Compromise

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So what about the last 50-100 years?

Prior to WW2, I think compromise was a frequent part of the national approach to governance because there were more points of policy commonality. Prior to FDR, most of our foreign policy goals were pretty shared and defined by isolationism and building US trade. In addition, the nation was largely churched and traditional values were fairly commonly held. Thus two areas of constant contention today (foreign policy and social policy) were fairly parallel between the two parties. Economic policy was not -- but economics is often the one most amenable to compromise. The Cold War, the growing impact of FDR's social programs, and the USA taking a dominant role in overseas events began to change this after WW2.

Roughly 50 years ago, we hit something of a sea-change in the USA, both culturally and politically. All of the quasi-socialist student protests from 1968, the advent of common drug use, the burgeoning numbers of college educated persons, the breakup of the old Democrat party and Nixon's cold-blooded use of the 'Southern Strategy,' 3 major political assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK), the choice to ramp up and make Vietnam a fully US conducted proxy conflict, the poor results of our efforts in Vietnam, the explosion of numbers in the baby boomer era, and all of the political turmoil and national angst over Watergate, ALL of these occur between November of 1963 and August of 1974. US political culture has never been the same again and following Watergate the level of disdain (hatred) for the political other, and not merely the need to oppose certain policies, has greatly increased.

How we view, and use, compromise is now in a very different context.

[Montmorency]

Without contesting any of that, I remind you that in the first place I asserted that the ideal or concept of compromise is seen and used a certain way today, and that I don't believe this was the case until relatively recently. I'm asking about why and howcompromise came to be emphasized this way, now. The most relevant fields to examine would be political rhetoric and media discourse.

I'm not good with corpora, and one I found just has a few presidential speeches (we need much more, and from many more players). Several hundred mentions of "compromise". Most of them attributed to Polk and Obama. (Probably insufficient data to jump any guns.)

But I don't think you need to read many contemporary quotes from politicians across news reports to get what I'm saying. I mean, it could all just be an artifact of my experience of the Obama era, I don't know. Maybe compromise was getting played up because it was the only trick the Dems had in their bag. That's why we need data going back to at least the 90s.

EDIT: Sorry if that sounded harsh Seamus, you were trying, but I wanted us to hone in on my question and you gave a generic summary of pivotal eras in the 20th century without moving on to describing an answer.