In my post “Why Conservatives think they are loosing” I talked mostly about how the Right want’s to either keep things the same, or take things back to an idealized past.  In this post I’m going to address the other reason the Right feels they are loosing, the ‘No Comprimise’ delima.

To start off, let me be very clear that I do acknowledge that there are some things that you can not comprimise on, but these are few and far between.  To take a such a position you have to accept that you are now in a binary logic universe. (To those who know me, you can get all the giggles done now.  I do like to use bifurcation when solving problems so it often appears that I am taking a.binary view of things.  Those that really know me well know I just use bifuracation as a reasoning tool to analyze the problem.). The issue here is why does the Right take this position on comprimise.  Those things that are truely binary, they are easy to identify because only two states can exists, you are either alive or dead.  The proble arises when you have to deal with some one who is in a permanent vegetative state.

For some the “No Comprimise” position is taken for philosophical reasons and/or religious reasons.  You often hear the statement “You can’t comprimise with the Devil” or it’s derivation “You can’t comprimise with Evil”.  Others do it because they see everything as a win loose situation, like a tennis game where the game goes on till someone wins and someone looses.  That is why I’m going to be talking about Zero-Sum games.  Fortunately not all human activity is a zero sum game, most are non zero sum.  For those of you who are interested here is a link to read more about Game Theory.

The first, and most obvious, problem with “No Comprimise” is that it force you into the position of having to get everything you ask for, otherwise you have lost.  As an example say you want to build a building at a specific corner in your town.  You want it to be so many stories high and have x number of elevators.  Now lets say the zoning laws of your town say that all building of a give height must have x+1 elevators,  or worse still that the corner you want to build on is owned by someone who will not sell, but the lot across the street is available. In both cases, the “no compromise” position says you have lost if you accept either restrictions.  This is a silly case, of course, but it does demonstarte the issue.

In politics you will often have issues that have many sub-issues.  The Gun (2nd amendment) debate in this country is a classic example of this problem.  The most simplistic view of the problem decides everything into anyone can have any weapon (arms) they want and take it any where they want or no civilian can have way weapon (arms) at anytime anywhere.  The answer to the problem lies somewhere in between these two polls.  The real issue is that there are persons on both sides of the issue who feel that they can not compromise.  The problem for the Right is that, even though they have won as much as can be done in the courts (2nd is now a personal right and all law effecting it must pass the Strict Scuriny Test. But some how they feel they have not yet won the fight.  Why?  Because not only do the want their position to be accepted in law, they want everyone else to acknowledge the rightness of their position. An here Lise one of the great traps with zero-sum, asking for something that can not be granted, that the other side has to not only acknowledge your win they must also admit they are wrong.

In sports this is often called grand standing and it can have very dillatorious effects (such as ‘clearing the bench’) and is so  frowned upon by the referees.

Inclosing, the problem with “No Comprimise” is that it almost always leads to feeling that you’ve lost, even when you get everything you could reasonablely ask for.

For a good time now I have been listening to Conservatives talk about how they are loosing and I think I’ve come up with an idea why.  I can’t say it is a theory, I haven’t come up with a way to test it, so lets just call it a working hypothesis.  Let’s just shake it out and get it some rigor into its thinking for now.

The first postulate is the growing acceptance of the idea of “No Comprise” that has really taken hold in some areas of the right and conservative movement.  The second postulate is that “because of what their goals are even when they win they loose”.  As this second postulate is the more complex, lets start with it.

When I say that the Conservative Movement & the Right (from this point on I will just be using ‘the right’ for shorthand for all forms os Conservativitiesum) loose when the win and that their goals insure this all I mean is that their goals, by their very nature are not achievable in the real world.  For the most part the Right wants to do two types of things.  They want to keep things the way they are or they want to go back to the ‘good old days’ to the way things were.  Both of these types of goals have serous fundimital characteristics that doom their achievement.

Lets start with looking at “keeping things the way they are, the same”. This is a quite natural desire of anyone.  Even people like myself, who like new things, changes, sometimes have trouble with what changes the univers throughs at us.  The problem is the univers is nothing but change.  All things change and even when it looks like no change is happening, it is, none the less changing.  More often than not it is our failure to detect the change that is at fault, not that the change is not occupied. Physical science has long excepted this idea and has even given it a name “entropy”.

So lets look at things logically, after all that is what this blog is supposed to be about.  Lets try a thought experiment: lets say you do not want some cultural value to change, lets choose something none controversial, the preference of what pet people prefer.  Lets say N people have pets in America.  That means C people have cats and D people have dogs and O people have other pets.  That means N=C+D+O and the relationship between C,D, and O can not change.  What does this mean.

