Lincoln, compromise and the price to pay

This just in — compromise to a liberal really does mean compromising your principles, and you don’t have to believe me. Just read what liberal columnist David Brooks had to say about the new film “Lincoln”:

“We live in an anti-political moment, when many people — young people especially — think politics is a low, nasty, corrupt and usually fruitless business. It’s much nobler to do community service or just avoid all that putrid noise.

“I hope everybody who shares this anti-political mood will go out to see ‘Lincoln,’” wrote Brooks. “The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.”

Note the phrase: “Nobility of politics” — and then watch what follows from the pen of this award-winning New York Times columnist:

“[The film] shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical...”

Say what?

Did Brooks really slip “compromise” in there between “bamboozle” and “hypocritical” with nary a wink or a nod? Are we supposed to thus see compromise in a better light? Or is it really hypocrisy that Brooks is trying to elevate?

He finishes up his paean to “Lincoln” by painting a portrait of the 16th president as a precursor to the Chicago ward heelers who never let principle stand in the way of winning:

“To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.”

And then Brooks concludes with his warm and fuzzy bromide of the week:

“Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good.”

Ah yes, the noble politics of patronage and bamboozling. Those were sure the good old days, weren’t they?

But more importantly than Brooks’ near beatific ability to overlook human frailties in Lincoln is his own gargantuan ability to completely miss the point.

The film “Lincoln” depicts the absolute opposite of real compromise. Lincoln does not give an inch in his negotiations with slavery supporters. He has a principle that he is committed to, and he crushes his opposition both with his skillful maneuvering AND his refusal to succumb to arguments about why he should meet in the middle.

Very clearly, “Lincoln” is not about a compromise of ideas, where you give up something and I give up something in order to reach a middle ground. It is rather about compromising one’s own moral standards in order to do — in one case — what is right (Lincoln using bribery to win votes to end slavery) and in the other case to do what is wrong (sell your vote to the highest bidder).

The people who sold their votes to Lincoln certainly compromised their principles — however much we in retrospect disagree with them and find them morally repugnant — but what about this does David Brooks find laudable? Victory at any cost? The ends justify the means?

Is that really the role model we wish to use in our modern politics? If so, we don’t have to go all the way back to Lincoln to get the lesson; we could just go back 50 years. Ultimately, as envisioned by David Brooks (and some extent Steven Spielberg) Lincoln turns out to just be LBJ without the Texas accent.

But if we do venture all the way back to the 19th century, maybe we should do so with our eyes open. There is a lot of history back there, and not all of it is in Technicolor.

Compromise, you see, is what created all the problems that culminated in the Civil War and its half a million dead Americans. It was constitutional compromise back in 1787 that gave us the provision that slaves should count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of divvying up legislative districts. It was a noble compromise aimed at preventing the slave states from gaining too much power, but nonetheless it carries that same stench which inevitably follows all horse-trading.

Nor was it the last compromise that led inevitably to war by treating principle as something that could be squeezed into geographic boundaries.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery in the northern parts of the Louisiana Purchase, but allowed it in Missouri, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, most of southern California, and the southern tip of Nevada. That compromise probably sounded good if you were a black in the northern territories; not so good if you lived in New Mexico or Missouri.

Then there was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and declared that the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska could decide for themselves whether they would have slavery. This proves two things — 1) that a compromise is only as good as what the NEXT Congress decides, and 2) that compromise can be a bloody mess:

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, formulated by Lincoln’s arch-nemesis, Democratic Sen. Steven Douglas of Illinois, encouraged pro- and anti-slavery forces to converge in the Kansas Territory for the purpose of swaying the vote on slavery. The result was anarchy as the opposing sides waged a virtual civil war for four long years in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Another result of this “compromise” was the creation of the Republican Party, as abolitionist forces joined together to fight the spread of slavery. Their rapid rise resulted in the election of Lincoln as president just six years later, thus ensuring a war between the states as first South Carolina and then other Southern slave states declared their intent to secede from the Union.

It was only Lincoln’s refusal to compromise on the matter of slavery which finally forced the country to deal with its tarnished concepts of liberty and equality. And when the phony compromises of 75 years collapsed, they collapsed hard. Yes, more than half a million dead in the Civil War, and yet the price had to be paid. For principle.

So, too, it always must be. Principles can be compromised for 10 years or a hundred years, but eventually they rise up again with a vengeance. Spending human capital in the form of slavery took a horrible toll on our country, which could not be disguised by the bloody bandages of periodic compromise.

In the same way, for the past 100 years, our nation has been spending the proceeds generated by its productive capitalist economy in order to fund ever more expensive social programs and benefits. Endless compromises have ensured that this redistribution of wealth would continue — no matter how much it has drained our economy and our moral fiber of their sustenance.

Whether principle will prevail in the current debate over government spending for programs it cannot afford, I do not know. But I do know one thing — compromise is not an answer; it is just a guarantee that when we hit the wall of truth later, when principle finally collects its price, there will be hell to pay.