The Politics of Opposition

"If you listen to these questions they all have exactly the same theme, which is ‘How do we bring about big change?’ And I think that’s a fundamental, threshold question, and the question is, ‘Do you believe that compromise, triangulation will bring about big change?’ I don’t. I think the people who are powerful in Washington — big insurance companies, big drug companies, big oil companies — they are not going to negotiate. They are not going to give away their power! The only way that they are going to give away their power is if we take it away from them!”

It’s the Politics of Opposition. Fact Check: Politics is combative – our nation’s Constitution is specifically designed to be adversarial with three co-equal branches of government keeping each other in check.

Issac Newton said this is a law of nature. Equal and Opposite, all that.

There are forces in American society that always seek to accumulate money and power at everyone else’s expense. They push as far as they can, and several times conservatives have let them go too far and they’ve broken the whole system. See: Great Depression.

From last century’s robber barons and monopoly tycoons to today’s insurance industry Wall Street billionaires, these forces have always had at least one major political party at their disposal. Currently it’s the Republican Party that works to help the billionaires screw the little guy.

A good Democrat calls it like it is. These forces MUST be flat out opposed. It’s what the Democratic Party exists to do. Like Abraham Lincoln said about his party when they were the liberal party, when dealing with conservatives:

"What do they advise us to do? Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though [they] will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. These means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: that we cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right."

"No.. . . Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons… LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT."

Lincoln was different than the previous politicians of his party who tried to compromise. He was a fighter. Some things cannot be compromised with. There is sometimes no common ground. Ask Lincoln. Ask Teddy Roosevelt. Ask Prince Metternich. Ask Kennedy. Ask those people called leaders.