This is where we've come to in our noble "experiment in democracy" from 1789 to The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand and Sixteen...
From
The Federalist Papers to
The Art Of The Deal...
Not exactly oaring in the right direction from an intellectual-evolution point of view....
I disagree with those (like Sue) who seem to think that our system suffers from a paucity of influence from radical ideas, and that embracing those ideas would somehow right the ship...
I think
the exact opposite is our problem....
The center is not holding...
What this country needs right now more than anything else
isn't an influx of notions about "alternative systems of social, political and economic organization" ...
That's pretty much the
last thing we need...
What this country needs more than anything else is a return to "the sensible center"....
We need to get
out of our respective ideological corners, and understand that "compromise" rather than being a dirty word or a repulsive concept, is in fact the fundamental foundation upon which our Republic is based...
Anyone who runs for
any office on the platform, "elect me and I won't compromise" should be hooted down, scorned, ridiculed, and driven out of the race, left or right... They should receive
no more serious consideration than someone running on the "The Moon Landing Never Happened" platform...
And we also need to once again embrace a
proper understanding of what "compromise" means...
In recent years over and over again I have heard from Obama and Republican leaders in Congress, (who like John Boehner certainly knew better) define "compromise" as "doing those things we can all agree on"....
Compromise is
NOT about doing those things "we can all agree on"...
It's about reaching arrangements and decisions on things we
don't all agree on...
It's about "I give you something that I think is a bad idea, in exchange for you giving me something that
you think is a bad idea"...
And as Don Barzini said, "there will be the peace"...
And the process works
best when both sides believe they are getting more "good" than the "bad" they are accepting in exchange...
This is not a particularly complicated concept, and it certainly isn't a novel idea...
It's how our government functioned for many
many years...
And we need to get back to that, to make our government even
minimally functional again...
