Compromise and Purity (Pt. 1)

When I first began to pay attention to politics, it seemed to me that the problem was clear: people started out with good principles, and then compromised them for short-term gains, and so we should never compromise. Change happens because someone sets a far goal and refuses to be moved.

Then I got more involved in various kinds of change—not just what we think of as “political,” but institutional and even personal changes. And that complicated my notion that change was best achieved by someone setting a far goal and refusing to compromise. I came to think I had misunderstood the role that compromise plays in progressive politics.

I can partially blame my misunderstanding on how history is taught in American high schools—Rosa Parks is presented as an extreme case, as opposed to someone who was part of a very savvy and deliberate campaign; King was actually a moderate; the most effective abolitionists were savvy about their compromises. Of course, one can also create a long list of appalling compromises (I think it’s plausible that LBJ decided to escalate in Vietnam because he thought it was a compromise that would get him what he wanted in terms of domestic policy, FDR may have gone along with Japanese internment as part of a nasty political compromise).

A long swim in the murky waters of the history of progressive (and reactionary) politics has persuaded me that compromise is sometimes a great move and sometimes a disastrous one. And, while, in the abstract, I can repeat what other scholars have said about the conditions under which compromise is savvy, I’m still not very good at knowing the right move in specific moments.

Part of my uncertainty involves what it means to compromise. It can mean that you’ve listened carefully to what everyone involved has to say, and you really think you’ve made all the compromises that can be made. You believe the deliberative possibilities are exhausted because you haven’t been treated as a part of the conversation.

It can also mean that you’re certain that you’re right, that your position is the best one, and that everyone who disagrees with you is spit from the bowels of Satan—you don’t need to listen to anyone else because you’re right.

Here’s the short version: it depends on whether you’re in a bargaining or deliberative situation (refusal to compromise in an expressive situation is just wanking). In a deliberative situation, the refusal to compromise can be very persuasive, if it’s grounded in good evidence that all the compromises have been made, that the compromise being requested is unreasonable, and that the power situation is imbalanced—you’ve listened, but not been listened to (listening doesn’t mean agreeing with—it means the ability to summarize someone else’s argument in a way they would say is accurate, even if you disagree with it).

If it’s a faux deliberative situation (people are claiming it’s deliberative and it isn’t), then shifting to strategies appropriate for bargaining is what a sensible person does.

Bargaining situations aren’t as simple as I used to think they were. Basically, bargaining situations are all about power. When you’re in a bargaining situation, it doesn’t matter if you’re right—that only matters in deliberation—your threats or promises only matter to the extent that they’re strategically useful, and that’s determined by:

    1. whether it’s plausible that you can enact your threat/promise,
    2. whether your interlocutor cares very much about your threat/promise (they really fear your threats and really desire your promises),
    3. whether you can offer more than they can get without you or cost them less than they can get with you,
    4. whether s/he can thwart your ability to enact them.

So, if you threaten to take your ball and go home, and it isn’t your ball, and you aren’t big enough to take it away from anyone else, no one is going to care (this is also known as the “I’m going to hold my breath till I turn blue” threat). If it is your ball, and you could take it and leave, and no one there wants you to stay, and they have another ball, you aren’t bringing a lot of power to the bargaining situation. If people really want you to continue to play, but you tell them you’ll leave unless they let you win, then keeping you there will cost them at least as much as letting you go, and they’ll let you go. If you threaten to take your ball and go home and people think they can get another ball, they’ll let you go.

It isn’t always obvious prior to a bargaining situation (and even often while in it) what threats or promises are strategically winners. Were it obvious, there wouldn’t be bargaining—it would be like playing poker with all the cards dealt at once and face up. The only one that can be obvious ahead of time is the third—if the cost of the bargain you’re offering is the same as not bargaining at all, then there is no incentive for someone to bargain with you.

It took me a long time to see that, largely because I was confusing deliberative and bargaining situations. My entrance into politics was environmentalism, and I thought (and still think) that, as David Brower said, all the compromises have been made. We shouldn’t compromise anymore because what we were asking for was the right thing. And it seemed to me so obviously right that we need to protect the earth for future generations, that we have a sacred obligation to steward the earth’s resources in ways responsible to all the present and future inhabitants, that I thought simply insisting on our rightness was the only possible strategy.

What I was not seeing was that many members of my opposition sincerely believed not just that they could get what they wanted, but that what they were doing was right. They weren’t just motivated by greed or a desire to destroy—they believed their arguments were better than mine. This isn’t some kind of hippy-dippy woah man have you ever looked at your hand all sides are equally right argument. I still sincerely believe that the arguments for drill here, drill now are internally inconsistent and irrational, but I now know they aren’t obviously so, and showing what’s wrong with them involves long discussions about Scriptural exegesis, Millerism, the prosperity gospel, the just world hypothesis, and short- versus long-term economic gain/stability.

What I’m saying is that, in a deliberative situation, my simply insisting on how right I was wasn’t going to work—regardless of whether it was true. In a bargaining situation, it was a waste of time. And refusing to compromise would mean (as I came to see) that, unless my side had some kind of plausible threat—we’ll sue, boycott, protest, cost you an election—we would end up with nothing at all. Compromising felt physically painful to me, and it felt as though it cost me in dignity (I also bought into all sorts of slippery slope narratives, about how you compromise once and then pretty soon you’re hunting endangered species while drinking heavy-metal water).

More experienced lefty activists in favor of compromise tried to argue against my insisting on being right as the only possible right strategy was to say that I was being selfish. And that, to me, seemed another obviously wrong argument: my position came from a genuine concern for beings other than me, so it couldn’t be selfish. What they were saying, I late came to understand, was that, once I’d made the realization that my strategy wasn’t going to work, my refusal to compromise came from concerns about my dignity, my aversion to the mucky murky work of compromise, my desire for clean hands.

What I had to think about, though, was what my refusal to compromise was costing, and who was paying that cost. The cost to my dignity had to be weighed against the costs paid by people who lived in neighborhoods with poisoned water, or who had to breathe unsafe air.

Being right wasn’t enough to get the right outcomes. And I had to think strategically about those outcomes.

Once I got to that point, I discovered every experienced lefty activist responded to my insight with a “No fucking shit, Sherlock.” They had figured it out long ago.

Again, this isn’t to say that compromise is always necessary. There are times we all say, “There is some shit I will not eat.” But, when we decide this is where we go and we go no further, we have to think about who will pay the cost.