The idea of e pluribus unum or ‘one out of many’ not only has roots in, but is in fact, ‘the root’ of the idealism underlying the tradition of the United States. Majority rule is a rough approximation of a solution to the stubborn persisting reality of plurality. By plurality I mean this country’s governance is designed to accommodate the individual’s efficacy and authority and smelt the nearly innumerable private authorities residing in the nation into a coherent public authority representing as best possible, the collective urge of the nation. In short, one-out-of-many is democracy’s new essential verb if you view life through history’s centuries rather than the 24 hour news cycle.

Majority rule is possible only when the population of people living under the agreement, agree to negotiate. The old joke that a camel is a horse built on compromise may be partially true, but negotiation is not compromise. Negotiation is a creative, disciplined, difficult discussion of conflicting values and the hitherto unseen possibilities that arise from the heat of the conflict. In negotiation you don’t set the world on fire or shoot your opponent if your values don’t dominate. You set up a human, rational, heat shield collecting the energy of the conflict’s discussion until the smelting process literally changes the reality of the individual ingredients and yields a new reality. So get to work Congress and voters. Today’s disfunction of governance comes down to voters who vote for performers rather than producers. Congress’s closest metaphor should not be Broadway or Hollywood, but the prior era iron belt where miracles of transformation occurred in the steel mills because the workers were willing to endure the heat of the process and produce one steel beam out of extreme heat and many ingredients.  Governing is very hard work and never magical thinking. Genuine private prayer also likely helps but that is my private efficacy speaking.