The Hard Truth About Political Compromise: Political Scientists Say We’re Doomed Unless We Give Our Enemies Room to Move
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On paper, America looks like a nation of political compromisers. In surveys, the vast majority of us say that we’re tired of gridlock, and that politicians ought to compromise more to get things done.
And yet, in practice, when it comes to any particular compromise—on immigration, on taxes, on health care—we’re often against it, no matter which side we’re on. We consistently vote for politicians who swear to stand by their principles no matter what, and boot compromising politicians out of office. It’s no wonder that some politicians can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge the possibility of comprising. (In 2010, when pushed to say “compromise” by the journalist Leslie Stahl, John Boehner said, “I reject the word.”)
Increasingly, this hardened attitude represents a danger to democracy and the economy. (Think of last summer’s debt-ceiling standoff—likely to be reprised this summer.) And it stems, according to two political scientists, from our failure to understand what compromise really is. In their new book, “The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It,” Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson argue that Americans have an inaccurate view of compromise. In particular, they say, we vastly underestimate the costs of rejecting it.
Nowadays, they write, we have a simplistic view of compromise. We tend to think of compromise in terms of settling for less: We want two scoops of ice cream, but settle for one. That might describe what happens when you and your spouse compromise over the size of a new television—but it doesn’t work, the authors show, when it comes to politics. Political compromise requires more than settling; it requires actually letting the other side make progress on its agenda, even if you find that agenda repugnant. Even worse, political compromises are often incoherent. A compromise on immigration, for example, might mean combining ideas that seem to work against one another, like amnesty for illegal immigrants and strict rules criminalizing illegal immigration.