When I was in high school, I heard it asked about someone if he might become a politician one day. “Oh no,” came the reply. “His moral standards are too high – he would never compromise them.”
Compromising one’s principles – is that such a bad thing for a politician to do? Is there not a market for this, demanding the supply of people able and willing to do it?
The thing is that if you are a person of principle engaged in fashioning or managing a community alongside others of incongruent or even conflicting principles, what do you do?
If you rule out compromising your principles, then you become an ideologue. You insist that those who disagree with you do what you refuse to do. And yet you will view all those who fail to adopt – or at least to submit to – your principles as your foes. Willingness to compromise with you, rather than as evidence of agreeableness, is viewed as a despicable sign of duplicity – an attempt to undermine, gain purchase, and then to ultimately overthrow your regime of virtue.
Should you, however, fail to impose the despotism of your ideals on others – then it’s off to the hills for you, where you wage war on your enemies from the political wilderness. One way or another, whether in domination or insurrection, with you it’s going to come down to guns, power, and suppression.
But those politicians, they will compromise. Maybe they just don’t care as much as you. Or, maybe they see a higher, joint goal of sufficient value to persuade them – all of them, on each side of the issues in dispute – to hold their noses, make the best deal they can, and keep their communal interests viable.
This sometimes takes a kind of discipline, stamina, and focus that can be stunning, and much more productive, powerful, and enduring than anything rendered by the wild-eyed fanatics in the mountains.
The people who fashioned the Constitution of the United States 221 years ago were such politicians as these. They expended tremendous energy and sacrifice to keep alive an experiment that was universally agreed to be of surpassing immediate and historic import.
These efforts included the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise. It was an overtly cynical play by one side for political power. By the other, it was a reprehensible agreement to a staggeringly immoral demand.
But at the same time it was a breathtakingly inspired act. It helped enable the creation of a society that represented a turning point in history, a generator of incalculable good for its own people and, it must be said, an inspiration to the world.
And now, that nation has elected as its 44th president a man of the very race that was the subject of that compromise. Had ideologues, rather than politicians, sat at the Constitutional Convention then, we would not have this politician soon swearing to preserve and protect the internationally renowned document – scars and all – that it produced.
We never know precisely how such compromises and choices will turn out, but we are fortunate to have the freedom to make them, and the politicians to help us broker the process.
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