Ezra Klein notes the harmful paradox of goo-goo centrism, as currently exemplified by Starbucks' eye-rolling "Come Together" campaign:
If you want Washington to come together, you need to make it painful for those who are breaking it apart. Telling both sides to come together when it’s predominantly one side breaking the negotiations apart actually makes it easier on those who’re refusing to compromise.
Implicit in Klein's sizable paradox is also its vast expansion. Many of us who have regularly urged compromise as the proper grease of government's machinery now find ourselves the most tactically as well as philosophically uncompromising faction. Republicans' deliberate gridlock, maliciously imposed, has reached such intolerable heights that by now the only serviceable response is the selfsame intransigence, squared.
Time and again we have been to Munich, time and again we have cautiously accepted the ideological militants' good faith, and time and again we have been betrayed. Each compromise--each appeasement--has been but a minor, temporary triumph in the opposition's march to total victory--which they mean to either achieve, or destroy us in the attempt. They intend, as Lincoln characterized his contemporaneous version of these cryptofascistic wretches, to "rule or ruin in all events."
As only a delicious paradox might have it, these non-compromisers will now desperately seek some oxygen-permitting compromise, while yesterday's virtuous compromisers should simply slam the door on any compromise whatsoever. For we'll never breathe easily again, until we asphyxiate this threat.