Call me naive or stubborn but these aren’t points I would compromise at all with.

Abortion rights: People have the right to bodily autonomy. Anything less means that you don’t own yourself.

Gun Control: People have a right to live safely and without fear or going to school to be shot up or at the mall. The fact that gun violence and school shootings are a regular occurrence is not a good thing.

Climate Change: Every single scientist is literally saying the next few decades will see some of the worst weather patterns in human history and that’s even if we go to 0 emissions starting tomorrow. This will affect humanity on a global scale and cause unprecedented population displacement and suffering.

Any compromise on any of these posts means you are causing some kind of demographic to suffer and die simply to appease the egos of individuals who lack empathy.

There is no room for a discussion. It’s like one side saying “kill everyone” and the other side is saying “let’s not kill people” then people are like “well, let’s compromise and kill just some people, it’s only fair.” No, I’m done. Democrats have been way too tame and compromising for too long, I’m done entertaining this BS.

If there was something I give up on, it’s gun control. For several reasons:

1. There’s basically no gun control anyways so it’s not like we’re giving up something.
2. Compared to abortion rights (ie bodily autonomy) and climate change (ie existential crisis), not having gun control is the least bad. It’s still pretty crucial, to be fair, but comparing to actual existential crises like the other 2, not having gun control doesn’t seem that bad in comparison

I don’t pander to fascists. None.

Do you consider yourself a partisan? The pervasive notion that there are “two sides” and you must be on one of them, it results in ordinary citizens viewing one another with suspicion and fear. It’s a useful lie that serves the interests of those who would foster division in order to maintain the cultural status quo.

Not calling you out in particular. Just that I think about this every time something is posted that perpetuates this false “our team, their team” narrative because it’s a powerful, insipid tool of oppression against the common person. True, people differ on contentious issues, sometimes irreconcilably. But if we are made to view one another as dyed-in-the-wool adversaries over that, we will fail to discover our common interests much less promote them through solidarity.

Not denying that the two major political parties in the United States do hold seemingly unassailable dominance in major elections like the one we’re entering, largely due to determining winner by first-past-the-post. And yes, sadly it’s very often the case that a meaningful vote will support one of those parties. But it doesn’t have to be this way forever. In fact, I will be able to vote for city office candidates by ranked choice starting this year!

Sorry for the rant. Not an expert. Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

I’m fine with getting rid of the immigrants in America but it has to be all immigrants. European, every body. Got to get a visa from the native peoples if you want to stay and work. Hopefully they reject the racists.

Human rights are not a compromise. I will not even entertain the idea of compromising those. Abortion rights stay.

Gun control is an iffy one. It really should be fixed, but it will take decades of continuing reforms and filtering firearms out of the market to really get it to where it should be. On a short term basis, “compromising” (but not giving up) on this would be OK.

Climate change will obviously just kill us all, soooo…

In a keep two, give one scenario to shut Republicans up for an election cycle, it would be safe to compromise on gun control in exchange for cementing proper human rights and getting meaningful climate action.

I am willing to compromise and allow trial by combat to be reintroduced as a valid judicial process. The only caveat is that the wealthy cannot appoint champions to fight for them.

Seriously though, I’m not in love with either party. Honestly, there are things I despise about both. Most Americans are pretty middle of the road. It’s the extremists and the parties holding the country hostage, not the American people.

I’d give up any and every gun point in favor of police reform, proper election and transition of power legislation, and climate change.

Great question. Democracy is all about compromise. I am bothered by how few people seem to grasp this fact. Personally, when I hear the phrase “squabbling politicians”, I roll my eyes - to squabble is their job! They’re doing it on our behalf because people have different interests and different values and so we don’t all agree, and that is a good thing. A polity where everybody agrees - well, there are names for that kind of political system and none of them are democracy.

Over here in Europe, I just wish the progressive parties (for whom I vote) would do the obvious deal and sacrifice their dilatory approach to immigration and in particular border security. This issue is undermining all their other policy goals. The obvious allergy of voters to porous borders is not just a result of disinformation, and taking a tougher line on it does not necessarily mean infringing human rights.

The Dems really should give up the party line on gun control. Red flag laws make a lot of sense, but bans on specific weapons are unpopular,
Ineffective, unworkable, and almost certainly unconstitutional.

Compromise can only exist when there’s at least one coincidence of interest. A greater good or similar common value that motivates the parties to negotiate over the aisle on individual issues. The principles, values, goals and even worldview of the two party system in the US is radically polarized. Which makes it almost impossible to negotiate a compromise. Right now, the few policy issues they agree on are nonessential points (supporting Israel, e.g.) that don’t weight the balance and exist out of pure accident. It exist on either side for completely different reasons. When one side argues that some people deserves to die, it is hard to negotiate when the protection of life and dignity is above all for the other side. But compounded by the fact that they don’t even agree what life, person hood and dignity even mean.

