Money v. Moderation

A number of posts have discussed compromise and polarization.

John Farmer, Jr. at The Messenger:

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.

Compromise of 1850

The original idea was to do an omnibus bill, and give the southern pro-slavery and northern anti-slavery factions each some benefits, hoping everyone would vote for the whole package.

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 30, 2018

But the package never passed as an omnibus. As it turned out, many members cared more about preventing things they didn’t want than they did about getting things they did want. So there was little enthusiasm for the deal.

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 30, 2018

The trick to making the Compromise of 1850 work was the realization (by Douglas and others) that there was a small contingent that *did* like the compromise. Therefore, if you split the bill into its individual parts, those compromisers could vote each of the large blocks.

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 30, 2018

The point being: the vast majority of the House didn’t want the compromise, or at least didn’t want to vote for it. But broken into pieces, they didn’t have to. The single bills could produce the compromise, with only very few people voting for *all* the bills.

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 30, 2018

This is important to remember, because a lot of people intuitively think omnibus bills are the essence of compromise. But that’s not always the case.

— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) June 30, 2018

Compromise and the Constitution

One reason why the government has shut down is that a number of hard-liners in the House oppose compromise.  At National Affairs, Jonathan Rauch writes:

The Constitution was designed to do many things at once. Modern conservatives who say it set limits on the power of government are correct. Modern progressives who say it created a flexible framework to promote the general welfare are also correct. Those who say it established federal supremacy are as correct as those who say it safeguarded the sovereignty of the states.

The foremost thing it does, however, is embodied in its structure, rather than its text. It forces politicians to compromise, by creating competing power centers and depriving any of them of the power to impose its will on the others. The resulting system is often referred to as one of "checks and balances," but that phrase, as William Connelly, Jr., notes in his 2010 book James Madison Rules America, fails to do justice to both the intricacy and the dynamism of the constitutional order.

The Constitution forces compromise not merely between the branches, levels, and institutions of government but also within each of them, and within each of the parties that populate them. Members of the majority party in each chamber of Congress must negotiate with one another to garner votes, and members of the minority party must negotiate with one another about whether to cooperate with the majority or obstruct it. "Factions within each party constantly fight over whether they are part of the government or part of the opposition," writes Connelly. "The majority party in Congress is not the government, nor is the minority party merely the opposition, whether under conditions of divided government or even under conditions of so-called united party government. Neither Democrats nor Republicans govern; rather, the Constitution governs."

He adds that although the Madisonian system will compel compromise, spoilers who oppose compromise can cause trouble along the way.

In particular, spoilers have three pernicious effects. First, they make it difficult for leaders to lead. If any deal that a leader brings back from negotiations is suspect precisely because it is a deal, and if any leader who brings back such a deal is likely to be accused of treason by a significant share of his base, then it will be hard for a leader either to accept or deliver on a compromise — exactly the kind of problem that has weakened House speaker John Boehner in recent years.

Second, the presence of a knot of spoilers on one side increases polarization by hardening opinion on the other side. Why compromise, after all, if you think the other side will put any concessions in its pocket and then ask for more without giving any ground? "We won't compromise because they won't" is not an unreasonable attitude. As opposing positions polarize and harden, the substantive ground for compromise shrinks, and the trust necessary to find it erodes. That, in turn, makes it harder, not easier, to make painful but important policy changes such as long-term budget restraints or entitlement reform.

Finally, either party's isolation from the political mainstream, and from the mainstream's acceptance of the give-and-take of transactional politics, is undesirable in its own right. At some point, when insurgent voices within a party become dominant (or at least disproportionately influential), that party will begin behaving less like a party and more like an interest group

On Compromise

At Commentary, Peter Wehner notes that Madison made important compromises on the Constitution and Lincoln compromised in his choice of candidates.

Madison and Lincoln were superb politicians — tactically flexible and shrewd, able to distinguish between subsidiary issues and fundamental ones, and rejecting what has been called the “seductive appeal of the absolute” in order to work for the better. Both men were hard-headed, realistic and principled. They struck a deal if, but only if, they believed it would advance the cause to which they were dedicated.

Throughout American history, the word “compromise” has been a Rorschach test. By temperament and experience, many of us are drawn to, or made uneasy by, the concept. But those predispositions need to be set aside. Compromise, after all, can’t be judged in the abstract; it can only be assessed in particular circumstances. And it’s a two-edged sword. It’s basic to self-government — but in the wrong hands, in weak hands, compromise leads to setbacks. As a general rule, the best compromises are the ones agreed to by people who are willing to walk away from them, who see them as a means instead of an end. Think of Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik.