Thread by @JuliusGoat

My response to Yglesias’s roundly ratio’d “compromise with conservative values to win” tweet resulted in an exchange that demonstrates exactly the problem with that strategy.

When you’re dealing with an ideology whose foundational premise is the lie “only certain types of people matter,” any compromise abandons someone to exclusion and harm.

It’s common to frame unwillingness to compromise on this group or that group’s basic humanity as political intransigence, a puritanical focus on divisive “wedge issues.”

But that’s no wedge: there’s only one issue: honoring and protecting basic rights and dignity for *everyone.*

It’s fighting to exclude groups of people that creates divisions and wedges, not a refusal to entertain those who do so.

The fact that this isn’t obvious shows you just how successful these conservative “values have been at framing our politics.

But there’s a deeper and more important reason that I can’t compromise with conservative “values” on (for example) the basic human dignity and equal rights of gay people.

I’m not gay. It’s not my compromise to make.

Think how obvious this should be.

The entire bargain erases the people were bargaining about—which is exactly what is desired. To entertain the notion is to swallow the divisive framework wholesale.

And then there’s this: This compromise strategy has been the Democratic approach my whole life. It doesn’t work.

A compromise with the lie that only some people matter is never going to lure people captive to the lie. They don’t need our weaksauce when they can get the real stuff.

May as well instead refuse to abandon others, and show them all the ways you’re going to fight for them, too.

Far better to form a coalition in which bigots have been told in no uncertain terms we aren’t going to exclude or harm people, and they support us *anyway* with that full expectation, because they see how we fight for others, so they believe that we will fight for them.

Compromise is a good thing in many circumstances, but for it to be appropriate you need two parties who act in good faith, or at least you need the other party to not scorn the very notion of compromise as weakness, to be exploited at every opportunity.

We don't have that.

The ability to compromise is a sign of a healthy system, just as running a marathon is a sign of a healthy body—but you don't make a sick system healthy by compromising with its disease, any more than you'd make an ill body healthy by running 26 miles.

You just get compromised.