Sagan's optimism rests on something subtler than mere faith in human progress—he's suggesting that freedom and order aren't opposing forces requiring a victor, but rather problems we can actually *solve* through deliberation rather than ideology. Most people treat this as a binary choice (you're either a libertarian or an authoritarian), but he's pointing out we've already done this thousands of times: we accept traffic laws because they enable rather than prevent movement, we tolerate copyright to encourage creation. The real insight is that "workable compromise" doesn't mean splitting the difference down the middle—it means finding solutions where constraint and liberty reinforce each other, which is precisely what a functioning democracy must do if it's to last more than a generation.