Is There a Market for Moderation in American Politics?

From Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court to university campuses, one issue pervades American culture this fall: Why is every debate dominated by each side’s most extreme and irreconcilable exponents? W.B. Yeats observed over a century ago that “the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity… . Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.” 

That probably has always been true to an extent. In our current climate, however, not only can the center not hold but it can barely even be heard. More than anything else — more even than January 6, which is more symptom than disease — this represents the abiding threat to our democracy, because our constitutional republic requires what our political culture increasingly makes impossible: compromise.   

For most of my adult life, compromise has been hailed as the genius of our Constitution.  Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle At Philadelphia was essential reading; it detailed the debates that consumed a divided America in 1789 — national debt, state sovereignty (some states offered their own currencies, and maintained their own navies), the persistence of slavery — that nonetheless resulted in our Constitution. The only way for the nation to survive with such deep-seated divisions was for advocates to compromise. When compromise over slavery became impossible to sustain, the nation fell into an existential crisis.   

Not surprisingly, given its origins, the need for compromise is built into our government’s structure, where, as James Madison put it, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” by dividing power among the three branches of the federal government, the federal government and the states, and, by virtue of the Bill of Rights, all forms of government and “We, the people.” 

It is no exaggeration to say that in the absence of a spirit of compromise, our Constitution is a prescription for paralysis. It is set up to fail. More than any other factor, the erosion of that spirit of compromise constitutes the greatest threat to our republican democracy.   

Where did it go? When did our political culture lose its essential sustaining spirit?

I believe the evaporation of compromise began when, in the 1960s and ’70s, the political class began adopting the lessons learned and best practices that had been refined by the Mad Men of Madison Avenue through the ’50s and ’60s. Political speech came to exploit a core principle of modern commercial advertising: As summarized in 101 Things I Learned In Advertising School,  “You’ll reach more by targeting fewer. … If you try to reach everyone, you risk going unnoticed by your core.” 

It is sheer folly, in other words, to try to reach a broad spectrum of the public. Instead, look for intensity of support rather than a broad base; the broader the base, the less clear, the less intense, the message. Put another way, “Find people who are gaga” and their intensity will drive interest and eventually pull in the otherwise reluctant multitudes. 

This principle applied to commercial transactions is demonstrably effective. It drives brand loyalty and, with it, rejection of competing products no matter how similar. But should the principles that drive commercial advertising — finding a narrow intense core of supporters and amplifying their intensity — also define our politics? 

Shouldn’t politics, under a Constitution like ours that requires compromise, be premised on trying to build public consensus across a broad spectrum of interests, rather than identifying niche markets and reinforcing niche preferences? Isn’t the commercial approach to political speech applied to a government of federated powers destined to cause that structure to fail? 

That is precisely what the application of commercial advertising principles to political speech has been accomplishing: stalemate, division, the widespread attitude that compromise is anathema, the prevalence of extremism and hate speech, and real-world violence. 

There is nothing surprising about this predicament. It is, in fact, the inevitable cultural endpoint of the underlying principle, endorsed by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that spending is itself a form of protected political speech, and thus subject to few, if any, limitations. 

Even in the absence of social media, that principle would have deformed political dialogue. The development of social media platforms has put the Citizens United principle on steroids. Such platforms became profitable only when they began to deploy algorithms that use commercial advertising principles to amplify every consumer preference. By applying those algorithms to political speech, they embody the deformities of political dialogue that the Citizens United principle made certain.   

But here’s the rub: Once you have generated money by appealing primarily to the most motivated supporters of a cause, and recruited others by demonizing the other side of an issue, how do you then explain to them the need to walk it all back, to compromise? Compromise, after all, is ideologically impure. It is messy and unprincipled. It is also, under our Constitution, essential.

In its own way, compromise points to higher virtue than ideology can reach: humility, the recognition that no set of beliefs has a monopoly on truth, and that no matter how fervently we may believe something, we just might be wrong. 

The intellectual humility that underlies our form of government is hard to find in the commercial marketplace, so it’s not surprising that it has been banished from our post-Citizens United politics. Accepting that the Supreme Court is unlikely in the near term to moderate its course and embrace some limitations on the role of money in politics, the issue of our time is whether you can sell compromise.  

Is there a market for moderation? The answer to that question may hold the key to the continued viability of our republic.

John Farmer Jr. is the director of the Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  He is the author of “The Ground Truth:  The Untold Story of American Under Attack on 9/11” and “Way Too Fast: An American Reckoning.”