"When the Zealots Rule..."

When the zealots of our system begin to rule, we lose the American promise of compromise. We lose ourselves in "idle ideology"--lazy, impotent, and self-aggrandizing talk of men and women not of virtue, but of greed. 

Yesterday, one of America's last great moderates, Richard Lugar, Republican Senator from Indiana, fell to one of these zealots. Cheers erupted among those on the far right while the "old guard" of the Senate lowered their heads in disbelief. Lugar's 36 years in the U.S. Senate have been distinguished, with some of his most famous (though, in the eyes of the far right, infamous) work coming in the form of bipartisan support for nonnuclear proliferation. On that same topic that came to define Lugar, bipartisanship, the challenger, Richard Mourdock, said "I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view."

When the zealots rule, compromise, that central tenet that made peace in our history, and negotiation, which, though time-consuming and needing great amount of strategy, are both dirty words. The hard work that it used to take to forge peace becomes indolence and an inability to make our neighbor a compatriot, but instead, they fall as our enemy.

 This is only the latest in a string of upsets for those in the middle, and will certainly not be the last. This is also not to say that this does not happen on the left as well (though, the Occupy Wall Street movement has had substantially less "success" pushing out Democrats than the Tea Party has had in pushing out Republicans). It is a sad notion, but unsurprising. The filtered and repackaged world we live in has distanced itself from the world where we knew our neighbors, where great newsmen warned against being anti-compromise.

  When the zealots rule, the prospect of being right is outweighed by self-righteousness. Some would rather see the system crash, burn, and implode than deal with the problems of it. We refuse to admit that there isn't a perfect society where everyone agrees with us and that we never have to lose, never have to grow up. It is childishness, then, that overruns our politics. Children refuse to compromise--and we have chosen to remain as such.

And we all lose, when the zealots rule.