Compromise

[a completely inoffensive name]

I don't see how that's necessarily true. It may be better described as getting shot at from all corners.

Why isn't compromise better understood as a last resort? There is no such thing as a "middle ground", and the rhetorical pursuit of it seems to routinely deny good government. See again, the parable of King Solomon and the mothers' dispute.

Let's hold up here and recap the King Solomon story and see if I follow.
Two women claim to be mother of a child.
Solomon's judgement is to cut the baby in half, one for each woman.
Woman A goes along with the judgement. Woman B does not and asks Solomon to give woman A the child to spare his life.
Solomon declares Woman B to be the mother.

You interpret Solomon to be "the middle ground" when I don't see him as that at all. The cutting of the child doesn't reflect the equal partition to both parties, it is the outcome of an all or nothing declaration. If both sides demand everything, in essence you get nothing.

Woman B is actually willing to make the personal compromise to allow Woman A to have the child in return for the child's survival and she gets rewarded for it. W.B advocates for a wider purpose (general welfare of the child/other) than her personal politics (ownership of her child). Arn't biblical parables fun?

Another approach is historical. When was American politics most polarized? Likely the 1850s. In that scenario we see the all or nothing tactic play out to its full extent. Without rambling through lots of details, we see that unless one side is successful in exterminating any and all resistance, you wind up with gridlock or even potential reversal of gains. What gains from the emancipation of slaves were not totally reversed in practice, if not in law, by the turn of the century?

I agree that Democrats have become less anti-immigrant since Bush, but I'm not familiar with a connection to "pro-union" positions.

Labor unions wish to protect their competitive advantage by preventing cheap labor from immigrating to the country and undercutting their workers...and profits. These labor unions up until recently were the main financial drivers of the democratic party and their influence was present in democratic policies until the post-1960s style of liberalism became the dominant public strain sometime in the mid to late 1990s. See passage from a book I am currently reading (Rorty, Achieving Our Country):

Most leftist reformers of this period [pre-Sixties - ACIN] were blissfully unaware that brown-skinned Americans in the Southwest were being lynched, segregated, and humiliated in the same way as were African-Americans in the Deep South. Almost nobody in the pre-Sixties Left thought to protest against homophobia, so leftists like F. O. Matthiessen and Bayard Rustin had to stay in the closet. From the point of view of today's Left, the pre-Sixties Left may seem callous about the needs of oppressed groups as was the nation as a whole.

But it was not really that bad. For the reformist Left hoped that the mistreatment of the weak by the strong in general, and racial discrimination in particular, would prove to be a by-product of economic injustice. They saw the sadistic humiliation of black Americans, and of other groups, as one more example of the selfishness which pervaded an unreformed capitalist economy. They saw prejudice against those groups as incited by the rich in order to keep the poor from turning their wrath on their economic oppressors. The pre-Sixties Left assumed that as economic inequality and insecurity decreased, prejudice would gradually disappear.

In retrospect, this belief that ending selfishness would eliminate sadism seems misguided. One of the good things which happened in the Sixties was that the American Left began to realize that its economic determinism had been too simplistic. Sadism was recognized as having deeper roots than economic insecurity. The delicious pleasure to be had from creating a class of putative inferiors and then humiliating individual members of that class was seen as Freud saw it - as something which would be relished even if everybody were rich.

With this partial substitution of Freud for Marx as a source of social theory, sadism rather than selfishness has become the principal target of the Left. The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many member of this Left specialize in what they call the "politics of difference" or "of identity" or "of recognition." This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

This shift of attention came at the same time that intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor unions, partly as result of resentment over the union members' failure to back George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. Simultaneously, the leftist ferment which had been centered, before the Sixties, in the social science departments of the colleges and the universities moved into the literature departments.

That's part of my point though. Democrats from the 90s on - though really beginning with Carter's admin - abandoned a coherent picture of what government should look like and do for the sake of imagined, putative popularity and moderation. Compromise should be about acceding to the best you can get, not proactively selling its image for its own sake. Making compromise your brand and motivation surely means you have nothing to offer.

I would say that (if I am understanding Rorty's position correctly), when liberals become psychoanalysts instead of economists they purposely abandoned government as an ineffective tool towards cleansing Americans of their personal sins. This of course will undercut their commitment towards any large scale policy goals and reinforces a self-flagellating mentality that insists your vision of the world is inherently flawed, and must be merged with many different values and opinions if it wishes to meet a purity test. In that perspective, yes, compromise is the ideal and is promoted for its own sake.