Whither the Art of Compromise?

A shibboleth is "a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning." The word "birther" has become a shibboleth of the left, used to castigate the right. The saying "Obama wasn't even born in the U.S." has likewise become a shibboleth, used to scorn the left.

So a shibboleth can be a word, a phrase, a sentence ... or, I would suggest, an entire column such as "Walking the Walk," by Hendrik Hertzberg, in this week's The New Yorker.

Hendrik Hertzberg

Not that I disagree with much Hertzberg (pictured at left) says. He's a liberal chortling about how President Obama, in his Second Inaugural Address last month, let loose the dogs of progressivism and urged all the various and sundry groups that voted to return him to the White House to form an ongoing coalition that will henceforth marginalize all those voting to send Obama to the showers. I'm a liberal who voted for Obama and who celebrated his victory with the best of them. But, still ...

... what about the 49 percent who voted for Mitt Romney? What about the large minority of Americans who live in red states, or red congressional districts, and have increasingly resented not only Obama and his Democratic Party, but the whole mindset/worldview that party stands for?

They are Americans, too, last time I checked. Why do we liberals need to so smugly smirk that we've had a closet monopoly on truth for the last 50 years and more, and now that Obama's become the first Democratic president since F.D.R. to be re-elected by a popular-vote majority, it's about time we flaunted it?

This isn't smart politics, not for the long run, because it's bad for the country to continue with divided, nothing-can-really-get-done government in an era when we need to tackle big problems like the federal deficit, the semi-stalled economic recovery, America's widening inequality of income and opportunity, global climate change, immigration reform, gun-control legislation, a crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. — not to mention our evolving defense posture and our seems-to-be-dwindling ability to lead abroad.

Politics is said to be the art of compromise ... yet compromise is an art that we've mostly forgotten.