"No compromise" Republicans decry Dem's partisanship. Of course

by: Ted Frier

Sat Oct 30, 2010 at 12:00:00 PM CDT

Milbank notes the new GOP talking point that there will be no compromising if Republicans take back one, or both, houses of Congress on Tuesday.

"This is not a time for compromise," House Republican leader John Boehner informed Sean Hannity on the radio on Wednesday, writes Milbank.

"Look, there will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt," Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana told radio host Hugh Hewit. "There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare. There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes. And if I haven't been clear enough yet, let me say again: no compromise."

Republicans were not always so down on compromise, says Milbank. "Ronald Reagan - so idolized by Pence that he has perfected a Reaganesque head-tilt while speaking - compromised with the Democrats on Social Security and taxes. American Democracy couldn't function without compromise."

But today, says Milbank, "there is nobody to stand up to the take-no-prisoners caucus" like Michele Bachmann who threatens to impeach President Obama or Sen. Jim DeMint "who threatens to leave the GOP if his colleagues don't pursue his biblical-law agenda."

There is nobody "with the clout to tell Tea Party-inspired backbenchers when it's time to put down the grenades and negotiate," writes Milbank. "Rather, there are weak leaders who, frightened by the Tea Party radicals, have become unquestioning followers of a radical approach."

Conservatives like to pretend that liberals are just as bad and that conservative obstruction is no different from what liberals do whenever they don't get their way. But I've spent most of my adult life in and around Republican and conservative politics so I know that when conservatives attack liberals for "ramming" an agenda down everyone's throats or trying to "impose" a "secular, liberal worldview" on a resisting nation, that these complaints are merely projections of the right wing's own my-way-or-the-highway political immaturity, which carries with it the inability to engage in politics of any kind requiring give and take.

It's easy enough to make a virtue of never "compromising on principle." That is why Republicans like Newt Gingrich always say Republicans can be successful by "getting back to conservative principles."

But then you discover that conservative politics are nothing but principles. And that makes compromise on anything impossible, as we have painfully disovered in the destructive obstruction from the right ever since Obama took office.

It also makes politics impossible, as we hear from conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who openly talk about politics as if it were war by other means -- not a relationship at all, but a zero-sum, winner-take-all fight to the finish. That's not democracy. It's totalitarianism and fascism.

I get it. People for whom politics is nothing more than an extension of their identity -- whether it is as a member of the white race, a fundamentalist religion, or some region of the country like the South that has a heightened sense of group solidarity and hyper-nationalism -- will never be able to meaningfully take part in democratic politics, or politics of any sort that demands compromise. Because for them, such compromise means compromising who they are.

Genuine conservatism is always on the lookout for ways to minimize ideologies so that social harmony is possible. But the fatal flaw for the right wing brand of conservatism embraced by the Tea Party Right is that it cannot govern except in an environment that is already homogeneous. Which means it is unfit for a country like ours that is global and diverse.

Whenever I listen to self-pitying right wing conservatives complain they are unfairly maligned by liberals for their refusal to compromise - a complaint that almost always carries with it the baseless charge that liberals are equally block-headed - I always return to the Rosetta Stone of Republican Obstructionism, the Farewell Address (or parting shot) that disgraced majority leader Tom DeLay gave to Congress in June 2006 after resigning his seat under threat of criminal prosecution.

Not enough attention has been paid to that remarkable speech. But within it, I think, are the signs which trace the anti-democratic depravity that has befallen today's Republican Party, controlled as it is by the Tea Party mob and other far right elements.

Tom DeLay is the spiritual godfather of the Tea Party's almost Middle-eastern variety of sectarian politics.

The cries of "no compromise" coming from GOP leaders like Mike Pence and John Boehner today can't hold a candle to the bullying defiance that was audible from this proto-fascist reactionary from Texas on that day.

His take-no-prisoners right wing manifesto to Congress was, when you sorted through it, a full frontal assault on the fundamental principles of democracy, which are deliberation and compromise.

All the more chilling was the fact that it came, not from some hillbilly back-bencher, but from the man whom the Republican Party had elevated to be their general, the second most powerful in the US House.

Right wing conservatives who think liberals are just being hypocrites when they complain about the unwillingness of Republicans to compromise on anything, need to listen closely to the words of their own party's chosen leader as he expresses nothing but sneering contempt for the very idea of compromise, and by extension politics and democracy itself.

The Tea Party Republicans can retreat back to their gated communities of mind, body and spirit if they want. They can build high castle walls against the rest of us, surround them with deepwater moats and pull up the drawbridge. But what they cannot do is claim that the rest of us share their pathologically anti-social worldview, whose rage and derangement are echoed so clearly in former Majority Leader Tom DeLay's words below. And neither can they claim they represent "Real America."

DeLay's remarks start out with a report on what he found during a tour of Washington's sites that he was too busy to take while engaged doing the nation's business - which for him meant turning over the nation to business.

Notice the menacing martial tone right from the start, with its imagery of sentries standing post, words that "thunder" and a Lincoln whose hand is in a perpetual clenched "fist":

"I noticed that in Washington's obelisk, the father of our country is represented not as an object of glory, but as a dutiful sentry at attention minding his post for eternity.

"I noticed that under Jefferson's dome the statue of the man is relatively understated while his etched words still thunder from the marble with the power to drive history.

"I noticed that Lincoln's chair, the man who sought above all peace and reconciliation, keeps one of his hands in a perpetual fist...

"In preparing for today, I found that it is customary in speeches such as these to reminisce about the good old days of political harmony and across-the-aisle camaraderie, and to lament the bitter, divisive partisan rancor that supposedly now weakens our democracy...

"Well, I can't do that because partisanship, Mr. Speaker, properly understood, is not a symptom of democracy's weakness but of its health and its strength, especially from the perspective of a political conservative...

"The common lament over the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint instead about the recent rise of political conservatism...

"You show me a nation without partisanship, and I'll show you a tyranny....All we can say is that partisanship is the worst means of settling fundamental political differences -- except for all the others.

"It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle...For the true statesmen, Mr. Speaker, are not defined by what they compromise, but by what they don't."