The DPP attack on Ko

I was watching one of the political talk shows on FTV, a deep green channel, a couple of weeks ago. They spent the entire time criticizing Ko Wen-je.

There were several different topics. The first one had to do with his mother’s house in Hsinchu. It has an illegal addition built onto the roof, and they have blocked the fire lane on the ground floor. His mother claimed that these additions were made 30 years ago, but a quick look at Google Earth pictures show that they date from six or seven or years ago. At that time, he was already Taipei mayor, and he was yelling passionately about tearing down any newly built illegal structures. The powers complained about the double standard with Ko passionately talking about public safety in Taipei city but ignoring his own mother blocking a fire lane with a metal fence.

The second topic had to do with the apparent alliance in Tainan between the TPP and former KMT member and legislative aspirant Lee Chuan-chiao. According to the talk show panelists, Lee is obviously and deeply corrupt. This alliance between the TPP and Lee shows what a blue-white coalition would look like in practice and just how little Ko cares about anti-corruption when it comes to his own personal interests.

The third topic wasn’t technically about Ko. It was about the corruption allegations swirling around Hsinchu mayor Alice Kao Hung-an, who has been accused of, among other things, accepting luxury cars and free luxury housing from various real estate developers. Kao is one of Terry Gou’s proteges, she is also one of the most prominent members of the TPP. This might not be an explicit attack on Ko just yet, but it will be soon: this is what you can expect to see if the TPP takes power nationally.

There were one or two other stories that I can’t quite remember. But the entire show was an extended attack on Ko and the TPP.

After the show as I was thinking about it, I realized I have seen this script before. The DPP is attacking Ko in exactly the same way they successfully attacked Han Kuo-yu four years ago. And it makes sense. While these two politicians are very different people, they share a few critical similarities. And this is what the DPP is trying to undermine.

Both Han and Ko have other bases of support, but what turned them into electoral forces to be reckoned with was their ability to supplement those bases with voters attracted to their populist appeal. Neither Han nor Ko fits the archetypical mold of a populist perfectly. Neither one makes scapegoating minorities a central pillar of their appeal. Ko doesn’t “perform the low,” saying and doing various crude things to make polite society cringe. And Ko hasn’t identified “the real people,” the way Han did with his shumin. But at its heart, populism is a moral argument against the ruling elite class. It tells people that the reason for their difficult lives is that the establishment has chosen to systematically siphon off society’s wealth. There should be enough to go around, but the corrupt elite politicians and their allies in society – and these are different groups in different flavors of populism – have intentionally stolen resources from the public. Both Han and Ko make versions of this populist argument.

I have written quite a bit about Han and his populous rhetoric, so I won’t rehash that here.

Most everything in Taiwan politics has its roots in the China cleavage, and Ko’s populist rhetoric is no exception. How to deal with China is the most pressing issue facing Taiwan, and the answers are usually grounded in people’s identity. KMT supporters generally have some sort of Chinese identity to go along with their Taiwanese identity, and they tend to think that Taiwan inevitably will – and should – have closer relations with China. DPP supporters tend to have exclusive Taiwanese identity, and they tend to think that Taiwan is better off keeping China at arm’s length and developing closer relations with the rest of the world. Ko wants to sidestep this question entirely. His answer is that the two big parties use “ideology” to manipulate the voters into supporting them. And if you vote on the basis of “ideology,” you really don’t have a choice. You either have to vote for the DPP or the KMT, no matter how lousy they are in office. This gives them free reign to be corrupt since their voters can’t go anywhere else. Ko tells his supporters to ignore this “ideology” and to vote for good governance instead. While he increasingly focuses his fire on the DPP these days – they are, after all, the governing party and more of his support increasingly comes from the opposition side – he does not often praise the KMT. In his vision, they are also part of the problem.

Where this rhetoric moves from standard third party complaints about big parties into populist territory is when he starts talking about what is to be done. For the most part, he doesn’t provide any specifics. In his view, good governance is a simple matter. You just have to do the “right” things. One of the phrases he says over and over is, “Do the right things; don’t do the wrong things; and work diligently” 對的事情做，不對的事情不要做，認真做. It’s just that easy. The problem is that the KMT and DPP often choose to do the wrong things, not do the right things, and they don’t work hard. They are morally flawed.

Barack Obama once said something to the effect of, “The president’s job is to make hard decisions, and all the decisions that get to the president’s desk are hard. All the easy ones were made a long time ago.” Ko is basically saying the opposite: the decisions are easy if you care first and foremost about the people. He is implicitly arguing he uniquely understands and represents the people and the popular will. If you disagree with him, it can only be because you’re corrupt and selfish. He is effectively denying the possibility that people legitimately disagree because they have different values or that some problems are complex and don’t have an obvious best solution.

So how do you undermine this message? It doesn’t seem to be very useful to argue against specific policies. That isn’t what attracts the voters in the first place. What attracts them is the feeling that someone who shares their values will be making decisions in their best interests. So the way to attack a populist is to convince the voters that he doesn’t actually share their values. Han Kuo-yu made a big deal of being a simple person who only needed a bowl of braised pork rice and a bottle of mineral water. When it emerged that he was dabbling in luxury real estate speculation, that severely damaged the image that he had worked so hard to build. Maybe he’s not just like us; maybe he is actually just another one of those corrupt officials that he complains about!

This is the narrative that the DPP is trying to build around Ko. He talks about right and wrong, but everywhere you turn you see double standards. He screams about not allowing any new, unsafe, illegal structures, but in his own personal life he is willing to look past not just an illegal structure but blatantly blocking off a fire lane. He says not to do the wrong things, but when it’s in his personal interest, he is happy to make an alliance with an obviously corrupt KMT politician. He guaranteed TPP nominees would be incorrupt, but look at the mayor of Hsinchu. And of course he doesn’t see anything wrong with anything she has done. It’s all very hypocritical. He isn’t actually making decisions for the ordinary people; he’s making them for himself.

It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work as well as it did four years ago. It’s worth remembering the Han was trying to overcome a big deficit in the distribution of national identity. Ko is not so clearly identified with Chinese identity, so he isn’t facing quite the same obstacle. And this is a three- or four-way race, so a lot of the people who have doubts about Ko are already supporting someone else.

Still, it’s interesting to me the the DPP has looked past all the dissimilarities with four years ago to identify the fundamental common challenge, and they seem to have chosen the exact same strategy to deal with it. I can’t say I think they’re making a mistake.