The most abused, misused and misunderstood word in American politics is “unity.”
All presidential candidates promise to unite Americans. Almost all pundits and public intellectuals lament the lack of unity.
“When America is united, America is absolutely unstoppable,” Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address. “With unity, we can do great things. Important things,” Joe Biden insisted in his. Kamala Harris proclaimed in her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention that “in unity there is strength.”
Such claims bring us to the first problem with the cult of unity: it is a call to power. There is strength in unity, of course, but strength is a completely amoral concept. Strength to do what?
Lynch mobs are united, that's why they are terrifying. The namesake of fascism, the FascesIt was a bundle of sticks that represented the idea of strength in numbers.
I am not saying that unity is necessarily bad, but its goodness depends entirely on what is done with it. If politicians routinely used the term “power” instead of “unity,” more people might understand that skepticism is justified when politicians demand it or claim it for their agenda.
Second, our obsession with unity runs counter to the essence of the Constitution. Presidents often talk as if they are running to be prime minister in a parliamentary system. They promise to do things from “day one” of their administration that a president cannot do alone under our system.
Triumph Fiance being a “dictator” from day one of a second administration (with a focus on immigration and oil extraction). In 2019, Harris fiance that if elected president, she would repeal the Trump tax cuts on “day one.” Presidents can issue (often dubious) executive orders on day one, but they cannot pass or repeal laws. That is the job of Congress.
And Congress is not elected to do the president's bidding. The often absurd idea that presidents have electoral mandates is irrelevant. Lawmakers are accountable to their own voters and constituents.
If Trump wins the election, Democrats won’t feel particularly compelled to endorse his agenda. And if Harris wins, Republicans won’t reflexively cave to it. A president can tell senators or representatives, “Look, I was elected to do X,” all he wants, but at least some can fairly respond, “Yes, and I was elected to try to stop you.”
This is a constitutional feature, not a bug. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Yuval Levin, underlines this point in “American Pact,” the best book on the Constitution I have ever read. The Constitution was designed to foster political competition—between the executive and legislative branches, between and within the states, and between the federal government and the states. The separation of powers, the structure of Congress, and constant elections are all intended to create conflict and tension—“productive tension,” in Levin’s words.
This competition is supposed to produce better and more democratically legitimate policies through strong lobbying. disagreement. The goal of the Constitution is disagreement, not superficial agreement forced by populist calls for unity.
The most beneficial form of unity is consensus achieved through vigorous but good-faith argument. The only other form of unity that should be expected or required of Americans is fidelity to the Constitution's rules for how these arguments are conducted and how officials use the power granted to them. No president can be a dictator at any time while the Constitution remains in force.
I, like everyone else, dislike the stupidity and demagoguery that polarization produces, but the problem is not so much disagreement as the inability to disagree better. Indeed, much of what drives our bitter disunity is the partisan desire to crush political opponents with forced unity and power not granted by the Constitution.
Politicians’ frequent claims that “the time for debate is over” amount to an undemocratic insistence that “my critics should shut up and get on with my agenda.” Sometimes it is advisable for critics to shut up, but only if they have decisively lost the debate. And even then, our system protects dissent because the founders recognized that free speech is indispensable to a free society and that the majority is sometimes wrong.
When that happens, dissenters should be able to say, “We warned you.” I hope to live long enough to say exactly that when we return to the system of productive political disagreement enshrined in the Constitution.
