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Recently I have been advocating my position that progressives should never compromise on their principles, a stance which I have found has been very controversial with a lot of people. Many accuse me of being a purist, someone who is unwilling to work with people who disagree with me, some have even accused me of being like George Bush for taking such a stand. None of these particular arguments against my position are true or intellectually honest in any way, and I believe they represent an attempt to get progressives to abandon their principles in favor of the status quo.
I think dialog is very important and I think debate is very important, what I also think is important however is that people are able to express their position loudly and clearly without automatically being dismissed as extremists for taking any position which exists outside of the status quo.
It is important that we distinguish between compromising on principles and compromising on policy. The vast majority of us have never served in public office, and most people never will serve in public office so we will never have the need or even the ability to compromise on policy. Our role as citizens is not to hammer out the details of the bills which eventually become our laws, our role as citizens is to take a stand on what we believe in and ensure that we hold our politicians accountable. Standing up to speak our minds as citizens of this country never requires any sort of compromise at all, and we can not allow anyone to tell us that it does.
While none of us are ever going to be right about everything, there are often however some very clear ethical principles which guide our views and while we may sometimes get the details of how to handle certain policies wrong we can often be certain that our views on basic fundamental principles are correct. We can be certain that is always in our nation's best interests to stand up for equal rights for all, we can always be certain that we should protect human rights and reject torture, and we can always be certain that we need to reject any policy which clearly violates the Constitution.
We need people who are able to stand up for key principles such as peace, civil rights, equality, and economic justice. We need people who speak loudly in opposition to those who want more war, more discrimination, and more violations of basic human rights. As citizens of this nation we have no reason or incentive to cave in on the key principles that are important to us.
Now there are a few of us who may some day be elected to public office in which case it will be required that we compromise on certain policy positions if we want to accomplish anything. Even in the case of elected officials however there are certain principles in which we need to demand that they do not compromise on. On issues such as equal rights there can never be a compromise because once you compromise on equal rights then those rights are no longer equal. We need to demand that our politicians stand for equal rights and we can not accept separate but equal. We can understand it when a politician who fights for equal marriage rights for all votes for a bill that allows civil unions as it brings us one step closer to equal rights, but we can not defend those politicians who oppose marriage rights and insist that we should accept civil unions as an acceptable compromise. There are no acceptable compromises to equal rights, and any politician who pretends that there are needs to be held accountable. Aside from equal rights there are some other issues as well that are very clear cut, and we should never accept any attempt by our elected officials to compromise on these issues. We can not allow any compromise on our Constitutional rights, we can not allow any compromise on our opposition to torture, and we can not allow any compromise when it comes to ensuring that every single American has access to health care.
On the health care issue of course there will be compromises involved when it comes to hammering out the details of a universal health care plan. There are countless ways in which a universal health care system could be implemented, and even among progressives we aren't all going to agree on the details of how that system should look. While our elected officials can compromise on the details however, we need to demand that they do not compromise on the basic principle that every person deserves access to health care and no one should ever have to go into bankruptcy simply because they become ill.
When it comes to any sort of spending bill compromise is always inevitable, the problem is that the “compromises” we often get are not really compromises at all. We see the Republicans put forward a plan that is extremely far to the right, and then we see the Democrats put out a plan that tends to be fairly close to the status quo. When they begin to compromise between a status quo plan and a right-wing plan then the final “compromise” always ends up moving us further to the right. On spending bills in which compromise is inevitable we need to put a lot of pressure on the Democrats to put their first draft of that bill in very progressive terms. We can understand that they may need to compromise on the final product, but if the bill starts out as a progressive bill rather than a status quo bill the compromise we end up with will likely take us at least a step closer to progressive policies rather than a step back.
While our elected leaders are forced to be making these compromises however as citizens we do not have to compromise one bit. We need to keep pushing our vision for what a more just society looks like, and we need to make it clear that while certain compromises that our elected officials make may bring us a step in the right direction they do not bring us to where we need to go. Their compromises are not our compromises, we are still going to keep fighting for progressive principles and we are not going to simply accept the fact that the Republicans are able to water any sort of spending bill down. We need to keep fighting and showing the people that the Republicans are wrong, and they are putting roadblocks in place which prevent this country from moving forward at the pace it needs to move forward.
Most of us are not elected officials, which means that most of us have no reason or incentive to compromise on anything in regards to our beliefs as to the direction this country should take. We do have an incentive however to make this world a better place, and the only way to do that is to fight for what we believe in and never back down from our core principles.
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