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Political compromises – like the debt-limit deal – have never been substitutes for lasting solutions

Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino, The Conversation on

Published in Political News

The compromise to avoid default on the U.S. debt passed muster, eventually. President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pulled it off.

The nation can breathe, at least for the next two years. And yet, the far right is unhappy, many Democrats from the progressive wing are similarly annoyed, and the gnawing problem – the ballooning national debt – that is at the bottom of this compromise hasn’t gone away.

But isn’t this precisely what politics is all about? As Biden said in a formal statement on the deal, “The agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want.” And he concluded: “That’s the responsibility of governing.”

Political scientists have long pondered over this exact topic: compromises. There seems to be a quasi-consensus that good governing demands them — the more, the better.

As a historian, I’m here to make the case that compromises are rarely a lasting solution. It’s true that they buy time. Also, they may be necessary to face an emergency. But they are usually ugly, like battles or slaughterhouses. Compromises leave many spattered with blood and gore.

There’s nothing wrong with the spirit of compromise, generally speaking. As Thomas Jefferson said, experience teaches “the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together.”

 

“When we cannot do all we would wish,” Jefferson determined, we should be content in “doing what good we can.”

The flip side is that compromises, or, in Jefferson’s words, the portion of good that can be done, often add up to hastily concocted responses to crises. And politics is – or should be – an art more ambitious than the management of crises and emergencies. Politics is nurtured by vision. It sees into the future and goes beyond the quest for last-minute, temporary solutions.

The Three-Fifths Compromise comes immediately to mind as an example of the poor quality – and only temporary utility – of compromise. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, there was an urgency to fathom how to apportion representation. In the new nation, what would be the number of representatives each state would get?

It was clear to all delegates that the tally had to be based somehow on each state’s population. More populous states would receive more representatives. But how to count enslaved persons? In the minds of these 18th-century men, the question was: Were they “inhabitants” or “property,” like cattle?

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