Duncan Black calls it “High Broderism“: the clamor for leaders who avoid the messiness of democracy by simply splitting every issue down the middle, calling it “compromise”, and thereby taking it off the table forever. Namesake David Broder is certainly an offender, as are people like Mark Halperin. However, the biggest, and most annoying offender, has to be David Brooks. For him, there isn’t any issue that can’t be solved by simply splitting the difference, no matter what the reality is. Middle class wages stagnating? Two-thirds of income growth going to the top 1%, leaving the small piece of the pie for the rest of us shlubs in the lower 99%? It doesn’t matter, because when we are in a recession, Brooks says that we should “Make Everybody Hurt“. On issue after issue, the Wise Leaders of the traditional media just want us to listen to them, so we can simply avoid unpleasantness like those protests in Wisconsin. A must-read takedown of that nonsense is here.

It is a very disgusting kind of elitism, from people who never have to worry about things like paying the mortgage or having health insurance taken away. And despite how highly they think of each other and their wise, “centrist” beliefs, they do not have the answers. You can’t solve the disagreements over unions, or health care, or the environment, or abortion, or the deficit, with these wise, faux “compromises” from on high. These are big, messy political fights because Americans have widely divergent views about how they think things should be. We aren’t looking for strong, wise men (and they are almost always men) to rule us from on high. That’s not democracy.

We are having big fights over public employees, deficits, health care, and the like, because they are huge issues with no easy solutions. People have different priorities, and they (shockingly) do not always align with pundits whose incomes are in seven figures. My priorities are going to be quite a bit different from the priorities of a member of the Tea Party, and I really don’t think that any solution will magically appease all sides. Like all of U.S. history, there will be a knock-down, drag-out fight to move things incrementally in one direction, until the tide turns and we move in a new direction. That’s democracy. It’s a contact sport where you play for keeps. As bad as it is, I’ll happily take it instead of some aristocratic fantasy world.

• Currently Listening To: "You Shook Me", Led Zeppelin

But even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then, and the gem to be taken from this column is this: “They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.”

I think that just about hits the nail on the head, and it’s something that I always mull over when it comes to the big policy debates of the day, like the budget. I’m baffled as to how many conservatives out there believe that the free market system is so inviolate that it must be implemented always and in all circumstances. Some advocate this with such fervor that it makes me wonder if life is some giant, super-secret video game, where points are tallied as to how vehemently one advocated for capitalism during one’s life. What else could explain the fact that some people refuse to see the very real flaws that exist in the system?

I don’t think it’s terribly irrational to believe, as I do, that while the free market system works best for a very wide variety of circumstances, that sometimes its flaws do outweigh its benefits. Especially in cases where the means of the free market does get in the way of the end of improving everybody’s lives. I’m not an economics textbook, so I’m not going to get into the cases where that is true, but those cases do exist. For people to not even admit that it is possible for the free market system to work poorly shows a lack of seriousness when it comes to major policy arguments.

The same goes for the absolute love of tax cuts that some people have. There are certainly times to cut taxes, and there are times to raise taxes; however, it is not right to do either 100% of the time. One would think this would be self-evident, but alas it is not. The same lack of seriousness applies here: when you take a big option off of the table 100% of the time, how earnest are you about finding a compromise?

There’s a lot in that column that is knee-jerk and ignorable. However, the light it shines on the tendency for a large swath of the Republican party, especially its leadership, to insist on a narrow subset of “solutions” with little regard to consequence is worth thinking about.