Even though unemployment fell last month to less than 8 percent for the first time since January 2009, it remains at 7.9 percent. The national debt stands at more than $16 trillion. Unless both houses of Congress come to agree with each other and with President Barack Obama before Dec. 31, a “fiscal cliff” looms that would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, payroll taxes would increase, long-term unemployment benefits would end, and defense and domestic spending would suffer to the tune of $55 billion each. Internationally, Iranian military forces shot at one of our military’s surveillance drones recently; this is not the first time they have done so.

Clearly, the United States is in need of some serious governing, and the Republican Party has to be a part of that governance.

Although Obama won the Electoral College by a vote of 332 to 206 votes and the popular vote by 3.2 million votes and the Democrats’ lead in the Senate is 54-45, the House of Representatives is solidly in Republican hands, 233-194.

The challenges the United States currently faces — and not just the challenges of her individual citizens — require the participation and consensus not of one house of Congress or of the president, but of the whole group. Lawmaking, especially lawmaking as imperative as this, requires the discovery of common ground. Beggars cannot be choosers, it is said, and if we cannot resolve these ongoing issues, the United States will have to dress the Statue of Liberty in the rags of a 19th-century matchgirl.

Yet, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said since the election: “We Republicans in the House and Senate think we have a voter mandate not to raise taxes,” and he is “not willing to raise taxes to turn off the sequester. Period.” Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, seemingly of political compromise: “If there was a mandate in this election, it was a mandate to work together to do what’s in the best interest of our country.” But he has also said: “Raising tax rates is unacceptable.”

Clinging so rigidly to policy, holding specific proposals as dear as articles of ideological faith, fails to account for basic demographic changes in the national electorate that, the results of Tuesday’s election show, largely favor Democrats. Obama might have won only 39 percent of white voters’ votes, but he took 93 percent of the black vote, 71 percent of the Latino vote, 73 percent of the Asian vote and 60 percent of the youth vote (ages 18-29).

Values should never be abandoned; their specific implementation, however, can always be adapted to varied circumstances, as can their explanation. Republicans can take a statement of President Thomas Jefferson’s as advice: “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”