Matt Wuerker for March 15, 2016

You’re right, of course, about the refusal to compromise. But if you examine the facts, the problem is highly asymmetrical. The republicans have come to a crisis because they can’t even agree among themselves, much less with folks on the other side of the aisle. I mean, seriously, voting over 60 times to repeal the PPACA, when the actual enabling legislation was dreamed up by a conservative think tank and first put into practice by a republican who ended up being his party’s nominee for president. Huh? What’s up with that?

There is a common misperception that every issue has two sides. It takes two to tango (or perhaps tangle), the old saying goes. But this view obscures the fact that arguments can have many, many “sides” or, perhaps, only one side that’s backed with facts. The pyramids were built to store grain, for example. Nonsense. Evolution and creationism are somehow equivalent in being two sides of an argument. Silly stuff. The overwhelming evidence would suggest the creationist arguments have an infinitesimal chance of being right, whereas the evidence for evolution is deep, wide, and constantly being assessed by scientists. Actually the same is likely true for anthropogenic climate change.

So, yes, the refusal to compromise is a big issue. But if the facts are overwhelmingly on one side or the other, why does compromise makes sense? Take the Laffer curve, for example. It is demonstrably wrong; just look at Kansas for a definitive case study. Yet, even though it’s a boneheaded set of ideas, it is taken as fact by the republicans.