You think that is an oxymoron; conservatives don't compromise because they are too busy sticking to principles. Maybe you are sticking to close to your principles of political definition.
I started thinking about this when reading Ross Douthat's column "A compromise that's centered on catastrophe". It was originally published as "The Catastrophic Option" in the New York Times, 2009-10-19. It is about shifting the health care debate to something that might actually work.
Ross Douthat supposedly is the resident "conservative" columnist for the New York Times. One of those attempts to show that a newspaper doesn't have a "liberal" bias. I've found some of his columns to be "liberal" in the sense that he approaches issues in a thoughtful, adaptive manner rather than a reactive manner.
In an email to a local columnist who generally writes reasoned columns, I wrote, "If you don’t change your paradigms, you won’t have a pair of dimes for change." I didn't mean to apply this to him, but to people who expect things not to change.
I think one of the paradigms we have to change is the "conservative/liberal" divide, especially when those to whom these labels apply don't really act that way. Rather, they are locked into positions that are neither conservative nor liberal.
Maybe we can move away from this locked horn position by looking at some of our definitions again. For starters, I offer these. A conservative is one who says, "Not so fast" with regard to change. A moderate is one who says, "Here are our choices and the probable consequences."
There are many other ways at looking at political viewpoints, but I think these two would be a good starting point on how we define our political parties and how we choose those who would govern us.