First off you have to keep the total population steady or when the population changes you have to take action to insure that the size of C:D:O stay in exact relationship with each other as the population changes and you must take steps to insure that the number of Cats, Dogs, and others stays in step.  In worst case this means that if the total population shrinks you would have to get ride of the the excess Cats, Dog and others.  An lets say the people who left the population did not own any pets at all, that means someone(s) will have to loose their pet(s).  I think you see the problem.  Another, more basic problem with no change in human activity is that change itself is a cherished human social norm.  We all want to better for our children, we all want progress in our jobs, etc.

Finally, on staying the same, what most who are attracted to the right want is not “No Change” but rather “No Change that I don’t like or Want”.  The problem here is that change that I like and want just might be change others may not like or want.  An as the Bard said, “Ah there’s the rub”.

Now lets turn to the goal of turning back the clock to the “Way Things Were”.  There are, at lest, two basic problems here.  First what most people say when they say the ‘way things were’ is an idealized past.  Most humans don’t remember all of the details of their earlier life.  Even people with eiditic memory are quite capable of editing things out that the just don’t want to remember.  So what people want to do is live in the perfect way things were and not in the real way they were.

The second problem with turning back the clock is that you can;t just change the social/political/economic environment, you will need to change the people too.  This is because the people who are alive now have different background than the people who lived then.  Time for another thought experiment….Some people idealize the 1950’s so say we find away to change everything back to the 1950’s we would, at the least give everyone over the age 15 the expreanses of living thru World War Two. Many of the men in their 30’s or older the expeance of fighting in the war.  Not only that you would have to remove from people my age the Vet Nam War and Watergate.  An these are just the big issues that affected lots of people.  What about the small events that only affected a few people?  See the problems?

So once more what we end up with is the same problem as before.  What is being sought is not what is really wanted.  What is being asked for is not “Lets go back to a better past” but “Lets go back to an idealized Past”.

An now were are at the crux of the problem of the Right Loosing, even when they win.  When they get what they are asking for it turns out, more often than not, not what they were really asking for.

We are very luck that the Trump Administration and the current GOP leadership is a government made up of a wonderful collection of  Kakistocracy and Kleptocracy.  The current administration, not yet two years old, is already in the running for being the most corrupt and the most incompetent in the history of the republic.  This is truely historic and I hear many many people, both talking heads and private conversations worry just how we will  survive it.  An they think I’m a Pollyanna for not worrying.  The truth is I do worry, I’m just not in doom and gloom worry.  The reason is basically simple but somewhat hard to explain, but here goes.

The first and most important reason is I am a patriot who believes in this country.  Not the seas to shining seas country, no, in the country of ideals and law.  The country of our constitution since 1788 (date of R.I. Ratification).  This country has been thru allot.  We’ve been thru six major (actually declared) and many many small war.  We’ve been thru many economic crisis’ and even more natural disasters and thru it all we have come out a better and stronger nation.  We’ve even been thru political (Constitutional and others) crises’ and only once did it come to force of arms.  Even then we got back up on our feet and kept moving forward.  So first off, I have faith.

Next is I personally have lived thru a Constituional Crises brought on by electing a crook to the Presidency.  In Nov 1972, I was 21 and able to vote for the first time for President.  I voted for Richard Nixon.  I new he was a crook, I thought he was a smart crook.  He wasn’t.  Or rather he may have been one once but he  succumbed to traditional foe of all leaders, Hubris. I was fortunate enough to be able to watch most of the Senate Watergate hearings and all of the House impeachment hearings.  It was quite an eye opener for a newly minted Political Scientists (I graduated June 1973 with a B.A. in PoliSci) to see our system working as it was intended.

I also watch in 1998-99 the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and watched our system work as it should.  Like the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, while the House can vote impeachment it is much harder to get the Senate to convict.  Once more we showed that impeachement is not some political tool but a last resort to deal with those who are patently criminal. ( I shan’t get into the debate on weather lying in a deposition is an impeachable office, the Senate said NO, case closed)  But we got thru it.

We will get thru this crises.  We will have some very spectacular bruises and maybe a broken bone or two but we will come out on the other side.  An we will be a better and stronger country.  Why?  Because of the American people and our American Constitution.  No man, no group of men can stop us for long.  This crises is a great opportunity to build a better, greater, country.  It doesn’t look like right now, we are seeing all the things that need fixing shown to us in the most brutal way.  But we Americans have never before refused to look at our warts and fix them.  At lest when they are shoved in our face like now.

So stop worrying, roll up your sleeves and get to work fixing it.  We have a Midterm election in November, the time is now, lets show those people who think we are too weak or too lazy to get up and do anything.  That we will believe anything we read on the Internet. That we can’t or won’t think for ourselves that they are dead wrong.

Who’s with me?