Replies

The choice is *not* "stick to principles win, " versus "winning is everything, abandon principles". It's a failure to think in anything other than strict black-or-white terms that leads to this. The point (which I was trying to make earlier) is that advancing principles effectively requires being smarter than thinking your only choices are being unbending or abandoning the battle of ideas completely.

That is far too brittle a strategy and an ideology. It's a philosophy for losers.

So you don't have to compromise your principles to win, but if you don't you're going to lose. Like I said, cognitive dissonance.

If you think it is cognitive dissonance to think compromise and principles can go together, you are expressing the brittleness of which I spoke.

Reagan once said he'd rather compromise to get 80% of what he wants then not compromise and get 0%. Reagan was an expert at the art of politics and he compromised many times. My point is simple: Compromising to accomodate what is possible is not abandoning your principles. It is *implementing* your principles!

I believe Govt spends and taxes too much. So do others. I may want to abolish the income tax, but others dont. Do I refuse to support *any* tax cut bill that is not 100% to my liking? If I do, we may never get *any* tax cut because the pro-tax-cut majority cant reach consensus. But working with others, getting an effective majority, I can get closer to the goal.

Liberalism wasnt implemented in one fell swoop. It was done incrementally. If we are to advance Conservatism, we have to do it the same way. Just look at Partial Birth Abortion ban. Incremental. But it has changed the debate to focus on the unborn human for a change.