I have spent much of my life believing that “die for your principles” was the heroic position.
Decide what is right, refuse to bend, and accept the consequences. There is something very clean about that. At the very least, nobody can accuse you of not meaning what you said.
But what if someone else has to accept the consequences?
Or what if holding a principle in its purest form today makes it harder to achieve the purpose behind it tomorrow?
That is where I have changed. Not away from principles, exactly. I think I am asking more of them now.
It is no longer enough for a principle to tell me where I want to end up. I want it to help me decide what to do from where we actually are.
And increasingly I want to ask one irritating question:
Then what?
A principle is not a plan
Foreign policy is what started me thinking about this again.
I am instinctively drawn to restraint: fewer permanent commitments, less centralized power, fewer wars, more responsibility pushed toward the people and countries directly affected.
I would prefer a world in which those principles were easier to follow.
Unfortunately, foreign policy has to operate in the world that exists while we are trying to get closer to the one we want.
That is part of what I hear myself wrestling with when I listen to J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. I respond to the warnings about American overextension and allies becoming too dependent upon American protection. But I also respond strongly to Rubio's emphasis on deterrence, alliances that serve American interests, and dealing with threats that exist now rather than assuming distance will contain them. Rubio himself has also argued that stronger allies should become more self-reliant, so this is not a clean disagreement between intervention and withdrawal. It is partly a disagreement in my own head about timing, risk and emphasis.
“Other countries should defend themselves” can be a perfectly reasonable destination.
But then what?
What happens while they build the ability to do it? What does an adversary do during the same period? What happens if reducing one commitment creates an opening that eventually requires a much larger response?
“Avoid war” is also a worthy principle. It still doesn't tell me which action is most likely to avoid one.
A principle tells me what I am trying to protect.
A plan has to get there from here.
Compromise the route, not the destination
Perhaps the question I am really trying to ask is how much of a principle can be protected while still dealing honestly with current reality and preserving the ability to move closer to the goal.
That is not the same as abandoning a principle whenever following it becomes inconvenient. People are remarkably good at calling something a temporary compromise for twenty-seven years.
But purity has its own escape hatch. It allows me to say: I did the principled thing. What happened afterward isn't my responsibility.
I don't believe that anymore.
If I dissent, what does the dissent accomplish? If I refuse an imperfect alliance, what replaces it? If I insist upon the final condition immediately, does that make the final condition more likely or less?
And who pays if I am wrong?
Those consequences belong in the moral calculation too.
Rand Paul gives me an interesting little test case. He has long advocated a constitutional amendment imposing congressional term limits, including a maximum of 12 years in each chamber. He has nevertheless continued serving under the rules as they currently exist.
I don't find that inherently contradictory.
In fact, I understand the logic rather well. A constitutional rule applying to everyone is different from voluntarily imposing the proposed rule upon yourself while everyone else continues under the existing one. Leaving office would demonstrate personal consistency. It would not establish term limits.
That distinction is useful far beyond Rand Paul.
Sometimes taking the final position unilaterally does not move the system toward the final position. It merely removes one participant who wanted to change it.
The harder question is when that reasoning is legitimate and when it becomes a convenient excuse for never accepting the cost of one's own principles.
I don't have a magic test for that. But “what happens next?” gets me closer than “did I remain pure?”
Jefferson gets both examples
Jefferson is useful here partly because he refuses to stay neatly inside the version of Jefferson I prefer.
The Louisiana Purchase is the obvious example. Jefferson favored a strict reading of federal power and nevertheless confronted an opportunity to acquire territory of enormous strategic importance. He had serious constitutional doubts about the purchase, but ultimately proceeded without the constitutional amendment he had considered.
The principle did not disappear. Reality presented him with another priority that mattered too.
From the Conservatory: The Other Path
The Barbary conflict presents another version. Jefferson preferred limited entanglements, but his administration used naval force when American shipping was being attacked.
It would be convenient for my argument if Jefferson's willingness to adapt always produced brilliant results.
It didn't.
His embargo against Britain and France was another attempt to reconcile competing principles and circumstances: protect American rights, avoid a larger war, and use economic pressure instead of military force. It proved difficult to enforce, badly disrupted American trade, failed to change British policy sufficiently, and was replaced near the end of his presidency.
That may be the more important example.
A principled intermediate step can still be wrong.
Reality gets a vote.
The point of accepting intermediate solutions is not that clever people can foresee every consequence. It is that the route must remain open to evidence and correction.
Do not disconnect the power yet
Suppose I want my house to be independent of the electrical grid.
That may genuinely be my goal. I may dislike dependence on the grid, want more control over my own power, and have perfectly good reasons for wanting to rely on it less.
But if I disconnect the house before I have enough solar, batteries, backup power and working equipment, I have not achieved energy independence.
I have achieved a dark house.
Current dependence is part of the starting condition whether I approve of it or not.
So I keep the grid while adding solar. Add batteries. Separate important circuits. Test what the system can actually support. Keep the generator available. Reduce dependence in stages.
The grid remains something I want to rely upon less. Keeping it temporarily does not require pretending otherwise.
What matters is whether each intermediate step leaves the next step more possible.
That is increasingly how I think about political principles too.
Not: Here is the perfect destination. Why aren't we there?
More like: Given where we actually are, what is the next defensible condition that gets us closer without giving away the reason we wanted to go there?
What is the principle protecting?
This creates another problem, because almost any compromise can be defended as necessary if we are sufficiently determined to defend it.
So the destination still matters enormously.
A principle should tell me what I am trying to protect. It should help me judge the next available move. And it should help me recognize the point at which an intermediate compromise has stopped being a route toward the principle and begun replacing it.
That means asking fewer questions than my brain would prefer, but harder ones.
What am I actually trying to protect?
What happens next if I do this?
What will the other participants probably do in response?
Who bears the cost if I am wrong?
Does this leave the goal more reachable or less?
And what evidence would make me admit that the intermediate step isn't working?
That last one matters. Otherwise “pragmatism” becomes another word for never having to say the plan failed.
Principles without reality can become purity tests. Reality without principles can become nothing more than expediency.
I want neither.
The hill
I remain temperamentally Jeffersonian. Limited government, individual agency and suspicion of concentrated power still tell me a great deal about the country I would prefer to live in.
But Jefferson alone is not enough to govern a world containing other people with different interests, hostile actors, unexpected opportunities, incomplete information and the annoying habit of responding to whatever we do.
That does not make principles less important.
It makes their purpose more important.
I still understand the appeal of dying on the hill. There is something honorable about accepting the consequences of refusing to betray what you believe.
I am less impressed by it when other people have to accept those consequences too, and I am no longer convinced that reaching the hill in one perfect leap is more principled than taking an imperfect route that actually gets closer.
The principle should tell me which hill matters. Reality gets some say in how I reach it.
The heroic act is not always dying there. Sometimes it is staying alive long enough to take the next defensible step, watch what happens, correct when necessary—and remember where you were trying to go.