immigration reform lobby group. He claimed that it was one of those issues where “you’re either for it 100 percent, or you’re against it.” According to Sharry, “Cantor was trying to carve out a middle ground, but there really isn’t one to be found, and he ended up speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”
This, I believe, is a better account of our dilemma than a simple tale of political extremism. A politician (admittedly one with solid conservative credentials in other policy areas) can carve out a maverick position on a given issue and, if he does so with sufficient conviction and consistency, can win the grudging respect even of voters who take a different view. Another can be both more doctrinaire and circumspect yet still come a cropper if his rhetoric suggests changeability. Cantor’s crime was less about the policy itself, or about his position on the Republican political spectrum, than about “speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”
What has been lost here is the possibility of uncertainty, of listening to others, of considering the evidence and the political realities and adjusting one’s position accordingly. Ideology, values, and policy differences are still critical to the story—though even they are more or less inseparable from the public language in which they are couched—but, to a significant degree, the radicalization has taken place in the field of rhetoric. It is less that the policy center ground has disappeared than that the zone of ambiguity and flexibility—that zone where almost all political progress takes place—has become rhetorically insupportable, not just between ideological orientations but within them, and not just in the traditional pragmatic political center ground but toward the extremes as well. Now it’s 100 percent or nothing.