Compromise, That Old Serpent

 The other day on his Substack, Matt Yglesias was writing about how all the DSA progressives who have recently been winning primary elections are 99% indistinguishable from their "establishment" rivals, except that they use the word "oligarchy" and are even more mad at Israel. 

Ha! I thought; Zing! Pow! Good one!

Both sides of the Democratic civil war in the blue state primaries, he argues, are "well to the left of the median voter" already. Neither of them—establishment nor DSA "populist"—is actually making the pivot to the center that will be needed to win elections. 

Right on! I thought. You tell 'em, Matt!

For instance, Yglesias argues, Democrats really need to change their stance on immigration. "I think Democrats think they’ve changed their pitch on immigration after the Biden fiasco," he writes; "but I genuinely don’t understand what they think is different about it."

Hold on a minute, I said at this point. You lost me. That's the one thing we can't possibly weaken our position on now! That's exactly the spot where we need to hold the line most firmly against this administration's relentless white nationalist attacks!

And here I confront all over again my whole problem with the "centrist," "mod" wing of the Democratic coalition that Yglesias represents.

Because I'm all for "moderation" in the abstract. But I hold my own actual views on all policy issues to be the moderate and reasonable ones. And as soon as Yglesias starts arguing that Democrats need to change their positions on things like immigration, asylum, or trans rights, etc.—he suddenly starts sounding very unreasonable to me. 

And at this point, I start to question whether anyone in fact regards themselves as anything other than "centrist" or "moderate." We all place ourselves at the center of the spectrum as we see it̉—each pursuing our own definition of the golden mean. 

And once we've conceded that much—I'm back to wondering if we really should be wasting our time at all trying to figure out what the "median voter" thinks—or if we should instead ask ourselves what we think. 

Perhaps we should try to figure out not what is popular, but what is true, and fight for that. 

Suppose that the "median voter" opposes trans rights or asylum, for instance—at least when the question is posed in certain terms (I bet they will take the opposite view when we use different words and framing). Is that person any more right about those issues than they were the day before we took the poll? 

I recall an anecdote from the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick's memoir of her father: "he [...] taught me the paradox: we are democrats, and that means accepting the will of the people, despite the fact (said with a triumphant grin) that 'the majority is always wrong.'" 

That's basically what I believe.

I seems to me that most people have very little experience of either being trans or applying for asylum. Their opinions on the subject are therefore probably less likely to be informed or accurate than those of people who are trans or who are applying for asylum; because they have spent comparatively little time thinking about it. 

In fact, probably the default "normie" position is not to be right-wing on either issue—but simply not to care very much. 

And if a minority of people—or even just one person—visibly does care, that might actually sway a majority of them to change their minds. 

As Emerson wrote at the time of the Fugitive Slave Act compromise: "why have the minority no influence? because they have not a real minority of one."

In other words, one person who stands for something they think is true is worth millions who vote for something because they thought that was how the political winds were blowing.

James Russell Lowell—another abolitionist—was acquainted with "median voter" theory in his time, and knew precisely what to make of it. As he wrote in one satirical stanza in the Biglow Papers: 

 [E]very fool knows thet a man represents

Not the fellers thet sent him, but them on the fence,—

Impartially ready to jump either side

An' make the fust use of a turn o' the tide,—

To cite one more abolitionist: Moncure Daniel Conway—in his great pamphlets penned during the early stages of the Civil War (The Rejected Stone and The Golden Hour)—published at a time when the Northern government was still resisting making the war about emancipation—argues that the Union cause would gain more and better adherents, by announcing its abolitionist goals explicitly, for every half-hearted fair-weather friend it would lose. 

I know that Matt dislikes the abolitionist analogy I am making. Indeed, he specifically wrote a post at one point titled: "Your cause is not the moral equivalent of fighting slavery."

But when it comes to some immigration and human rights issues, the comparison may not be so far afield as may at first appear. 

Matt, for one, has argued in the past that Democrats should compromise by changing their position on asylum. Presumably that means that even a Democratic administration should contemplate deporting people to danger without a hearing to determine whether they fear torture or persecution in that country. 

In other words, he would have the arm of the state under a Democratic president devote its muscle to sending people—in violation of international law—into the clutches of their persecutors and tormentors. 

Which is almost precisely what the Fugitive Slave Act did. It turned the governments of the northern states into enforcement arms of slavery, sending people back into the hands of their oppressors. 

Since some of today's asylum-seekers, such as those from Mauritania, are literally fleeing racial caste-based hereditary slavery in their home county—then a scheme to abolish asylum hearings would be a virtually perfect equivalent to the Fugitive Slave Act, in at least some instances.

We don't have to talk about this as a hypothetical danger. 

Our current, Republican administration has already practically shut down asylum at the border, and regularly expels people summarily on deportation flights—without any of the due process to which they are entitled under the Convention Against Torture—to third countries like Eswatini, Congo, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, where they face a risk of refoulement, indefinite detention, torture, or other abuse. 

When Moncure Conway writes of the Fugitive Slave Act that it brought upon the nation "the shame of repelling the fugitive from her door"—it's not clear to me why Matt Yglesias thinks the historical comparison to our present anti-asylum policies would be inapposite—or why he would think that repelling fugitives from our door would be any less shameful today than it was in the 1850s. 

Conway calls "Compromise" "that old serpent ever coiling around the tree of life." And so we call it again today—if compromise means selling out asylum seekers by deporting them to the hands of torturers. 

Let us then abandon the fool's errand of trying to adjust what we believe to the "median voter"—and simply come out and proclaim what we actually believe to be just and true. 

Yglesias would reply: we have to reach such median voters or swing voters in order to "save the republic," as he puts it in the title of the recent piece I quoted at the outset, which can only be achieved by electing Democrats in place of Trumpian MAGA cultists. 

But if to enlist such voters we need to join Trump in expelling innocent people to torture and kidnapping and extortion and death—what sort of republic would we be saving? 

People made very similar arguments against immediate emancipation in Conway's day—because they said it would alienate Border States and conservative Northern Democrats. 

And as Conway wrote in rebuttal—if the people we need to save the Union will only do so on condition of the continued "rendition of fugitives" or enshrinement of slavery—"would it not be a sure proof that it would be the old tar-and-feather Union" that they wanted to save—in other words: "a Union not fit to be saved?"

"These tories would be a drag and a curse to our side," he writes, "if they should espouse it." Let such as them go; and good riddance, Conway argues. He writes—adapting a poem from Browning—"We shall march conquering—not through their presence."

Maybe, then, we lose some people by sticking to a matter of principle over asylum or trans rights. "But Sir," Conway adds, "when the half-hearted go, the whole-hearted arrive." 

When we look at the pages of history, we are never impressed with the Compromisers or the political expediency that led them to abandon principle. "Relentless posterity," as Conway wrote in The Rejected Stone, "will all the same affirm that Humanity suffered under the Pilates—Democratic and Republican—who have ruled in the nation [...] and will not spend a thought on the political basins in which their hands are washed." 

"In establishing the government," he wrote in his follow-up volume, The Golden Hour, "our fathers compromised; to-day we reap the harvest of that seed; and to-day the people are reading the law, that those who begin with the compromise of principle have given themselves to the toils of a glittering, bright-eyed, golden-scaled serpent." 

"Let us hope," wrote Conway, "that the day has advanced enough to close up that old poisonous blossom Compromise, and that the new hour is opening Truth." 

Quite so. I say it again, then. Let's stop asking what the median voter thinks, or what we need to say to win elections, or which communities or principles we need to sell out or throw under the bus in order to succeed—and start asking what is true!