Ever since Republicans fed the increasing partisanship of American politics following the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and especially since the midterm election victories in 2010 of members associated with the so-called “Tea Party,” officials who have given decades of their lives to public service have decided to retire. Others have lost in their primaries.

While that fact lingers always in the back of my mind, being a political enthusiast, I was especially reminded of it when I browsed through the bookmarks I’ve saved to Internet sites. Among them? “Sen. Lugar Loses Primary To Tea Party Challenger, Ending 36-Year Career,” a story that NPR published May 8.

Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., is old. So are many of the other politicians challenged and ousted by Tea Party candidates. They and the more moderate elder statesmen of the Republican Party should not stand down from the political conflict simply because the members of the Tea Party are so ardent and so faithful only to their own notions of right and wrong that “compromise” is a dirty word.

Indeed, they assign to “compromise” the same meaning Ayn Rand gave it 55 years ago in her magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged.” There, she wrote: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. … In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”

The case of the man who beat Lugar in the Republican nomination for Indiana’s Senate seat is especially striking. How can it not be the obligation of every sensible person, everyone who has half a spine or half an ounce of honor, to oppose a man who says the day after his primary victory over one of the Senate’s most esteemed members, “I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. … If we [win the House, Senate and White House], bipartisanship means they have to come our way, and if we’re successful in getting the numbers, we’ll work towards that”?

That kind of attitude, which refuses to consider facts and ideas in the context of their existence, which refuses to acknowledge the inherent worth of things external to one’s self, is the highest form of egotism.

The superficial will of the voters as exercised in primary elections for party nominations, can be rejected to great effect and with great success.

In 2006, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., lost his primary and ran as an independent — successfully. The kind of drive that led him to do so, despite his loss, because he wanted to continue as a member of the U.S. Senate is exactly the kind of ambition necessary in a system that is characterized by too much acquiescense to either/or situations.

Third options always exist. At the end of the 1995 King Arthur flick “First Knight,” Arthur, played by Sean Connery, does not surrender to his rogue, vengeful knight Malagant, even though the latter has taken Camelot and holds hostage everyone inside it. Rather than lay down his sword at Malagant’s feet or die for making a stubborn refusal, Arthur shouts to his assembled citizens: “Do not be afraid; all things change. I am Arthur of Camelot, and I command you now all to fight! Fight!”

Politicians should largely adhere to the same kinds of chivalric creeds for which medieval knights are immortalized in legends. The creeds right with several themes, whether they be the words “Brother to brother, yours in life and death” that are repeated so often in “First Knight,” or the words of one youth from “The Knight’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” that “Even if it means we die by torture, / Neither of us would ever cross the other / In love or any other thing, dear brother, / Till death shall part the two of us forever!”

Among those themes are a regard for others and their well-being, service to a code of living that is bigger than the individual and cannot be distilled down to a single truth that is indifferent to the plights of individuals.

In writing this column, I took my copy of “Atlas Shrugged” down from my bookshelf and opened it to check the copyright date. There, in the front cover, I had at some point left a Post-It note. Written on that note was a quote from Winston Churchill: “Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.”

Better advice, I think, never was spoken.