In defence of compromise

 People can stomach a great deal of horse-trading when they know what was traded, why, and what they gain. What they punish, rightly, is the sense that a deal was struck in the dark.

From Dr Helmy Haja Mydin

When Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861, he filled his Cabinet with men who wanted his job and thought they were better than him.

William Seward, his secretary of state, regarded the new president as a country lawyer out of his depth. Salmon Chase, who was in charge of the Treasury, never quite stopped believing the nomination should have been his.

Doris Goodwin’s book about that administration, “Team of Rivals”, is usually read as a study in magnanimity. It is better read as a study in execution.

Lincoln understood something that eludes many who reach high office. Winning the post is the easy part; doing anything with it is harder, and it cannot be done alone.

That lesson is unfashionable. Across the democratic world, the politician who refuses to bend is admired as a person of conviction, while the one who strikes a bargain is labelled a sell-out.

“Compromise” has taken on the texture of an insult. Populists who trade on this mood promise to govern without concession, as though obtaining 40% of the vote licenses ignoring the other 60%.

The offer is seductive. In almost every case it is also a fraud.

Consider what governing actually demands. A minister may command a portfolio but not Parliament, a coalition partner, a central bank, a constitutional court, a mutinous backbench or a sceptical public. Majorities have to be assembled, then assembled again for the next vote.

Reform depends on civil servants who choose to move quickly rather than slowly, and on voters willing to absorb some pain today for a gain they cannot yet see. None of that can be summoned by a leader’s conviction of their own rightness.

Power, in a working state, is the capacity to make others act, and others will not act for long under someone who treats every disagreement as heresy.

Here also lies the deeper trouble with the politics of purity. It assumes that on any given question there exists a single correct answer, usually conveniently held by oneself, and that those who see it differently are fools or evil. This is hubris dressed as conviction.

Reasonable people hold irreconcilable views about taxation, migration, the balance between liberty and security, and the pace of the energy transition.

What is plainly sensible to a farmer in Kedah looks quite different to a graduate in Kuching or a factory owner in Penang. A political approach that cannot make room for that plurality tends to be blind, and usually brittle.

None of this is peculiar to statecraft. Compromise is the quiet machinery of ordinary life.

Parents settle on bedtimes and screen-time rules that neither they nor their children would have chosen unprompted. Colleagues divide credit, defer to one another and swallow objections for the sake of a shared deadline. All successful marriages involve compromise.

To imagine that politics can do without what every household relies upon is naive at best, and wilfully misleading at worst.

Otto von Bismarck, no one’s idea of a soft touch, said it plainly: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”

The Iron Chancellor built a German empire not by pressing every demand to the hilt but by knowing when to bank a partial gain and move on.

The same instinct rebuilt post-war Europe, where in 1950 France and West Germany, enemies in three wars within living memory, agreed to pool the coal and steel that had armed them rather than fight over it. South Africa’s negotiated transition rested on it too, with Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk each surrendering what a decade earlier had been unthinkable.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, too, assembled a government consisting of political enemies. Half a loaf, secured and eaten, has fed more people than any quantity of whole loaves promised but never baked.

The case for compromise is not, however, a case for compromising everything, and this is where its advocates, too, often fall silent.

America’s founders split their differences ingeniously over the composition of the Senate and shamefully over slavery, postponing a reckoning that arrived, decades later, as civil war.

Neville Chamberlain came home from Munich in 1938 with a signature and the cheers of a frightened public, having conceded the one thing that should never have been on the table.

The discipline is therefore twofold. A leader must decide in advance which principles are not for sale: the few red lines whose breach would drain the enterprise of its point.

Having drawn them, the leader has to say so, plainly and often. The gravest error of the dealmaker is rarely the deal itself. It is the silence around it, the assumption that supporters will grasp why a concession was necessary and forgive it unexplained.

They will not.

People can stomach a great deal of horse-trading when they are told what was traded, why, and what was protected in return. What they punish, rightly, is the sense that a bargain was struck in the dark.

The purist offers the warm certainty of principle and the reliable disappointment of achieving little with it.

The leader who holds firm on the essentials, bends on the rest and has the nerve to explain which is which tends to leave the deeper mark.

That, in the end, is what Bismarck meant by “the art of the possible”: the patient work of getting things done among people who are sure you are wrong. - FMT

Dr Helmy Haja Mydin is chairman of the Social and Economic Research Initiative.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.