Premise: I submit that, as a matter of logic, there is no long-term virtue inherent in compromise of itself.
(Oh, man, I can hear the word processors warming up in response, already!)
The virtue, if a compromise contains any at all, depends utterly on what values are being given up, versus what may be gained by such compromise, over the long term. In other words, for there to be a virtue in a compromise, the outcome of that compromise must be a net value gain, and this must be measured not in the short term, but over time.
Edmund Burke held that "All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
In truth, however, and over time, the opposite has ended up being true,
Look around. Want to know why we are now so divided as a country today? It’s because we have been victims for far too long of ill-advised compromises born of trying to go along to get along. We have found ourselves, out of a twisted sense of fairness, being forced to compromise our principles for the sake of expedience.
Am I suggesting we should never compromise on any issue?
Of course not, but let’s keep some sanity, some logic in the process. It is essential to sanity that we understand when compromise is appropriate and when it isn't. There's a difference between compromising on preferences (The color of your car, when to do a trip to the store, what restaurant to go to on your date night, etc) and compromising on principles. (Individual freedom, theft is wrong, murder is wrong, etc.) Compromises in the short term on such matters end up in disaster in the longer term.
Allow me to illustrate how compromise gets out of control, and how it's BEEN getting out of control for over a century here in these not-so United States: Let’s imagine that we have two arbitrary points on the ends of an imaginary line. You’re standing on one of them. Let’s further imagine that you move halfway to the other point.
Then, you move halfway between you and the other point.
Then, you move halfway between you and the other point.
Then, you move halfway between you and the other point.
Then, you move halfway between you and the other point.
And so on.
While you never actually get to the other point, each compromise of your position means meeting the other position halfway, so you are always and inexorably moving closer to the other point. Eventually, you are so close to the other point that it’s hard to distinguish that you’re not there. You’ll never actually reach that other point, of course, but in practical terms, you’re there, eventually.
Now, the point you were standing on when this exercise started is the group of assumptions and values that our culture and, in turn, our country was founded on, values enshrined in the constitution, and in the other documents of the day; these are the things our founders believed, and fought and died for. The founders were, if nothing else, individualists, and firmly believed that government is an evil that needs to be controlled, limited, and reined in. A necessary one, but an evil nonetheless. The Constitution was designed with that need in mind. Keep in mind that at the point where these documents were written and signed, they'd just fought a war against what was at the time considered a vastly superior and intractable force, run by a distant and increasingly powerful government. They understood well the evils in that situation and mostly lost everything in the resulting fight.
Now, let’s imagine that at the opposite point, the point you've been moving toward, you have a group of people interested in moving us away from the values of those founders, who, among other things, believe that government should be involved in every aspect of our lives, always, and that all the really important decisions about our lives and how we interact with one another are rightfully the place of a huge, distant government.
If we compromise with such people (just so we can get things done, you understand, go along to get along type things), we move halfway toward the point of view of those who want to move us away from the values our country was founded on. At every opportunity, we’re preached at by those people and sometimes by those claiming to value the founders and their vision, about the value of “Compromise." And so we, as conservatives, are forced by this narrative into meeting the left halfway.
Now, let’s stretch this out over a period of years, decades, in fact, from the time of, say, Woodrow Wilson, himself a big government type, whose wife took over his elected position due to his incapacity. (Sound familiar?)
We have had many disputes come to the fore over that time frame, and each time we have been forced to compromise. Each time, the distance between us and what they had left is halved. Eventually, it gets to a point where your position is indistinguishable from that of the hard left. A glaring example would be Mitt Romney, who claimed to be a conservative, offering a government-run healthcare system for Massachusetts, a thing so close to what the socialist left wants for the whole country that Barack Obama, in creating Obamacare, had to credit Romney for huge parts of what was billed as the ACA. (Affordable Care Act? You’re kidding, right?) The so-called ACA is, of course, just one example of what we face.
I hear you saying.. “But wait, don’t they have to come halfway too?” You would think so in a fair world… but since when has the world or the left ever been fair? More specifically, when has the left ever compromised, when measured over the long term? When have we seen an agreement that results in a motion away from the left instead of toward it? The best conservatives have been able to hope for for over a century now is the status quo, which itself is unsustainable, in large part.
Far from 'meeting in the middle', as you might expect in a fair world, the fact is that we have been moving steadily left since Wilsonian times, always and invariably away from the founders' vision. It is now to the point where our founders would hardly recognize the government they created and would be calling for a revolution. When observed as a whole, each individual compromise of our original values, our principles, seemed in the short term to be a win-win situation, but eventually, after a string of such compromises, it turns into a flaming disaster.
I am not suggesting anything so rash as another revolution. The left certainly is. Not in words, perhaps (Although that is often the case), but in deeds.
I point out that we have now come to the part in our hypothetical that any slowing of the overall slow movement to the left is often reacted to in a violent manner. I suggest that such violence takes on the form of assassinations (and attempted assassinations), mass shootings of innocents, large protest marches, and government shutdown fights, such as the most recent Schumer shutdown.
It is time for us to reckon with all this and regard our principles, our cultural values, as our driving force, once more. These are things that we should never compromise, that we never should have compromised. The "progressives" have been playing the long game. It is time we learn the rules of that game.
