The Liberal Patriot

The Failure of Compromise-The Anathema of Our Democracy

J.G. Schwam - January 23, 2006

The late great civil war historian Shelby Foote said in the first episode of Ken Burns documentary on the US Civil War regarding the basest cause of the war that: “we failed to do the thing we have a true genius for, compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising but it’s the basis of our democracy, our government is founded on it; it failed.”

During the Civil War our nation was polarized by a debate on disparate sides of a single ideological issue, slavery. There both similarities and dissimilarities we can draw today in a nation again polarized along ideological and sociological lines, on many issues.

Underlying the ideological issue of slavery was the matter that one fourth of those living in the states had no right to self determination under the law. The rights and the guaranteed protection of those rights under law and of the US Constitution were simply not granted to the enslaved. It is this issue that drove opposition to slavery out of the insular camps the theocrats and moralists of the day and into the daylight, that engaged the common man in the North to bring the issue to the political fore that ultimately led the nation to war on the matter.

The parallel of the 36^th US Congress of 1860 and many of its predecessors and today’s 109^th Congress is in the unwillingness of both to compromise towards a joint agreement between parties on the divisive issues of the day. But is the lack of willingness to compromise today on issues borne solely of ideological divisions between the political parties? Was it solely ideological in the 1850’s and 1860? I do not believe it was. The aims of the 106th congress of today are a much to preserve and protect economic interests of dubious viability at the expense or dismissal of basic morality as was the southern states caucus as is the Republican caucus of today.

The debate in congress as presented by the south in favor of slavery was purely based on the economic necessity of slavery, a necessity on which its economy was based. As the plantation system grew huge it was evident that the model of its perpetuation based on huge numbers of slaves was grossly inefficient. The north knowing this cared not for this argument. It saw the issue as entirely moral.

Enter the Corporato-cratic economic ideology of the GOP of today. Their political goals appear to be based in the same belief that a change away from inefficient unsustainable business models is too painful. Their actions in favor of the stripping away of regulations and taxation on industries too inefficient or economically unsustainable to operate within in a structure of morality structure that is socially acceptable to the majority. A structure that must be preserved by political means, despite the un-tenability of the social and moral methodologies under which it operates.

And so like the members of the 36^th Congress they attempt today, to lessen or deny the rights of those that labor for their corporate masters of today or the legal masters of the antebellum economy. And in doing so the Republican Caucus of today’s 106^th Congress exhibits the same stalwart stubbornness to preserve an untenable system that the members of the 36^th Congress from southern slave states did prior to the civil war. The political system of that era denied, by virtue of slavery representation to one fourth of the population of the nation. Today by virtue of corruption and an ostrich like attitude toward an economic system that increasing throwing desperate warning shot across the nations bow and an unwillingness to address the pressing economic issues that at least one fourth or more people demand, they are rapidly cruising our nation into another profound crisis, again borne of a failure of compromise.

Let us heed Shelby Foote’s wise analysis of the root cause of the greatest conflict of ideas and values our nation has ever know, the Civil War. Let us not drive our nation into another crisis of equal proportion, either economic or social by simply being too stalwart to see the demands of the scrolls of change bearing down upon us, before it is too late. Too late for the brilliant lesson of compromise, a lesson that built and preserved a great nation, a nation of equals among the different. Without compromise we will as we did then and as we are doing today, tear our nation apart.

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