Compromise vs. Common Ground

Context

The federal government is gridlocked in terms of legislating and it will very likely stay that way for a long time. One reason, probably the main reason, is that the radical right refuses to compromise. Of course, the radical right rejects that and blames the left. Politicians on the right sometimes used to refer to finding common ground as the way to get things done in the federal government. That raises the question of exactly what finding common ground means and how it works. It turns out that ground will not end gridlock.  

Biden is hosed: It is very likely that Biden will not get any period of goodwill with cooperation from the GOP in congress. The days of a legislative honeymoon with congress after a new president is sworn in are dead, gone and not coming back any time soon, if ever. Those honeymoons used to reflect a now-extinct belief in the GOP that elections have consequences if a democratic president is elected to office. That was clear after Obama’s election in 2008. What is happening now with vicious GOP attacks on the 2020 election is a matter of pounding more nails in the already sealed coffin that holds the long-dead corpse of the legislative GOP honeymoon.

Compromise vs. common ground

In a well-known 2011 interview, former House speaker John Boehner attacked and rejected compromise as a governance tool:

BOEHNER: We have to govern. That's what we were elected to do.
STAHL: But governing means compromising.

BOEHNER: It means working together.

STAHL: It also means compromising.
[ . . . ]
BOEHNER: I made clear I am not going to compromise on my principles, nor am I going to compromise . . . the will of the American people.
STAHL: And you’re saying, “I want common ground, but I’m not going to compromise.” I don’t understand that. I really don’t.
BOEHNER: When you say the word “compromise”. . . a lot of Americans look up and go, “Uh-oh, they’re going to sell me out.”
[ . . . ]
STAHL: . . . you did compromise [to get all the Bush tax cuts made permanent]?
BOEHNER: . . . we found common ground.
STAHL: Why won’t you say–you’re afraid of the word.
BOEHNER: I reject the word.

 

In October of 2011, the Washington Post wrote: “‘My message to you today is simple: faith in government has never been high, but it doesn’t have to be this low,’ Boehner said, according to his prepared remarks. ‘The American people need to see that despite our differences, we can get things done. We can start by recognizing that ‘common ground’ and ‘compromise’ are not the same thing.’” 

It was clear that by 2011, if not earlier,[1] the radical right had rejected compromise as a legitimate tool of democratic governance. The radical right sleight of hand called finding common ground meant no compromising, which was the real goal. And, now in 2020, the radical right usually does not even pretend to worry about compromise, finding common ground or whatever other euphemism it might come up with to deflect from its central role as being the core source of partisan obstructionism.[2]

Arguably, the GOP no longer governs mostly in the name of the public interest, the will of the people or the rule of law. It rules mostly in the name of party and the special interests who financially support it. 

What else is there?

Given the seriousness of the compromise and gridlock problems, and they are gravely serious, what else has been said about compromise and common ground in politics? 

One source, the Common Ground Committee, discussed the merits of finding common ground at length (transcript, podcast). One useful suggestion was to look for smaller issues or nuance where there is bipartisan agreement in bigger divisive issues such as healthcare or immigration. That constitutes common ground, but it offers no insight into how to reach compromise on bigger issues. 

Another source argues that finding common ground is sometimes useful, but more often it’s an impediment to compromise. It can get in the way of facing the difficulty and cognitive dissonance of actual compromise. 

“Where common ground agreements can be found, they can in fact serve the common good. But they are not the only – or even the most productive–way to pursue that goal. The classic compromise – where all sides gain on balance but also sacrifice something valuable to their opponents – is a more promising route to the common good. ..... To begin to make compromise more feasible and the common good more attainable, we need to appreciate the distinctive value of compromise and recognize the misconceptions that stand in its way. A common mistake is to assume that compromise requires finding the common ground on which all can agree. That undermines more realistic efforts to seek classic compromises, in which each party gains by sacrificing something valuable to the other, and together they serve the common good by improving upon the status quo. ..... Common ground agreements are morally and politically attractive because they have a principled coherence from all perspectives. ..... Consensus on common ground is desirable if it can be found. But the common ground is more barren, its potential for yielding meaningful legislation more limited, than the inspiring rhetoric in its favor might suggest. ..... Another problem with common ground agreements is that trying to find the usually small points of policy convergence is likely to prove less effective in addressing major issues than combining big ideas from the partisans. 

