(Host) Maine Senator Olympia Snowe recently announced that she’s retiring because she’s fed up with political gridlock. Commentator
Vic Henningsen is a teacher and historian who says that this news
reminds him that American political discourse has always been pretty
bad.
(Henningsen) Supposedly, compromise is what Americans do
best. We’re told that agreement by mutual concession is the most
reliable way we’ve managed to resolve irreconcilable political
differences. Compromises in 1787 gave us a Constitution and a federal
union. Nineteenth century compromises saved the union and, as one
historian noted, "When compromise broke down, the Union broke up." The
Civil War offered final proof that the alternative to compromise is
chaos and carnage, a lesson that has guided us ever since.
On
the other hand, it’s possible to see today’s divisiveness as evidence of
a consistent thread in American political life and the intransigence of
the two major parties as intelligent political behavior. After all,
were those earlier compromises really compromises?
The short
answer is "No". Blackmail at the Constitutional Convention caused the
famous "Great Compromise" when smaller states threatened to bolt the
convention if they weren’t protected by equal representation. That’s how
we got proportional representation in the House and equal
representation of states in the Senate. Desperate to gain a Union,
delegates wrote protections of slavery into the Constitution because
Georgia and South Carolina threatened to leave if they didn’t. These
weren’t mutual agreements but concessions made because of intimidation.
They may have looked like compromises, but they weren’t.
And
what about the famous Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a
free state in return for a tougher Fugitive Slave Act? Sure looks like a
standard horse-trade until you learn that each measure was voted
separately, with different majorities. No mutual concession, no shared
ownership of the result, hence no real compromise.
Even the
infamous "Compromise of 1877", wasn’t as much of a mutual exchange as it
first appeared. As inauguration day neared without a declared winner of
the 1876 election, political and economic chaos loomed. This forced
both sides to give Rutherford B. Hayes a presidency he didn’t win at the
polls in return for a promise that he wouldn’t enforce civil rights in
the South.
Then there’s last summer’s debt-limit deal, in which
President Obama accepted deep spending cuts but Republicans blocked any
tax increase. Obama caved because the nation risked economic catastrophe
if it could no longer borrow to pay its debts – a possibility
Republicans claimed to be willing to risk. The deal was called a
"compromise", but it really wasn’t because there was no mutual
concession.
In fact, for most of our history, political
compromise has been, as historian Julie Doar has written, "a problem
masquerading as a solution". At best compromise is effective in the
short term, cobbling over immediate disagreements. Far from resolving
irreconcilable differences; it mostly postpones resolution, which tends
to make things worse.
So it may be that our cherished belief in a
past in which compromise saved the day isn’t true. Today’s inability to
resolve major issues by mutual concession; our on-going game of
political "Chicken"; and settlement by short-term postponement, are, in
many respects, business as usual.