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Much like in marriage, you also have to have political compromise in a country.

During the last few decades, American elected representatives and our electorates succeeded in reaching compromise about difficult issues. However, political compromise seems to be breaking down today.

This breakdown, Diamond posits, is the "most serious" problem the United States faces because it could precipitate the rise of a dictatorship in the country.
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JARED DIAMOND

Jared Diamond, a noted polymath, is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World Until Yesterday; and The Third Chimpanzee, and is the presenter of TV documentary series based on three of those books.
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TRANSCRIPT:

JARED DIAMOND: Let's talk about compromise, both personal compromise and national compromise. In a marriage, you have to make compromises. A friend of mine with a happy marriage said the best you can hope for in a marriage is agreement on 80 percent. If you agree on 80 percent, that's fantastic. Nobody is ever going to agree on 99 percent. And so every couple is going to have to compromise about something. Maybe they agree about sex, children, and money, but they got to compromise on the in-laws. Maybe they agree on in-laws, sex, and money, but they disagree about what they're going to have for breakfast. So you have to have compromise in a marriage. You also have to have to have compromise in a country.

It's especially the essence of a democracy. This is something worth restating for the United States today because during much of my lifetime our elected representatives and our electorates succeeded in reaching compromise about difficult issues. But political compromise is sadly breaking down today. The most recent congresses in the United States have passed fewer laws than any Other Congress in American history. They cant reach agreement. In the 1980s President Reagan and the Democratic House leader, Tip O'Neill — they disagreed strongly in their politics but they respected each other and they reached compromises. And they got big pieces of legislation passed. The legislation was not exactly what Tip O'Neill wanted. It wasn't what Ronald Reagan wanted. But it was a satisfactory compromise. And they'd pass some legislation. Nowadays our Congress is not passing legislation. Our executive, our president is at loggerheads with the lower house of Congress. Within each political party, there are the radical and the centrist wings.

Our legislature, our executive, our odds with our judiciary, the legislature of the state of West Virginia-- don't laugh when I say this-- but the legislature of West Virginia has impeached every justice on the Supreme Court of West Virginia. Why? Supposedly because they spend $30,000 to buy new sofas for their office. But there are more fundamental things. There is breakdown of compromise between the state government and national government. My state, California, is busy suing the federal government because the federal government is busy suing the state of California. So political compromise is breaking down in the United States today. We can discuss the reasons for it. But to me, that is the most serious problem United States faces. It's the only problem that could precipitate the United States into the end of democracy and into a dictatorship in the next decade. The United States is not the first country in human history to have a breakdown of political compromise.

Other countries have faced it as well. An example that I experienced firsthand was the South American country of Chile, where I lived in 1967. Chile has been the most democratic country in Latin America. When I moved to Chile in 1967, and my Chilean friends wanted to explain to the American visitor what our country is like, my Chilean friends said we are not like those other Latin American countries. We are a democracy. We know how to govern ourselves. That was 1967. But Chile was in the middle of a decline of political compromise, which exploded in 1973 with a military coupe. The military government stayed in power for 17...

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