gracchusdixit

One week ago, the nation was riveted by a spectacle we have not seen in decades: a televised political event so compelling that it shot straight to the top of the Nielsen ratings.  More than 20 million Americans watched the Senate hearing, in which Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, squared off against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of attempted rape when they were prep school students more than 30 years ago.  While Dr. Ford’s testimony seemed to many to be, not only credible, but heartfelt and humble, Kavanaugh’s riposte was angry, bitter, and ferocious.   

Although he did not assail Dr. Ford directly—given the era in which we live, he did not dare—Kavanaugh turned his wrath against everyone else, proclaiming himself to be the innocent victim of a “left-wing conspiracy,” designed to derail his nomination and destroy his personal honor.  Whatever else you may think of Kavanaugh, you have to give him credit for putting on quite a show—a show that was promptly cheered by those on the political right, not only by the Republican Senators in the room, who promptly sprang to his defense, but also by the White House and Donald Trump.   

Several hours later, however, as the Senate Judiciary Committee was about to vote, Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona had a change of heart.  He rose from his chair and began to leave the committee room, motioning for his friend and trusted colleague, Chris Coons, a Democratic Senator from Delaware, to join him.  They disappeared for the better part of an hour, during which the other Republican members of the Judiciary Committee sat stone-faced, twiddling their thumbs.  When the two eventually returned, Flake quietly but firmly stated that he was prepared to support Kavanaugh’s nomination, only if the FBI was allowed to conduct an investigation of the charges of sexual misconduct that had been leveled against him.  The silence in the room was, as the old cliché goes, deafening.

Flake and Coons were immediately heralded for their civility, their readiness to compromise, and their ability to “hear one another,” despite ideological differences.  One, rather hyperbolic cable news commentator even called them “heroic”.  This episode was held up as an iconic example of the sort of collegiality that once supposedly characterized our governing institutions but has been swept away by a whirlwind of corrosive partisanship.

There are two problems with this narrative.  

First, it ignores history.  Far from being unusual, political partisanship has been with us from the very beginning of our republic.  

Second, it treats the qualities of collegiality and compromise as ends that are noble in themselves rather than purely instrumental means to a greater end.  Compromise and conciliation are not “moral virtues”.  They are merely one way of achieving a moral result.  If they fail in that purpose, they have no more value than a hammer that cannot hit a nail.  

In the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain fervently believed that conciliation could appease Hitler and avert a second World War.  Events proved him wrong—tragically so. At the time, however, Chamberlain was heralded as a hero, until Hitler revealed himself to be the lying monster that everyone but Chamberlain knew he was.  Within a year, it wasn’t Chamberlain’s conciliation that drew the accolades; it was Winston Churchill’s defiant belligerence.

Compromise and conciliation work only when fundamental moral values are shared and underlying facts are commonly acknowledged.  Absent these conditions, they are worse than a waste of time, they are impediments to justice.  Indeed, the most consequential moral questions are simply too important to allow for compromise.  They are either-or propositions, which can only be resolved by partisan struggle, in which one moral vision prevails over the other.

Such was the case in 1860, when the American Civil War erupted after decades of craven compromise came to a bitter and bloody end.  Conciliation was no longer possible between those who believed that all men were created equal and those who insisted that some men were disposable property, to be exploited or abused for the profit or pleasure of their masters.  The only way to settle the matter was for one side of the partisan divide to compel the other to change its ways.

Such is also the case today in, for instance, the battle between those who believe that women have a right to decide their own reproductive fates and those who hold that embryos should be immunized against that right.  There is no middle ground here, no room for a conciliatory truce between two parties with mutual good will, because the opposing moral priorities can never be reconciled, and the indeterminate facts can never be settled.  To accept that the preservation of an embryo, or even of a fetus, takes moral precedence over a woman’s freedom of choice, one must also accept that an embryo or a fetus is as much a “person” as the woman whose body it inhabits.  This is not a factual question that can be answered by science.  It is a question of definition.  A caterpillar may eventually become a butterfly.  That does not mean that we must necessarily accept caterpillars and butterflies as being one and the same.

As much as we may admire what Jeff Flake and Chris Coons did last week, we should not confuse the comforting prospect of compromise with the uncomfortable reality that many of the most important moral issues are irreconcilable except through partisan struggle.  We also must resist the temptation to view past eras of political consensus through the misty eyes of nostalgia.  

Consensus usually comes, not when our political discourse is more elevated, but, rather, when the nation at large chooses to sweep truly important questions under the rug.  Such was the case in the decades of compromise preceding the Civil War, in the Jim Crow era that followed Reconstruction, in the intoxicated 1920s, and in the soporific 1950s, when it was taken for granted that women and minorities knew their place, that even a whiff of “socialism” was the devil’s work, and that anyone who dared to question capitalism was a communist or a traitor.  It was easy then to reach consensus, because the most fundamental social, cultural, and political contradictions were simply ignored.  

That is not the sort of time we live in now.  Women are no longer content to subordinate themselves to male privilege.  African-Americans are no longer willing to settle for second-class citizenship.  Hispanic and Asian immigrants are no longer ready to accept the proposition that they are somehow less American than the white evangelical Christians who inhabit the broad, bleak “heartland”.  We live in a time of fundamental moral conflicts, and the only way to resolve them is through partisan struggle, a struggle that will inevitably be unsettling and uncomfortable.  That is as it should be.  The stakes are too high for anything else.