I don’t think the kind of compromise that is necessary is able to be stated in the way you’re asking for, because of how values feed into beliefs.

Take abortion rights for example: someone who would describe themselves as “pro-life” may argue something that is effectively saying that murdering babies is never okay. I would be in complete agreement there. As someone who is “pro-choice”, the core of my argument is usually some form of “a clump of cells that could become a person does not trump the rights to bodily autonomy that an existing person has”. No progress will be made in this discussion unless we can address the fact that the vast majority of abortions are nowhere near “murdering babies”. That’s where compromise is most likely to happen, in the discussion that arises when trying to reconcile different word views, and coming to speak in mutually intelligible terms.

For example, one area where I and many other abortion advocates have compromised on this front is recognising that the line between “a clump of cells” and “a baby” is pretty blurry. Personally, I don’t know where I stand on where the law should stand on that line; in my country, abortions after 24 weeks can only be done in exceptional cases (mother’s health at risk, foetal anomalies etc.). I think a time limit like this seems reasonable, but I’m not sure whether at 24 weeks, a foetus is more like a clump of cells, or a baby. I have personally had a very early term abortion, and I’m grateful to have had that opportunity, because I have no idea how I’d feel if I was in that 20-24 weeks range. Acknowledging this uncertainty I feel is part of how compromise works. I would hope that someone on the “other side” of the argument would apply a similar approach to try to understand and entertain my argument wrt bodily autonomy. In a way, this is an easy example, because all the leeway in positions has been explored, and the core issue is something that can’t be compromised on (such as how I can’t have a productive discussion with people who are actively against women’s bodily autonomy, or people who believe that life starts at conception).

An area in which I’m working on trying to compromise on is trying to reshape how I think about farmers and other similar social groups. Farmers are a good example because I am a very left wing, queer, university-educated city-living scientist who has Opinions on the climate, and I’m very socially progressive. To some people, I am the big bad Other, an inherent problem with the world. I don’t like this, because certainly I don’t see myself as “the problem”. I’d actually rather like to be part of the solution, but I won’t do that well if I take the easy route of dismissing people like this as just racist, idiotic bigots whose opinions I shouldn’t care about. Many of them are bigoted, but if I don’t want to mass exterminate people whose views are unacceptable to me, nor be exterminated myself, I need to try to imagine a world where I could break bread with these people. That’s a pretty difficult challenge.

PhilosophyTube’s video on Judith Butler helped a lot on this actually. I have been realising more and more that the common ground that exists between me and many of my “political enemies” is that we are humans who are scared and struggling, like me. When I feel hopeless, solidarity pulls me through, and thinking in this way makes it easier to feel compassion for people whose anger and bigotry isolates them from this kind of community support: a person can simultaneously be a product of their environment, and responsible for their actions; they can both be a victim of fascist ideology (through becoming isolated, disempowered and stewing in hate), and also an active perpetrator of said hate.

This reframing isn’t itself compromise, but hopefully if I continue to work to see what I share with the people I most disagree with, I’ll be able to have the kinds of conversations that build compromise. Successful compromise takes a small amount of shared ground and extends that, bit by bit, person by person. That’s why I think your question didn’t get the answers you were hoping for: by the time things become solidified into political parties and manifesto stances, there isn’t much fluidity and ambiguity left to act as space for new, shared understanding.

If you made it to the end of this comment, thanks for bearing with my meandering. If you’d like to read an essay about compromise that’s a much better story than my rambles, you might enjoy this article about a beautifully mundane yet improbable compromise helped build the internet. . The whole article is great, but I especially love this part:

"In the beginning, the disagreements seemed insurmountable, and Miller felt disheartened: ‘The first night we thought: This is gonna fail miserably. At first nobody saw eye to eye or trusted each other enough yet to let each other in and try to figure out the art of the possible.’ But as concessions and then agreements were made, people began to feel energised by the creation of a new system, even if imperfect; one piece at a time, their system could bring the content of the web within reach for everyone. As Caplan remembers: ‘By the second day, there was a lot of drinking and all-night working groups. We were running on adrenaline and energy. By the last day, we realised we were making history.’ "

I take heart in the understanding that compromise is messy, and hard to evaluate when you’re in the thick of it.

Just wanted to direct folks to [email protected], which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers!

Guns: A well regulated militia includes gun registration and training requirements. The fear based self defense justification is a bunch of baloney. The compromise is being able to keep guns if you are part of that well regulated militia, which should probably require not being a violent felon along with guns being taken away for other people’s safety, like when domestic violence allegations are involved.

Abortion rights: A woman and a doctor decide when and how she has an abortion. Since a doctor already has an oath to life, they won’t abort a viable and healthy fetus anyway so they can compromise on how that situation works out.

I don’t really have anything to compromise on with Republicans because they oppose basic rights that impact no one else, and compromising rights is only necessary when the impact the rights of others.