It has never been easy to be a moderate in America; our two-party system is set up against people who are in the middle. But the difficulty of being a moderate has greatly
increased in the past 20 years, and this trend worries me.
We’ve had polarization of outlooks from the getgo; the loyalists wanted to stay with Britain, the revolutionaries wanted to form America.
But once general Americans (i.e. moderates) sided with the revolutionaries instead of the loyalists, the American revolution got going (and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” then as now, resonated with the average American citizen).
Once it became time to write the Constitution, there was conflict in many areas. States’ rights, slavery — it’s all fifthgrade American history now. But current Democrats and Republicans seem to have forgotten that the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Great Compromise were two of the most important moments of the Constitutional Convention. We wouldn’t even have a country without compromise.
Once the founders got past the whole loyalist vs. revolutionary thing, they realized they had to work together or they were all going to get killed individually. Their loyalties to their
states were not forgotten, but instead compromised, for the better good.
It saddens me that Americans have fallen so far from the celebration of compromise, that “compromise” has an almost entirely negative connotation in our culture.
“Don’t compromise your morals!” “This mission has been compromised!” These are familiar statements. The word compromise has been associated with “weakness” in a terrible way. It’s not weakness. It’s diplomacy.
It’s strategy. It’s a necessity.
This is due heavily to spy movies, for the second sentence and the polarization of the culture. While the biases of various news networks are the most obvious display of polarization, I don’t fault the media. They only show what people will watch. If nobody watched the polarized media, media would shift back to actually reporting in an unbiased way. But unbiased news is boring. We don’t like boring.
This polarization of culture is damaging to America. Instead of being able to come up with solutions in which one party gets some things and the other party gets other things with neither getting all of what they want, the party in power jerks around the minority party for as long as it can, knowing that it will eventually get jerked around when it becomes the minority. Instead of taking some losses while in power to ensure that they have some gains while not in power, they just take everything they can get while they’re in power.
This caused, is causing and will continue to cause a stalemate in America. If we don’t remember how to compromise, then we’re going to have a long period of Democrat action replaced by subsequent Republican action, which is then nullified by more Democrat action. The country will never go anywhere and will never be as prosperous as it could be.
It is a good thing not to have rock-solid beliefs on everything. It allows compromise, which is pretty much the only thing separating this country from tyranny, monarchies, despotism and oppressive ideologies.
Unfortunately, it seems that oppressive ideologies seem to be taking over American politics, and moderates have no place in that system. I hope that we re-learn to compromise so we don’t have to work backward down the list.
-Stephen Carradini is a professional writing junior.
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T_Money 3 years ago
Your argument is extremely weak and it starts from the beginning. The Revolutionary War is a prime example of not compromising our principles. A small minority of people realized that revolution was necessary to protect our rights as people. What you fail to realize is that it was a propaganda war that convinced enough people in the middle to accept revolution. There was no compromise. How can there be a compromise between revolting against Britain and not revolting against Britain? Terrible start to an article about compromise.
Another glaring weakness is the mechanism for this compromise. This always entails interventionism which is not a neutral process. Some are thrilled that our country is not extremely socialist or extremely capitalist. We put restraints on the free market because compromise is good and more desirable than following a complete ideology. The major problem with this thinking is that compromise is more detrimental to capitalistic ideology than socialist ideology. Government interventionism is anti-capitalism and is welcomed by socialism and communism. So in effect with compromise you just get a milder form of socialism. When the government intervenes in the market by the guise of compromise it actually isn’t compromising between the two ideologies. It is de facto accepting the interventionist tenet of socialism and communism.
It would have been nice if you could comprehend the anti-compromising position the Founding Fathers took when they revolted against England and applied it to our modern day politics. Compromise is the disguise of mild socialism and not the great thing it is made out to be. In some respects compromise is more dangerous than polarization because the ignorant middle cannot make the connection that compromise is not neutral and always favors bigger government. So we creep along the path to socialism because compromise is falsely believed to be the way to settle the capitalist/socialist controversy.