Compromise

[Montmorency]

The founders certainly viewed compromise as a tool of governance within a legislature. They were classically trained debaters who wanted an issue argued over, judged on the merits, and voted up or down. Where no clear cut decision coalesced in the minds of the representatives, then compromises would be bruited until one achieved enough support. That is compromise as a tool OF governance, not as an end state.

So what about the last 50-100 years?

I found the cartoon amusing, and certainly that kind of process DOES result from shifting latitudes of rejection and acceptance over time (that's classic SJT), but as a student of history yourself, you are aware that the pendulum inevitably hits a point where it swings backwards and re-centers.

That's what many are advocating.

I think you make a great point about the Dems as a source for this stronger reactionary tone in US politics.

I didn't say they were a source, and they are not. What they did was choose not to resist it in a principled way.

They did shift African Americans from a strong and sometimes unthinking support for the 'Party of Lincoln' into a near lock-step support for the Dems, but in doing so they focused more and more on identity politics and crusades against injustice....without remembering the working class voter (mostly white) upon which their party success had been built. Had they kept those voters and added the marginalized groups we would have a different political story today.

You've got things on their head. The act of adding the marginalized groups was in itself what enabled the loss of older constituencies.

Suburban white people abandoned the Democrats, not the other way around. This was indeed essential to the formation of suburbs. Wherever there was a push for inclusion and desegregation, whites broadly responded by retrenching their spaces and institutions to continue exclusionary practices. As I mentioned above, white flight from unions starting around Nixon coincided with legislation and grassroots activism to bring in women and blacks en masse. Unionism should have been stronger than ever before in the 1970s, but, as with urban spaces, the depletion of the white core made political and economic marginalization inevitable. Fun fact from the article above: the first unions to receive setbacks in the 1970s were the oldest and strongest, the manufacturing unions. White flight wasn't a direct cause of marginalization, it just allowed capital interests to swoop in and leverage the knock-on vulnerability.

Chauvinism is what you call it. Responsive government for me, not for thee.

The problem with the Democratic platform shift was that it prioritized personal economics over group and class interests, and to the extent that group interests were present they were erroneously focused on reducing discrimination to enable the mythical "level playing field" between all types of individual.

But the critical project endlessly rails for change without realizing that the change they seek MUST be established through cultural shift in values and thinking and is a multi-decades project, not something that can be accomplished by fiat. The critiques of capitalism began in earnest in the 1840s, it would be 30 years before Unions began to make an effective counter. Modern feminism can trace its trace its roots to the late 18th century, but it would be 40 years before the first "woman's issue" laws were put on the books. The Stonewall Riots occurred in 1969, but same-sex marriage wasn't legal until 2000 in the Netherlands, 2015 in the USA, and still ISN'T legalized in half the world. The critique is a worthy effort, but values and cultural norms change slowly.

That's exactly what the Right has done so effectively for two generations, through think tanks, the Federalist Society, media organizations, and myriad other groups. They've been terrifyingly effective in transforming society. While it's true that leftist academics (mostly confined to the humanities) have done a bad job getting their perspective out to the masses, providing an alternative viewpoint, and explaining what should be done, the main reason the Left has failed to counteract or replicate this success is fairly simple: (lack of) money. Without money, you can't reliably promulgate ideas to millions. Up to now the large proportion of the general population's exposure to Left ideas has been a distorted and falsified product of conservative media. And while there are upper-middle class and rich liberals (like George Soros), they have very limited overlap with the Left - opposition to persecuting minorities and to elevating religion over science mostly - and their class interest aligns with Right and Neoliberal ideologies. You're never going to see a progressive Prager U, or WSJ, or American Enterprise Institute, etc. You don't even have a left-wing equivalent to George Mason University or Harvard Law School.

This is also why notions of an underdog conservative "intellectual dark web" is so comical. Conservative ideas have and still do hold primacy throughout media, government and politics except on minority rights, which at least superficially they already ceded and tried to co-opt decades ago. Even the alt-right uses euphemistic language of paring back "special privileges" to soften the reality of its agenda.