The most serious problem with the preoccupation with the common ground is that it undermines the pursuit of the more challenging but more promising form of agreement: the classic compromise. In a classic compromise, all sides sacrifice something in order to improve on the status quo from their perspective. The sacrifices accepted in a classic compromise are at least partly determined by the opposing side’s will, and they therefore require parties not merely to get less than they want, but also, due to their opponents, to get less than they think they deserve. ..... Classic compromises serve the common good not only by improving on the status quo from the agreeing parties’ particular perspectives, but also by contributing to a robust democratic process. ..... So if compromise is to be achieved on these major issues, we must value agreements that are less morally coherent and less politically appealing than those that rest on common ground or an overlapping consensus.” (emphasis added)

That argues that finding common ground is usually not as good as compromise. Instead, it  can be a means to avoid actual compromise and maybe for at least some people, creating a false appearance of getting something significant done. That source argues that governance by common ground is a utopian mirage. Unfortunately, real compromise generally creates moral dissonance, leaving compromises open to criticisms of confusion, political treason and surrender. Moralization and attendant weaponization of politics and political issues (discussed here), e.g., the pandemic, helps make compromise more difficult. 

Morally weaponized politics is what the radical right intends. That works to its advantage because it is easier to stop government by fomenting the moral dissonance that compromise creates than it is to get something done by government. The radical right hates government. It hates a functioning government. It tries to break government so it won’t compromise and thus won’t work .

Again, Biden is hosed.

Footnotes: 

1. It was clear that by early in 2009, prompted by the election of Obama, radical right elites decided they were done with compromise. They decided that all-out opposition, no cooperation and no compromise with any democrat, including Obama, was the best strategy for the GOP going forward. That remains true today. When bills passes congress today, it is because the subject matter does not trigger intense radical right resistance or because failure to pass the bill would probably hurt the radical right too much. In 2011 Boehner was still blithering and deceiving about finding common ground, because the radical right (i) believed its rank and file still had some feeling that compromise was at least occasionally necessary, and (ii) did not want to appear obstructionist. With the exception of bills to avoid shutting the government down or defaulting on the mostly GOP federal debt, such qualms are now generally gone. 

2. The trend goes back even farther than 2009. At one time, compromise was considered a virtuous outcome. Today, the radical right and its endless dark free speech regard it as treason. Politico wrote this in 2011 about how the Senate had become dysfunctional by the late 1990s:

Today we have an increasing tendency to approach every task — and each other — in an ever more adversarial spirit. Nowhere is this more evident, or more destructive, than in the Senate.

Though the two-party system is oppositional by nature, there is plenty of evidence that a certain (yes) comity has been replaced by growing enmity. We don’t have to look as far back as [Henry] Clay for evidence. In 1996, for example, an unprecedented 14 incumbent senators announced that they would not seek reelection. And many, in farewell essays, described an increase in vituperation and partisanship that made it impossible to do the work of the Senate.

“The bipartisanship that is so crucial to the operation of Congress,” Howell Heflin of Alabama wrote, “especially the Senate, has been abandoned.” J. James Exon of Nebraska described an “ever-increasing vicious polarization of the electorate” that had “all but swept aside the former preponderance of reasonable discussion.”

 

Regarding Republican Motivated Reasoning: A Moral Question

Did Jane get it right? 

Or is she talking more about hypocrisy than morality, or about both ~equally?

When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country. -- Noah Webster

Motivated reasoning: Emotionally-biased reasoning that produces desired justifications or decisions, but not necessarily ones that accurately reflect the evidence or sound reasoning; motivated reasoning is conscious and leads to reduced cognitive dissonance, which is discomforting for most people; it reflects the tendency to find facts or arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe; in politics this often happens even when the facts or arguments are false or flawed, i.e., when truths are inconvenient

Context

Multiple sources are reporting that ongoing efforts to overturn the 2020 election is nonsense. The reporting is getting more pointed and critical. For example, the New york Times writes:

“The telephone call would have been laugh-out-loud ridiculous if it had not been so serious. When Tina Barton picked up, she found someone from President Trump’s campaign asking her to sign a letter raising doubts about the results of the election.

The election that Ms. Barton as the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills had helped oversee. The election that she knew to be fair and accurate because she had helped make it so. The election that she had publicly defended amid threats that made her upgrade her home security system.

“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the campaign official.

Evidently not.

If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Mr. Trump’s fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Mr. Trump fell behind on Nov. 3.”

CNN interviewed Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) this morning about the president’s and GOP ongoing attacks on the election. In response, Blunt offered the standard radical right motivated reasoning to deflect and weasel out of giving direct answers. The interviewer (Dana Bash) tried hard to pin him down, but he was unpinnable and weaseled out. What little substance Blunt did offer was a combination of deflection and motivated reasoning. One source commented on the interview: 

“‘The President wants to see this process play out,’ Mr Blunt said. ‘The president-elect technically has to be elected president by the electors. That happens in the middle of December,’ the senator said, referring to the electoral college that is chosen to represent each state based on the results of its popular vote.”

