Alan Rosenthal, the eminent state legislative scholar at Rutgers University, recently put together two observations on the importance of compromise (aka "selling out") in representative democracy to share with his students. The first comes from a visit that he recently made to L.L. Bean in Freeport, ME, the second from rereading a classic of political science.
First, the window display in L.L. Bean, Freeport, Maine. Titled “The Locked Moose of New Sweden, Maine,” the display shows the final charge of two Bull Moose, who died in May 2006 after their antlers had become locked in battle during the previous fall’s rut.
Second, relating to the “abandonment of principle” element of compromise, the words of George Bernard Shaw (as quoted by Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, in Politics, Economics and Welfare (1953), p. 334). Shaw is referring to a member of Parliament who refused to compromise what he considered a matter of principle and subsequently lost his next election.
“When I think of my own unfortunate character, smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, mildewed by expediency, dragged through the mud of borough council and Battersea elections, stretched out of shape with wirepulling, putrefied by permeation, worn out by twenty-five years pushing to gain an inch here, or straining to stem a backrush, I do think Joe might have put up with just a speck or two on those white robes of his for the sake of the poor devils who cannot afford any character at all because they have no friend in Parliament. Oh, these moral dandies, these spiritual toffs, these superior persons. Who is Joe, anyhow, that he should not risk his soul occasionally like the rest of us?”
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