Of bipartisanship
Historian, Steven Hayward, on bipartisanship at The American:
"Everyone says he or she is for 'bipartisan consensus,' but usually this represents nothing more than lowest-common-denominator compromise—necessary from time to time, but hardly a political philosophy. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had it right when she scorned consensus as 'the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?'"
Rather than bipartisanship, Hayward promotes debate:
"[W]e did it in the only serious way possible: long conversations (as in day-long, several times), and genteel argument. It took a year and a half in total. Rather than debating disagreements, we argued about them at length, which is not the same thing. It was more like an advanced graduate seminar, with everyone looking for academic literature and other evidence to illuminate problems and persuade others about a particular point."
"Everyone says he or she is for 'bipartisan consensus,' but usually this represents nothing more than lowest-common-denominator compromise—necessary from time to time, but hardly a political philosophy. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had it right when she scorned consensus as 'the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?'"
Rather than bipartisanship, Hayward promotes debate:
"[W]e did it in the only serious way possible: long conversations (as in day-long, several times), and genteel argument. It took a year and a half in total. Rather than debating disagreements, we argued about them at length, which is not the same thing. It was more like an advanced graduate seminar, with everyone looking for academic literature and other evidence to illuminate problems and persuade others about a particular point."
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