Recognizing the sweet taste of compromise
On a recent family road trip, our kids called for an emergency bathroom stop at a desolate stretch of road in Maine. In this remote region, inhabited by more wild moose and coyotes than people, the only public facilities available for miles were located at (you guessed it) a roadside Dunkin Donuts.
O glorious outposts of civilization at the edge of the known world! Offering well-loved caffeine and carbs, these lone Dunkin Donuts buildings are wondrous beacons of comfort for weary travelers to the great snowy north. But every joy in this fallen world comes with strings attached. If you have ever taken a preschooler into a donut shop and managed to walk out without purchasing a donut for said preschooler, your visceral fortitude and capacity for debating a determined five-year-old far exceeds mine.
But this is not the point I want to make. Rather, this particular donut shop visit occasioned an experiment that poignantly demonstrates a democratic principle at work. For reasons of clarity, we will call it the donut principle of democracy.
You see, in a desperate effort not to ruin a looming dinner for two kids who had already consumed excessive amounts of sugar for the day (because of the car trip), I asked them to select a donut to split without thinking about the consequences of such a request. Nearly ten minutes of passionate deliberation ensued. Then an impasse: One child really wanted the chocolate donut while his sister really wanted the one with pink frosting and sprinkles—because pink is her favorite color, she noted with Ciceronian arm gesturing, presenting the most powerful rhetorical argument in her considerable arsenal. Neither one would back down. I suggested a third option that I knew both liked: vanilla frosted with sprinkles. Taken aback for a moment, the two cautiously agreed, but at the last second sister changed her mind and decided that chocolate, her brother’s favorite donut, was good enough for her after all.
And so, dramatically, a decision was reached with one of the two major contenders winning, bypassing the third option that was not the top choice for either party. Both happily ate their share of the donut, which I carefully sliced into two halves that passed thorough inspection, and on we went with our drive.
To be honest, however, there was a good two-minute stretch somewhere in the middle of the debate when I was uncertain if any decision would be reached. Feeling like a terrible parent at that moment for setting my kids up to fail, I was just about to offer each of them the donut they wanted, on the condition that I eat half of each (for parenting is all about dying to self daily). For better or worse, I was spared that difficult duty when the two parties reached consensus at last.
Such difficult debates between the tiniest of future voters are a good microcosm of democracy in action. The health of a democracy requires people of wildly differing opinions and preferences to discuss their respective positions and, ultimately, reach a compromise acceptable to both. Someone will have to yield. Just as it is in the donut shop, so in society at large. If something important is to be shared—whether a donut or the government—someone will always have to compromise and not get their way precisely. Who will it be?
The process of elections allows us to take such difficult decisions out of the personal realm of the donut shop and into the more impersonal arena of modern voting booths. But the voting process doesn’t quite bypass this issue of compromise. Just because voting (Iowa caucuses excepted) is more impersonal than a donut shop debate between the constituents does not mean that real feelings, hurts, dreams, ambitions, and, most of all, dramatically conflicting visions of what is good—and, really, what is best—for oneself and for others are not at stake. They are.
The donut principle of democratic politics forces us to consider the key role that compromise plays in a well-functioning democracy. In every election, someone (and a large group of someones) wins, and someone (along with, again, a large group of other someones) loses. But the willingness to keep working together is a sine qua non for daily existence in any community, large or small. History of democracies, ancient and modern, repeatedly shows this.
In his decades of writing on the Athenian democracy, ancient historian and political theorist Josiah Ober repeatedly highlighted the sharp divisions that existed in the Athenian citizen body—such divisions as those between mass and elite. But no less significant were the citizens’ efforts to keep going despite these divisions. This sense of commitment, of marching along together, required regular compromises, just as it does today, and—this is crucial—this does not mean that one gets nothing by compromising.
Too often we mistake compromise for loss. Victory in a democracy does not mean the hoarding of all the things. To go back to the donut principle, by reaching a compromise both kids ensured that they each got half a donut out of it—which is half a donut more than they would have gotten had they refused to compromise at all. In other words, as Ober argues in his most recent book, the success of any democracy depends on a civic bargain.
This bargain always requires caring enough not just about oneself but about the other person or group as well. Sharing the donut, rather than just selecting whichever one you want and eating it all yourself, requires a completely different paradigm of political thought from the choose-your-own-donut method that secretly we would all much prefer, human nature being what it is. This last point, indeed, is the focus of Tracy McKenzie’s analysis of the American democracy, We the Fallen People. Of course, there is another possible alternative that we generally would rather not contemplate: One or both sides could refuse to compromise, snubbing the civic bargain through rejecting election results or perhaps adopting the approach of “if I don’t get what I want, no one gets anything good at all.” One could, in a nutshell, refuse to cooperate to select the proverbial donut acceptable to both parties—with much more harmful repercussions for the body politic.
In the Russian language, the idea of a donut hole—dyrka ot bublika—has a curious connotation. (Technically, this is the hole of a bagel, but the concept stands.) In Russian this is always an insult, a promise that someone is getting absolutely nothing, and they deserve it. For the Putins of the world, this term highlights their entitlement to the entirety of the donut while emphasizing no less strongly the lack of power for everyone else. How American it is, by contrast, that donut holes mean something very different. They are tiny blobs of delicious goodness that come from the same heavenly substance as the larger donuts proper—homoousios, theologically speaking—created through the natural process of donut-making.
For our democracy, so imperiled this election year, this symbolic and linguistic redemption of the humblest discards of donut dough offers a comforting reminder that compromises among citizens can take a variety of forms. We can—and should—share the donut that is our democracy and our societal resources with fellow-citizens. We should also accept the smaller compromises that donut holes offer. Most importantly, we must continue going on together—for the alternative benefits no one.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (forthcoming, IVP Academic, 2024). She is Book Review Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog.