So many things back-asswards and wrong in this one it would take me months to cover them all.

Compromise to Make America Great Again

WELL. There’s an inauspicious start if ever I saw one.

A devout Catholic and a pro-abortion socialist walk into a conference room. No, this isn’t a setup for a joke. It’s an example of how America can win. If that seems odd, consider this one: a slave owner and an abolitionist walk into a hall in Philadelphia. That’s no joke, either: it’s how America began.

In 1787, men who wanted slavery to end convened in Philadelphia with men who wanted slavery to grow. Their purpose was to write America’s Constitution. Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, delegates to the convention, were ardent abolitionists. George Washington, chairman of the convention, opposed slavery, too, writing a year before “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” Pierce Butler, delegate for South Carolina, thought otherwise. “The security the southern states want is that their negroes may not be taken from them,” he declared.

The Framers bridged a nation over these deep divides. Congress today can’t even pass an infrastructure bill needed to fix bridges. A bridge too far for this Congress is—well, any bridge. 

Let’s all just please ignore the fact that, if past form is any indication, the “infrastructure” bill will result in precious few bridges being fixed, if any. But there’ll be whacking great soupçons of taxpayer gelt freely ladled out to federal employees, labor unions, illegal aliens, failing green energy companies, and any other Demonrat grifter-constituency groups astute enough to put their hands out for a nice taste.

America is the one nation that has best realized freedom and equality for all. Americans are freer and more equal and yet of more colors and creeds than citizens of any other nation. America rid herself of slavery, which had been international practice. She liberated Japan from despotism and Europe from Fascists, Nazis, and communists. She enriched her people, among whom even the poorest are rich compared to billions abroad. She proved that a nation of men free to think as they will, speak as they wish, and do as they please can together achieve more than any nation forcing its citizens to think, say, and do as the government commands. What would be obvious to the Framers seems utterly lost on too many today: compromise made all this brilliant success possible.

Fair enough, but I have a question.

Q: Why was compromise possible in 1787, but in 2021 is neither possible nor at all desirable? A:

• In 1787, one side could be confident that the opposition was bargaining in good faith; in 2021, this is NOT the case
• In 1787, both sides pursued the same primary objectives despite differences on how it might best be accomplished—individual liberty, safeguards against tyranny, government of, by, and for the people; in 2021, there is a fundamental conflict between not just the details, but the objectives themselves
• In 1787, negotiations were conducted by men for whom personal integrity and good character were of paramount importance; in 2021, the opposition considers integrity to be an exploitable weakness, and the definition of “good character” has, as with so many other words and phrases, been upended to mean the exact opposite of what had traditionally been understood
• In 1787, negotiations were conducted by men who, while by no means agreeing on everything, for the most part had many of their values, ambitions, and personal backgrounds in common with the rest; most importantly, they respected dissenting opinion instead of despising it; in 2021, no trace of comity, respect, and tolerance for dissent is to be found on the Left, with whom Real Americans share almost nothing apart from rough geographic proximity
• In 1787, all negotiating parties could be secure in the knowledge that, all of them being honest, respectable men for whom their word was their bond, the terms of any compromise would be fully honored and upheld; in 2021, the record shows that any compromise serves the opposition purely as a jumping-off point for demanding further concessions, on the rare occasions when the agreement isn’t just ignored and/or flung down and danced upon before the ink has had time to dry
• In 1787, American citizens had elected representatives who correctly understood their role as public servants and therefore could be trusted to advocate their constituents’ interests vigorously and honorably; in 2021, Amerikan subjects have no representation in the federal government whatsoever, their interests are of no importance to anyone in the federal government, and the political parties operate in barely-veiled collusion rather than honest opposition

The pitiful denouement:

Uncompromising moralism rejects more than America’s founding. It rejects any secular government over a free people. Either the governed are free to disagree over what is right or the government decides what is right over the objections of the governed. The only way for the governed to remain free while the government inches its way toward the true good is compromise. Some compromises already occurred in the Constitution: they are set. Others remain.

In a word, NO. Our Founders—those wisest, most far-sighted of men—knew well that carrying on in search of a way to forge a reasonable compromise with the tyrant King George, particularly after years spent bootlessly imploring him for redress of grievances, would be the very height of folly. They knew what the matter was all going come down to eventually, what they were going to have to do to free themselves. And instead of bleating and whimpering endlessly about lawsuits, non-violent protest, and “compromise,” they didn’t flinch from their duty to themselves and their posterity as they perceived it. They just by-God did it.

