Why everyone says they favor compromise, but nobody does it

President-elect Joe Biden is a dealmaker and a compromiser, someone who has spent a career looking for the places where people can find mutual agreement so something can get done. While there are ideologues who find in that impulse a reason to dislike or distrust Biden, it’s a perfectly reasonable approach to politics, whether you share it or not.

But is it what his constituents want? And how are they likely to react to the compromises he seeks?

A new HuffPost/YouGov poll goes some way toward answering these questions. Asked whether their own party’s representatives should stick to their positions even if it means nothing gets done or compromise with the other side, Republicans said, by 54 to 25 percent, that they should stick to their positions, while Democrats said, by 43 to 33 percent, that they should compromise.

This is not an unfamiliar finding. The Pew Research Center has asked a similar question for many years, and most of the time substantially more Democrats than Republicans say they value compromise (though in 2018 the two groups converged).

So if both sides were to simply respond to their constituents, Democrats would seek out Republican help on passing legislation, and Republicans would spurn their advances. Which might well be what happens.

But compromise is an interactive process. If you make clear to me that you think, say, raising the minimum wage will destroy America and you’ll never ever help me do it, then I’m going to lose my interest in compromising with you pretty quickly.

That applies to Biden, too, no matter how many times he expresses his hope that Republicans will warm to his ideas. While he is by no means an ideologue, there’s no reason to think he’s after compromise for its own sake. If Democrats have the votes to pass a bill on their own and Republicans are unified in fruitless opposition, that’ll be fine with Biden; the point for him is that in the end the bill is passed.

And the dynamics of opposition all work against compromise - particularly now, and particularly for Republicans.

We’re about to enter a period of furious Republican opposition, in which some kind of new tea party will arise - angry, convinced Biden is an illegitimate president, and innately suspicious of the GOP establishment - which will inspire fear in the hearts of every Republican in Washington. Any Republican who sides with Democrats on any meaningful legislation knows that he will immediately be branded a traitor across a range of media outlets to which many of his most politically active constituents, not to mention the entire conservative world through which he moves every day, play close attention. Being pilloried on Fox News and conservative talk radio puts you in a very uncomfortable and vulnerable position.

Progressive media, on the other hand, is not only weaker in its influence but also doesn’t react to deviations from orthodoxy with the same kind of swift and sure punishment. Which means that Democrats have at least a bit more room to welcome bipartisanship if it means getting something valuable out of it.

That’s another key part of the dynamic: When you’re the party in power, compromising can mean achieving one of your important goals, like a promise you made on the campaign trail. It will probably be substantively significant and politically valuable, because you can say you’re delivering results and claim the credit.

All the opposition gets by compromising is making things slightly less bad, which is one of the reasons they find little value in it. Those with long memories might recall how David Frum, a prominent former George W. Bush speechwriter, wrote an article when the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 arguing that Republicans had made a mistake by not working with Democrats to force the bill to be more conservative; instead “when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.” For that bit of heresy he was forced out of his position at a conservative think tank, even though he was right, and today Frum is one of the foremost Never Trumpers.

But most Republicans are willing to take the risk that total opposition entails, particularly since they don’t have much in the way of substantive goals during Biden’s term that they’d be willing to give something away to achieve. If nothing at all happens for the next four years, that will be a huge victory for the GOP. And the razor-thin margins in both houses, even if Democrats win both Georgia Senate runoffs and get control of the Senate, make compromise even less attractive; if victory over the president and his party is always just a vote or two away, compromising looks even more like capitulation.

All of which means we’re likely to hear plenty of talk about compromise from both parties - since it’s easy to say you support it in the abstract - but very little actual compromising. And the politicians know perfectly well that while much of the public says it’s what they want, in the end the politics of compromise are usually too dangerous, especially if you’re in the opposition.