There are various challenges facing the United States that leave no room for compromise.

For most normal people, compromise is not a dirty word. We often try to find a point of agreement in negotiations with our kids, business partners, and others. Compromising on details that do not include principles often leads to deals getting done. Donald Trump is the king of deal-making, and his success often involves parties getting most of what they want but not everything.

While compromise can often be useful for progress, there are times where there is no room for compromise. Just as no woman was every 1/3 pregnant, so too there are principles that either are respected or lost. The US faces at least two major, existential challenges going forward. Neither allows for finding a middle ground. Either we win and keep a constitutional republic or we lose everything we have known for 250 years as a country. The two challenges:

In the past, such as in the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill or Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, compromise could still be found to advance legislation or the interests of the country. As I wrote in the past, until the past two decades, Congress was nearly monolithic with white, Christian men of similar values and economic backgrounds. While there could be profound differences in policy views, the baseline values were generally the same, and the only job was to find a point where both parties could claim some level of victory. That was then but that definitely is not now. When one looks at the Democrats, especially the younger ones, they are mostly not religious. They all went to college where they were brainwashed by leftwing professors. They are in favor of open borders, endless governmental handouts unrelated to Treasury income, trans, climate change, and every other modern fad. One of the reasons why so little legislation has passed since the last election is that the........

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