Compromise would have doomed them; uncompromising adherence to the “moralism” of human political liberty set a sterling example for an entire civilization to emulate. As I’ve said before: any fool advocating “compromise” with the Demonrats must grapple with one simple question: Which of the Bill of Rights are you willing to trade away, then? Until they’ve provided a straightforward answer to that question, they needn’t waste their breath hectoring me about any “compromise.” They have not one thing to say that I’m at all interested in paying attention to.

“Uncompromising moralism” when it comes to tyranny is EXACTLY WHAT AMERICA’S FOUNDING WAS BASED UPON. It is in no way a “rejection” of anything whatsoever else…other than tyranny. So it was then, so it remains now.

The author of the above is under the sway of several paralyzing delusions, first among them that the central government as currently constituted is not only Constitutionally legitimate, but is in fact nobly trying to “inch its way towards the true good” of its benighted subjects as well. As if nothing we’ve seen over the last not quite two years—the Fauxvid power-grab; PantiFa/BLM riots; the wink-nudge sanction of same by governors, mayors, and other authorities; ongoing FBI corruption and thuggery; the fraudulent 2020 election, to name but a few—had ever happened at all. As if Amerika v2.0 bears even a trifling resemblance to America That Was. As if the country wasn’t already teetering on the brink of catastrophe and collapse brought on and exacerbated by its own goddamned government.

From this original self-deception the other noxious fallacies sprout, as branches from a tree-trunk. Debate and haggling over which branch might best be swapped for another is a mug’s game. When the tree itself has become toxic, none but a fool bothers with pruning. You chop the fucker down and burn the remnants to ashes, lest the whole orchard become sickened unto death from close proximity to its poison.

Phony “compromise” with villainous, amoral totalitarians barren of integrity, suffused with ill intent, and unswervingly committed to the “fundamental transformation” of America as founded into a monstrous, despotic shitrapy, is precisely what got us into the dire straits we find ourselves in today. Heaven preserve us from the dolts who still try to persuade us that only more of the same can possibly save us. There IS a way aspiring tyrants can be effectively dealt with, but reruns of the self-same DC dumbshow we’ve already been forced to watch again and again and again wouldn’t be it.

Even so, Callaghan is by no means alone in his self-deception. Steyn adroitly eviscerates Charlie Kirk, feebly laboring under similar crippling, self-negating delusions, as evidenced by the tail-chasing nonsense he mistakes for argumentation in dispute with an interlocutor way more intelligent and perceptive than Kirk appears to be:

Covidstan has sufficiently restricted my movements these last two years that I see fewer things firsthand than I might wish and am dependent, therefore, on media coverage, which is never a good thing. The parents pushing back against the social engineers (at best) and (at worst) rape-enablers of the Virginia school boards seem, given the provocations, calm and of moderate mien by comparison with the sick ideological commissars attempting to silence them.

But elsewhere there is the increasing sense that the combination of Covid, the election and the accelerating politicization of agencies such as the Department of Justice and the FBI have pushed us closer to the Yeatsian point: “the centre cannot hold”. This exchange is making the rounds:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When do we get to use the guns? No, and I’m not — that’s not a joke. I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was not anxious to go down this road:

KIRK: I’m going to denounce that and I’m going to tell you why. Because you’re playing into all their plans and they’re trying to make you do this…They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen. We are close to have –

AUDIENCE MEMBER: They’re already doing it.

KIRK: Hold on. We are close to have momentum to be able to get this country back on a trajectory using the peaceful means that we have at us…They fear us holding the line with self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings. They are the ones that are willing to use federal force against us.

And I know that people get fired up. We are living under fascism. We are living under this tyranny. But if you think for a second that they’re not wanting you to all of a sudden get that next level where they’re going to say, OK, we need Patriot Act 2.0. If you think that, you know, Waco is bad, wait until you see what they want to do next.

Mr Kirk is trying to thread a difficult needle here: “We are living under fascism” and “tyranny”, but it is not yet time for getting out the guns.

Not a difficult needle—an IMPOSSIBLE one to thread, thanks to certain self-evident contradictions which no true American ought ever to contemplate disgracing himself seeking to reconcile. I know nothing whatever about the man, but the above quotes reveal that Charlie Kirk is either a fraud, a buffoon, or an out-and-out moron desperately cherishing a long-gone memory, dizzied into stupefaction by his own circular illogic.

Between liberty and tyranny, there can be no compromise worth the making. The two are polar opposites; by definition there is no common ground to be found between them. The idea that such might nonetheless exist is chimerical, an ever-elusive phantom any wise, self-respecting, freedom-oriented American knows better than to fritter away a moment of his time and an ounce of his strength in search of. In these times, he well knows that there are far more important things he must do.

Again: Either there is liberty, or there is tyranny.

Choose.