You want to draw a gasp from a crowd of Republicans, all you need to do is drop the C-word.
No, not that c-word. The really bad c-word.
Compromise.
No word has been more villified in the Republican lexicon. It’s the great unmentionable today, and that’s why attacking it is even more popular than writing articles attacking Trump on Bearing Drift.
My neighbor Shak Hill, whose name should be familiar to our audience, wrote a long email today on the subject (which you can also read here on RedNOVA) of compromising principles. Using a tortured metaphor about painting your kitchen by committee and some dubious history lessons, Shak trots out the same tired arguments about the need to “stand on principle” and that the “principle of compromise” only serves the “Leftist Media, the Democrats and the Establishment on both sides, but not the people.”
Shak’s thesis is essentially that there can be no compromise when government is exceeding its bounds, and that doing a little less of something that’s wrong is still wrong.
That’s a fine theological argument, but it doesn’t work in public policy. Why? Because one man’s definition of “a wrong” is another man’s definition of “a right” – a perfect example being abortion. Where we claim government is overstepping its bounds in harming life, the Democrats are screaming that government isn’t doing enough to protect a right.
We as Republicans spend too much of our time arguing whether government can do the things it does, instead of debating whether it should. We tend to lose sight of the fact that all government authority flows from the people, and if the people think government should and does have the authority to do something, there’s a pretty good argument to be made that it does, even if we disagree vehemently. There are venues to resolve those issues, from the courts to the ballot box. Regardless of the outcomes of those debates, we must recognize and accept that, at the very least, the scope of government authority is not merely a straightforward exercise in reading comprehension, as so many who flatteringly call themselves “constitutionalists” seem to think it is.
That’s where compromise is vital. To resolve these issues, we need to engage in the political process. That’s why we have the process. It’s also where the framers expected us to use compromise to resolve differences.
Good compromise – the kind we should want and expect from our leaders – results in incremental progress towards a larger goal that can’t be done immediately. Say, for example, rolling back a program we think represents government overreach like Obamacare. Anybody who is rational and honest will tell you that we aren’t going to repeal Obamacare overnight. But we can slowly do it, piece by piece over time, replacing as we go, until it’s gone.
But, obviously, to do that, we’re going to have to give the Democrats some things that they want. Thus, all of this becomes a question of negotiation. What are we willing to concede to get our priorities accomplished? The Democrats most decidedly do not share our principles, but they do share the power and authority to govern. For us to put our principles in to practice, we are often asking them to compromise theirs. To expect them to compromise their principles without us compromising our own when those principles conflict just doesn’t make any sense. You don’t get something for nothing.
This is why we elect people to office. We can program a computer to just vote no on everything. I can write a program on my iMac (I’d call it my “tMac”) to just veto anything Congress or the General Assembly passes. That’s easy, but that doesn’t reduce the size of government or advance our other principles. We want progress, and the often means balancing multiple, conflicting principles and choosing which one is more important. Often, on any one policy decision, you have conflicting principles at work and elected officials are faced with the daunting task of balancing which should have priority, as I have noted in the past. That’s why we hire them. It’s not easy work.
Our system of government itself is the product of a vast number of compromises, and it has compromise baked into it. Any system of diffuse power, with checks and balances, is going to require compromise to function. That’s why things are so dysfunctional now. When we send people to Washington and Richmond who refuse to compromise on any issue they think is related to a core principle, and they proceed to define core principles so widely that everything becomes a principle, of course nothing gets done.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t take issue with some of Shak’s history. He claims a few things that just don’t stand up to scrutiny. “The Republican Party was born refusing to compromise on slavery,” he writes, saying that “there is no compromise on the principle of freedom, so there is no compromise on the issue of slavery.” That’s just not true. Slavery’s legality in the first place was the result of compromise, and Federalists, Whigs and later Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, went out of their way to compromise on the issue to avoid a civil war. The war itself only happened after every Northern attempt at compromise, including the proposal of a 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery remained legal in the states it existed in exchange for no slavery in future territories, had failed. Even throughout the war, Lincoln was willing to compromise on slavery to restore the Union. What killed slavery wasn’t Republicans being unwilling to compromise on the principle of freedom, it was the South being unwilling to compromise on their desire to subjugate and oppress their fellow man. His other historical points are just as flawed.
I also have to say that it strikes me as odd that a retired Air Force Colonel and combat pilot would write “If the principle is all human life is precious, then compromises can’t be made to kill when life is inconvenient.” I know he’s talking about abortion, but he could just as easily be talking about war.
The Republican Creed expresses the principles that Virginia Republicans all accept. But not everybody is a Republican and not everybody accepts our principles. Sometimes to get the Democrats to accept our principles, we need to accept theirs. Compromise is the vehicle to do that.
If you can’t do that, or you’re unwilling to do that, politics is not the business for you.