Other major republican politicians have repeatedly defended the numerous verbal and court case attacks on the 2020 election in the name of massive voter fraud. That is a lie the republicans and president falsely claim to undermine the election and generate unwarranted but intense distrust amone rank and file republicans in both the election result and Biden’s legitimacy.

The moral question

The president and republican leadership have the right to continue to (i) lie about the election being seriously fraudulent or flawed, and (ii) undermine its and thus Biden’s legitimacy. Among other bad things, these tactics damage democracy, polarizes the republican rank and file and generates unwarranted distrust in elections and fellow citizens. Doing this is legal. But is it moral?

For people who believe that the ends justify means, including deceitful, divisive means like this, what the GOP leadership and president are doing is justified and thus morally acceptable. But that reasoning appears to be persuasive with only about 35-40% of adult Americans. Republicans do this dirty work in the name of party, tribe or some other ideal or political goal and that is good enough. 

For people who believe it is not justified to use deceit or to foment social division to create false beliefs, these tactics can reasonably be seen as immoral. 

Is there a different or better way to analyze this moral question? For example, does it matter that decades of relentless radical right propaganda smearing liberalism, democrats and the democratic party has created a false image of evil and corruption among some or most republicans and significant numbers of independents? Or is the rhetoric from the right basically accurate and thus deceit and social polarization, distrust and discord are acceptable collateral damage in politics?  Or, is morality not even a relevant concern, e.g., because morals are personal and subjective?

HOW TO SPELL S.U.C.K.E.R !!

 

Trump supporter who gave $2.5m to fight election fraud wants money back

Businessman Fredric Eshelman sues pro-Trump ‘election ethics’ group citing ‘disappointing results’ of effort to expose cheating

A Donald Trump supporter who donated $2.5m to help expose and prosecute claims of fraud in the presidential election wants his money back after what he says are “disappointing results”.

Fredric Eshelman, a businessman from North Carolina, said he gave the money to True the Vote, a pro-Trump “election ethics” group in Texas that promised to file lawsuits in seven swing states as part of its push to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election”.

But according to a lawsuit Eshelman filed this week in Houston, first reported by Bloomberg, True the Vote dropped its legal actions and discontinued its Validate the Vote 2020 campaign, then refused to return his calls when he demanded an explanation.

Trump 'voter fraud hotline' inundated by prank calls

Read more

The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, a venture capital company, said he asked “regularly and repeatedly” for updates, the lawsuit asserts, but that his “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises”.

The lack of success of True the Vote’s efforts to challenge the outcome appears to mirror that of the president himself, whose team has lost 38 court actions since the 3 November election, most recently in Pennsylvania where a federal appeals court panel blasted Trump’s legal team for filing a case with no merit.

True the Vote did not immediately return an email from the Guardian seeking comment. True the Vote did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment, but posted a statement on its website, attributed to the group’s founder and president, Catherine Engelbrecht, seeking to blame outside forces for the failure of its efforts.

“While we stand by the voters’ testimony that was brought forth, barriers to advancing our arguments, coupled with constraints on time, made it necessary for us to pursue a different path,” the group said, announcing that it had withdrawn legal filings in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All four states were won by Joe Biden, the Democratic president-elect.

“Our mission is much bigger than just one election. It is about repairing the system for all future elections,” it continued.

Like the Trump campaign’s own legal filings, which have been based on scant evidence, however, the True the Vote statement did not detail any of the proof it claimed it had to support the allegations of election fraud.

Eshelman, the former chief executive of a pharmaceutical company, claims in his lawsuit that the non-profit offered to refund him $1m if he would drop his plan to sue the group. He is seeking the return of the full $2.5m that he says he wired on Engelbrecht’s instructions in chunks of $2m and $500,000 on 5 and 13 November.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/28/trump-donor-election-fraud-sues-money-back

How to "fix" politics...

In response to Germaine’s OP, I have been brainstorming (with myself) about what it would take to fix our toxic U.S. politics.  I’m thinking, the only way to fix the whole is to identify and fix the constituent parts.  We can’t expect the machine to run smoothly on flawed parts.  So what are the (faulty) parts?  I can think of some.

I just knocked out this list below and, granted, it’s far from polished.  But what do you think?  What is wrong with my (pie-in-the-sky?) suggestions, when it comes to the problems associated with politics, here in the U.S.?  

Give your own solutions to the cited problems.  Feel free to add to, or correct, my ad hoc list.  Thanks!

And thanks for recommending.

