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These are ways of naturalising compromise, of ascribing ontological certainty to an outcome that has not yet been tested by appealing to vague notions of maturity and experience. Compromise, with a capital C, is a weary parental figure listing off the platitudes of liberal pragmatism: ‘this is how the world works’ or ‘well, life’s unfair’. The compromiser is somebody who values moderation over excess, incrementalism over upheaval they stake claim to the political virtues of expediency, reason, and resourcefulness, while portraying ideological purity and the demand for serious structural change as comparatively irrational. There is a certain level of personal idiosyncrasy to these chosen topics, but their disparateness is also part and parcel of Smith’s project, which welcomes the conflict, dissent, and disjunction that is smoothed over during compromise.Ī picture thus emerges of compromise as a dangerous ideal that trades duplicitously in faux-realities and faux-necessities. Across twelve short essays that run the gamut of American politics and art, from the 2017 Women’s March to the history of Poetry magazine, MFAs to Guns N’ Roses, David Foster Wallace to the far right, she deconstructs its appeal. It is this second form of compromise, where it is less of a process and more of a general value - ‘an affect, an attitude, a moral ideal’ - that troubles Smith. She sets this up carefully, in case her critique of centre-left thinking is confused with that of her right-wing adversaries, by distinguishing between compromise as an unfortunate but necessary ‘means to an end’ and compromise as an ‘end’ in itself. In On Compromise, a book that should be titled Against Compromise, Rachel Greenwald Smith not only challenges this liberal framing of what constitutes ‘a good compromise’, but the very notion that compromise could ever be ‘good’. After all, what could be more gratifying than meeting in the middle? What could make more sense? like a good sentence or a good piece of music’ is something that nobody can dispute and Third Way politics, a fairytale of Goldilocks and the Golden Mean, settling at the ‘just right’ centre. He does so by appealing to harmony, to the satisfying and pleasurable logic of finding common ground. In William Finnegan’s 2004 New Yorker profile of the future president, Obama cleverly frames legislative compromise as a kind of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, compromise is cruel optimism rendered as an agreement: it means accepting, even desiring, something that is, by definition, a diminished version of what you want.
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