I thought this was an interesting passage from Rules for Radicals by Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, on “reconciliation” in our “world of irrationality” — in which the pragmatic radical is instructed to work within the system to achieve revolution:

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where “reconciliation” means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.