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To be effective in politics you must compromise, and probably the hardest choices politicians make are about how far to go. How much of their base support can they afford to put at risk, and how much of their sense of their own integrity can they bear to sacrifice? These can be in conflict, and it would be glib or priggish to pretend the moral case is simple: maybe shifting a position, or even shaving the truth, will help you achieve greater good down the line.
When President Trump claimed in 2020 that the election was rigged in Georgia, Geoff Duncan, then the state’s Republican lieutenant-governor, rebutted him. As my colleague Rebecca Jackson
writes this week,
Mr Duncan started receiving death threats, chose not to run again and grew so alarmed about Mr Trump that he is now campaigning for Kamala Harris.
I thought about Mr Duncan as I watched Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, try to manoeuvre through the crisis Mr Trump has whipped up in his state with different baseless claims, that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield. Like Mr Duncan, Mr DeWine has rebutted the claims; unlike him, he says he still supports Mr Trump. To have influence in politics, he said at a press conference on Thursday, “you need to be inside one political party or another.”
Which politician has made the right call? “History isn’t kind to the man who holds
Mussolini’s jacket,”
a Republican senator once observed, in explaining his resistance to endorsing Mr Trump, according to “Confidence Man” by Maggie Haberman. I hope he’s right. But, then, the senator who said that was Ted Cruz. He once called Mr Trump, who attacked the senator’s wife, father and faith, a “pathological liar” and “serial philanderer” who was “utterly amoral”. Now he is among the former president’s most ardent fans. As a compromiser, Mr Cruz probably sits at the other extreme from Mr Duncan.
Many Democratic politicians have made startling compromises of their own in recent years, not in response to a figure such as Mr Trump but to an uprising by activists on the left. The policy agenda of that movement never had broad electoral support, yet it prompted Ms Harris in 2019 to take important positions—on fracking, Medicare for all and border enforcement—that she evidently had only a thin attachment to, if any. As
our briefing
this week shows, the uprising has waned, for now. (That’s why the new conservative “mockumentary”
I wrote about this week,
which satirises the anti-racist movement, can seem like a blast from the past.)
The paroxysm on the left led to some progress, as
our leader
makes clear. Yet it had its excesses, and the way Ms Harris and others (in politics, media, academia and the boardroom) truckled to them should probably temper Democrats’ righteousness about compromises made by the likes of Mr DeWine—and increase everyone’s admiration for the likes of Mr Duncan. Maybe the Democrats, and everyone else, are just lucky no figure such as Mr Trump has yet emerged on the left, one who does not worry about compromising their own principles, because the only one that matters is winning.
If you have any thoughts on this newsletter, please write to me at
jbennet@economist.com.
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