…to posts directly with a post, but Chris Saxman’s “relationships trump resumes” comment struck a particular nerve.
For one, I get it that we have to build coalitions in order to advance policy, I truly truly do. This has cost me a number of false friends on the right, whom I could name but politely will refuse to do so.
Yet there are certain things where I will not bend — the dignity of human life, the importance of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, ethics in politics, creating a society which thrives on liberty and opportunity rather than dependency — these are things that speak to the twin voices of Catholic social justice and American conservatism nee classical liberalism that define me as a Republican.
So when I read advice that suggests that compromise as a virtue rather than compromise for virtue as the path forward, I bristle… and am reminded of William Butler Yeats:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”— William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919)
In a world today where we are urged to compromise for its own sake, it can seem to many that we are giving half only for the loyal opposition to take the other half later. Meanwhile, those intransigent voices at our back in the conservative movement refuse to change their tactics or methods as so many Polish hussars charging the German panzers.
“The best lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Saxman’s politics and my own are neatly aligned for the most part. I share his pragmatism, but I do not share an eagerness for compromise that reeks of concession.
The balance is rediscovering what we are for — and that conversation in an era of RINOs, establishment, Teabaggers, losers, consultants, winners, moderates, libertarians, Catholics, evangelicals, and all the panoply of what constitutes the resistance to our lock-step plunge into a social democratic future?
It’s not happening… but it ought to.