Craziest gerrymandering
 

The President's Toxic Legacy

Is the president an elitist?

Troye described one COVID-19 task-force meeting in which she said the president — a known germophobe — remarked that the pandemic might be a "good thing" because it prevented him from having to shake hands with "disgusting people." -- Business Insider, Sept. 17, 2020

Building the authoritarian radical GOP deep state

A Washington Post article describes an effort the president is making to enable mass firings of federal employees he deems to have been disloyal. If he succeeds, they will be fired for being ‘underperformers’ or agents of the deep state. Fortunately, Biden can undo most of the damage by executive action because the damage is being done be executive action. Also, since the employee protections were put in place by congress, a lawsuit claims that the apparently intended mass firings are illegal. WaPo writes:

“The outgoing Trump administration is racing to enact the biggest change to the federal civil service in generations, reclassifying career employees at key agencies to strip their job protections and leave them open to being fired before Joe Biden takes office.

The move to pull off an executive order the president issued less than two weeks before Election Day — affecting tens of thousands of people in policy roles — is accelerating at the agency closest to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget.

By fast-tracking a process that gave agencies until Jan. 19 to identify affected jobs, the administration appears to be signaling its intent to leave as big an imprint as possible on a workforce it has long mistrusted. Democrats on Capitol Hill are trying to block the effort.

The executive order has a flip side, too. The administration could use it to assign current political appointees to the new personnel category, giving them a more permanent status than they currently have — although Biden could easily fire them.”

In other words, a new GOP precedent is the building of a true deep state by demanding federal employees be loyal to the president before being loyal to the constitution, the law, the public interest or truth. At present, those values are above loyalty to the president. What we had is, more or less, the opposite of a deep state. What the president wants is the epitome of a deep state. And, by its acquiescence the GOP leadership accepts this apparent new normal. It is now fair to call the GOP leadership the head of a deep state, radical right Christian nationalist ideology. Most rank and file republicans would not see it that way, but that's what it is.

Before the 2016 election, a few observers predicted that such back and forth changes seemed to be inevitable when a president from the other party came to power after an election. The first president would be reversed as much as possible by a new president in the other party. The ping-pong game of doing and undoing would go on for as long as the two-party system remains hyper-partisan, broken and paralyzed like it is now.

Reinforcing the radical right mirage and hypocrisy of concern for the little guy 

Political theorist Hannah Arendt was familiar with the demagogue dictator propaganda tactic of lying so outrageously and often that people started to believe the lies. The main ‘rationale’ for the phenomenon is purely human: No one could possibly make up such incredible whoppers, so they had to be true. 

The GOP is now fully engaging with this toxic tactic. Demagogues, dictators and totalitarians of the past have used it with great but lethal success. Packaged with the toxicity is blatant hypocrisy.  The WaPo writes on the latest whooper:

“President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself ‘Middle Class Joe.’

While Trump’s populism often manifested in style rather than substance, he was able to appeal to a unique coalition of voters that politicians from both parties are now aiming to capture in a post-Trump era, said Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

‘It’s this us-versus-them mentality — a belief system that there’s a real America, and we’re the only party fighting for it,’ Walter said. ‘I think that’s where Trump was the most successful, and I don’t know how well anyone else is going to be able to do that.’

‘Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,’ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. ‘I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.’”

Elitist president recently playing golf as he quite often does

(since inauguration, at least 145 golf outings, most recently Nov. 26, 2020; 

total taxpayer cost to date: ~$142 million)

Apparently, Rubio forgot that the GOP was fully on board with ‘normal’ policies that left us dependent on China.’ He helped get us here.  Rubio himself wanted more trade with China and he supported the TTP multilateral trade agreement before he was against them. Not surprisingly, he is a lying hypocrite about this, just like most of the rest of the GOP leadership.

This hypocritical elitism criticism is purely hyper-partisan GOP dark free speech intended to deceive and further polarize the American people. The GOP never complained about the millionaires, billionaires, lobbyists and ethically challenged and conflicted business executive elites he larded his incompetent, corrupt administration with and/or took his orders from. 

Conclusion

Both matters discussed here point to the same thing. Hyper-partisanship, polarization and partisan distrust and intolerance are not going to go away. Neither is the contempt for truth and sound reasoning the authoritarian radical right GOP has to rely on to keep from being swept away by natural demographic and social change. In its deep immorality, the radical right will continue to poison American society and the minds of tens of millions of Americans. This does not bode well for the health of democracy, the rule of law, truth or social healing. What, if anything, can snap the GOP leadership out of the toxic authoritarian hold that the president and ruthless radical right ideology has trapped it in?